Podcasts about Shawnna

According to research from the CMO Council, 63% of marketers say they are under extreme pressure to deliver improved revenue outcomes. So how can you leverage your tech stack to enhance collaboration across GTM teams and drive impactful results? 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 Andrea Bras, VP of product marketing at Viant Technology. Thanks for joining, Andrea! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.  Andrea Bras: Wonderful. Well, thank you Shawnna for having me. I’m excited to talk about my journey at Viant and as we’ve continued our partnership with Highspot. So, as you mentioned, I’m vice president of product marketing at Viant Technology. We are an AI powered DSP or demand side platform built for CTV or Connected Television. What we do is we help marketers to connect with their consumers. Through planning, through execution, through measurement of their advertising media in the most engaging ways using our technology. So I’m actually coming up on my tenure anniversary, so it’s just, wow, it’s almost mind blowing. It’s been such an amazing journey here. VT is such a pioneering, innovative company and we’re never left bored or wondering what’s next, right? So prior to joining VT, I’ve actually been in digital marketing for, geez, almost 25 years now. Actually, I joined when it was actually still known as online marketing. If anyone in your audience can remember that. But what I’ve been fortunate enough along my journey is to really wear a lot of hats and be exposed to a lot of different types of companies. So I’ve worked with the small startups, local retail, all the way up to big global corporations. I’ve also worn a lot of hats. So I’ve sold advertising. I have bought advertising. I’ve developed partnerships, thinking about the consumer in mind, and it’s really positioned me very well in what I believe. Is a perfect mixture of all of that background to bring me to my best results as a product marketer. And so our role here in product marketing at Viat is we really sit at the intersection of all of the orgs in the company. We provide support to all of them, but primarily sales and product. We sit within the marketing team and it’s our job to really look for the best things that all these teams are working on in order to craft. Really amazing and compelling positioning and messaging. We developed the go-to-market solutions and the content. We support the product launches, and of course we manage and work through all the sales enablement technology. We, of course, have chosen Highspot, which we love. And that brings me here today, and I’m excited to discuss more with you, Shawnna. SS: Likewise, we are lucky to have you on this podcast. Given that you are a seasoned marketing leader, I’d love to understand what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business this year, and how does your enablement tech stack help support these efforts? AB: Well, that’s a great question. And you know, given where we sit in the org, we have our hands in pretty much everything, but we really do have some very key go-to-market initiatives. We’re highly focused on, as I mentioned in my intro. Connected television is something that is our most important focus and for good reason. I mean, when you think about the power of TV and what that does for advertising, and you’re converging it with the power of digital and the ability to understand and message the performance of your advertising. It’s such an exciting thing and we’re doing a great job of really building the technology to support that in the best ways, as well as the partnerships. I mean, we’re getting to work with some of these greatest streaming platforms. Think Disney, think Paramount. And so we’re working really hard on how do we showcase how easy it is to build these upper and lower funnel opportunity that CTV brings based on campaign objectives. So there’s a lot of education that comes in mind, or that we have to work with our consumers and our clients just so they can really understand the huge opportunity in front of ’em. So that keeps us very busy. The other thing that really is related to CTV, but it’s our recent Iris TV acquisition. So for those of you who may not be familiar, Iris TV has really built their tech. To standardize contextual, the opportunity to present ads contextually AC interoperable across all of these various streaming platforms. So think cooking shows and what that could mean across not just one cooking show, but all of the great content cooking shows across numerous streaming platforms. And that really brings such value because now you’re layering in the ability to capture the consumer in the right mindset. So that just, you know, it’s an organic content experience and we’re really excited about that. And then of course there’s Viant AI. So we launched Viant AI. It was hugely successful last part of last year. And man, it’s just so exciting ’cause we have on this hand, CTV and all the great things coming there, part of our direct access program. But then over here we’ve got this whole new realm of innovation with AI. I know you guys lean in really heavily, which we’re excited about. So we’re just really. Keeping close to our technology teams and watching the innovation develop and keeping track of that. Of course, to make these launches successful and keep our go-to market as top-notch as possible, you need a unified go-to-market alignment as your company’s very familiar with, and that’s where Highspot has just been an absolute game changer for us. When I think about where we were before, I mean, we had really legacy tech and we did our best, but you can only do so much. Right? I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of stories from your clients. When we brought on Highspot, a couple of really magical things happened for us. One, we had to sit and think about our content strategy, right? You know, before we would organize it, but we didn’t really think about what it was. And you know, due to how you build and develop the platform, it’s really exciting because. You’re thinking, okay, what are our buckets of content, right? So we had to think, okay, well there’s storytelling content. And then it’s like, well, we also have all these different product releases that come. So you have product overview, right? And you know, verticals, channels, you name it. So we had to take the time and effort to really build this out. And then we wanted to also put it around a wonderful launch, give it a big stage. So put us a little bit under a time crunch, which was probably a blessing in disguise because we had to work. In fact, our Highspot onboarding rep, who was amazing, he told us we were one of the fastest launches. So I don’t know if that still holds true, but from contract signing, I think we signed the contract in late October, and then we had this up and running in January. So for all of you who either are planning a launch or thinking about launching or maybe haven’t signed up yet, there’s a lot you can do to get up in front of it. For us, it was a combination of having a pilot team as we were building, getting their feedback along the way. Then we did a soft launch just to get the logistics outta the way, get people using it so that when we did our big launch at our annual Viant Con, where we dedicated two hours and actually. Flew the Highspot rep out to help us launch this. We had a such a meaningful two hour session. Honestly, we still hear great feedback about that launch. It really helped us get started with Highspot in a big way. SS: I love that. And you, you touched on the importance and the critical nature of alignment. What are some of the common pitfalls that organizations might encounter when aligning go-to-market teams to execute these key initiatives and, and how can they avoid them? AB: Yes, that is absolutely critical and we have really face several and overcome. And of course, Highspot has been a great tool in helping us do so. You know, when we first started, when I first started Viant, we were a smaller corporation. It was pretty easy to stay on top of your priorities and kind of know how to manage your workload. But as you’re rapidly growing or expanding or adding teams. The more support you’re providing and the more awareness that the functions across the org understand about what you can bring, that starts to change. You start to get all of these demands, and the lack of prioritization isn’t because there’s no priority. It’s that idea that if everything’s high priority, then there’s no high priority, right? So. That helped us realize, okay, we’ve gotta do a better job. And luckily we, our Chief Product Officer, he came from a very big tech company and you know, they were very used to juggling prioritization of high needs across the org. So he shared the tips and tricks that he’s done and I was able to add on the marketing lens. And so the end result is we meet monthly with the C-Suite across every function. They have a chance to see transparently all of our projects. They can prioritize their departments, so they get to own that, and then they also see where their priorities fall in our holistic view. So it’s been a game changer and it’s really helped us. So, you know, everybody will probably look a little different, but it’s been hugely valuable. And I’d say the other things to keep an eye out for is whenever you introduce anything new you’re gonna have change management. There’s always challenges with that. So really just, you know, the Highspot team was great helping us understand the win-win value for our sellers and other stakeholders. So just getting ahead of that, working through those, of course, defining SWIN lanes, if there’s any blurred lines or confusion, you’re gonna have people stepping on each other’s toes. Just really getting in front of all that business. So, and then I’d say the last thing, and you guys are great for this, is really having technology partners that have support teams. Because what’s great about Highspot is we have that ongoing support. So we’re always working as treating you as a partner, but then we’re also, we have the ability to tap and, you know, level up the support as needed. And that’s come in handy several times. So these are just some of the things that can help you get in front of some of the challenges with alignment. SS: I think those are, that’s phenomenal advice for our audience. And you actually also recently established multiple committees to support your go-to-market engine. Can you share more about that journey and the impact that it’s had so far? AB: Thank you for asking. That’s a great question. We have put a lot of work, so yes, we have launched or about to launch, actually three distinct committees started out as one, but we landed on three. And I’ll tell you why. Rewinding back last year as we launched last January, I forgot to mention, of 2024. And so, you know, as you’re ramping up, you’re kind of learning the process, you’re getting best practices, you’re building out the platform, all the things you’re doing in the first year. And one thing I also forgot to mention, which I will touch on in our discussion is engagement metrics. So you’re kind of getting your feet wet there. That has been another game changing element with the Highspot platform. What is really critical, and I can’t stress this enough, to your audience, is getting that co-ownership across your key stakeholders. Especially, you know, think sales leadership, right? You need that co-sponsorship. So while we have support, sales leadership is busy, they’ve got big goals to crush, right? We were thinking, how do we get in front of them? How do we really show them how much opportunity there is for them to really move the needle using this technology and get them closer to it? So the other thing obviously is the feedback loop. We really wanted a good feedback loop. So we’re like, how do we do it in an organized way, make good use of their time? And so when we started to build a list, it became very big. And then we had all these objectives. So that’s why we broke it into three. And so at first we had the executive, and that’s really pointing back to that co-ownership. Getting them bought in. Um, we are creating compelling metrics that I know will raise their eyebrows, so I’m getting that ready, leading into our executive committee. And so really just letting them know the awareness, showing them some things to get them excited and asking for their hand and driving adoption with their teams. Then we’ll have the, what we’re calling the steering committee. And this is really your kind of more short term strategy. Your operational managers that, you know, they can help us really drive that lower funnel strategies and behaviors from their teams. And then of course, the cross functional stakeholders think Salesforce, rev ops training, having really valuable discussions. And then of course, the action committee, which is gonna be our day-to-day users. So that allows us to capture what’s working, what’s not, and just your general feedback of what’s going well. And of course we’ll do this quarterly. We don’t wanna take up too much time and use kind of a waterfall effect. So we’re really excited. And I know my boss, our chief marketing officer, he’s leaned in totally, which is gonna be tremendously successful, and he’s gonna help co-run the agenda with me for the executive. So more to come. Exciting stuff. SS: I absolutely love it. And I think, you know, for our audience listening, it’s a really great strategy to deploy within your organization if it makes sense for you. But I think it’s a great initiative. AB: And one thing I’ll add on to that really quick, I would say really what we wanna do with this is ensure we’re coming in loaded with a heavy agenda. Of meaningful content. So prep, prep, prep, that’s, and so, you know, whoever you can pull in to help you make the best use of the time, I highly encourage that. SS: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’ll be extremely valuable on both sides, so that’s fantastic. Now, you’ve touched on this. I. Actually quite a bit throughout our conversation already, but I’d love to hear your perspective on what would you say is the unique value of a unified platform when it comes to maximizing go-to-market effectiveness and, and really improving collaboration. AB: You know, I can’t saying praises enough at Highspot. It has really elevated us in that way, which was beyond my wildest dreams. Like I saw the opportunity and just seeing it play out has been just a wonderful experience. Starting for foremost with just product marketing’s needs. The consistency that we’re able to. Foster across teams now in this unified platform is when I think about what we used to have to do when we had a logo change or we had, you know, some sort of, we had to manually do all of these things and now we can just do bulk updates or folks would share decks, you know, that they had out market. And I’d see just content with old branding or just really, really just. Horrible things, you know, make you cringe. I don’t see that anymore. You know, it’s so exciting because now they know that the best content’s there and so there’s no dependency on these old things or an inability to find the stuff they need. So it’s very rare that I find anything that’s off brand, if at all. So that consistency and governance is huge. Obviously, probably more importantly is what it’s doing for our sellers. I mean, when you think about the time they save now, they’re in there, they’re in and out, they’re experts, you know, they love it. We hear nothing but great feedback. The amount of time it takes ’em to build compelling content, find what they’re looking for, and all of that has been second to none. And then the ease of pitching it out. Really the ones, we wanna get more adoption of this looking ahead, but the ones that are even leaning into client metrics and things like that, I mean, it’s just been a phenomenal result. Again, that brings me to engagement metrics that’s really closing the loop and having that single source of truth really just makes a huge, huge difference. So what we’re seeing is we’re breaking down silos. We’re having really meaningful conversations, unlike we used to with our partner teams. Everybody’s able to use it in different ways, so it’s really just driving faster, smarter, go-to-market execution, and we love it. SS: Well, I love that. Now, you’ve talked about the partnership that you’ve had with Highspot, and I know that VT recently partnered with our professional services team on an initiative to begin leveraging Highspot AutoDocs. Can you share a little bit about how you’re utilizing AutoDocs to streamline workflows and improve effectiveness? AB: I’m really glad you asked about that, Shawnna, because this is one of our most recent and most exciting efforts leveraging Highspot technology. So we call our version of AutoDocs Pitch Builder just to create some, you know, fun for the sales reps, make it easy for them to understand what it does, and it really has helped us. Where we elevated with the one unified repository, it’s helped us take it even further. And what I mean by that is due to the nature of our clients and the businesses we serve. The content we build serves different purposes. You know, if you think about advertising, everybody needs to advertise their business. So I think automotive companies, retail companies, travel and tourism, pharma, you know, so we build content that way. We have vertical, we have channels, we have measurement. There’s a whole vast array. And you know, the reps are really good at building these custom stories, but feedback we were getting is, you know, I’m still struggling even in the remix experience to know where to go to find the best content and all these things. So. Pointing to your Highspot Spark conference. I like to get as much of my team up there as possible. You guys do a fantastic job with that. So last October we were there and I had a member of my team and he’s like, Hey, you know, he sat in one of the focused AutoDoc sessions and he says, I really think that we were getting ready to launch our new general presentations and we were taking a new approach this year. And he is like, I think that what Highspot has with AutoDocs would really help sales team with this. You know, in my head I’m thinking, oh my gosh, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to launch that, you know, by the time we need to roll this out in a month, you know? And he’s like, no, no, no. I think he’s like, let me talk to the team. I really think we can. So I’m like, okay. But in my mind I’m thinking, oh, it’ll be summer. You know? There’s no way. Long story short, he worked with our ongoing support team and they connected him with the professional services you guys provided. Put together a case and I was blown away. We were able to deploy through the help of your team. You know, we could have built it ourselves, but it would’ve taken a long time. We never would’ve met our deadline. And it was just such great work. And what this does now is it creates this really easy pathway for sellers to, you know, pull in the problem statements from a choice of things that, a choice of problem statements based on where their discovery questions, take them with their clients, and then choose, you know, the right core messaging. Choose the right verticals, choose the channels, all within this visible, easy. And you, you have this structured framework. So think about it as a new seller, you can go in there and it. Immediately, that’s valuable trust. You can trust you’re building a deck that matches the company positioning. And then on top of that, the loose feedback I can give you was what I have heard is it used to take our sellers at least 30 minutes, probably an hour to build a reasonable deck. And those are probably our season one, probably up to ours. We just ran the numbers leading up to this podcast. On average, our sellers that use Pitch Builder are building their decks in 3.2 minutes. SS: That’s amazing. AB: Right? That’s what we said. So the combined learning of the Highspot Spark Conference and understanding new releases you guys had coming, having my team there, understanding, bringing that idea to it, and then leveraging a professional services, they did a superb job, just was a perfect blend. SS: Amazing. Well, I’ll be sure to pass that along to our professional services team. I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear that. Now as we talk about improving effectiveness, another way a lot of businesses are starting to think about optimizing effectiveness is through ai, and I know Viant actually recently won in AI Excellence Award, so congratulations on that. What are some of the key ways that you’re leveraging AI to support your go-to-market teams? AB: That’s a wonderful question, and thank you. We’re truly honored to have received that recognition for AI excellence and kudos to the team here at Viant across the board. It’s just been such a wild ride. We are leaning heavily into AI, as I know Highspot is, and so what we’re trying to really do is focus on all the wonderful feedback we’re getting from our clients. From our Viant AI solution, how easy it’s, you know, done for them and really capture the wins there and understand how do we transition that into internal wins within our org. And we’re doing it across the board, but specifically for product marketing. I’m leaning in heavily with any tools and resources we have that can help us do better quality work, do it faster, just make it easier, all those things that AI brings. And so I’ve tasked my team, we’re kind of on the forefront of this. We’re already, we’re using ChatGPT on the regular. We’re using our own by AI on the regular, but we wanna get better and we wanna continue to explore that. So I’ve tasked my team with leaning into things like co-pilot with Highspot. Okay, how do we tap that? How do we do more with that? Another thing that we’re leaning in on, and I have another person on my team who really, I am very lucky here, very specializes in billing the bots and things so. When due to how technical our products are, obviously we have our initial storytelling and the benefits and all the buzzy stuff, but as you build relationships with clients, as you probably well know, you get those deeper questions about technology. And so we have a lot of just kind of fragmented FAQs, docs that support launches. So he had the idea of saying, Hey, we should probably get those FAQs into a chat bot so sellers can just get in there and ask questions and not have to search for these random docs. Kind of scattered throughout. And then we’re like, how do we get that where our sellers go in the Highspot platform or leverage something like copilot. So we’re just kind of dipping our tone, a lot of waters, but we’re excited. We’re thinking about calling it pitch aid just to kind of go with the theme, and we’ll probably take it even above and beyond. We’re building out personas, so we’re trying to think about. All the ways that we want to create this value that our sellers can tap when they’re making their pitches and make it very easy for them to just do a q and a chat style function. So, you know, we look forward to partnering closer with you in our AI journey. SS: I love that. I think that’ll be amazing for your reps and your sellers. Now, to shift gears a little bit, what are some of your best practices for measuring the impact of your programs on your go-to-market performance? AB: That is probably one of my favorite questions because it’s a combination of solving a huge need that I didn’t ever think would get solved, as well as just a journey that’s new for me. So it’s exciting in its own right. So we are leaning really heavy into, okay, how do we really make sense of this gold data we’re getting from you? Engagement data, right? So I like to quote my boss, he always says, okay, don’t boil the ocean. You just gotta get started, right? So that’s what we’ve done through the last year. We were kind of, you get these really fun insights. You’re like, oh, that’s such a cool insight. And you’re like, okay, well what do we do with it? Right? So you’re, you go through this journey. But we really started to nail down how do we need to think about this? And so. We started to realize it’s like, okay, we have the sales engagement data and then we have our client engagement data, so how do we wanna start thinking about that? And then there’s really kind of the two big buckets of how we apply those layers is one for product marketing. Direct control is governance, right? And content management. So, okay, based on our sales and our clients are engaging pitches, digital rooms, you know, views, downloads, et cetera. And then, you know, what does that tell us about our content and how we should be managing it? And one thing that’s so exciting that I’ll share our most recent learnings from this effort, you know, we’re used to working through our roadmap. We get these initiatives, requests, you know, executive asks all of those things. We’re now really shifting how we make and build our roadmap. We’re still gonna do all that, of course. But now we have this new opportunity with this kind of engagement data to say, hey, there’s these materials that get used all the time. So we do a monthly report to our executive team, just of the high level metrics I just mentioned. And we started seeing this one brochure we built. It’s our differentiators brochure, which, you know, it’s a good piece. But we originally built it two or three years ago and we’ve refreshed it once. We were seeing that thing in the top five every month and often the top position every month with both sales and client engagement data. And we’re like, holy moly, this thing is on fire. Right? So what we’re doing now is it is now part of our ongoing strategy and we’re gonna look to the top 20%, right? Driving all engagement data. To make it a proactive part of refreshing and keeping it the best capable content on an ongoing basis, whether that’s monthly or quarterly. So that’s how we’re changing and shifting based on governance. The other side of the hat is really the behaviors, right? And we don’t directly control that, but what we’re trying to do is leverage data in a way. Now we can really showcase how this data can drive the behaviors we want from the team and then inspire our sales leaders and executive team to embrace that and leverage it, right? So we’re, we’re building out that platform. So more on that, but it’s really so exciting because, you know, we used to have to rely solely on maybe an annual survey we would send to sales, hey, you like what we’re doing right? And maybe you get 10%, 20% responding or just kind of ad hoc, scattered feedback. And now we really just have this objective, trustworthy data we can work off of. SS: I love that. Since launching Highspot, what results have you seen on that front and are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share? AB: So as part of leaning in more, like I said, we’ve already learned so much, and then now also in preparation to make these committee our kickoff sessions as valuable as possible and really go out with a banging. I had this hypothesis and I said, and I felt pretty good about it. Because you see the names of the people driving new business and you recognize those names from users in Highspot. And I started thinking, I said, I really think Highspot drives new business. So I tasked my systems and analytics team. I’m very fortunate. And product marketing, if you were in a product marketing team, if you can have an analytics team, it’s really valuable. So I test ’em to say, okay, how do we drive the correlation between Highspot engagement? And revenue outcomes. And we started with kind of looking at a quadrant. We said, okay, let’s look and do the old quadrant on Highspot engagement, users usage to revenue outcomes, and kind of map out those so we can think through different use cases there to start and then really start to see the correlations. So the big great things is you start to see these stories emerge naturally. And they dug in and there’s another persona team who came from another big tech and has regression analysis and all this. So lucky me, they were able to drive that. When you take a user of Highspot or a non-user, I would say someone like one of our sellers that’s not really using Highspot, and you layer on the best Highspot engagement activities, you have an opportunity to enhance their new business by 29%. And now I’m sure there’s other variables. You know, I’m sure the Highspot users that are active, Highspot users probably are good at going after new business. But the bigger picture there is, is think about that. If we even get 10%, 15% of the movable middle and the bell curve, just doing the things that are right, think about how you can move the needle. So we took that same lens, or we put it across total revenue, connected to engagement, and then also incremental increases with existing business. And every single one had really remarkable results. New business being the top. So. Just huge insights. We’re gonna definitely debut that to our executive team and get them excited and, and then lean in, hear their questions, and work with our sales enablement and training teams to say, okay, here’s those behaviors that we should start to reinforce. SS: Amazing results, though. Amazing results now. I appreciate you joining this podcast so much. I’ve learned so much from you already, and it is amazing to be able to talk to another strong female marketing leader. So I really appreciate your time and I noticed that you were recognized for the Los Angeles Times Inspirational Women’s List in 2024. So I have to say, this might be one of my favorite questions of the entire podcast, but what is one piece of advice that you would share? With other women looking to develop as leaders to drive impact for their organization. AB: Well, thank you so much for that question. I will tell you it was such an honor. I mean, I was so humbled and grateful to the LA Times Studio for that recognition. And it was such a journey and just so wonderful. But you know, back to your question, you know, as you go through your career journey, you see different types of leaders and you see what works and what doesn’t work. What inspires you individually? What inspires teams? And some of the takeaways that I’ve kind of compiled and really showcased as part of panel I got to participate on last November was how you need to lead authentically. And what I mean by that is. You can’t adopt someone else’s leadership style exactly, because it may not fit you. You have to understand your natural way of inspiring people because you get more as a leader by inspiring people than mandating them to do things, right? Not saying mandates don’t have their place where they’re needed, but when you’re inspiring people and getting them excited about the work they do, it’s gonna have such an impact, and you can’t do that unless you’re your authentic self. It’s kind of hard and as a woman, you probably know this, it can even be harder sometimes because the, the standard kind of tried and true leadership that have been staples don’t always come off authentically when you’re a woman leader. So, you know, we know the age old challenges that come with that. So how do you, I’ve really studied and done a lot of psychology reading and stuff like how do I foster the best. Kind of leverage my quality traits. And that leads me to the second part that’s really important. I was lucky enough in my earlier I was, when I was working at one of the larger corporations, they put us through this exercise, and if you can do this anyway, if you haven’t already, we did strengths finders, which I thought was so great, but I’m sure there’s lots of tools out there. And you kind of learn about your own unique strengths. And it’s kind of eye-opening ’cause you know, but you don’t. But when you see ’em in front of you and then you start to read what they are, you think they nailed it, right? And so when you can understand those things about yourself, you start to position yourself to be where you do well, right? Because you know that about yourself. And then you can kind of channel those and then work on the areas where maybe aren’t as easy. That’s also really helpful as a leader when you’re building teams, you know, it’s not getting the same cookie cutter employee. You have to build these energies together. Right. And it’s really a combination of different types. Of strengths. And so when I have a position to fill, I’ll look at the current team and I’ll say, okay, what, what are my strengths on there? What’s missing? What can I do better? And I will design the whole process around that. When I’m looking for a candidate, I’ll say, you know, I’ll design the interview questions, I’ll design the job role, all of it. And that’s how you get kind of a well-oiled machine. So that’s a big thing. And then of course, just in mentorship, you know, embrace mentorship. It’s so important to build future leaders. Help them understand the grace in getting out of a job they hate, you know, and finding that place where, you know, we’re always gonna have projects that aren’t fun, but if you really hate your job every day, it’s, you know, I always advise young people coming up like, don’t be afraid to make a move. It’s okay, whether it’s another department or another company, you know, you’re only gonna do yourself justice by getting yourself where you belong. So, yeah, it’s really. Tailoring your support for the unique mentorees that you have. We have a regular intern program, so I get interns every year and it’s really great. I learn and get a lot of great feedback. So, you know, I guess I’ll say, you know, to sum it all up, lead with authentic behavior and purpose and clarity, and you’ll drive impact and really focus on driving the young future leaders of America. SS: I love that advice and it resonates a lot with me, so I really appreciate this, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today. AB: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. 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.

Send us a textA historic house that bends time and captures spirits. The Doss House of Loretto emerged from heartfelt grief when Shauna Rigsby lost her mother to cancer in September 2023 after a devastatingly brief seven-week battle. What started as a way to honor her mother's unfulfilled dream of owning an Airbnb transformed into something far more profound – a paranormal destination where the boundaries between our world and others seem remarkably thin.Built in 1810 and likely serving as one of the original meeting houses for the town founded by Prince Galitzin, the Doss House sits across from a basilica in a deeply Catholic community. Its walls have witnessed countless lives as it functioned variously as a barbershop, doctor's office, dentist practice, and even an undertaker's establishment. But what makes this location truly extraordinary are the unexplained phenomena that defy conventional understanding.Investigators have documented security cameras spontaneously resetting to December 31, 1969, a visitor's smartwatch completely failing to register her existence during her time in the house, and phones entering SOS mode upon leaving the property. Objects move on their own, disembodied voices echo through empty rooms, and shadow figures dart through doorways. One particularly compelling incident involved a phone smoothly pivoting on its own while a blindfolded investigator sat nearby, followed immediately by equipment responses indicating an intelligent presence.For Shauna and her wife Danielle, operating the Doss House and their paranormal team "Unique Paranormal 1.5" represents more than just ghost hunting – it's a healing journey. As Shauna poignantly shares, "Doing all of these things has become my grief journey." The name of their team itself reflects their humble aspiration to embody even "half of what my mother was in this field," carrying forward her values of inclusivity, respect, and genuine community-building.The ethos of the Doss House stands in refreshing contrast to the sometimes rigid structures found in paranormal investigation. Here, the focus remains on having meaningful experiences, bringing people together, and maintaining a profound respect for both the living and whatever might exist beyond our understanding. As Shauna beautifully articulates, "If you go into something with true, pure intentions and stay steadfast in that, the sky's the limit."Want to experience the time-bending mysteries of the Doss House for yourself? Connect with Shauna and Danielle through Facebook, email them at thedosshouse.278@gmail.com, or check out their website at thedosshouseofloretto-pa.com to book your own investigation.Support the showFind us at: gxparanormal.com Watch On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@generationxparanormal Listen: • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/generation-x-paranormal/id1661845577?i=1000666351352 • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6zQmLQ0F78h8KRuVylps2v?si=79af02a218444d1f Follow us on Social Media: • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GenXParanormal • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/generationxparanormal/ • Twitter (X): https://x.com/GXParanormal

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report, organizations utilizing enablement tools are 52% more likely to engage in formal collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders. So, how can you effectively collaborate across the business to drive transformation?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 Lauren Richardson, senior vice president of sales transformation operations at NTT Data. Thank you for joining us. Lauren. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Lauren Richardson: Hi, Shawnna, it great to be on the podcast series today. Thank you so much. I am senior vice president of sales operations transformation and in this role we are driving transformation across NTT, especially for the selling community. I’ve been at NTT now 10 years, and prior to that I was at Microsoft, I was at Nandos, and I also had a wonderful opportunity to run my own business for about 10 years. This has really put me in a fantastic position in a generalist role to drive transformation in an integration of a company this size. SS: Well, Lauren, we’re excited to have you here on the podcast as well, so thank you so much for taking the time to join us. In your role as a sales transformation operations leader, what are key initiatives that you’re focused on driving this year, and how are you bringing these transformations to life through your strategic programs? LR: It’s an interesting one, Shawnna. Our journey with NTT Holdings has over the last five years, been taking the companies outside of Japan and then been integrating them or merging them into one organization. So in the last year, we integrated NTT Data, NTT Data Services and Entity Limited. Now in the integration, you can imagine the transformation that would have to drive is more one of standardization, simplification, and really bringing this organization to operate as one. So when we look at sales transformation, we are running projects like one CRM, one revenue enablement platform, one sales performance management tool. So these are the projects that we are focusing on because we need to drive the simplification before we can truly drive innovation and transformation for the organization. SS: I love that. In your opinion, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform in supporting the success of your sales transformation initiatives? LR: It’s absolutely critical. So when we launched the one enablement platform in October, 2024, it was the only platform that, regardless of your legacy company, you could access through single sign-on, which meant there was only one place a seller could go to to find out around our one portfolio offering. There was only one place that they could go to for training. They could go for information, they could go for change management. Absolutely critical from our Salesforce team to have this one stop that it doesn’t matter if you’re in Americas, if you’re in Taiwan, if you’re in Australia, you could access Highspot, for example, to be able to find out what is our one portfolio, what are we doing in industry? What is the training that is available for me to learn about our new portfolio? So absolutely critical to drive one repository, one change management, and one enablement tool. SS: Amazing. Now, in the introduction, we talked about the importance of stakeholder relationships. Now I know that that is one of your strengths in building really meaningful long-term stakeholder relationships. How do you foster these relationships at all levels of the business to drive your transformation initiatives forward? LR: Yes, I absolutely love stakeholder management. For me, it’s about building trust and at every level of the organization trust is foundational. I have three things that I look at. First is listen and learn. How to make sure that you truly listening from their perspective, what are the challenges that they are facing and learn from that conversation. The second one for me is around response. So if somebody is contacting me or trying to set up a meeting with me, or sending me an email, or trying to communicate with me, ensuring that I respond immediately or within a 24 hour period to be able to get the trust that I’m going to actually listen and learn. And then finally is around integrity and kindness. I think acting with integrity in everything that you do, whether it’s a crazy transformational project, it takes nothing to have integrity and treat people with kindness. And I think with those three things comes to the core, building that trust, whether you’re an executive member, whether you are part of the project delivery team, if you have those elements in place and they trust you and they believe in you, you can drive the transformation for this organization. SS: I like those three principles. How have these strong stakeholder relationships helped you optimize and innovate your transformation initiatives? LR: I think for us was around simplification in a lot of the integration moments with this organization. I. We didn’t necessarily have the mandate to deliver on something. I’ll give you an example. Highspot was a legacy tool that we used for for limited, and in creating this one NTT data in the tool wasn’t used across the organization and we didn’t have the mandate to operationalize it across the organization and our CEO said to us. Lauren, if you can get the Americas to buy into Highspot, you’ll have the mandate for that to be a tier one enablement platform. But I had to use influence. And with the influence of that, I was working with people I’d never worked with before and I had to build that trust so that when I made the statement, I really believed that this is the right way to go for the organization. They believed in me and they believed that influence is the right thing to do. So, absolutely key to success. If the stakeholder believes in you, you can drive anything, but you’ve gotta follow through on that trust. You’ve gotta deliver on your promise. And that’s how I approached it for this initiative. SS: Amazing. I absolutely love that Lauren. Now, NTT data operates with a pretty complex business structure across 50 countries. How do you maintain consistency in your strategy while still adapting to the unique needs of the different stakeholders in your global teams? LR: It’s a challenging one, because the client is owned at the edge by the edge. It gives them a lot of autonomy to adjust to what the client would need in country. But I strongly believe that without simplification and standardization. You will not scale for growth and their edge or the countries rely on us to make sure that there is one tool, that there is one process, that the operational heartbeat of the company is sound. In order to be able to focus on the client. So I think it’s really understanding that would a group function be responsible for the edge, but also making sure that we are making their life easier through the operational standardization that we are driving, and that the growth strategy can come a lot easier at the edge if those foundational layers are in place. SS: Absolutely. Now, along with the large global reach, your programs also support different role types across the business, from client managers to solution architects and more. What are your best practices for developing programs that really resonate with each role? LR: It’s a topic that’s very close to my heart because I really believe that we need a persona driven strategy. So when we designed the revenue enablement framework – the framework that would inform how we build Highspot for NTT data in. We had a persona first lens to that. And for us it’s around creating how do you make sure that the persona has the right information at their fingertips. In the moment that matters the most. So if it’s a solution architect and he’s preparing for an RFP moment, well, how does he get his hands on that content or training or information or insights or data in the moment that matters in that RFP? If I’m a client manager and I’m preparing for A QBR, how do I find the information that helps me prepare for that QBR? So for when we designed the revenue enablement framework, we selected four primary personas and we did the tagging and the connection of to the material and the training within Highspot, through that persona, identifying that the moment that matters the most for them. And we did a number of interviews across the organization to make sure that we understood their moments. What are those top five, those top eight moments that mean so much to you? And how do we make sure that we can connect you to that moment at the time that it matters with a client? So for us, it’s absolutely critical. Persona driven mapping. Persona driven journeys is where the maturity of the organization will come through in our enablement platform. SS: Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Lauren, to shift gears a little bit, I know that you are a data-driven leader. How do you use data to inform and enhance your strategic programs to drive your transformation efforts and deliver on business goals? LR: I think data is, is there’s so much data. It’s it, it can actually work against you if you are not asking the right question. So when I look at the data, I definitely look with a lens of looking backwards, help me see trends that are happening, help describe a moment for me so I can see the insights against that trend. Then once I have the historic view, what’s happening, I start to look at the predictive. Where are we going with this? How do we forecast? How do we use machine learning to be able to anticipate where we’re gonna be going? And then once we’ve looked at the predictive, then I’ll probably look at how we then use the insights against that to prescribe to the organization how we should address where we are going. So it’ll be the three words for me, you know, describe, to be able to predict and then be able to, uh, look backwards in terms of describing. So, describe, predict and prescribe would be the three words for me. SS: I love that. Since launching Highspot, what results have you seen and are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share? LR: So we launched HighSpot for Entity Data Inc in October. First and foremost, we’ve got Americas on board. So you would’ve remembered I said the CEO Lauren get Americas and, and you’ve got a tier one platform. We now have it as a tier one platform for entity entity dating, which means it’s part of our, our digital blueprint and absolutely supported by our IT organization. I think where it came to life for me was when we designed this framework, persona driven framework, and we started to see our pre-sales solution architects, 30% of the data that was being, or the downloads were coming from that audience, which means that we had designed it correctly. And that was really exciting for me. It’s since October 34,000 downloads, we’ve had over 500,000 views. We. I also had to shown it just as a indication a lot of our co countries had changed their go-to market strategy from portfolio led to industry led. And we partnered with primarily, which is one of Highspot partners that has immediately activated in Highspot. And in one month we noted a thousand. Courses were completed, which means that the seven and a half thousand people that have license to Highspot, we were getting activation after activation in the first three months where people were going and consuming this data. So really exciting for me to see how much traction we had. It drove a huge, uh, change management plan, but really good traction. And I think where the rubber hits the road is, yes, we have seven and a half thousand people that are actively using Highspot, but we have a delivery organization that don’t have the license yet to Highspot, and the requests, those are 10, 20,000 people. The quests coming in. Please, please, please can we have access to this content, to this training, to these insights, to this analytics. So the forecast is also bright, which is really fantastic. So I’m really excited about what we’ve delivered. The feedback has been incredible. The stats are there and um, I think we are gonna start to see the functionality of Highspot being consumed a lot more in our maturity phase, but also looking at how do we start to spread the license model across the organization. SS: Lauren, it’s absolutely amazing what you’ve done at NTT Data, I have to say. Absolutely amazing. I have one last question for you, Lauren, if you don’t mind. To close, if you were able to offer one piece of advice to other leaders looking to drive impactful sales transformation efforts, what would it be? LR: For me? Listening to that, we have to be persona led. What does our audience need from us as enablers? They need to drive productivity. They’re complaining to us that they spend so much of their time in administrative talks, whether it’s compulsory training, whether it’s completing their time sheets or their submissions, or preparing for the client engagements. How do we make their lives easier so they’re productive? Where, where they need to be and that is selling for the organization. So whether we are looking at AI, if we are looking at personalization of our content, if we are looking at how do we make sure that we are optimizing the functionality of everything they do, whether it’s in CRM, whether it’s in high spots, whether it’s in the training, make sure you know what your audience’s pain is. What is the opportunity that you designed to address that pain? Our pain was, I’m spending too much time in admin. Our solution is to drive productivity through simplification and transformation and innovation through AI. SS: Amazing advice. Lauren. Thank you again so much for joining us today. I greatly appreciate your time. LR: Thank you so much 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 our insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to research from Gartner, only 24% of workers have a high degree of readiness to adopt new technology. So how can you optimize your enablement tech stack to build excitement and drive adoption from the start? 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 Karen Gauthier, senior Manager of growth enablement at Bright Horizons. Thank you for joining us. Karen. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Karen Gauthier: Thank you for having me very much, Shawnna. I’ve been with Bright Horizons for about five years in sales enablement. Our role here is basically to support our sales and client relations teams and serve up the right content, messaging and procedures so that they can do their job as effectively and scalable wise as possible. Prior to that, I worked in a number of different organizations, most recently education related. And I started out doing technical and user documentation, writing, and then supporting the training of those documents with the user group. And it just kind of, you know, one thing led to another and I probably was doing enablement before they called it enablement, but here I am. So enjoy it very much. SS: Well, we’re glad you’re here, Karen. Thank you for joining us. And given your extensive experience in education management, what are some of the. Unique challenges that reps in the industry face. And how would you say enablement can help them navigate these challenges? KG: Yeah, well, specifically for Bright Horizons, we have a number of products and services that really run a span from onsite care through career development and college coach elder care, everything for the lifecycle of the workers of the employers that we support. And so needing to understand all of the needs and the different types of tools that help. Those employers retain and recruit employees and just make it a quality place to work. And a best in class place to work is a big ask. So our reps not only need to understand the broad strokes, but the details and our job. And I think that the job of enablement is to serve it up in bite-sized pieces, but not just content, but the context. So when given a specific. Situation, different client, different industry, all of the different regulations or legal or political things that are involved in, you know, care or working for a nonprofit, those types of things. I mean, a lot of that makes our content very dependent on a specific use, and so having a tool that is robust, scalable, and flexible for our users with a good interface is a game changer. SS: I love that. And your organization has evolved quite a bit. On the enablement front. You recently switched off a previous enablement platform and moved to Highspot. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the challenges your team faced before and how you’ve been able to overcome those since implementing Highspot? KG: Sure. When I started with Bright Horizons, we were very new in the launch of that original tool, so we really did have it almost five years. I was there for kind of all of the growing pains, and I think that tool allowed us to understand what was available, what we could do. But I feel like at some point. It hit its limits of growth and scalability and you know, then there are always the little support issues, upgrades and things like that, that we just felt like we were needing a little bit more. So we went ahead and really took a good long look at our requirements matrix and what we needed and did our due diligence and came upon Highspot as the best in class for our needs. SS: I love that, and I think you made the right choice since you were a key advocate in the evaluation process. How did you build the business case for switching to a new enablement platform, and how did you go about securing stakeholder buy-in? KG: Yeah, I think that the first thing that we’ve tried to do that I think we learned using the original tool that we had was we had kind of sporadically throughout our user base, some key users that were early adopters and leaders on their teams, and we just kept them very closely in the loop as kind of team members. Tangentially so that they, they would be aware of what was going on. They could provide us feedback, what was working, what wasn’t, and using them as a sounding board, we were able to identify very quickly, not only what requirements we needed to kind of improve on with a new tool, but also prioritize them. And so being able to use that as our main business case. As our internal customers. Then when we went to the management, you know, ladder as we need to make a change and within our scope of budget, these are the priorities over the next three, six months and then a year and further, we were able to kind of take that scope of what we needed and the budget and the sale, and then having an internal coach and champion. Helped us navigate some of the internal procurement and technology things that needed to be tied together. So just kind of bringing everyone into the organization of understanding what needed to happen and prioritizing it was the most important thing for us. SS: Well, you must have done a phenomenal job on that front. The team did. Yeah. Team effort. Now, at your previous company, you participated in the implementation of Highspot. In your opinion, what are the key building blocks for a successful rollout of a new platform? KG: I mean, I think one of the biggest mistakes, and this goes back to my training and documentation days, is not stepping into the user’s day in the life. And, you know, there could be a hundred features in, in a particular tool, but they may use five of them 90% of the time. And so it, it’s a matter of really stepping into their shoes and understanding what needs to get done, what needs to get done at scale, what are some nuances. For the different ways their days could go and then incorporate that into the rollout prioritization plan. And, and that was something that part of the team I was on at a previous company did a really good job. And then, you know, kind of accepted all support from people that were willing to help in, in identifying little details of things that could go wrong down the road, not just the big picture, but. The little details, like there’s embedded links that are gonna go wrong in a script when that old tool goes away. And just identifying a lot of that stuff up front so you don’t have chaos day one. SS: Yeah. Well, I have to say your approach to stepping into their shoes must be working because you’ve already seen an impressive 85% recurring usage of Highspot. So I’d love to understand what are some of your best practices for driving adoption and really building excitement for your programs amongst the teams that you support? KG: Well, thank you for that. Our teams worked really hard, like I said, to have champions throughout the user base. We have users in the US separately in the UK, and then we have three different main lines of business. So it’s kind of spread out and all of them have unique needs, and so making sure that we bring them in so that not only do they feel part of the solution, but they can then go back and be champions and socialize it with their teams and, and we started that early on for this implementation. For a number of reasons. We had a very, very tight rollout. It was like five weeks, and so that was like all hands on deck. And the goal on the backend was just to kind of drill in, get as much done as we could, but outwardly we just kind of dripped out information, made it as positive as possible. And then I think the key to the adoption being successful was on day one, there were very few things that they used to do that they couldn’t still do. So that was priority one, was to kind of keep it. Status quo. And then once all the little bugs were worked out, then we started, you know, bringing out some of the features that we knew were very, very high on the priority list. And, the other thing we did was have a lot of opportunities for them to jump in as questions offered one-on-ones, jumped in on team calls, provided our own little videos and job aids for people, that kind of thing. Just so that there were a lot of communication tools out there so that they felt like they were always kind of having it in the forefront and, oh, I can do this, I can do that, and that seemed to just feed on itself and work well. SS: Amazing. Well, like I said, phenomenal job already. That is amazing. Now, as we head it into this year, I know one area that you plan on focusing on is enhancing buyer engagement. Can you share how you envision leveraging features like digital rooms to personalize and elevate the buyer journey? KG: That was one of the main tools, I think when we were out in the market looking for something to elevate our users into. That context was not just, you know, serving up the right brief at the right time because it’s the healthcare industry, but as part of a buyer journey. What pieces during an introductory BDR conversation would be more useful than like right before a finalist meeting. And so that was something that because we have a lot of deals going on concurrently, we wanted to be able to have something that we had a template for that could be reused, but also customizable with a pretty. Easy interface so that our users could make those changes. And it didn’t have to be gate kept by the admin group. So that was phase one was just kind of understanding that people were used to just dropping something in an email and sending it out, and we were losing not only the ability to repeat it, but we can track. Any of the information that was now available to us in engagements and we couldn’t relate it to opportunities, accounts, contacts in Salesforce and gain information that way. So we started out just really getting people used to the email pitches and link pitches so that they were getting a little more familiar with internally. In the tool, sending things out to prospects and clients, and that went really well. So then our new launch, which is something we’re working on now, we are, we have a few prototypes of some different digital sales rooms, and the initial feedback has been very positive. We’re hearing that they’re able to connect with people that had gone silent or share things and the response from their prospects has been that they like having one portal, that they know that information’s gonna get updated or the next time they go, if there’s an updated version, it’s gonna be there. And it’s been so far, very, very successful. We’re excited to expand it further, but I feel like just being three, four months into our launch of Highspot and being this far, being able to actually get this out there has been a big win. We’re excited about that. SS: Amazing. You touched on this a little bit, but I know you’re currently working on integrating Salesforce with Highspot. What value do you see in this integration and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? KG: Well, I think because we don’t have one path to a sale or one path to a existing client, so I think right now we’re just kind of getting a feel for. What that data’s gonna look like when it comes in. I mean, we know theoretically what it’s gonna do, but right now we’re making sure that whenever somebody shares something externally or uses a digital sales room that they’re relating so that we can start gathering all of the engagement information, tie it back to Salesforce, and we’re hoping to see is which content is most useful, at which stages of the lifecycle of a deal, which pieces of content help push it? Further and are there gaps where there just wasn’t content at the right stage for the right type of deal so that we can be serving up the right content at the right time. So I think initially that’s, that’s what we hope to get is providing the right content and then later making sure that we can tighten up our sales playbook with what to use at the right time throughout the lifecycle. Some of our deals are very short, but you know, building a new center is months and months, so they’re very different. SS: It’s amazing though that you guys are using that integration and that data that you’re seeing to really understand the full buyer’s lifecycle, so that’s phenomenal. Since launching Highspot, I’d love to understand what results you’ve seen so far and are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share with us yet? KG: I don’t have anything very quantitative. I can just say that whatever we are receiving in terms of information about what people are viewing and which tools are which, which pieces of content are more receptive than others, that’s all a hundred percent in improvement over where we were before. Because some information’s better than no information. I think. The people that use it appreciate the ability to go in and make it theirs, but not have to start from scratch. I think they like the idea of being able to see the metrics of people’s use or lack of use, and then understanding there’s another way to go about reaching out to that person. People you know that have different comfort levels with technology. So, you know, some people are gonna be all in on just building this out internally in the tool. Some people are gonna wanna just grab a link and put it in an Outlook email, and their clients might be appreciative of one way and not another. So I think that was one of the big wins we found so far, is that the tool is flexible enough to give and take for what we need. SS: Amazing. Well, Karen, we’re excited that you’re on this journey with us. And now I will say, last question for you, if you don’t mind. For enablement leaders looking to effectively implement and drive adoption for their new enablement platform, what is maybe the biggest takeaway you’d leave them with? KG: I think you need to know your customer, which is the internal users, and I think that you just have to find the tool that matches as best you can, given your budget and then prioritize. You can’t boil the ocean, but you know, you can pick and choose and and get those wins and, and when you do get a good win at an early win, good news travels fast, and when the right people hear the right message, it just does build on the energy, which is. Very helpful for the new tools that we wanna bring out to them. Things like the AI, we’ve just started dipping our toe into what that can do for us, and being able to get those wins with your user base behind you allows you to have the flexibility to play with some of the new features and bring them more. SS: Amazing. Well, Karen, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. KG: My pleasure. 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 maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to research from Gartner, only 24% of workers have a high degree of readiness to adopt new technology. So how can you optimize your enablement tech stack to build excitement and drive adoption from the start? 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 Karen Gauthier, senior Manager of growth enablement at Bright Horizons. Thank you for joining us. Karen. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Karen Gauthier: Thank you for having me very much, Shawnna. I’ve been with Bright Horizons for about five years in sales enablement. Our role here is basically to support our sales and client relations teams and serve up the right content, messaging and procedures so that they can do their job as effectively and scalable wise as possible. Prior to that, I worked in a number of different organizations, most recently education related. And I started out doing technical and user documentation, writing, and then supporting the training of those documents with the user group. And it just kind of, you know, one thing led to another and I probably was doing enablement before they called it enablement, but here I am. So enjoy it very much. SS: Well, we’re glad you’re here, Karen. Thank you for joining us. And given your extensive experience in education management, what are some of the. Unique challenges that reps in the industry face. And how would you say enablement can help them navigate these challenges? KG: Yeah, well, specifically for Bright Horizons, we have a number of products and services that really run a span from onsite care through career development and college coach elder care, everything for the lifecycle of the workers of the employers that we support. And so needing to understand all of the needs and the different types of tools that help. Those employers retain and recruit employees and just make it a quality place to work. And a best in class place to work is a big ask. So our reps not only need to understand the broad strokes, but the details and our job. And I think that the job of enablement is to serve it up in bite-sized pieces, but not just content, but the context. So when given a specific. Situation, different client, different industry, all of the different regulations or legal or political things that are involved in, you know, care or working for a nonprofit, those types of things. I mean, a lot of that makes our content very dependent on a specific use, and so having a tool that is robust, scalable, and flexible for our users with a good interface is a game changer. SS: I love that. And your organization has evolved quite a bit. On the enablement front. You recently switched off a previous enablement platform and moved to Highspot. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the challenges your team faced before and how you’ve been able to overcome those since implementing Highspot? KG: Sure. When I started with Bright Horizons, we were very new in the launch of that original tool, so we really did have it almost five years. I was there for kind of all of the growing pains, and I think that tool allowed us to understand what was available, what we could do. But I feel like at some point. It hit its limits of growth and scalability and you know, then there are always the little support issues, upgrades and things like that, that we just felt like we were needing a little bit more. So we went ahead and really took a good long look at our requirements matrix and what we needed and did our due diligence and came upon Highspot as the best in class for our needs. SS: I love that, and I think you made the right choice since you were a key advocate in the evaluation process. How did you build the business case for switching to a new enablement platform, and how did you go about securing stakeholder buy-in? KG: Yeah, I think that the first thing that we’ve tried to do that I think we learned using the original tool that we had was we had kind of sporadically throughout our user base, some key users that were early adopters and leaders on their teams, and we just kept them very closely in the loop as kind of team members. Tangentially so that they, they would be aware of what was going on. They could provide us feedback, what was working, what wasn’t, and using them as a sounding board, we were able to identify very quickly, not only what requirements we needed to kind of improve on with a new tool, but also prioritize them. And so being able to use that as our main business case. As our internal customers. Then when we went to the management, you know, ladder as we need to make a change and within our scope of budget, these are the priorities over the next three, six months and then a year and further, we were able to kind of take that scope of what we needed and the budget and the sale, and then having an internal coach and champion. Helped us navigate some of the internal procurement and technology things that needed to be tied together. So just kind of bringing everyone into the organization of understanding what needed to happen and prioritizing it was the most important thing for us. SS: Well, you must have done a phenomenal job on that front. The team did. Yeah. Team effort. Now, at your previous company, you participated in the implementation of Highspot. In your opinion, what are the key building blocks for a successful rollout of a new platform? KG: I mean, I think one of the biggest mistakes, and this goes back to my training and documentation days, is not stepping into the user’s day in the life. And, you know, there could be a hundred features in, in a particular tool, but they may use five of them 90% of the time. And so it, it’s a matter of really stepping into their shoes and understanding what needs to get done, what needs to get done at scale, what are some nuances. For the different ways their days could go and then incorporate that into the rollout prioritization plan. And, and that was something that part of the team I was on at a previous company did a really good job. And then, you know, kind of accepted all support from people that were willing to help in, in identifying little details of things that could go wrong down the road, not just the big picture, but. The little details, like there’s embedded links that are gonna go wrong in a script when that old tool goes away. And just identifying a lot of that stuff up front so you don’t have chaos day one. SS: Yeah. Well, I have to say your approach to stepping into their shoes must be working because you’ve already seen an impressive 85% recurring usage of Highspot. So I’d love to understand what are some of your best practices for driving adoption and really building excitement for your programs amongst the teams that you support? KG: Well, thank you for that. Our teams worked really hard, like I said, to have champions throughout the user base. We have users in the US separately in the UK, and then we have three different main lines of business. So it’s kind of spread out and all of them have unique needs, and so making sure that we bring them in so that not only do they feel part of the solution, but they can then go back and be champions and socialize it with their teams and, and we started that early on for this implementation. For a number of reasons. We had a very, very tight rollout. It was like five weeks, and so that was like all hands on deck. And the goal on the backend was just to kind of drill in, get as much done as we could, but outwardly we just kind of dripped out information, made it as positive as possible. And then I think the key to the adoption being successful was on day one, there were very few things that they used to do that they couldn’t still do. So that was priority one, was to kind of keep it. Status quo. And then once all the little bugs were worked out, then we started, you know, bringing out some of the features that we knew were very, very high on the priority list. And, the other thing we did was have a lot of opportunities for them to jump in as questions offered one-on-ones, jumped in on team calls, provided our own little videos and job aids for people, that kind of thing. Just so that there were a lot of communication tools out there so that they felt like they were always kind of having it in the forefront and, oh, I can do this, I can do that, and that seemed to just feed on itself and work well. SS: Amazing. Well, like I said, phenomenal job already. That is amazing. Now, as we head it into this year, I know one area that you plan on focusing on is enhancing buyer engagement. Can you share how you envision leveraging features like digital rooms to personalize and elevate the buyer journey? KG: That was one of the main tools, I think when we were out in the market looking for something to elevate our users into. That context was not just, you know, serving up the right brief at the right time because it’s the healthcare industry, but as part of a buyer journey. What pieces during an introductory BDR conversation would be more useful than like right before a finalist meeting. And so that was something that because we have a lot of deals going on concurrently, we wanted to be able to have something that we had a template for that could be reused, but also customizable with a pretty. Easy interface so that our users could make those changes. And it didn’t have to be gate kept by the admin group. So that was phase one was just kind of understanding that people were used to just dropping something in an email and sending it out, and we were losing not only the ability to repeat it, but we can track. Any of the information that was now available to us in engagements and we couldn’t relate it to opportunities, accounts, contacts in Salesforce and gain information that way. So we started out just really getting people used to the email pitches and link pitches so that they were getting a little more familiar with internally. In the tool, sending things out to prospects and clients, and that went really well. So then our new launch, which is something we’re working on now, we are, we have a few prototypes of some different digital sales rooms, and the initial feedback has been very positive. We’re hearing that they’re able to connect with people that had gone silent or share things and the response from their prospects has been that they like having one portal, that they know that information’s gonna get updated or the next time they go, if there’s an updated version, it’s gonna be there. And it’s been so far, very, very successful. We’re excited to expand it further, but I feel like just being three, four months into our launch of Highspot and being this far, being able to actually get this out there has been a big win. We’re excited about that. SS: Amazing. You touched on this a little bit, but I know you’re currently working on integrating Salesforce with Highspot. What value do you see in this integration and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? KG: Well, I think because we don’t have one path to a sale or one path to a existing client, so I think right now we’re just kind of getting a feel for. What that data’s gonna look like when it comes in. I mean, we know theoretically what it’s gonna do, but right now we’re making sure that whenever somebody shares something externally or uses a digital sales room that they’re relating so that we can start gathering all of the engagement information, tie it back to Salesforce, and we’re hoping to see is which content is most useful, at which stages of the lifecycle of a deal, which pieces of content help push it? Further and are there gaps where there just wasn’t content at the right stage for the right type of deal so that we can be serving up the right content at the right time. So I think initially that’s, that’s what we hope to get is providing the right content and then later making sure that we can tighten up our sales playbook with what to use at the right time throughout the lifecycle. Some of our deals are very short, but you know, building a new center is months and months, so they’re very different. SS: It’s amazing though that you guys are using that integration and that data that you’re seeing to really understand the full buyer’s lifecycle, so that’s phenomenal. Since launching Highspot, I’d love to understand what results you’ve seen so far and are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share with us yet? KG: I don’t have anything very quantitative. I can just say that whatever we are receiving in terms of information about what people are viewing and which tools are which, which pieces of content are more receptive than others, that’s all a hundred percent in improvement over where we were before. Because some information’s better than no information. I think. The people that use it appreciate the ability to go in and make it theirs, but not have to start from scratch. I think they like the idea of being able to see the metrics of people’s use or lack of use, and then understanding there’s another way to go about reaching out to that person. People you know that have different comfort levels with technology. So, you know, some people are gonna be all in on just building this out internally in the tool. Some people are gonna wanna just grab a link and put it in an Outlook email, and their clients might be appreciative of one way and not another. So I think that was one of the big wins we found so far, is that the tool is flexible enough to give and take for what we need. SS: Amazing. Well, Karen, we’re excited that you’re on this journey with us. And now I will say, last question for you, if you don’t mind. For enablement leaders looking to effectively implement and drive adoption for their new enablement platform, what is maybe the biggest takeaway you’d leave them with? KG: I think you need to know your customer, which is the internal users, and I think that you just have to find the tool that matches as best you can, given your budget and then prioritize. You can’t boil the ocean, but you know, you can pick and choose and and get those wins and, and when you do get a good win at an early win, good news travels fast, and when the right people hear the right message, it just does build on the energy, which is. Very helpful for the new tools that we wanna bring out to them. Things like the AI, we’ve just started dipping our toe into what that can do for us, and being able to get those wins with your user base behind you allows you to have the flexibility to play with some of the new features and bring them more. SS: Amazing. Well, Karen, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. KG: My pleasure. 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 maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to research from Gartner, channel partners are crucial levers of revenue generation, accounting for up to 75% of revenue income. So how can you build efficient and deeply engaged channel partner relationships to optimize channel sales? 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 Jason Singh, the head of global partner marketing at Meta. Thank you for joining us. Jason, I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jason Singh: Thank you very much for having me. So I look after partner marketing for business messaging, specifically at Meta, which is our conversational platforms around Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Being in B2B, marketing, sales, and marketing my entire life. We started in Australia and then moved over to Singapore and then New York about five years ago. What we do is three main things. We focus on ensuring that our partners have all the information that they need to be able to run their programs that they want to around business messaging. The second thing that we do is ensure that they have the right tools and materials. They’re able to grow their business. So that’s partner enablement, whereas where a lot of the Highspot focuses is within. And then lastly, it’s partner demand generation. So making sure that partners have the right investment from us, whether it’s time, dollars, et cetera, to be able to add fuel to their demand generation five. So those are three different programs that we have and where we focus a lot of our attention. SS: I’m excited to have you here, Jason, as a fellow marketing leader, and as you mentioned in your introduction, you have extensive experience across multitudes of regions, including Australia and Asia, and you really have a global perspective on how to bring the channel partner ecosystem to life? How has this diverse background shaped your approach to channel enablement? JS: The role that I have now is my first full-time role where I focused purely on partners previously being in and out of partner marketing and partners as a key audience over the past 15 years. But I took on this partner marketing leadership role officially about 24 months ago. And one of the things that I found out in that, firstly in the first 90 days, I think I met our top 35, 40% of our partners because I didn’t want to assume what they needed to know and the information they need to have and the formats that they needed to have it in and read rates of emails and, and downloads of contents. And I didn’t wanna assume. And so I spoke to a lot of them and it was super, super interesting that there were hardly any patterns. If you spoke with APAC partners, you would think you’d be able to put them into a category if you spoke with India partners similarly versus Latam, Spanish speaking Latam versus Brazil, North America… There weren’t really any regional patterns or trends. It was only when you looked at all partners globally, were you able to look at how partners operate and start compartmentalizing them into different groups, which would then give you a cohort to then cater around in terms of enablement, content, information, demand generation, et cetera. So I think one of the things that, having a diverse background where I. Help me to figure out is don’t assume in the first place, don’t assume more partners are the same. When I, when I was based in APAC, you would think Southeast Asia would be compartmentalized North Asia, so Japan, Korea, China could be compartmentalized and there we have these sub regions within the APAC region where we say, oh, okay, they operate the same, but it’s actually quite different. And so I think that really helped me coming into this global role because I was able to remove that assumption that we have these groupings, these cohorts, that because they’re based in certain regions, because they’ve got certain demographic attributes which are similar, but they’ll work the same way. And so instead of relying on those assumptions, what we did was just net new partner discovery, speaking with partners, getting, building really strong relationships with a lot of our great partners, and then figuring out what those groups are outside of. Demographic regional assumptions. SS: I love that you went in there unassuming and just really kind of learned what the partner ecosystem needed in today’s fast pace evolving environment. What would you say you were hearing are maybe some of the top challenges in channel partner sales and how are you addressing some of these challenges? JS: There is so much opportunity for the channel that they often struggle with. Prioritizing opportunities. If you look at any one of our partners, they partner with us somewhat exclusive, but many partners, partner with a number of other technology providers, and then within each technology provider there are end number of products of go-to market motions of incentives of programs. That they could be a part of. And within each of these standard operating procedures, there are processes, there are portals, there are hubs to sign into, passwords, usernames to remember. And then you’ve got the teams within these organizations that they need to make sure that they’re building relationships with the incumbent partner teams, the the senior leadership marketing teams like myself, et cetera. So it’s no surprise that when you speak to a partner that they’re often doing this. Inner calculation in their head around how important is this? Is this opportunity right now? Is this new product that we’re launching, A new program that we have is our H two market development fund, which we’ll launch in June. How important is this to me right now in the near future and in the long term? And how do I figure out what level of resources to invest? And that could be turning up to a meeting, that could be turning up to a webinar, or that could be. Injecting a couple hundred thousand dollars. That is, I would say by far, the most top of mind thing right now with our channel partners is. What is the actual opportunity with this thing that we’re being positioned with right now, and what do we need to do around this? SS: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of building on that, what do you believe are the key building blocks then for being able to foster really strong and effective partnerships with those channel sales teams? JS: I mean, I think I touched on that first point a little bit, so I’ll expand. Not assuming firstly and not doing groupings or categorization by those assumptions is super important because all of our partners operate probably a little bit differently to how we expect them to operate. The second bit is, I’ll speak my partner marketers lens specifically is learning about how these partners operate. You’ve gotta know who these partners are. You have to build relationships with partner marketers, salespeople, alliance managers. Marketing operations people within the partners. I’m very fortunate to have built a pretty strong relationship with probably about 40 or 50 people within our top 40, 50 partners in different partner groupings for our strategic partners, our tech partners, our service partners, where I’m starting to build a little bit more relationships now with our agency partners as well. And so I’m starting to get a really strong idea about how these partners operate. When I say how they operate, I’m talking about what are their incentives, what are their KPIs? What are the needles that they’re trying to move? Number two is how they actually work internally. So what are the processes? What are the procedures? What are the operating models? What are the systems? What are the tools that they use internally to help them get their work done? And lastly, it’s what are their expectations and what are their needs from us? What do they actually need right now? And that could be something as simple as one of the biggest things that we did. I think last year we’ll start rolling out more decks in Google Docs because we found that a lot of our partners wanted Google Docs because that’s how they operate and wanted the option of Google Docs as well as PowerPoint. And that subtle shift made, I don’t know, 10 partners to be able to work with our content from. Four days, two instantly because from Highspot, they could download that and ship it straight away, or just share organically within Highspot as opposed to having to download it, manipulating it, and then distribute it. And so you’ve really gotta invest the time and the effort to intentionally want to learn about your partners. It’s not a tick in the box of, oh hey, I can show my leadership that I met with 10 partners in Q1. It’s you being able to represent the partner voice. Across all of the different touch points that you have within the organization, whether that’s building content, building plans, talking with leadership. I would say once you get them out of email into a WhatsApp group or a WhatsApp chat, that’s where the real sort of connection happens, and that’s when you can start, like what I do now is when we’ve got a new piece of content, a new program that we’re building, I will take a screenshot of that and I’ll send it to about 12 different people from a different partners on WhatsApp just to get their input and they’ll respond very quickly within a couple hours globally, and they’ll start tell me what they like, what they don’t like, how it’ll work, how it won’t work, and that sort of instant feedback loop that I get with the partners have been cultivated over six months of getting to know them. So I won’t provide like three things that you need to do. I’ll provide, I’ll make it super simple with. The P zero thing that you need to do is build a relationship with your partners, really intentional, meaningful relationships with your partners and get to know them. SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Jason, to shift gears a little bit, you developed a framework — Learn, Adopt, and Grow to keep channel partners engaged, kind of beyond the onboarding portion of coming on with Meta. Can you tell us more about this framework and what each of the phases entails? JS: Definitely. Before I took over partner marketing, we had a really strong content development arm, but we, we lacked a little bit in the structuring of our content and from a partner point of view. Some of the feedback that we had from our partners when I took on the role and start a meeting with them was, got too many assets on there. There’s there’s too much stuff. We don’t know where to start. One of the assumptions that we made internally actually right at the start was, oh, we need to split this by product type partners, want to know individually by products. And that’s when we sort of paused a little bit. ’cause that didn’t make a whole bunch of sense to me and a few of the other folks in my team. And we went to our partners and plus it didn’t specifically tell us this, it was very clear that partners had different levels of maturity. And within their teams there were different levels of maturity. So partner A may have a sales team that’s super advanced, but their marketing team hasn’t yet really been enabled on business messaging on WhatsApp Messenger or Instagram Direct. And so what we decided to test was how do we group our programs, our content, our materials that aligns with partner maturity. So we split these in, into three different cohorts of partners. Number one, they’re the partners that just kicked off, just finished onboarding, like you said, and, and they’re looking to learn. They’re looking to learn about the products, the platforms, the incentive, our programs, how we go to market. It’s a learn phase. And so we built this category of, of learn, and we started mapping almost, I think two years ago or 18 months ago, we started mapping all of our 101 content and then the second one is adopt. We notice that a lot of partners have at that stage now where they want to, they wanna kickstart some stuff. They wanna launch some programs. They wanna launch a sales program around WhatsApp. They wanna launch a campaign. They want to do internal education. I. Show globally around education, around meta business messaging, and this is all around how do they get from zero to one. And so that was around adoption or expansion where partners have finished that learn phase and they’ve decided they’ve onboarded and they’ve internally prioritized business messaging. Sort of the tier one things of the, what they wanna do. And so in here is a lot of sales materials, marketing materials, program materials to help them to get from zero to one and launching stuff. And so we do things like sales toolkits. We do things like partner ready campaigns, which are campaigns that marketing teams within our partners can give to their. Campaign team and you’ve got landing page designs. You’ve got social media kits, we provide Figma files, co-branded assets, everything that you need. Basically 80% of the stuff that you need to launch a marketing campaign or a sales campaign. And then lastly, we’ve got Grow. Grow is made up of a series of programs that have fairly high investment but are built purely to 10 XROI or ROI. And this is where we partner. We wanna make the programs available. All of our partners, but there’s pretty strict qualification, uh, or eligibility criteria to be part of one of these programs. But essentially these are programs where a partner’s already pretty successful. They know how to sell business mission. They know how to pick the concept and the product they’ve got runs on the board. They’ve got considerable pipeline or revenue already, and they’re looking at options for meta to help them grow this to 10 x, 50 x to a hundred x what they’re already doing. And so that’s grow. That’s when you’ve already mastered. The learn. You know all about the product, the platforms, the programs available to you. You’ve already started driving product adoption or portfolio adoption using our tools, and now you’ve got that. You’ve got a good run rate, but you’re wondering. How you can actually really blow this up. So that’s, that’s our growth phase. And we’ve probably got about 15 to 20% of our partners, I would say, are in there. I would say the lion’s share 50, 60%, 50% probably in that middle bucket. And we’ve got another maybe 15% right now in Learn. But as we expand our partner ecosystem and we open up our ecosystem to different types of partners. Marketplace partners, commerce partners, agencies, et cetera. We will see them starting at learn. We’ll see a lot more people or that waiting shift a little bit more to learn. And then over the course of six months to a year, we’ll see them starting through that process. SS: I love that framework because it really helps kind of guide them through their evolution and their journey with meta. So that’s amazing. And you know, on a similar note, you actually spoke at Highspot user conference last year and you had shared that relevance and timeliness are key to driving adoption with channel sales teams. How do you ensure these elements are really embedded into all of your programs? JS: It’s a hard one. Um, relevance for me focuses on, it’s a three-legged stool. Relevance is all about making sure that the CONT is, I would say firstly it’s format and it’s probably a little bit reversed from how. The majority. Think about it. I think about format, because again, knowing our partners, and this comes with knowing the partners, there are a hundred things that a partner could be doing in any given day. If they’ve decided in half an hour to focus on something related to partner enablement, what I look after and they open up a document and it’s not in the format that they need. So they’re expecting a one pager because I’ve called something intro to x. They’re expecting a one pager, but it’s an 80 page SOP that’s in Microsoft Word that, that they’ve gotta open up on their mobile device and look through it. They’re gonna close that window and they’re not gonna spend the time necessarily finding the thing that they want. They’re gonna shift their mind into focusing on something completely different. So format for me in terms of relevance is key. Making sure that when we launch something, it is in the format that it needs to be in. We have a really strong understanding about the length, the detail within that document. We have a really strong understanding in the time of the day and the mental mode that a part of the audience is gonna be. When they open up this document, are they looking for something really quick that they can share with something? Are they gonna be expecting something really detailed, which they can absorb and then distill for other teams? Are they gonna be looking for something on the go, on the way to a client meeting? And so format number one is, is big for me. And relevance the other legs, uh, of that stool would be. I would say I would include timeliness within that. It’s making sure that we are producing things within the right timeframe requirements of that audience. And so what I mean by that is often what you’ll see with teams is they launch things in phases. You’ll wanna enable a partner on a new product, and you’ll have this phased out over a 12 month period. Quite often that’s done based on the requirements of the internal team and not what the partner’s requirements actually are, and so you’ll almost enable them 20% to do what you want them to do because you’ve got other things coming in phase two, phase three, what we like to do is we like to build our phase one. We used to also launch in phases. We build our phase one point of view. But then we share that with the partners and say, hey, is this the MVP that you need? Like we think it’s these four materials. Do you actually need something else? And they’ll give us feedback. We do this formally, but we also do this informally through like our WhatsApp groups, as I mentioned before. And they’ll come back and say, hey, that ROI calculator that you’re building for phase three, we’d love that in phase one, which we’ve got some pipeline right now that we can accelerate to closure if we were have to show them a stronger ROI through some sort of tool. And what you’re building is perfect for us and so we will recalibrate internally to try and build an asset that’s in phase two, phase three into phase one. Or they’ll say, hey, we don’t actually need this narrative right now. We’ve built this PowerPoint deck already. We’ve got what we need. You can push that out for some other partners that may not be at the stage right now. So again, like having a good understanding of the partner, but also just sharing with the partner, having partners at the core of what you’re actually building in your development cycle is part important and part of and timeliness. And lastly, would be how you launch. So we talk about relevance in terms of making sure got the right format of the materials, the right details within each of the specific assets. We talk about timeliness. I’d say lastly, it’s how you actually launch something. We’ve had to get pretty creative about how we launch certain programs and just projects and and campaigns internally. The main reason being, as I mentioned before, partnered with a hundred things that they could be doing, and so you have to ask yourself, how do you cut through the noise? With those 101 things that partners have to think about every given day, and it could be soft launching, it could be launching with a smaller group of partners, building a case study around partner success, and then using that to launch to the other 80% of partners. But thinking a little bit more creatively around how you launch something so they can build internally. And understanding about how this particular thing is important to me right now is relevant to me right now. Versus the other a hundred things that got going on. SS: I love that approach and clearly it must be working because you guys have recently increased the number of partner organizations that are engaging with Highspot by 21%. I’d love for you to walk us through that journey. What strategies played AQ role in driving these results? JS: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s kind of, we mentioned before around a format, format launch and, and timeliness. When I joined the team in this specific role, having worked with partners before in various roles and be being a partner to a lot of organizations previously as well, I understood the importance of a content management system. You know, we have typically you have partner managers that. Manage your top under know 10, 15, 20% of partners, but then you’ve got this medium tail and this long tail that you need to activate and you do that through documentation. We had a pretty good Highspot experience previously, but again, there was, there was little organization done around it. And so the first thing I kind of did was, you know, take off my, my partner marketing hat and put my partner hat on access Highspot and go. Let me do the top five to 10 things that a partner would need to do, and I had that list after chatting with the partners in my first 60, 90 days, and I noticed that almost every single one of the top 10 things that a partner needs to do was a real struggle in Highspot and not because of the tool, but because of how we had structured our Highspot experience. It wasn’t aligned to how partners want to actually use it. And so we focused in 2023. In the early part of 24, we predominantly focused on three things. We focused on content, making sure we did a pretty comprehensive content audit. I think we had about something like six and a half thousand different assets on Highspot, and so we did a complete content audit. We removed the stuff that we didn’t need that needed to be archived. That was just, I think it was, was three groups. It was remove, archive, update and keep. Something like that. A key thing for me on the next phase was on the user, the more of a visual experience. Ours was good. It was a little bit more out of the box and I feel we working with some of our internal brand teams, we could prove that to be a little bit more similar to some of the other partner experiences that our partners have. On some of the other portals that we have, just a partner portal, a partner center, our partner hub. And so we work to bring in some of those brand elements from Meta and WhatsApp and our different platforms into Highspot. We’re able to do that with one of our partners. And then the last thing we did was test, though we updated our content. I’m a big stickler for content naming and having a really strong naming taxonomy and nomenclature around how you name your content. And if you ask my team or the team that we work with, I’m always pushing the team. If there’s something, if there’s an asset that’s, that I feel is not named correctly, people aren’t gonna click on that. So what’s the point of even building that asset if it’s not named correctly? People need to be really understand what they’re getting themselves into when they click on an asset. And so we did our content audit. We update a lot of our content. We renamed almost every single asset once we had archived. A lot of the assets rebuilt the design of our complete Highspot experience. We had different groupings, different categories, and then again, we had partnered as part of this journey. So we tested this with partners and we said, hey, if we had this, what do you think? A lot of these were just workshops with partners moving certain things around saying, hey, if we put this here, does that work? We put this here, does that work? And then we launched, we soft launched, I think to about 20% of our partners, we saw some good results and then we, we had launched for everyone else. I mean, we saw an initial spike straight away when we launched because we’ve completely redesigned high spot and it’s great experience and you’re gonna get a lot of people organically come in and say, hey, I wonder what this is about. So we saw a spike in the first two weeks, but after that, that’s when we started. We saw the drop after the spike, and then we saw the gradual. And importantly for us, we wanted partners that don’t visit us at all to start visiting our Highspot experience. We wanted more people within our partners visiting Highspot as well. And so eventually over the six months, we started seeing like a really steady, nice, gradual ramp up. And then some of our other metrics, the time spent on HighSpot, the number of things that they’re downloading, number of things that they’re opening, so views, a lot of these started improving. The challenge now is that now we’re getting really strong adoption on Highspot. We’re starting to see teams wanting to upload more and more content on it because we’re starting to see the value of a lot of the foundational work that we’ve done. And so whilst we don’t, obviously we don’t gate content, but we do wanna make sure that everything that’s uploaded. Is super intentional and is aligned with the risk of enablement program that we have. So it’s a good problem to have. SS: Absolutely. That is a great problem to have. And so, aside from some traffic, and you did talk about a couple other key metrics, but I’d love to understand, how do you think about the metrics that you need in order to continue to measure and optimize your channel enablement strategy. JS: If you’re kind of first principles that, and think about why do we have Highspot experience in the first place to enable our partner ecosystem. We have a partner ecosystem within business messaging which is evolving and growing. We’re expanding to, if you say we have about 12 different types of partners in their ecosystem, we’ve got really strong activation with. Probably a quarter of them. And we’re now focusing on evolving our partner ecosystem into the rest. And so our partner marketing goals are always aligned to our partner ecosystem goals and our channel goals in general. And then with end partner marketing, our enablement goals are aligned with what our channel strategy is. And so right now what we’re focusing on is ensuring that as we expand our private ecosystem to new and different type of partners. When they’re ready for enablement, we start taking them into that learn phase of the learner grow model. That experience is really positive for them, and it’s almost a page turner type experience where they’re really excited to move into the next phase, or really excited to be shown a different asset or for another asset to be uploaded and email to them and say, hey, you think you’re really like this? And so really key for me is ensuring that whatever, whatever I’m doing, whatever my team’s doing, is aligned completely to a partner ecosystem strategy. SS: I love that. And do you have some wins that you might be able to share? What are some of the initial business results that you’ve seen on Highspot specifically? JS: Look, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but there were two things that we wanted to do. We wanted more partners, more net new partners on it, so partners that spend zero time on it and we can see from our dashboards that we build, I wanted to see more partners on it. ’cause that for me was, and they’ve been enabled on a Highspot before. They’ve got access, they’ve got a license, they know how to use it. They’re just not using it. And so for me, that was a real win to start seeing Partner X that hasn’t visited Highspot in three months to start seeing them, oh, hey, we’ve got one person from Partner X now in Highspot last month, and now I’ve got two people. The average time they spend on the platform was 60 seconds. Now it’s three minutes. Now it’s six minutes. But that was a great personal win for me because that’s almost, for me, that was proving them wrong. Initially, they had probably visited it and not enjoyed the experience, and in their mind it was something that I didn’t really need. And so for me to be able to turn that around with that team and rebuild the experience of them to say, oh, it’s actually pretty good now, that was a really great win for me because that’s turning a detractor into an advocate, which is just, just a, a great personal goal to have. And the second thing is starting to see people, I suppose we’re seeing people spend more time on it. We’ve got a hypothesis around why they spend more time on it is because we’ve got less content on there. Now, I don’t know exactly how many assets, but it’s not, it’s not close to 6,000 anymore, but there’s less assets on there. So the discoverability is far better. They can find the assets that they want. When they go into the search field and they search for something, they don’t come up with 40 different assets. It’s 12, which is manageable. And so they’re spending more time within those assets. So now we see new partners using it and existing partners using it more and better. The two things that we focus on, we’re seeing those move up into the right, which is great. We wanna start looking into different sorts of measures of success. This year we are looking into, you know, again, as I mentioned with the part ecosystem, how do we launch to a new partner type? Which is new, and so we haven’t done that yet. On Highspot, we had a bunch of partners already enabled on business messaging through a different portal. Then when we adopted Highspot, we moved them to there. But we’re gonna start looking at things like sharing. We’ve recently started using digital sales rooms, which is something that we didn’t do last year, and we’re testing about five to six different things with digital sales rooms. That’s a really powerful feature. We haven’t figured out exactly where, where the superpower is for us to use digital sales rooms. But once our pilots are finished, we’ll probably have a hypothesis there. But yeah, I think the metric for us this year is we know our partner numbers are gonna still go up and into the right. It’s gonna slow down a little bit our growth, but we know we’re in the right direction. So our other measure for success is how do we deepen our partner’s experience with Highspot? We know we’ve only scratched the surface of what Highspot can do for us. So we’re looking into what are the other things that we need to do, and also importantly, how do we connect the Highspot experience with some of our other tools that we have, and starting to integrate it more into the partner experience that we have versus a standalone CMS, which a little bit it is of now, but I know that’s something we’re working on with your team. SS: I love that. Jason, last question for you, and I don’t think we could. Get away from talking about AI these days. It’s everywhere. And at the conference you were at last fall, I know you were excited about some of the AI innovation that we, we showcased there, but I’d love to hear from you, how are you starting to envision AI playing a role in further enhancing your channel partner enablement strategy moving forward? JS: I mean, the buzzword of the year, right? It’s a little bit hard right now. We’ve just finished our foundational rebuild of Highspot, and we’re at a really comfortable stage with what we’ve delivered to our partners and the operations around it, including, you know, governance. Measurement content, strategy, et cetera, like when a really good spot there. I think there are some operating models around AI that make sense for our partners to want to lean in towards. When you talk about enablement, which we’re at different stages of exploring, I think the most powerful one would be how do we get the right content? It comes down to timeliness and relevance as we spoken at the start. How do we get the right content to the right partner at the right time? And so that’s more generative content enablement, if you will. And that’s tough because you need, you need sort of metadata to support that. But I think if you were to ask our partners what’s the main thing that they would want from AI and channel enablement or partner enablement, it would be, hey, be really useful instead of me looking for the, the asset for you to actually know that I need this asset right now or group of assets. I think that would be the main thing that they would want. And I get it. So we’ll get to that stage at some point. But right now we’re, we’re definitely focused on maintaining our strong grassroots and foundations right now, and then looking at more sort of piecemeal. Additions to that. So things like digital sales rooms, things like making it easier for them to be able to share content with their end clients on the go, which is one of the ask that they’ve sent from us. And so those are the few things that we’re focused on this year. SS: I love it. Jason, thank you again so much for joining our podcast today. I truly appreciate you sharing your insights and experience. JS: Of course. It’s been great. Thanks a lot, Shawnna. 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.

Banning cell phones in schools, trying to get egg costs down, affordable housing, transparency in government and more with Senator Shawnna Bolick. 

According to Salesforce research, 66% of sales representatives feel overwhelmed by the number of tools they use. So how can you streamline your tech stack to enhance operational efficiency and drive revenue growth?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. Here to discuss this topic is Serge Lobo, the Chief Revenue Officer at Loadstone. Thank you for joining us. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Serge Lobo: Thank you, Shawnna. Thanks for having me here today. What is this year today? So I’m 27 years in sales, 23 years in sales management. I used to work for multiple different known brands like Microsoft, HP, Pegasystems, Ingenico, and SAS, so that’s a famous analytics company. And now I’m chief revenue officer, so we try to get The right title for my position because nowadays in size business, the revenue comes not only from sales, but also from retention of the customers. So my role is actually to wrench all the sales processes and ensure that the customers are getting the right impact so that we managed to retain them and then ensure that they grow together with us. SS: Amazing. Well, thank you again for joining us today. Given your extensive experience in sales leadership across both large enterprises and startup organizations, I’d love to understand how does your background influence your strategy for driving global revenue growth at Loadstone? SL: I play the thinking first of all, so before making any moves, any discussion. So we need to think of what do we want to achieve here rather than just get the contract. Yeah, it’s not as simple as it used to be when you get a call and then just because you have a fascinating piece of software, someone getting excited and then just signs the contract. Not anymore. A lot of competitors, like in our space, we just made a rough calculations and we had. We counted like 14, 000 companies worldwide that are doing pretty much the same things as we do 14, 000. Yeah, that’s a lot. And, uh, the concept that I apply is that first of all, so we need to think of how we drive the process and then go after automation of that. So we need to design the processes. We need to get to build the operating model, and then we need to understand the requirements for the systems for the systems that we want to deploy and to benefit from them. And of course, well, all that. Goes through the, uh, revenue thinking. I’m a chief revenue officer. So I’m partially responsible not only for revenue, but also for spendings. Yeah. So spendings are also the key elements. So every solution that we’re using should be cost efficient for us. SS: Amazing. And I understand Lodestone recently went through a rebrand, which can bring a lot of significant changes for the sales team. What are some of your best practices for helping your teams effectively navigate this transition? SL: Well, first of all is, uh, we need to be transparent. Yeah. We need to be transparent and we need to make sure that the team buys the general idea. And then the team is ready for change. Cause as for any human being, the change is the biggest challenge. Yeah. So after five years old, so then we are really hesitant to change, which is surprising before five years, we want to try everything. You want to change everything like every day. After we are five years old. So we become really hesitant to that. That’s pretty much the major challenge that we have when we change anything in the company. We won’t change the sales process and we need to sell that first to people. And sometimes it’s, it’s not an easy task. And so we try different means of getting that to people so that they start to use that. It’s because it’s not only to make. People try to stand that, right? But it’s also like, do you use that in like everyday work? Do you use that in everyday customer discussions? Do you use that when you talk to your peers? And so that’s most difficult. And so we spend a huge amount of time now in terms of like getting them to people so that they start using that. Yeah. Cause we have people from different generations, different background, different experience. And so of course, well, they try to use the experience first. All right, so we are now in Lodestone. Okay, so what’s your product, product X, Y, Z. All right, let me try to sell that. And then we need to make sure that people are doing that in the right way. Yeah. Cause we see that there is a best practice and there’s some practices that have very little propensity to be successful. Yeah. So we need to increase that chance. We need to give people not only the automation tools, but also the methodology and the process tools so that they speak in the right way to the customers. SS: Absolutely. And as you mentioned, when these organizational changes happen, you often have to reshape the sales process. And I know that’s one of your key focuses. What challenges have you faced in optimizing sales processes and how have you overcome them? SL: Well, the first is to measure the measurement of the current status and the measurement of the target status, say in my career when they try to do the major change, so then people want to move fast. Yeah, okay So let’s move fast. Let’s change everything Let’s do it for the best But then when we try to analyze and to think on what will be a successful change. Then we need to define the target where we are today where we want to go in the future And that’s the number one thing. Then the second thing is really to get people involved into that change. And what I do usually throughout my career since my early management years, so I try to involve people, you know, so involving people into designing that process because they know about what’s going on in the field and then they know better what might work in order to do it best. Yeah. And then of course, well, if there are some good people with different experience also, but different attitude to the process. So they usually get some really good insights and really good advisors and me as a manager. So I usually facilitate that process, even though I might know the final answer. So, but I then guide people to the final answer, which is right so that they cannot escape them from deploying that and usage of those process, those ideas, those guidelines that they designed literally for themselves. SS: I think those are some great best practices now from your perspective, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform and helping organizations improve sales processes and really drive operational efficiency? SL: Some years ago, I heard that statement when the boss asked, what if we enable people teach them to do and they leave? And then the sales manager answers that question with another question. What if we don’t enable them? We don’t teach them and they stay. So that’s literally it. So that’s a key element of any successful sales organization to enable people, not only of the product knowledge, not only of the pricing tools, but the way you sell that, because nowadays this is not a challenge to sell something. It’s in fact, the challenge, the huge challenge is to buy, and if we analyze the customer processes, then we will find out that the process to buy something is by far more complicated than the process to sell something. And so we need now to understand and to guide our salespeople, to be the helper in that journey, for the customer to fulfill their buying intentions, to fulfill their buying process in the best way, because well, they buy it once, but we sell it like on a multiple times. And so we now. What are the intentions of the customer in the process of what will be the next step? How to justify this or that step, justify this or that number. Yeah, so all of those talking to people in numbers, talking to people in financials that requires a huge amount of routine operations and a huge amount of experience. So you need to be very comfortable to do that. Yeah, and in order to do that, you cannot do that on the fly. So you need to be enabled properly. You need to be enabled through the business cases. You need to be enabled through the rehearsals of the pitches. You need to be enabled through the templates. And of course, all of that, the combination of all those streams. So it becomes kind of the most important part of the, uh, in the company, because all the rest is just the outcomes on how good your people are trained, how good people are enabled if they’re not. There’s a very little chance that they form well and you build up the sustainable system of sales, a sustainable organization. And that’s why actually, so the first thing I did in Loadstone, when I joined the company, I asked, do we use any kind of database or knowledge base enablement system? Do we have any enabling processes for people who come to Lodestone, who come to, uh, to join our great team and, uh, make sure that we multiply our, Successful cases and best practices. And the answer was like, well, really, so yeah, we got some Google Docs, multiple slides for people trying to serve there. And, um, literally, so they, sometimes they just get drawn in those multiple artifacts and never, never came up. So that’s why we decided for a different approach. SS: Well, I love that you’re taking that and from a sales leader perspective, what role does leadership play in really fostering a culture of efficiency? SL: Let me give you an example. So for every single new employee that comes into a client facing role, I spend at least four and a half hours of my time for every single employee, not a group level, like on individual level on getting people through our operating model. How do we work on getting people known? What do we sell on getting people know? What are the major tools that I’m looking as a zero on the management? So means that We try to get our employees, our sales or client facing people, not only through the tools, but also through the cultural DNA. So what the company is, what are we doing? Well, why are we doing this? Why we don’t do that? Why we don’t push in the products? Why I didn’t need the contract without knowledge of the customers? Yeah. Because sometimes, well, there are people who come up to and say, Hey, here’s a contract. I just signed it. I said, do you have enough information about that customer? Well, who cares? Yeah, I just signed the contract. Well, I do care because, well, there’s a little chance to retain that customer in one or two years just because, well, we did the last job during the sales process. No, that’s not the DNA of the company, and we explained that right from the beginning of the employee journey in our company. SS: I love that. I love that’s part of the DNA. Now, you mentioned that automation has played a key role in helping you drive operational efficiency, such as your automated process for content governance. Can you tell us more about this process and how you’re automating sales workflows? SL: Well, the sales workflows are being automated with a solution from the company called Pipedrive. So that’s our sales automation tool. But everything aside of that, so it means the knowledge base and some parts of the customer interaction workflows, including learning and management, we are automating that with Highspot. So we’ve came across Highspot a couple of years ago. And so I found it really fascinating because I know in my previous companies we’ve had. Self enablement platforms. And that time I was like thinking, okay, so we don’t have enough resources to develop anything, which would be at least at the level of what I used to have in my previous companies. And then I came across Highspot and I was like, really? So can these guys do this and this and this? And then we came through a couple of use cases and then we understand, okay, so Highspot is a good, probably a good selection for us. And then when I understood that this is a great selection for us is that when we start talking money. Cause this was literally like the, the only provider who managed to convince me from the money standpoint, from financial standpoint, rather than the features and functions. So, and that’s still the example for, even for my salespeople, I still have that first proposal from Highspot saying, all right, so this is how the proposal should look like for, for our customers, because that speaks in terms of financials, mostly rather than features and functions. Then that impressed me a lot. And so I understood that company wise, we have pretty much similar DNA. Because we also talk to our customers, not for features and functions, but through the benefit that they may get from usage of our software. SS: Well, I have to say, you guys are doing amazing with streamlining those processes. And you’ve also driven really strong engagement from the sales team with 95 percent recurring usage and Highspot. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption of these investments that you’ve made in tools for your sales team? SL: Well, first of all, what I was impressed at the beginning is how I might use that for customer interactions. So the functionality of what they call the pitching and that transformed into creation of Digital Rooms. So that allows us to create a very personal lending. Content page for all customers. So whenever I want to share something with the customers, I make my people to share that through the pitching of the Highspot because I can definitely say whether this content was attractive or not, whether this content was read, how much time was spent in reading of that content? Because that’s very important for me. And I had a couple of times I even had some nasty customers had a situation when, you know, me personally, I was sending them the pitch and then I called them and said, hey, we spend a time, we prepared a proposal for you. Well, what do you say? He said, well, um, I read this proposal. I never saw that being opened and we don’t go, okay, all right. So I don’t want to spend the time with you just because, well, it doesn’t make sense for you. Okay. If it doesn’t make sense for you, it doesn’t make sense for us, but pitching is a very important part of custom interactions and that drove a lot of ROI for us. Because we now see that those customers who are mostly interacting with this landing pages, personal landing pages, they close the deals with us quite fast. So then the second one is, of course, for the internal knowledge base. So we found that those people who are most readers in Highspot, they are, surprise surprise, our top performers, yeah? Because in a lot of cases, you might face this situation when you just create some kind of piece of content and then you ask your people to read this, read this, listen to this, watch this, and then say, well, listen, well, I don’t have time, I have a custom meeting, I don’t have time, it’s just too long, can you just make it one page of me? And the bottom line, those who read most are the top performers. What a sequence, yeah? So that structure actually helps us to build up the sales guides to check what are the most useful pieces of information that we have in a high spot, also from to spend the time on developing or stop developing certain pieces of content at a time. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Those are amazing. And since implementing Highspot, do you have any business results that you can share or any wins that you can share? SL: Well, in fact, it’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of sales enablement rather than through the sales results. And so I know for sure that we increased our conversion rates by 110%. So that’s, that’s the official number from our Pipedrive. So just getting prepared for the session, I asked the CRM team, what’s the result or what do we have from numbers? And it told me, well, we have this and this and this. And I think, well, this is the highest award for me. To understand what’s the efficiency of Highspot in Loadstone. Yeah, 110 percent of onversion growth. And, we have today, I think, over 7, 000 artifacts or pieces of information that we uploaded. And we have a very, uh, a very big open rate for those pitches that, that our customers are getting from our client success managers. So that’s, we are delivering, I think while we are delivering at least month to month, that’s a different number, but this is around 200 pitches per month for us, which means that we have a lot of those personal interactive sessions. SS: Amazing. Amazing. Well, last question for you, I loved hearing about kind of your journey in terms of the rebrand and the sales process, see optimizations, but I’d love to understand as you’re kind of looking ahead as someone who is passionate about innovation and operational efficiency, how do you envision leveraging AI to further enhance your strategy for driving revenue growth? SL: Oh, that’s a buzzword today. Well, actually in content of knowledge management, AI should help people to have all information on the top of their fingers. Yeah. So whatever you ask, you need to have the concentrated answer. So, and that’s where AI can help to get known to new information. Because, well, I told you, we have 7, 000 pieces of information. How do you navigate through that? Yeah. That’s really challenging. And in fact, so so this is what we’re looking for is that a I will help us to get first of all, like a little pieces off and concentrated pieces of information to start your journey into specific area of knowledge and if you understand that, well, this specific thing is of value for me is a value for my customer, I need to get deeper. And so then depending on the depth, so AI should be helping people to get as much concentration of the information that they need in this specific level. Cause, uh, yeah, we do have this pieces of information, like 70 pages it sounds reference guide. Yeah. So then you cannot make people to read it nowadays. But then is this a valuable piece of information? Of course it is. Yes. And we have the reason why it’s 70 pages, not 50, not 30, not 20, not one. There’s a lot of valuable information, but I don’t need it at the same time all the time. Yeah. I need the piece of information which will be valuable for me right here. Right now. And so AI might be a very helpful tool in that. So that’s how I see that. So needless to say, for the international companies, you have a lot of pieces of information that should be translated into multiple languages. So that’s also the help of, uh, that’s with AI tools. You save huge amount of time now to do that completed. Yet you have like write visuals, write text, optimize text to the specific cultural languages and so on and so forth. That’s something that AI already helps us a lot, but then I see that we’re still in the beginning of the journey. SS: Yes. Yes. There’s a lot more that I think it’ll bring over the fullness of time, so I’m excited to see where it takes us. Serge, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and your thoughts. SL: Thanks Shawnna! 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.

Chicago Stand TF UP!!! Female MC Lil Keisha slid on me and man, the amount of respect I have for her and her story is incredible. Eating the fellas up on the mic, she brings her raw flare to music. Recently she collaborated again with rapper Shawnna and L Streetz on Shawnna's single "King Size Snicka", in addition to her own new music. Outside of music, Keisha speaks on changing her perspective on life, toxic people and the power of therapy. Her single Go Up has fans going crazy, eager for what's next!! Watch Full video episode on YouTube @RobinEvette --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robin-evette/support

Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that when sales processes and plays are structured, organizations report 19-percentage-point higher win rates. So how can you optimize the sales process through enablement? 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. Here to discuss this topic is Jeff Eisenberg, the director of sales enablement at IntelePeer. Thank you for joining us, Jeff. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jeff Eisenberg: Of course, Shawnna, thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. So my name is Jeff Eisenberg. I am the Director of Sales Enablement for a mid-sized SaaS company in the communications automation space. I’ve been in sales enablement for eight years across both enterprise and mid-sized companies. And before that, I sold for 12 years. So everything I do is looked at through the lens of a salesperson. I always like to tell my sales teams that I’ll never ask them to do something that I don’t feel is beneficial to their role as I wore a sales hat for a long time. SS: I’m sure that that helps to build a lot of rapport with your team, Jeff, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. Now, one of your key initiatives at IntelePeer is, as I mentioned in the introduction, optimizing the sales process through enablement strategies. What challenges have you faced when it comes to streamlining sales processes in the past, and how have you overcome those challenges? JE: Adoption is always a challenge when it comes to streamlining sales processes. I would say that to overcome them, you need several things. Number one, buy-in from your sales leadership team and other stakeholders. They are the ones who are going to drive any initiative on the ground floor level with their team, so they need to have a voice in that process. Additionally, my CRO, my Chief Revenue Officer, always says – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. In other words, repetition is key to success, so consistent reinforcement of any initiative. Going to my earlier point, they need to understand the WIFM, so what’s in it for me, so it’s important for me to be viewed as that advocate for sales. If it doesn’t make sense to their role, tell them not to roll it out. We need to demonstrate how it will benefit their role. Now, lastly, a content management tool is critical to consistent reinforcement. Now there are some pretty staggering stats that show the rapid drop in retention from any initial presentation. So that’s where a content management and LMS system play a key role. Providing the sellers with the right resources at the right time to accelerate their sales process. SS: In your experience, what would you say are the essential building blocks for creating a sales process that really effectively helps to drive business results? And how can enablement play a key role in that? JE: Well, that’s a great question. So first, I would recommend getting buying on the importance of a sales process. Now there are two great statistics that I often share to reinforce the importance of following a process. The first is that 70 percent of businesses with a standardized sales process are high performers and see a 28 percent increase in revenue compared to businesses without one. The second stat, conversely, 68 percent of salespeople do not follow the sales process at all. Now that comes directly from Harvard Business Review. Now, those are pretty scary when you think about it from that perspective, but it also demonstrates a significant opportunity for any organization to drive revenue. Now, at the end of the day, you need to go back to the beginning and either define or refine what that sales process will look like. Now a sales process is fluid, so it can change over time, but it’s essential to really lock down what that initial process is. Additionally, and this step I think is overlooked far too often, is the need to align with the buyer’s journey. That’s more essential than ever. On one hand, technology is evolving so rapidly that many buyers don’t even know a specific product or solution exists. On the other hand, a significant majority of buyers, 70%, complete most of their research before reaching out to a sales team. Meaning they’re well into their buyer’s journey before even initiating contact with a seller. Now, specifically, When we’re looking at the essential building blocks, it comes down to a few key measures. Number one is qualification criteria. So, we need to define who that ideal customer is at ICP. And this is not just basic measures such as industry, role, and job title. But where a prospect is in their buyer’s journey. So are they window shoppers or actually interested? Do they have a vested interest in the solution? Or what challenges are they trying to solve for? The second measure, the deal stages. Now it’s important to define the criteria for each stage of the sales process and the necessary measures to continue to move that sales process along. Whether it’s initial qualification, qualification of the opportunity, proposing the recommended solution, or understanding what their procurement process is. Now that’s essential for forecasting purposes. Now, then we have to look at the desired end state. Now this goes hand in hand with the deal stages. So what is the desired end state of each stage? And then more importantly, what’s the overall desired end state? Now, obviously, the overall desired end state is closing more deals. The goal has to be defined as financial in nature and has a timeline. So, for example, if my quota is X, for this current year, do the building blocks align with that goal? And then lastly, conversion rates. So, by knowing your conversion rates, not only across the sales org, but across each individual contributor, you can uncover the gaps and plan accordingly. To bring it all to summation, as sales enablement professionals, we need to initiate, we need to facilitate, and drive the creation of the sales process and then plug in all the necessary resources to align. Whether that’s sales plays, SLPs or standard operating procedures, reports, training, CRM alignment, and the list goes on and on. SS: Absolutely. And on that note, what motivated you to re-evaluate and change your enablement tech stack and how has that impacted your sales process? JE: Great question, because when I joined the organization four years ago, content was actually shared out via MS Teams, so through chat. So, we needed to actually scroll through multiple chat groups to find the relevant content. Obviously, this is exceedingly unorganized and inefficient. Additionally, there was a lot of outdated content that was saved on individuals’ hard drives, and that’s detrimental to our go-to-market strategy because it was rapidly evolving. Additionally, we had Lessonly as our LMS. So my goal when researching the various content management solutions was to partner with a company that could help us organize and optimize our content, but also simplify our tech stack. And actually, I ended up moving forward, not just with Highspot’s content management tool, but also with their LMS solution. Now, I’ll tell you, the impact has truly been a game changer for my organization. A compliment to Highspot as the tool, they’re consistently evolving it, which is great. They’re keeping up with the times. I mean, AI is critical and the new features that they’ve added are game-changers. Number two, I will say I’ve got a great customer success team behind me that’s very invested in my organization’s success. We meet every two weeks, we have consistent agenda items, and I feel they are on the same page with me. SS: Amazing. Well, that’s always helpful to get alignment on that front. And you’ve already achieved an impressive 93 percent recurring usage rate in Highspot. What are some of your best practices for driving the adoption of your enablement programs? JE: Absolutely. First off, you’re speaking my language. I love when statistics are dropped, as you can tell from some of my earlier answers, I believe they add weight to any point or position you’re trying to make. I would say Garbage in, garbage out is my motto when it comes to Highspot. So it’s essential to monitor all content that is being added to Highspot and then track for adoption because it can quickly get out of control. Buyers need to feel confident that they’re getting the right information in an efficient way or you’re quickly going to lose sponsorship. Now, we have quite a few administrators for the tool, so it’s important that everyone is on the same page in terms of What’s being added, making sure we’re swapping out old content versus just continuing to add, categorizing it correctly, creating violation rules for quality assurance, and lastly, providing a feedback mechanism for sales if the content doesn’t measure up to their expectations. Now, I have a quarterly cadence with the other administrators where we leverage the scorecards and associated reports to identify unused or outdated content to determine the next steps. So every quarter we do a deep clean to ensure content is still relevant. Additionally, we incorporate different avenues to keep relevant content front and center. So first, our Highspot homepage is tailored to provide multiple ways to promote content, whether it’s dedicated landing pages, or featured content. And additionally, we review new content on what we call a weekly sales huddle and then send it out to the sales organization. So in summation, this is how we ensure that content stays top of mind and sellers continue to see value. Which ties right back to the 93 percent continued utilization rate. SS: Amazing. And to your point about helping to guide sellers, I know plays have been a key lever for you to streamline sales processes. Can you share more about your strategy for leveraging sales plays to really support your go-to-market initiatives and continue to optimize the sales process? JE: Sure. I would say overall sales plays are great because they build the Boil it down to the most important elements of any go-to-market initiative. Sellers, need to be focused on selling. So, sales plays enable us to deploy the KISS method or keep it simple, and straightforward. Now, Highspot does a great job of providing pre-built, smart page templates broken out into know, say, show, and do, which helps break down the information into a digestible format. Ventures, easy adoption, easy utilization. Easy, fast rollout. SS: Amazing. I love that. Now, you talked a little bit about this periodically throughout the conversation, but you mentioned the importance of having data. I’d love to understand how you incorporate data into your process of refining the sales process. JE: Sure. Now, data is critical in all areas of sales enablement. It’s how we measure the impact of everything we do, whether it’s directly or indirectly. Data tells a story on overall effectiveness and then breaks it down into digestible elements to really understand where in the sales process we need additional resources and support. So for example, conversion rates significantly drop somewhere along the sales process. That gives us an opportunity to see where we are not aligned with our buyers. Is it messaging, pricing, or lack of qualification? Then those adjustments can be made accordingly. Now, we also measure the usage of the associated tech stack to really understand what’s being leveraged, where it’s being leveraged, and the value. Now, with newer sellers where the conversion rate can be premature, tech stack adoption is a great measure to ensure that the seller is really pulling all the necessary levers to be successful. Now, this provides sales leaders with an opportunity for understanding and then early intervention if necessary. So, for example, um, the pitching feature in Highspot is great because it provides visibility to open and view rates of our content. Now, that’s a great indication of buyer interest level and where the level of interest lies. Now, if pitch utilization is low, we can then determine whether it’s a training issue, an adoption issue or otherwise. SS: I love the way that you’re thinking about the optimization process and with your focus on optimizing the sales process, what specific improvements or results have you seen? And how has having a unified enablement platform contributed to those achievements? That’s JE: a great question. So yes, of course, we measure everything we do to determine the effectiveness. I can honestly say that improvements and results have been widespread across the organization. So number one, onboarding has drastically improved with using Highspot as our single source solution for content management and learning development. We have shortened our time to proficiency window significantly. We’ve decreased our time to the first deal. We’ve increased our funnel and reduced turnover. Now, from a seasoned seller perspective, we’ve seen a drastic improvement in the sales cycle, but also in deal size. So, in other words, we’re closing larger deals, and we’re closing them faster. And then lastly, I would say time optimization. Now, Highspot has enabled us to give back one of the most important resources available, and that’s time. SS: Yes, time often is equated to productivity. And so if you can give that back to your reps so they can focus on revenue, I think every business would want to know. JE: I always like to tell my sellers that at the end of the day, when you talk about revenue, I work for them. Sales enablement works for them. Because at the end of the day, they’re the ones bringing the revenue. So, that’s the way I always like to view the sales enablement role. Because at the end of the day, we need to support sales. They’re the ones signing our paychecks in a roundabout sort of way. SS: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. I have one last question. If you could summarize maybe one crucial lesson learned from your experience in improving your sales process, what would it be? JE: It’s a great question. I would say seek to understand before being understood. Make sure you’re including all the stakeholders, not just sales, to get a baseline before collaborating on changes or improvements. This maximizes your chance for success. SS: I think that is fantastic advice, Jeff. Thank you again so much for joining us. JE: You’re most welcome. Thank you for your time. 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.

Shawnna Montes v. SPARC Group, LLC

According to a study conducted by McKinsey, 72% of respondents experienced management behavior and peer resistance as major barriers to successful change initiatives. So how can you align stakeholders and gain buy-in to drive transformation? 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 Anna Borbotko, the Sales Enablement Lead for B2B at TomTom International BV. Thank you for joining us, Anna. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Anna Borbotko: Thanks, Shawnna. Very happy to be here today. Talk about enablement. So yeah, my name is Anna Borbotko. I help grow product marketing and enablement teams. I proudly associate myself as a marketer. Product marketing in particular is my passion and craft, but I also love sales. And that’s how I ended up in enablement. I always work for tech companies, big and small for different industries, and also have a failed solopreneurship business in my records. But at the moment I’m building a sales enablement team from scratch at TomTom. And for those who don’t know TomTom, TomTom is one of the most famous mapping and navigation technology providers globally. A lot of people know us for our consumer business because we were the inventors of personal navigation devices. But TomTom is a unique company primarily because there are not so many cases known to the world where a company actually successfully transitioned from being a B2C company to actually B2B. From an enablement standpoint, TomTom is an amazingly challenging case because I have to enable TomTom. Two different sales teams that have a completely different sales dynamic. The velocity of the sales cycle is very different. The product portfolio that we sell is very different and the challenges those teams face are also very different. Then you can start counting how many times I said the word “different”. It’s tough, but I love it.  SS: Absolutely. Well, Anna, thank you so much for joining us. In fact, one of the reasons why we were excited to have you as a guest on our podcast today is because, as you mentioned, you are focused on building out the first enablement team at TomTom. I’d love to understand what were some of the main problems that you set out to solve with enablement.  AB: I think, as I already said, there are two sales teams that are all under the leadership of our CRO who needed to kill this CRO organization. And he did some clever things. And one of them is creating a centralized enablement function. So in terms of the main problems, I think all the enablement teams face is defining enablement at TomTom. Having enablement at your title can be both a curse and a blessing, as I like to say it. A curse, because you’ll get inducted with requests from all directions as people expect that you will solve all their problems, enable them. My biggest fear, when I took on this role, was that my team would just turn into this content production factory, churning endless slides and training materials. So we had to turn this into a blessing. And with the team, we’ve done a lot of research, understanding both sales teams. We had to sort of put everybody on pause saying like, hey, give us some time to do some homework. So eventually we settled down on a grocery store analogy and how we position ourselves as we say, Hey, our purpose as enablement at TomTom is to organize shelves and ensure that they’re always stocked with the most up-to-date materials. Most importantly, it’s very easy for you to find and navigate, very quick and confident, which actually became our main problem for now to solve. SS: Interesting. Now, from your experience, what would you say are some of the key building blocks needed to create a successful enablement strategy? AB: I’m new to enablement. So whoever is listening to this, please take it with a pinch of salt. Uh, but so far from my experience, I can say there are three things. The first one is doing your homework before you jump into the truck that’s on fire and really distilling the signals from noise, whether it’s external, because nowadays there’s a lot of influence on LinkedIn and there’s a lot of experts sharing their opinion, but also internal, because a lot of people will take it. Tell you how they think you should be doing enablement. And I think that at that moment you really need to think for yourself, okay, is it really a noise or is it something I can actually take on as valuable advice and turn it into something strategic and valuable? The second one is understanding the real essence of enablement is driving behavioral change. For me, that was a big hard hit because my impression of that was very different when I started. And changing people’s behavior is the toughest part and especially challenging if you’re really not sure where to start, you will just scratch your head all the time and think, okay, how do I do this? And the last, and I think that’s also one of the most important things is building friends, building friends in the organization because enablement is a hundred percent a cross-functional team. So without good partnerships. Driving behavioral change is going to be impossible. And earlier this year, I was at the sales enablement collective in Amsterdam and Felix Dmitrikas, I stand by his words. A hundred percent. And that’s, it doesn’t matter where sales enablement sits, what sales need, and what you think they need. It’s all about alignment. And it’s a hundred percent true.  SS: I love that. I love that quote as well. You touched on a few of these, but what are some of the biggest challenges that practitioners can face when building an enablement strategy from scratch? And how did you go about overcoming those challenges? AB: Oh, that’s a tough question to say too. So I would like to link them to three things, which are process, people, and tools. The first one is the process. You have to educate, and put some process in place in order to educate your stakeholders. I start preaching saying, Hey, I know enablement is in my title or the title of my team, but actually every external facing role, be it marketing, product, product marketing, customer success, even legal or finance, you’re all doing enablement. And it’s just not explicitly stated in your title. So it is everybody’s responsibility. And the enablement team is there. To orchestrate all of this, so defining the boundaries of your team, and what it is, takes time. It’s a lot of repetition and coaching, and you also need to establish a lot of processes in place in order to get there. So that is challenge number one. The second one is, as I said, it’s people and I here refer to the team. So setting up your team for success. I think it’s another challenge because I, for example, didn’t hire my team. They were transferred to me from different departments as we started forming enablement. When you inherit a team, it comes with all sorts of challenges because you need to build trust and motivation and convince them that Enablement is the next big thing in this organization. A lot of times when you inherit those team members, they might not even know what enablement means, and you have to discover that together. In my situation, I was very lucky to have very open-minded team members, and they were very eager to start something new and fresh. And one of my team members luckily also has a lot of training and learning design experience, which is very crucial in enablement. So I have a lot of competent team members, but I can imagine it’s not the case for other companies. And the third one that I would like to stress, as I said, is tools. I think whether you are being hired as a sort of first enablement hire to build a team from scratch, or you’re already in that role, like what happened to me, I think you really have to set the boundary with your management that there needs to be a commitment from their side, not to invest in this function. Just creating a team and thinking they will fix all the problems doesn’t work like that. There will need to be an investment from a tooling perspective, meaning the minimum you need is at least a learning management system, LMS, and an enablement platform. That’s at least the minimum tool that you need to start with and have a commitment to. SS: On that note about tools, from your perspective, what role does an enablement platform play in bringing your enablement strategy to life? AB: I know there are a lot of listeners, especially also in my organizations, we had a lot of debates about this before. They say tools are sort of secondary, we first need to fix certain problems. I like to quote Marshall McLunack, who famously said, hey, we shape our tools and therefore they shape us. So for product marketing or enablement teams, having the right tool stacks is actually very important because it can really help you bring that value to the table, which a lot of those teams are struggling with. In my personal belief, it is an essential foundation, like your house having an enablement platform, you can’t build a roof or walls because otherwise, your house will collapse. So the same applies here. For example, in my team, when we started, we said three core values that drive everything we do. It needs to be centralized. It needs to be data-driven. And the third one, it needs to be scalable. Having an enablement platform allows exactly that. And therefore without it, I don’t think we would be successful. SS: I could not agree more. Tell us a little bit about what the evaluation process was like and ultimately what led you to select Highspot as your enablement platform and how did you align your executive leaders throughout that process? AB: Oh, that we can write a book about it. So first of all, I think buying an enablement platform is not something that we woke up one day this year. It’s three years in the making. When I was still in my product marketing lead role back then, but at that moment, the timing was just off. We had other pressing challenges to fix and like many organizations, of course, we had issues with keeping our collateral up to date, ensuring that sales have the latest and greatest. But, you know, I compare it to rearranging your family’s closet. It’s not urgent. It’s not a top priority, but the organization and the problems it creates cause silent grief to everyone. And it only sort of builds more friction and friction over time. So year after year, I had this nagging thought that, hey, we need an enablement tool. The question was when, and so as I became the lead for sales enablement at that time, it was right. And here’s the caveat, of course, having a thought and maybe a nice speech is one thing, but then having a budget is another one. And I’m not a budget holder, so I had to get it somewhere. And so I had to build a business case. So you slowly start talking here and there, like, Hey, I think we need more sophisticated tooling. Here’s the benefits it can bring. And it can be quite challenging because you will face a lot of resistance. People don’t understand it. People know it will probably require a lot of money. So people don’t want to invest. So the best advice I can give to enablement practitioners or product marketers who face the same challenge is don’t follow the finance lead because they will mostly tell you to build a business case around cost saving. Take destiny in your hands and actually focus on the story saying that enablement is actually a revenue-generating engine. Because when you build a business case, typically they will say, Hey, if you save time, or if you save effort of the sellers, let’s just say, by 15 minutes a day, you generate X amount of saving, but in reality, nobody’s going to fire salespeople. So the cost will be on top of the personnel costs, right? So the best way you can say is that, hey, I can actually make my sellers more productive by. Freeing up 15 minutes of their day. And if you multiply it by the number of reps that you have, you already have a pretty solid business case to say that, Hey, actually, if we’re going to generate revenue, yes, it’s going to cost, but that’s an investment. And that investment will need to unfold itself over time. And you can again, build it over year after year, depending on how much you want to do it. But I would highly recommend considering the two, and three-year timeline in order to prove itself.  SS: I love that approach. And so I know you’re just getting started with implementing a new platform and a lot of your enablement programs, you’re just getting off the ground running for the first time. I’m curious, how do you plan to drive adoption and really build excitement and momentum for your enablement programs amongst the sales teams that you support? AB: So I am fortunate enough that I have a lot of change management background in my career like I’ve done a lot of these launches in the past. And then by being a product marketeer, I have my whole ammunition ready to sort of make it a successful launch. So I think there are some best practices out there that we take, which is, Hey, we’re creating a champion group of sellers, customer success teams, as well as marketers who join us. And we try to engage with them. We try to tease them. We try to get the input as fast as possible. And the other thing is, you can go the route of doing it bottom up. But again, I’m fortunate enough that my management is supporting me with this. So therefore I’m also doing it both ways. So from bottom to up and vice versa. So I highly recommend that because that way you can get it much faster and it will have a better impact. I really am a great believer, and that’s my product marketing speaking here, in micro launches. So what we approach, we’re going to be taking is that we are not going to wait too long with launch. We’re gonna launch a very basic functionality. And then we start sort of building micro launches on top of that. So it will have a lot of phases. Yes. It’s a lot of extra work maybe because you need to communicate and proactively do a lot of things. But I do believe that because the platform is very powerful and if you sort of bump it all together at the same time, it might lose some valuable things that we want people to start using or seeing. So therefore I really believe that by doing it on the micro levels, we can actually have a much bigger impact. SS: So moving ahead, as you are looking forward, what are you hoping to achieve next as you continue to build out the enablement team at TomTom? AB: So I want to see my enablement vision come to life. That vision is that I want my sellers to find anything that they need when it comes to training onboarding or collateral in a maximum of three clicks. I think we’re almost there and the enablement platform will help us get there completely. I just need to take our time to really make it complete. So that’s one. I really look forward to seeing how we can replicate the same success, not only for our internal sellers but also for partners. And eventually, I also want to see that we can turn it not just into sales enablement, but a revenue enablement function where they can also focus on customer enablement. So we’re only starting. There’s some excitement. Let’s say it's the vision that I have for the future, but for now, I’m really focusing on the very first foundational bit, which is sales. SS: Well, I can’t wait to see all that I know you will accomplish at TomTom. I’m very excited for you. Last question for you, Anna, for other companies looking to invest in enablement for the first time, what’s maybe one piece of advice you would give them to set them up for success as they get started? AB: Commit. For real, commit. If you build it from scratch, see it as a revenue engine, not a cost. If you have the right people who can do it internally, or you have to hire, the impact that enablement can have on the performance of your teams is huge, but you will need to give it time to unpack. So commit and commit for real and prepare to invest. That’s my advice. I love that. I think that’s fantastic. SS: Well, Anna, thank you again so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights. AB: Thank you so much 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 maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report from 2024, teams that utilize data-driven training are 36% more likely to decrease ramp time. So how can you ensure your training programs are maximizing sales readiness?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.Here to discuss this topic is Lizzy Goldstein, the sales enablement manager at Newsela, Inc. Thank you for joining us, Lizzy. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Lizzy Goldstein: Thank you for having me, Shawnna. My name is Lizzy Goldstein, I am the director of enablement at Newsela and II started my career in education. I was a ninth-grade ELA teacher and I transitioned into tech sales where I was on the new business end for two years. Then I joined Newsela almost six years ago as a customer success manager, working with the schools and school districts that purchase our product. I moved to the enablement team about three years ago and have had a lot of success growing on this team, using both my education background and sales background to really help me navigate through this enablement experience. SS: Amazing. You touched on this a little bit around your prior experience before going into enablement and how you have a background in education—which I have so much respect for those who have been in the teaching field. Thank you for all that you did in that role. I imagine that some of that actually carries over into enablement. How does your teaching experience influence your approach to your enablement strategy? LG: I’m lucky at Newsela in that we are an education platform and so I work with a lot of former educators. Two things that are really top of mind for me when I am creating new enablement materials is outcomes and engagement. That really comes from my teaching experience. Whenever, as a teacher, you start planning a unit you first look at what are the outcomes I want my students to be able to achieve at the end of this time. You say, what do I want them to be able to do? And then everything you teach should be teaching to that outcome. If you want them to be able to identify verbs and nouns in a sentence, we make that our end goal and then we make sure that we teach verbs and nouns throughout the unit. We call that backwards planning where we start with what’s our goal and then what do we want to achieve, how are we going to get there?The way to ensure that students are taking in what you’re teaching is engagement—it has to be interesting, it has to be engaging. Otherwise, it’s going right over—if you are just speaking at a group it’s really hard for that to penetrate and for that to really resonate with your learners. Once you know what the outcomes are, then we talk about how are we going to engage these learners and make sure that the material that we share is interesting and relevant to them. SS: I love that approach. If we take a step back, tell us more about your enablement strategy at Newsela. What are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on supporting? LG: Last year we purchased a company called Formative, which is also in the education space and that acquisition has taken a lot of our focus over the last year. We had to onboard the formative sales reps and CSMs to teach them about the Newsela product suite and also teach them our sales process. Then, we had to look at our existing sales organization and teach them the new product that we had acquired. So, there was a lot of A to B and B to A kind of learning and we also had to discover what was our product strategy for these two unique products that also work pretty well together. How can we ensure that our go to market team understands the value of the products individually and then also the value of the products when paired together? That’s been a large focus of mine over the past year. From an industry standpoint, the education space was really impacted by COVID, and districts are still really feeling that when planning for the 2024 to 2025 school year. Especially because ESSER funds, which are federal funds, were such a large part of funding for the last two years and that ESSER funding has run out. A lot of districts are being much more picky when looking at their product suite than they ever were before because they are tens of millions of dollars in the hole compared to what they were in the previous term. So how do we educate our go-to-market team about this changing landscape? And then, continue to drive value and show our districts the value that Newsela brings to keep our product on their budget for the next year. SS: That does sound like a lot of things that enablement is trying to help make sure you are steering for the organization. What role does your enablement platform, Highspot, play in helping you land your go-to-market initiatives? LG: The word that comes to mind with Highspot for us is accountability. We consider Highspot our source of truth; every marketing collateral that we have for customers is in Highspot, a lot of our knowledge documents are in Highspot. When we talk about the changing landscape of the education field, we post podcasts. We want them to use the results about the education space, and articles about the education space in Highspot, and expect our go-to-market team to find those resources there. We really want them to use Highspot as that internal Google search—if they have a question about Newsela, Formative, or education in general, they know that they can find the answers in Highspot. We use Highspot’s analytics to ensure that our go-to-market team is investing time in those new initiatives so we can track usage of resources that we send. Let’s say we publish a podcast about the changing landscape of education. We then look to see how long our go-to-market team, individuals we also created certification tracks for our go-to-market team and shared weekly reports with managers to broadcast how much time their team was investing and made it a little competitive. Always shouted out, “Great job, Elizabeth’s team for an average of eight hours this week in Highspot learning about the new Formative platforms.” So, we use the analytics to make sure that managers and individual contributors understand that we don’t just throw it in Highspot and not look at it again. We are constantly checking in and making sure that everybody is using the resources that we spend time creating for them, and if they’re not, maybe there’s a problem with the resources, maybe they don’t actually hit the points that are necessary. Maybe we missed the mark. And so we need to know that so that we can then publish new pieces of material. So using that accountability and talking to managers, talking to individual contributors and saying, “Hey, I noticed you didn’t spend that much time listening to this podcast. Was it not helpful to you? Was it just something you didn’t have time for this week? Let me know so that we can then update our resources and make sure that they really do align to your goals.” SS: I love that. Recently, your team had a huge training initiative and I believe you created north of 30 courses. Can you tell us more about this effort and how your team brought it to life using Highspot? LG: Yeah, those 30 courses relate to our new acquisition. We had to create courses for our Newsela go-to-market team about the Formative platform, we had to create resources for the Formative team about the Newsela platform, and we had to create new resources for new products that allowed those two to work together. So, it was a lot of effort and a lot of talking to different SMEs across the organization. What was really important to us was to make sure that in six to nine months, there wasn’t really a difference between a Formative sales rep and a Newsela sales rep. We wanted to make sure that the entire go-to-market organization had the same baseline level of knowledge for our entire product suite. We knew that a person who’s more comfortable selling Formative is going to continue to sell Formative and they’re not going to sell the Newsela product suite and vice versa. So we needed to make sure there was that baseline level of comfort.We used Highspot to both educate and evaluate our sales reps. We built e-learning courses that allowed them to explore the new platforms. And then going back to that accountability, there was always an evaluation. We had formative evaluations throughout the courses and then summative evaluations at the end, to make sure that they weren’t just sitting in front of the screen without a chance to practice what they were learning. We gave them an opportunity and used our managers as reviewers to make sure that they knew where their sales reps were, they knew their comfort level, they could hear their pitches, and they could really get a sense for each one of their ICs where they were through this transition.I think keeping the managers really involved was a big part of our success because, it made enablement feel like it wasn’t some black box, that they would just get these materials and nobody would know if It was looked at. They would record videos and not sure who was reviewing it. There was really a relationship between them and their reviewer, and so I think the expectations were higher because they knew that their managers were involved. They knew that their managers really cared and that they were putting an effort into reviewing their work. So, I think that was a big part of our success was bringing in that management level. SS: What are some of your other best practices? You talked in your intro about how important it is to really engage the learner. So what are some of your best practices for creating effective training programs for your sales teams? LG: As much as I love hearing the sound of my own voice, I know that not everybody loves to hear the same person over and over again. We really try to make sure that with every enablement session, we’re bringing in different voices. We like to really vary who that is—we’ll have executive sponsorship, and we will get C-suites, and I think that really sets the tone in training sessions and to do introductions or to be a part of our videos. But then we also love to leverage our IC's. They’re experts in the field. They have great knowledge. They have great best practices. And so we love to invite IC's to be a part of our trainings as well. And I think that really, people love to hear from their peers—they love to hype up their friends. That makes a huge difference for us when somebody gets on the screen and—we are a Google Meet organization—all the emojis pop up at the bottom and everyone’s cheering, “Love that Craig is here. Good job, Craig. We love hearing from Craig.” And so that really makes a difference for us. And we know that people are engaged when they’re hearing from their peer and it’s not just me over and over again. So I’m having that top-bottom executive sponsorship, and then that bottom-up of really leveraging the IC'ss makes a big difference for us.  Another thing that we’ve done this past year that we found to be really successful is that we have a recurring cadence of enablement events. So, every two weeks we have an hour on Thursdays that is just a hold on everyone’s calendar for an enablement session. And so usually two or three weeks in advance we set the enablement event. We will pare down the invite list to make sure that it’s really relevant to that group of learners. But having that recurring cadence really makes people feel like this isn’t random. I’m not just getting this calendar invite last minute and I’m not sure if I really need to show up for it. We’ve taken time on everyone’s calendar over the year and so they expect that training every two weeks and they know. What they’re going to get out of it, and so that has also made a difference of publishing our schedule far in advance, making sure people understand that, they have dedicated time with us regularly, and that we are, really forward-thinking, that we’re not being extremely reactive and saying, “Oh, in two days we’re going to do a training on something”. But we’re respecting their calendar, we’re getting time on it early, and that’s made a big difference for us this past year. SS: I love those ideas, I think our audience can take some of those as takeaways within their own organization, so thank you. What impact have these new training courses had on your teams and do you have any early wins you can share? LG: I think that one thing that is really valuable at Newsela is that we have a lot of internal movement. You take me for example, I started on the customer success team, I moved to the enablement team, and have moved up within that organization. We really do value our internal transfers and we want to make sure as an enablement organization that we set up everyone for success. And so having that standardized baseline for our go-to-market team is really important. I said that when we merge the two Formative and Newsela organizations, we set this baseline to make sure that everyone had the same knowledge. We do the same thing with our onboarding program. So whether you’re an SDR, a CSM, a professional learning manager, you get the same baseline training and you understand our products. You understand our organization at a baseline level, and that’s created an environment where our SDRs after a year are prepared to move into other role, they don’t need to do more learning—they have this baseline standard set. They understand from an early time how our organization works and they understand where they can take their skills, so that’s been really successful. We had about eight internal transfers so far this year, all that have been successful in their roles, and have stayed in their new roles. So that’s really exciting for us. I think the other thing that our onboarding has been successful at is reducing the time to revenue. In 2023, we reduced the time to revenue for sales reps to 36 days, which was a 15-day improvement over the previous year, and that’s been huge for our organization. Nobody wants to hire someone and wait and wait for them to start generating revenue. The earlier somebody can generate revenue, the better it is for the organization, the better it is for the sales rep. Because, it’s really hard to feel like you’re not really quite ready yet. You’re told that you’re going to take calls, but you don’t feel confident so we really want to set people up early for success and, depending on their role, if they’re a sales executive, to make sure that they understand the product suite, [and] they understand the sales process. If you’re an SDR, to really get that track down early so you can start making calls and booking meetings. If you’re a CSM, to start understanding the way that our customers renew, the cyclical nature of our the industry that we’re in. And, again, we want to make sure that people feel really comfortable. Because if they feel comfortable, they feel empowered, they feel confident, and they show up differently to their job. And I think that the work that we did the past year to really stabilize our onboarding and standardize it, has made a huge difference in our organization. SS: Amazing. And you guys are seeing some incredible results, I think your overall adoption of the platform is at about 88% recurring usage. What are your best practices for driving adoption and how has this helped you improve the impact of your programs? LG: If you could just send over the 12% that aren’t recurring after this call, I’d love to see that. I think that we just expect them to use Highspot, it’s not an option at Newsela. We’re pretty vigilant about we’re only sharing content through Highspot. If I see somebody in a public channel share out a resource that’s a Google Doc, I’ll DM them and say, “Hey, does this already exist in Highspot? If it doesn’t, let’s add it and then can you edit your post to add the Highspot link instead of this Google Doc.” We did that a lot our first maybe two years of adoption with Highspot and set the expectation with everybody that if it’s not in Highspot, it didn’t happen. So now I’ve got a lot less of those kinds of messages like, “Hey, why isn’t this in Highspot?” Because that’s really the standard for us. Some organizations can fall into a pit where they aren’t quite sure what should be in Highspot and what shouldn’t be in Highspot, and maybe we overshare in Highspot, but I would rather that than have knowledge that lives outside of what we’ve told the organization is our standard knowledge base. If we tell sales reps that they can find everything that they need in Highspot, and then they find really good resources outside of Highspot, that really just degrades the trust in the platform. It degrades the trust in the enablement team, so we set a pretty high standard, and we make sure that everything is in Highspot. We also send a bi-weekly newsletter to our go-to-market team with updates from our product team, updates from our data team different marketing initiatives and any content that we share in that newsletter is hosted in Highspot. So we’re always pushing people there. Every two weeks we probably get a big spike in Highspot engagement because if there’s a product release, that’s in Highspot. If there’s a new marketing collateral, that’s in Highspot. So there’s not really an option for us, but if you do have that list of who’s not a regular user, I’d love to know. SS: Absolutely love it, Lizzy. Last question for you. What are some of the key ways you measure the impact of your enablement programs on your go-to-market initiatives, and how do you leverage Highspot to help? LG: I think that goes back to the analytics piece and really continuing to share updates regularly with our managers and our directors. Whenever we have a new initiative we have a due date for, maybe we have a new course and we want people to practice their pitch for a new product or a new release. We’ll update that group regularly on where the go-to-market team stands. We’ll break it down by role. We break it down by the manager. To really build a team. That Hey we’re looking out, we’re watching what’s going on. And that little tiny bit of public shaming. “Hey, Elizabeth, only three out of your 10 reps have finished this course so far. What’s going on?” That does help a lot. We make sure that throughout the learning that people are kept up to date on where we stand, so that it’s not on the due date they say, “Oh my gosh, we’re only 75% complete? Why didn’t you tell me?” We tell them every couple of days leading up so that they really understand where we stand and that they can talk to their individual contributors who have yet to complete the work. Usually, about three to five months after a due date, we’ll look back and say, was this actually helpful? Was the outcome that we asked of our individual contributors, did that align with what the actual goals of this initiative was? So you go back to that teaching experience and say you start with the test, then you teach things that would lead you to that, I want them to be able to identify verbs and nouns. So what did I teach that got them there? And then maybe where did I miss? I had a lot of students that are having trouble with nouns. And so I’ll look back on what we did about nouns and maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe I didn’t have the right material. Maybe I wasn’t quite checking in on students, doing formative assessments, doing quizzes, and seeing that they were struggling there and adding that extra help. So we do like to look back, [and] call it a post-mortem. We look back on what we did and say where were we successful? We call it, what are we going to continue doing? And then where do we need improvement? What do we need to do in the future? And so that’s an exercise that’s really helpful. Sometimes it can hurt a little bit because you put a lot of effort into something and then to have somebody rip it apart doesn’t feel good, but it makes you better. You look back and I think it’s a really healthy practice to look back at your work and say, where was I successful? And where can I be more successful in the future? SS: Absolutely. Lizzy, thank you so much for sharing such amazing advice and best practices for our audience today. I really appreciate the time. LG: Yeah, anytime.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 Sales Enablement Pro found that reps are 15% more likely to understand how to navigate different sales scenarios when utilizing sales plays. So how can you ensure your sales teams are effectively equipped for success?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 John Hesseltine, the senior manager of sales enablement at Crestron Electronics. Thank you for joining us, JJ. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. John Hessaltine: Thank you for having me, Shawnna. As you said, I’m the senior manager of sales enablement at Crestron Electronics. We do a bunch of different things that make everyone’s lives easier and I’ve been here for almost six years. I previously came from another manufacturer in the professional AV space. In total, maybe 12 years total in the professional AV scene. But I’m not alone, right? I have a fantastic team of six people who all work together to create sales enablement content all within Highspot. So it’s clearly not just a job for one person, I represent the whole team here and we’re excited to be a part of this. As for like the role and what we do, like it’s been in flux for the last six years since I’ve been within sales enablement, it’s still like sales enablement still an extremely new position, we’re still trying to figure out what it means. Sales enablement folks know what it means, [but] everyone else within the company is like, “So what is it that you do?” I guess what that means is we’ve been changing what we do every so often. Every year we have new updates, roll out different strategies, and try to implement new changes to hopefully equip the sales team better around the globe for Crestron. It’s been a lot of fun and we just try to make ourselves useful for everyone. SS: I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, I appreciate it. Crestron Electronics is definitely on the cutting edge of innovation and manufacturing. What are some of the strategic initiatives that you are focused on driving for the business and how does your enablement strategy help to support these? JH: For folks that don’t know Crestron Electronics, we have almost 2,000 unique SKUs —a super wide range of products that we offer: commercial, residential, marine education, government healthcare, and hospitality. We do so much stuff [for] everyone that’s behind the scenes if you will. The way we say it is we make spaces smart, we enhance the way people live and work, and we do all that via hardware or software. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into manufacturing, but it’s really difficult to enable [for] 2,000 unique SKUs. You could do content for each one of those or each product family, but that doesn’t totally work.What our value is as a company is how we bring all of that together to create one consistent ecosystem, regardless of if you’re in the home, or if you’re in the office, or you’re in the hospital, a hotel, or a school. We bring all that together and that’s where sales enablement is key. Being able to consistently deliver a message, not just about products, but how all those products come together as a multi-layered, multifaceted approach. Creating value not just for the end user, but the IT professionals and the people that have to work with the technology on the backend every day.So, really it’s enabling our sales folks to talk about, and position our ecosystem, and leverage everything that we have to provide the best possible experience. That’s what we do when we create storylines, right? We work with a bunch of folks in different aspects of the business. We have people in vertical marketing and channel marketing, we work with the various team leads and VPs to come up with consistent strategies for their teams to leverage with all our products. A hospital is going to use the same product that potentially an enterprise is going to use, but they’re going to use them in different ways and they’re going to connect to different things. We enable folks to speak proficiently about our product and our solutions specific to the market. That’s what we’re doing and that’s how sales enablement is helping Crestron get that word out and that message out. SS: Now, you talked already about some of the unique considerations for the manufacturing industry, but how do you factor those into building an effective enablement strategy? JH: Part of the best thing about being a manufacturer, and especially when you’re techy, is you get to work with the people that build the product, engineer them, and design them. The biggest issue when working in an electronics manufacturer is translating that vision from the person that created it and making it accessible to everyone to understand not just, our customers, but also our sales team. We can do some really interesting and complex solutions for problems that our customers might face. It’s sometimes really hard to explain how we do that and what our value is in doing that. That’s one of the interesting things about being a manufacturer—you’re creating all this new stuff, and it has a place in the market, but you just have to tell the customers and tell the world what it does and how it does it.The way you do that is via your sales team. Of course, you can do marketing, you can put anything out there on the internet on the web, and make posts on LinkedIn. It's really making sure that your sales team can also articulate those advantages and they feel confident in doing it.We want to make sure that they can have conversations about the products and go a little bit in-depth when they need to. And that’s why we leverage, Sales Plays within Highspot. We can give them what to know, say, show, and do with their customers. And, it gives a really easy hopscotch approach within their sales opportunity. They go from their needs audit, or they ask questions of the customer to find out what it is that the customer is looking for. We don’t tell our sales team to go in there pushing X, Y, and Z products. We want them to sit down with the customer, understand what their needs are, and what their problems are, and have a meaningful conversation with them. Then we can start prescribing and telling them we think this would solve their issues, and here’s why. Highspot has allowed us to organize those conversations for the sales team in an easy-to-follow way. I think that from the manufacturing side, that’s difficult. Initially, without a platform like Highspot and without being able to organize all of this stuff, you would just get spec sheets, and spec sheets don’t tell a story. Some people can understand or read one, and they prefer that, and that’s fantastic. But a lot of people making purchasing decisions in our industry find a lot of value in other aspects and they don’t care to learn specifically about what the product or solution does.That’s the fun part about working for a manufacturer, we can make that story, extract from the spec sheets, and use those as data, but then create the story of how the sales team should use it and talk to the customers and show the value.SS: Now I want to focus specifically on the enablement components prior to Highspot. I believe you all were leveraging a different enablement platform to execute your strategy. What were some of the challenges you were facing during that time and what was the impetus for making a change? JH: This was before COVID, and we switched to Highspot during COVID. We switched to Highspot in early 2020 and we had already made that decision. But in December of 2019, someone who was pretty high up came walking by my desk [and said], “Hey, so and so says that the platform's not good.” And we’re like, “Oh, okay. Interesting.” And so I told my boss that, and it was “Oh, all right, we got to make a change.” It had reached the point where it was being spoken about that. What we have isn’t working and it was all the way at the top of the company. And we’re like, “Alright, we’ll make a change.”We did our due diligence, we looked and explored different options, and we landed on Highspot. It made a massive difference. We didn’t know what we were missing, we didn’t. It’s been a wild ride, we’ve been with Highspot for a little over three years at this point, and it’s been great. It’s been eye-opening and we’ve been learning so much and reiterating what we do with it. We weren’t able to get that with our previous platform and it’s been awesome also working with Highspot in large part, thanks to podcasts like this that we’re on now, where there are sales enablement pros also being a part of the journey with us as a customer.We learned so much from not just being in the platform, but from all of the content and all of the assets that Highspot as a company creates for the sales enablement industry. And that’s been extremely helpful for us to sit down and focus and not have to do our own research specifically, but listen to what you all say as pros, and it’s gone a long way to help us create a better platform for our users. SS: I do always love to hear that, so thank you. Now, talk to us about some of the challenges, though, and how you were able to overcome those challenges by leveraging Highspot to help? JH: Biggest challenge: I can’t find anything, and I don’t know where anything’s at. Our previous instance looked like a folder structure. No different than SharePoint, right? So that was the biggest hurdle, our sales team needed to find resources to use. We’ve been able to reorganize Highspot—search tags were a godsend. Being able to organize things with tags and then, guess what? The search works with tags. It just made it so easy to, you can find content. What we’re saying now—and we should have said this three years ago when we first started using Highspot—[if] you can use a mouse, you can use Highspot, it’s where you can find everything you need. Now granted, a lot of that has to do with my team of six folks who worked hard through multiple iterations, Highspot assisted with making a UI that makes sense for our users. We were able to do that, and the next thing was actually telling people how to use the content they found. Sales Plays was just like an epiphany. We didn’t have anything like a Sales Play prior to that, so we would just put assets on there. Comparison documents, compete documents, SWOT analyses, all the typical things sales say they need and marketing says you should do. We’re doing all that content, we would put it out there and announce it so people would know about it. But, only 20% of the sales team looks at the announcements we do.You can’t force their eyes like Clockwork Orange, where you just see and look at all our announcements for everything. Being able to organize it in a way that makes sense for the user has been able for us to leverage, to organize the content in a way that they see it, they find it, no matter their journey to get there, regardless if they’re clicking, or if they’re searching, or if they’re looking at one of the Sales Plays we made, right? We have the content in multiple different ways which has been super helpful. We still get calls about, “Do we have any assets about this?” Absolutely. But, those calls are super diminished. If anything, it’s great now because everyone knows that they should be looking in Highspot first.They say I didn’t find it in Highspot. We might have done something wrong, but we’re also super happy that the sales team is using Highspot to find content. It’s been great. It went from something that was, “I guess I need to look in there for something”, to the default workflow and work path for the sales team.They will look at Highspot first before they go to our website. They will look at Highspot first before they go to our marketing portal. Highspot is that single location where they go to find anything, and that’s it. There are certain things we don’t have on Highspot for a reason, and we get questions like, “Hey, why isn’t this on Highspot?” “Oh, because of this.” “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” But it’s so ingrained in them now to go check Highspot first. It’s great, we’ve been able to surface the content and organize it in ways that we weren’t able to do before, and that’s made all the difference for us. SS: And I can tell because your results are amazing. You guys have an incredible 92% adoption rate. I’d love to understand, what are some of your best practices for driving adoption with your reps? JH: It’s a name, actually. Jill, on my team, is one of the reasons that we have such great results. One of the great things about this whole sales enablement thing is people know who we are now. Our names are associated with all the content we do and one of those names is Jill, on our team. She calls every single rep, and we’re a global company, so we have people all around the globe and she calls every single one of them. From their bosses, their directors, and their VPs, and asks them, “What are you using from Highspot that is successful? What else do you need? Do you have any comments?”We have constant contact with all of our sales reps and we use Highspot as the backbone for it. “Did you see this, by the way? We just added this to Highspot and we just announced it out. Did you see this?” “Oh yeah, I’ve seen it and I had a lot of success using that with X, Y, Z customers.”We pick up the phone and call people. I know it’s a weird concept nowadays, but we literally do schedule phone calls, and Jill calls everyone in the organization and it helps us get everyone on the same page. So that’s one of the ways that we drive adoption.We call them and tell them what’s new, right? [It's] really easy to ignore an email, especially when you get multiple emails from the same source over and over again because we’re constantly churning out content for them. You can’t ignore a phone call, [and] you don’t want to ignore the phone call from Jill. It’s great though and that’s how we get a lot of uptake on the platform. SS: Communication is key, so that’s fantastic. JJ, you’ve talked about this a few times, but I’d like to actually click into it a little bit. A major part of your strategy is Sales Plays, for which you even won an Impact Award—congratulations. What are your best practices for building effective Plays? JH: The first thing we did, and maybe it’ll help others get their Play adoption up, is we make like a monthly reader’s digest for each of our market verticals. We call that the monthly message and we make that in a Sales Play format.So that is the default thing, we put everything in there. It’s not like we’re explaining everything, we just have links. It’s like a repository, a link to Plays, and it trees out from Play to Play as you go down there. We have all the sales teams default. “Oh, I’m going to look at the commercial monthly message. I’ll look at the residential monthly message.” And you can’t go wrong when you look at that because of all the content that we create. The sales enablement team, we don’t just say, I feel like making a piece of content or a Sales Play on this today. We work with the sales leaders and find out what they are really focused on—if there’s a new product, or a really big initiative.We don’t just create content for content’s sake, we make it relevant to the business, and our sales team travels a lot. If they just need to check in on, “Oh, what is it I’m supposed to be doing?” It’s in a Sales Play. It’s right on the homepage of Highspot when they log in. We have the monthly message Sales Play and that has other Sales Plays in it. They can go in, they know that they’re going to get an organized structure of, what to say about it, what our advantages are, there might be a competitive analysis in there that they can look at or leverage, and pitch out to a customer when they’re going up against a competitor like that. And it’s just become an integral part of the experience within Highspot.Yes, we have a lot of individual assets, but almost every asset is made in response to a Play. They’re all tied in there and they’re all interconnected. Plays have been a major part of our time at Highspot and we find them good to leverage. It’s a solid solution and we don’t make them too big either. SS: Absolutely. It sounds like you’ve created a really interconnected experience for them leveraging plays. How do you leverage those same sales plays to help support some of the key strategic initiatives that you’re driving for the business? JH: Like I said, we do them based on new product launches or campaigns that we’re leveraging. But the main thing is, we have a red phone all the way to the top, and we can talk to anyone. That’s one of the great things that we’re privileged to have, is we can speak with anyone. We use those Plays to say, this is what XVP is saying, this is what the mandate is, right? At the end of the day, we all have marching orders. The plays encapsulate that, right? And that’s how we get strategic initiatives accomplished. I can give you an example. Recently there was some industry news.The first thing that happened, the head of residential sales called us and said, “I need a Sales Play about this subject right now.” We created a form, he gave us a little bit of information, and we went with it from there. We worked with marketing, we created a Sales Play, it was super timely and super important. Then, what the head of sales did, he called every single rep and said, “There’s a Sales Play made. I need you to read that. There’s also a Pitch template made. I need you to pitch that to every single one of your customers.” This is not typical, but it was extremely timely. We just got handed a golden opportunity and we need to take this, our whole sales team needs to act on it immediately. Sales Plays are super vital and super important to us and as a result, we reached out to thousands of people, thousands of customers and have opened up conversations that, those doors we thought were closed. We’ve opened up conversations with those customers again, those deals, and it’s been great.So we’ve had a great response with it. It’s awesome, the sales leaders, like the head of sales, think of Highspot first when he wants to get a message out. SS: That is amazingly impactful and again, another area where you guys are seeing amazing results. You’ve driven 88% Play Adoption amongst your team, even in just the last few months. Can you tell us about some additional examples of the impact that you’ve been able to drive through plays?  JH: I can’t give you numbers specifically because as we’re talking, our Salesforce sync is happening with Highspot, which is at 30% at the moment. So we don’t have numbers associated with anything. But I can tell you, my team sees it on LinkedIn all the time, we see our content being used on social media. Of course, it’s legally approved and able to be sent externally, we market as such within Highspot. But we see our content in use, we see the messages that we write, how we write things, and what we tell our sales team to say.We see that happen and then the sales team will come back to us and say, “I had a lot of success with this. This worked so well. Can we get something else like this?” I think the proof is in the pudding, we are seeing 100% impact of what we do. It is so cool to log into LinkedIn and then see new ways that people are using our content. I can’t give you numbers, but I can tell you that it’s being used and we see it everywhere. It’s great.  SS: It sounds like it. JJ, last question for you. As you look to the year ahead, what are some trends or innovations you see that are really shaping the future of enablement in manufacturing?JH:  AI. AI is something that we’re really excited about. Everyone’s talking about Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and all of those things. I haven’t dabbled in that too much, but I’ve dabbled in a bit of the Highspot AI and how much that’s helped us. If that can translate over to creating content, that’d be awesome. As I said at the top, we have almost 2,000 unique SKUs. That’s a lot to create content for, and if we can just create little tidbits of information about something that we didn’t have before on certain SKUs, that’d be awesome and that helps a lot. I think AI is going to be a way that is going to make us more efficient, right? We’re not going to leverage AI to create new content from scratch. You have to feed it good material, but it’s just going to make our lives so much easier and so much quicker to collect the information, and put it in a standardized format that we can then bring to the finish line. As it is now, we spend hours, days, and weeks doing certain tasks. AI is going to make that easier and it allows us to be more efficient. I don’t know if AI is going to help us get more done, right? The biggest thing I learned from Highspot is it’s not always about more, but it’s also about the [quality], more importantly. We don’t want to do more Sales Plays.One of the biggest things I learned from Spark was you can only change the behavior of the sales team three times a quarter. More than that, the sales team is getting whiplash. We’re not going to use AI to create more content in that respect, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to use AI to help us focus more on creating better Plays for the sales team.AI is just going to take a load off our backs and we can focus more on what is impactful for our teams, and we think it’s Sales Plays. That’s what I’m looking forward to, I’m looking forward to more AI stuff. We're still in a trust, but verify phase with AI. I think that’s going to be a massive help to help us really concentrate on what we know is effective for our sales teams. SS: Amazing. I hope you’re joining us again at Spark ‘24 in October because I think we have a lot more innovation coming on that front. John, thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate the time. JH: Thank you. It was great. Thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it. 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.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report from 2024, 76% of executive leaders say that an enablement platform is key to improving overall sales performance. So how can an enablement platform help drive momentum at your organization?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 Kate Shearer, the senior manager of sales enablement at Antech Diagnostics. Thanks for joining us, Kate. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.Katherine Shearer: Thank you for having me. My name is Kate Shearer, I’m the senior manager of sales enablement at Antech Diagnostics. We’re part of Mars Global Incorporated. I’ve been in the sales industry for about six years and in the veterinary industry for, about 15—I can’t believe it’s been that long. I oversee sales enablement for Antech Diagnostics and we’re made up of about 250 sales professionals across six or seven specialized sales role types and help with enablement for an entire organization of about 400 commercial and sales professionals. SS: I appreciate you joining us, Kate. I know that Antech Diagnostics has had a lot of momentum over the last year, including a recent acquisition. How has this growth trajectory influenced your enablement strategy?KS: It has been part and parcel of shaping our enablement strategy. Our org has just rocket launched in terms of growth, new role types, and different departments that have been introduced all in the last year. We have had to be a lot more thoughtful, purposeful, [and] strategic about how we communicate, how we use our sales tools, and how we train on them.We used to be very wild, wild west. We could roll something out and train on it, communicate it as it was happening, and we have to be a lot more planful now that we’re managing a much larger organization. [There's] a steeper learning curve culturally, just in terms of what folks need to learn new lines of business [and] new products in a new environment for them to navigate.We needed to earn trust very quickly—we had to have a single source of truth and a consistent way that we were communicating and engaging with the organization. SS: In your opinion, Kate, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform when navigating change like an acquisition? KS: I think the number one value that Highspot had for us during our acquisition was [it] streamlined communication and a central source of truth.There’s a quote: good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity. Highspot was absolutely that very early on in our integration and acquisition and it has remained that through the period. We probably did our company a little bit of a disservice because it was so easy.It was one of the first platforms that we integrated that we got our newly acquired company logged onto and using. So a massive amount of change management. We were able to use the platform to ensure that we had consistent, clear communication across all levels of the organization. We were able to really reduce confusion and misinformation.And as we had updates, like vital information, we were able to communicate those in real-time and have them in a repository where folks could go back and reference them. If they miss that communication when it went out initially, we’re also able to use Highspot to monitor performance and get feedback.So we were able to see our folks logging on. Are they using their sales tools? Are they going through the training modules? And we were able to understand who was engaged, who needed help, where folks were lagging behind. Or, where we needed to reassess as a company the strategic direction we were going and offer more support to our sales professionals.SS: And before you had Highspot as your enablement platform, you actually leveraged a different tool. What were some of the challenges you faced that led you to make this change? KS: So before we used Highspot, we did use another platform. Some of the challenges we had in the other platform that we were using were primarily around just ballooning of content.We were like hoarders, we wanted to keep every single thing. That made it very difficult to navigate [and] for our organization to find the content they were looking for. And then when they did find it, often it was outdated or there were duplicative versions of it, and we weren’t really sure when it was updated, or who had made it, [or] who had published it.We also didn’t have a feedback mechanism, so we would get all of these emails and questions; how did they find something, or [to]  let us know something expired. Just very manual, it was just a file folder where everything was going, and we were managing a lot of the support of it just through email and conversation, so it became pretty inefficient to manage.SS: Definitely, sounds like it. How have you been able to overcome those challenges and how have you leveraged Highspot to help? KS: So, Highspot's search feature is so good, it’s just as good as Google. I was so happy when our sales representative told us that pre-sales process, and it’s very true. So, very happy about it. The search feature we leverage heavily, as well as the ask a question—the AI feature. The more we feed Highspot, the better information we’re getting out of it, so we have good ROI the more we leverage it. Our company also loves synonyms and acronyms, we need an acronym analyst hired at Antech.The search feature has a function where you can enter synonyms and acronyms. So if I have a rep that’s searching for DOS or the directory or service list, it’s going to bring up our 2024 directory of service, which is what I know they’re looking for. So we use that heavily and we also use the expiration dates on content.Everything gets a one-year expiration date. If it’s not organically updated just through our typical commercial process, we have a force of function for folks to lay eyes on it and make sure that it’s getting looked at [and] reviewed. Typically when we do pull it up and we do have to review it, it’s getting updated. So it helps us stay accountable that the content is effective, up to date, and relevant for the sales team. SS: So you’ve seen high adoption statistics across the board, including an impressive 91% recurring usage, which earned you a nomination in the Highspot Impact Awards last year. What are some of your best practices for driving rep adoption?KS: We say this all the time in so many meetings: if it is not in Highspot, it’s not real. It’s a rumor and you don’t listen to it. So we really use Highspot as a central source of truth for our formal, legal, and approved information. We have a weekly sales bulletin that we send out every Monday to our commercial organization with all the updates from the last week, and what’s coming the week ahead.All of the call-to-action links in that link out to Highspot. So, it’s highlighting all those communications and again, using Highspot as that repository to memorialize them, but not for too long. We have that expiration date on there, so somebody is not searching it in five years and finding something that I’m going to send tomorrow. We’ve also used Highspot University to help train some of our sales professionals and get up to speed as quickly on how to use Highspot, especially for some of our new buyers. SS: I love that. And you also began leveraging Highspot for training and coaching last year, and you’re already seeing 85% active learners. What are some of your best practices for developing effective learning programs and how does Highspot help? KS: So for Highspot, we had used the training and coaching to assign pre-work ahead of our national sales meeting. We had a very big product launch focus at our sales meeting and we wanted to make sure that folks came in with some exposure. They had time to permeate on some of the information we were going to share and had time to practice. We were able to assign out pre-work and also empower some of the managers to see [the] progress of their team on their learning path. Highspot was really the right time for our acquisition. We had a company that had a different type of diagnostics, in-house diagnostics joined with ours, which is Reference Lab, which is a service-based company.Highspot was really good at bridging the knowledge gap and cross-pollinating across those groups. So as we went into that meeting everyone had their bearings on what we were learning about, and what we were talking about, and we were able to show up for the first time as a single unified company.We also use the video feature for reflection and feedback. We have some other ideas and other ways that we’re thinking about incorporating that into our training and learning process in the future. SS: Exciting. And I know another area of innovation that you started to explore in the platform is around AI. How are you leveraging AI to continue to scale efficiency amongst your teams? KS: I am such a big proponent of AI. I will sell all my information to anyone who wants it if it makes my life easier. So Highspot has done a great job with that. I love putting in content, you can hit the generate description button, and it gets 95%, if not more, accurate in the description.Saves me so much time. Previously, we would either leave them blank or put in a quick blurb about what it is. And the AI descriptions it’s able to generate are just so much more helpful and so much more informative. Especially as we’re growing so quickly and we have so many new sales professionals coming on.It helps us increase the quality of the content that we’re putting in there. We also use the ask questions feature for training and coaching. Sometimes our brains get a little tired and we’re like, what should this quiz question be? We hit the ‘ask a question' button for the coaching feature for it to give us some question ideas for the learning modules, so we hack that a little bit.When we were at our national sales meeting, we did a little bit of training on Highspot and we shared with the sales organization how to use the AI feature to write an introduction email in a pitch, for example. And every single room, every time I hit that AI button, the whole room went, “Whoa!”It was such a high, it was so nice showing them that. So it created a lot of value and a lot of stickiness so they could continue to use it in their sales process. It helps me from an administrative standpoint, [and] it helps our sales reps move a little more efficiently. Anything that’s AI—it’s turned on, I’m using it, and I love it. SS: Now, as you have expanded and evolved your enablement strategy, your team has leveraged analytics and Highspot to measure impact. How are you leveraging scorecards and reports to optimize your efforts?KS: I love this question. So we just recently launched internally with our commercial marketing team, what we’re calling the content quality program. Old habits die hard. We do still have a lot of content in Highspot, but we’re trying to be more disciplined about it, especially as we have the analytics now.So we say, even though we’re holding on to this piece, like reps really aren’t using it, we can sunset it and no one’s going to be upset. So with our content quality program, we’re using the scorecard to partner with our product managers, as well as our marketing managers to go through the data of how this is being used and how clients are engaging with it. [Then] to make decisions around if it can be consolidated into another sales tool and if it should be sunset, evolved, [or] what type of change needs to happen with the content.The analytics are extremely helpful there to go against some of our assumptions. Maybe that something’s being used a lot or a little, and really shows us the field reality of how it’s being utilized. We also have a plan to teach the sales managers how they can use the team scorecards to see how their team is performing and using Highspot.Because broadly, we have really high adoption, and then we’ll have a few pockets where there are folks who don’t use this heavily. We want to help managers have visibility into how their team uses it and see if they have any opportunities to close a learning gap. Maybe somebody needs more training or coaching, and we’re all there to help with those things, too. Just need to help make them aware, and the scorecards are helpful for that. SS: Amazing. Thank you for those examples, Kate. Last question for you. Looking ahead, how do you plan to continue to evolve your enablement strategy alongside the momentum of your business?KS: That’s a good question. It’s a big one. So, one of the things on our pipeline—as we’re looking at introducing a more formal sales methodology—we’re also going to be assessing Digital Sales Rooms a little bit closer. We think those are going to complement the direction we want to go strategically from a sales process.We also love the feature preview pane in Highspot. We live in there, we check it like once a week, and that actually inspires just the art of the possible. There’s a good way for us to get some conversations going about how we continue to evolve our strategy and not let it get stale because I think where we are right now, we’re chugging. We have a good system going, but I want to be in love with people’s problems and make sure we’re continuously talking about how we keep doing good.SS:  I love that. And that is the perfect way to conclude this podcast. Kate, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your insight.KS: Thank you for having me, Shawnna.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.

According to Forrester, 72% of business professionals share that improving the ability to innovate would be a higher critical priority in the year ahead. So how can enablement help you drive innovation for your business?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. Here to discuss this topic is Kerstin Valet, the regional director of marketing and communications at CRIF. Thank you for joining us. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Kiersten Valet: Thank you, Shawnna, and I’m happy to be with you. I am Kierstin Valet from CRIF, I head the marketing and communications area for Germany, Austria, and Poland. I’m actually Austrian, I lived pretty long in Vienna and six years ago, I moved to the beautiful city of Hamburg in Germany, taking over the team. We are taking care that our clients get the best support in data, analytics, and solutions for identity, credit risk, and fraud management. In marketing communication, our task is to address the different industries with our products, make sure they know the added value, and play the whole marketing suite we have at our disposal. SS: Wonderful. I’m really excited to have you here with us as a fellow experienced marketing leader, I’d love to hear more about your strategy and priorities. What are some of the key business initiatives that you’re focused on at CRIF? KV: So you’re touching on a very important point. We started our last strategy circle back in 2020 because we are in a very dynamic market and want to make sure that we always address the right needs our customers have, and because a sustainable business model is crucial for success. As I said, the focus is identity, credit risk, and fraud management solutions. So everything that you need to reduce your payment loss, to reduce your risks in general, and to provide the right data and the right solutions to make information-based decisions on the side of our clients. SS: Absolutely. What would you say from your perspective, are some of the major challenges that marketing teams face today, especially in the financial services sector? KV: From my point of view the biggest challenge and the biggest shift that is currently going on in the marketing and communications area is becoming a profit center and going away from being just a cost center. Adding value to the business and not just beautiful pictures. This is something that I think we are at a turning point here and I see a lot of my fellow marketers in the B2B environment, especially in the financial industry that they are just at this point, which also means a different way of collaborating with sales departments and product departments. Especially as we don’t have potential products, we need to present them even more emotionally and underline the added value compared to others, in other industries. And here we are trying to put down silos to improve collaboration with sales, and marketing products, but also controlling and sharing. Also, KPIs and goals to make sure that everybody is on the same page and wants to support the goals of others. This is something that I see as one of the challenges apart from what everybody is talking about now. AI, of course, also, is something that in marketing communications is challenging us a lot. We’re trying to identify the use cases and become more productive to have time and resources for other tasks. SS: And I think the marketing and sales alignment one is uniquely situated in a way that enablement can absolutely help to remove some of those silos between those organizations. How does utilizing an enablement platform like Highspot help you overcome some of the challenges that you just chatted about? KV: First of all, it’s maybe important to understand that the topic of knowledge management. Which, maybe even on a higher level, has been part of our strategy map as one of the enablers that will make sure that everything that comes above bid, so all our strategic actions and growth levers, will become a reality or will become a success. Within this part of knowledge management and information platforms, we said we want to tackle first the heavy need of sales to have the right information, at the right time, over the right tool. And additionally, what we saw then afterward with the project of sales enablement, we were able to get down those silos because at this point, be it a sales product or marketing, we all worked in the same tool, Highspot, which we also integrated into the CRM. So, our CRM became more and more our single source of truth. It was a real success that we not only implemented now in Germany but also [will be] rolling out to Austria and probably other countries to follow. SS: Amazing. From your perspective, what is the strategic value of sales enablement, especially in the financial services industry? KV: Currently, we have the challenge to be more productive and reduce costs. With prices rising everywhere, every company has to make some changes. What we can see, thanks to Highspot and our focus on sales enablement, is first of all, for new people that are coming on board—especially in sales and in the financial services industry—we have products or solutions that are very complicated, or at least you have to explain a lot; it’s very technical. Training new people coming on board is not so easy and probably they get lost on the way because they do not know where to find what. It’s imperative that product and marketing provide a common set of knowledge and documents to train new, but also existing people even faster and sell faster. This is one of the advantages that we have now with Highspot to work on that and have a platform that is adapted for that purpose. But, on the other side, it’s also getting insights from marketing and product, how sales are using our content because I think often marketers will know a sales company, “I need very urgently a specific product sheet, a specific brochure because I know our clients want that one and the others are not good enough.”So now we can see when we produce that kind of collateral, are they used by sales? But then also by the client, how is he interacting with it? To become more productive with our resources, but also to provide the client or potential client a better experience in terms of if we see he’s not reading our documents past page. Then probably we need to shorten it or bring the most important messages in the front or vice versa. A lot of the mindset changed a little bit applying Highspot to our use cases. So it’s a continuous learning process, and we get better and better. SS: Now, within your region, the financial services industry is hyper-competitive. How do you leverage your enablement platform to help you execute your competitive strategy? KV: You’re completely right, it’s highly competitive. It’s more about taking away market shares from other information services provider, because especially with us, nearly every company, nearly every bank has already credit rating agency, how we are calling ourselves, to optimize their risk management processes. So, it’s just about taking away market share. And for that, we have to be different. We have to provide something on top. We have to create the “wow” effect. And I’m very happy that for now, at least in Germany—I hope this stays this way—none of our competitors are taking advantage of leveraging such tools like Highspot because, with the Digital Sales Rooms, we have the possibility to approach our clients in a more advanced way, in a more professional way. And, look here, you have everything that we shared along the contract negotiation phase or the customer life cycle. This is our common place where everything is. That we share information, and so on, you will find there. It’s also on this side a vehicle to create stronger customer relationships and provide this extra, which then hopefully makes the difference to decide on us and not for our competitors. SS: One area in which you have seen success with your teams is using Sales Plays for product highlights, which has led to a 16% increase in adoption recently. How do you leverage Plays to drive consistency with your team and land your initiatives? KV: We use Sales Plays to group information around a product line or a solution, which is information that has formerly been stored in different platforms in different ways. And the time to look for that has been enormous.So I completely can understand that this feature in Highspot is one of the best or most appreciated ones by our sales force because they see, okay, Sales Play, I would say CNSG or ESG solution. And they know everything in there is up to date, is structured according to sales stage, is structured by the industry that they’re approaching, so the industry of our client. It makes it very easy for them to know what to use, when, and maybe what they need to do to prepare properly for the meeting. So everything is together and makes it very easy for them to know what to do. SS: Congratulations on the fantastic adoption on that front. Now, to shift gears a little bit, you mentioned at the beginning of the discussion the importance of having that insight into the data. And I know that it is really important to you to take a data-driven marketing strategic approach. How do you leverage data to optimize your strategy, and how do you leverage Highspot to help? KV: As I said in the beginning, it was a key asset for us that Highspot could be implemented in our CRM system. We just introduced our new CRM platform some years ago and had still some trouble with adoption here. So, also thanks to Highspot, we got higher adoption in the CRM overall because suddenly our team also got value out of it and did not have only to insert data and comply with some processes. So this was the first thing. And then, because the question was about the marketing strategy we see, of course, after an event, we create a CRM campaign and sales. But also, we add the leads there. For us, it’s important to see how many leads convert into opportunities, convert into contracts, and so on. We then want to check how many contact people have been approached using, for example, Highspot, and how many [have] not. How did they react after an event, after a certain campaign to our content? How can we improve or even how can we use Digital Sales Rooms? For lead generation activities, sometimes we provide some content and use it on LinkedIn or via QR code in conferences. Okay. Please go there, but before you can approach the content, you have to leave your email address. So we use Highspot in several use cases that then support, as you said, our marketing data-driven marketing strategy. And that’s very useful when the next planning cycle comes up to know what to do and what not to repeat. A last point that is also interesting for other marketers, is you can also improve efficiency. We just had, some months ago, a new corporate identity relaunch. And as everybody knows, it’s a lot to do every collateral, every document has to be touched, has to be changed, and what did we do? Because we had already introduced Highspot, we had a look: what is currently in use? And out of, let’s say a hundred just to give you a number, probably only 40 collaterals were actually used. So what did we do? We also used it to do some spring cleaning and we adopted the new corporate guidelines and corporate image guidelines for those 40 collaterals. And we saved a lot of money because we did not have to ask the graphic designer to do the rest. So it’s a lot of time, and we saw that just in a few exceptions, sales asked us to change the design of one of the other 60 documents. So everything where you want to make a decision based on data can be supported with Highspot. Or, let’s say a lot of those decisions can be supported by Highspot if you really integrate it also in your strategy. SS: I love that, that is amazing. You touched on a few pieces of advice already, but what advice do you have for other marketing leaders in your industry who may be considering implementing enablement or an enablement platform? KV: What I saw during the decision phase with Highspot, it was crucial to have everybody on board from the beginning. What do I mean by that? It could have been worse if we as marketing, after closing everything and signing the contract [went] to sales and [said]: here, we have now the perfect solution. Please take it, please use it. I think in such a case, they would not have done anything and completely rejected it. What was very imperative from the beginning to already, in the negotiation phase, have a small group of sales with us, making the tests with us. We made sure that what we sign is also something that will be appreciated, that will solve the needs, not just the needs marketing things sales have, but actually the needs that we’ll say are really good. Then we also had support from the top. As I said, knowledge management was something that was an integral part of the strategy itself, so was also pushed by our management that for the different needs, we bring the right solution. I think having all those different entities of a company, also GDPR, IT security, et cetera, having them on board before taking the final decision. Maybe it makes the process longer, but in the end, it has proven successful. SS: That is already starting to unify and align all of the various departments that need to work together in your go-to-market motions Last question for you as you look ahead In what ways are you planning to utilize enablement to continue to evolve and innovate your marketing strategy within your organization? KV: First of all, we are looking to extend the usage of the training and development module. So we are developing specific courses, training courses, for the different parts of our sales team. This is also in close collaboration with our product management team. Then we want to further extend the usage of Digital Sales Rooms. And that those are directly sent from the opportunity entity in the CRM so that we have to connect, that we also see and can measure in cases where the clients have received, or the entity opportunity has received, a sales place or Digital Sales Rooms from our sales, if the sales cycle gets shorter or if something changes in the way the client is behaving. Overall, of course, have a look if we are more successful together with Highspot. Always also hear data-driven, how is the adoption, and what can we do better together so that we bring the best practices then also to other countries, as I said, Austria is next on the roadmap. Some, of the early adopters are already working with it and giving us good feedback and it will be a challenge or a topic of the next weeks and months to extend that even further. SS: How exciting. Again, congratulations, and thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time. KV: Thank you for inviting me, and looking forward to our next projects ahead. 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.

According to a study conducted by Gartner, 77% of sellers struggle to complete tasks efficiently. So how can you improve the way that your sellers work?Shawnna Sumaoang: 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 Ben Taft, the vice president of global sales operations at Arm. Thank you for joining us, Ben. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Ben Taft: Hi, Shawnna. Thanks for having me today. As you mentioned, I run global sales ops at Arm, and I’ve been here a little under five years. Prior to that, I had experience at both startups and Fortune 100 companies, running revenue ops, sales ops, and marketing ops. Everything in between from trying to get our first millions of dollars in revenue to billions of dollars in revenue. Looking forward to the conversation. SS: As a sales operations leader, what are some of the key initiatives that you are focused on driving for the business this year?BT: As I thought about your question there, I think two things really come to mind — and I’ll try not to be too marketing-speak or, lingo-speak on it — it does come down to business transformation as the first one. In an enablement, rev ops, and sales ops role, one of the elements is we have to find ways to bring in all of the other groups we work with. Whether it’s marketing, whether it’s the field teams, whether it is our product teams, engineering teams, or our solution experts.We’ve got to bring them together to find, a way to get that information in people’s hands as quickly as possible so that they can make use of it. The other element of that is with so much information, how do you simplify that down so you can scale it out quickly? If we rely on the legacy way of doing things and the legacy approach, whether it’s processes or the ways of working that we used to do, that’s not going to get us there.And if anything, we are trying to look at all of those legacy mindsets and say, how do we completely rethink this from end to end? Cause with so many people involved, that just elongates the overall process. So, it really comes down to how can we find better ways to transform with all of those different stakeholders. And how can we simplify it so people actually feel like this is happening a lot faster than I’m used to, and so let’s do more of this. SS: Those are some big initiatives. So from your perspective, Ben, what role does your enablement tech stack play in helping you land these initiatives? BT: One of the ways I think about it is a phrase I’m using called time to education. And this is where I’ve seen a massive improvement with some of our sales enablement, like Highspot. It gives us analytics that connects content owner’s right to deals in some cases, or right to the people that are at the front of this. If we can improve that time to education, that allows people to use that information with a lot more veracity and a lot more velocity.It comes down to the legacy approach, obviously. I’ve got something, I’ve got to get it out to the field, or I’ve got something people can find valuable, and it will help them in their conversations with customers or whoever they’re engaging with. But, if it ends up taking us months and months to get that put out there to go through review cycles, or it gets put out in a way that’s static and dormant, and it doesn’t get all the amplification or it doesn’t come across in a rich and engaging fashion, it’s like you never put it out there to begin with.If I can shorten that time to education, that becomes a huge factor. But, one of the more interesting elements of that whole thing is traditional groups that I would have to go to extract all that knowledge out and then put it back to a team and say, “Okay, take all this goodness and put it in some way that people will find engaging.” A tool like Highspot now allows for non-traditional content owners or experts to immediately put that out there. I find that some of those folks are finding that is incredible development opportunities. It’s not just PowerPoint that they have to go write and it’s not some boring brief they’ve got to write.Now they’re creating these spots they’re creating a rich set of information out there. And they’re feeling like mini developers, in a sense. It’s such an easy way to do it that the time to education dramatically decreases and suddenly it’s out there very quickly. People are consuming it and they can see it being consumed with all the analytics. In a lot of ways, it allows me to scale beyond the traditional content owner process, and you’re creating a lot of new content owners, and they’re having a lot of fun with it. SS: I love that. Now on the topic of scale, I know that you also believe in the philosophy that implementing enablement technology is key to accelerating revenue while improving operational scale. Can you tell us more about how enablement helps to drive those outcomes? BT: The way I think of it is the abundance of information doesn’t necessarily guarantee the relevance or value of each piece of that information. A really well-thought-out enablement stack changes that, right? You now have an ability to really isolate down on what they need at that particular point in time.Now that’s a bit of a cliche I know, and I said I wouldn’t do that, but it’s: what do I need right now at this point? Even though we all strove to do that, the legacy enablement stacks still didn’t really solve that problem. Somebody could search for something and imagine they’re in a library; they’re looking for that book and they see all sorts of things they can’t make use of.We now have the ability to be much more refined on that. That goes back to my earlier statement about time to education. It’s now allowing people to get it out there in a much more refined way, a much more sophisticated way. And that gets you to outcomes at a much quicker rate. And it also goes back to allowing some of those non-traditional content owners to be much more invested in that process.And when they’re much more invested and they see outcomes at a much quicker rate, their buy-in becomes, they’re like that worked completely different than my usual experience. How do I do more of that? And that changes the outcomes that we see. SS: I absolutely love that. So Ben, for our audience out there how did you go about finding the right enablement tools to help you drive these outcomes, what were maybe some of the key factors that you were considering?BT: Oh, probably nothing, groundbreaking in some of that regard. Obviously it starts with what the user experience looks like. I definitely have a philosophy, of the hub and spoke approach. I think that there are traditional platforms that act as an anchor across your business, and then you plug in sort of platforms or tools that are really purpose-built for what your field teams need at that particular time. And that starts with user experience meaning. Does that tool think the way my salespeople think in some regards? Is it set up in an intuitive fashion that is driven by people that, where they think this is how I would search or how I’d want to use this information, or this is how I’d want to present it back to my customers?And if everything, the tool or the enablement or however tools we use takes that sort of approach on it. I find that my time to get people ramped up on it dramatically decreases, and the faster I get people ramped up on it, the better. So it starts with user experience. A really high-end user experience translates to a lower ramp-up time, and that lower ramp-up time then suddenly yields better analytics.And so suddenly now you have all of these analytics about where you got it right, and maybe where you didn’t get it right, and you can quickly pivot in on the things that you didn’t get quite right. And go back to the drawing board. And then the last piece is I really want something that stands out on all my tools.I look for something that maybe is going to be a little disruptive, a little progressive, or it’s going to look not like some of the tools we’ve traditionally had. And, because I want people to go, this is different, this is cool. And I want people to have that feeling like they’ve just unwrapped something cool under the the Christmas tree or whatever. And if they get excited about it then that makes my job a lot easier. SS: One thing I think that sellers are definitely getting excited about on that note a little Christmas in July, but digital rooms are really popular amongst sellers these days. They create opportunities for sellers to really foster deeper engagement with their buyers and their customers. Can you share how you see Digital Rooms changing the traditional go-to-market motion for your sellers? BT: I’ll probably step back even in terms of just Digital Rooms in general. One aspect of enablement tools is your traditional audiences will always lap it up and adopt it. But as I look at the spectrum, you may have groups on your field teams or your marketing teams or whatever that sort of lag behind, either because of cultural norms, how they do business, different, maybe there’s language gaps, or maybe there’s just.For whatever reason, there just tends to be gaps in how they adopt things. One thing I’ve seen with Digital Rooms is some of the traditional groups that maybe haven’t adopted as quickly have actually been some of the early adopters in some cases. And I think this has to do with the fact that their relationships with their customers tend to maybe have a different, it’s different than, every region has a slightly different engagement with their customer due to how they, cultural norms or regional norms or what have you.I find that things like Digital Rooms actually allow groups to really get customized and tailored to be really bespoke in terms of how they set that up. And it goes back to something I mentioned earlier about non-traditional folks taking ownership inside of a tool, like a Highspot, and suddenly they’re building things and they’re doing things that I’m not even aware of.I have not even laid out to them and they’re pushing the envelope on the tool faster than I am. That is really cool because now I’m getting all sorts of different ideas and innovations that maybe I hadn’t thought of in the past. It’s so easy and quick for them to do it, that it allows them to get very bespoke to what they need.They’re still operating within the confines of what we’ve provided, and it allows them to, get even deeper into those engagements with their customers. I find that the biggest thing that I see of concepts like Digital Rooms, is it maybe allows some of the non-traditional user sets or non-traditional heavy users to suddenly expand their use cases.SS: I love that, it’s like a force multiplier effect. So I love that’s what’s happening with Digital Rooms at Arm. I do want to go back to something that you had just said in your response prior to that, which was around all of the information and analytics. You’ve talked a lot about how important it is to have access to that, especially vis-a-vis your enablement platform. How do you utilize data to help drive sales execution? BT: So there are two things in an approach. One is, you’ve got an enablement platform where all that information resides. But I also have deployed what I call the bar. The bar is business analytics and reporting. This is a separate sort of function, and so when you need information, you go to the bar. And you order up your drink in terms of what you want, so the bar is a group that is trying to take vast amounts of data and put it in very visual, very useful, and informative ways. There’s nothing groundbreaking about that. But when your enablement platform and your bar capabilities become almost the foundations for every informational piece that goes out to the field, or your field teams, or your marketing teams. When that becomes two anchor points, we’ve got something great we want you to learn, or we’ve got great information we want you to digest, here’s where you can find it.And by the way, it’s a really rich experience, and you’ll get all this. And by the way, here’s where you can go see information in terms of how that information is being used and how you may apply it to all, the things you’ve got going on in your space. Marrying up enablement stack plus rich analytics that has now taken root, when those are the anchor points of all of your education efforts then the rest is just, it becomes a well-oiled machine.And people know what to expect. I know where to find it, I know what I’m going to get, and I know I’m going to get what I need. And I’ve got a resource to then go track how it’s working for me. SS: Absolutely. And so to that point, how do you see enablement tools helping to improve efficiency and enable sellers to become more effective?BT: We’ve touched on some of those things. I think that enablement tools changed how users interact with that content. I used to joke that 80% of it was trying to figure out where was that specific PowerPoint. And I know that’s early 2000s in a way, I’m probably dating myself here.But you forget at the last miles, many times it’s people trying to stitch together some information. And I think a really well thought out enablement stack and some of the tools that surround that in the other parts of the sales go-to-market motion.They’ve really allowed people to get back to the work of putting together value for their customers as opposed to searching for stuff and trying to understand do they have all the right pieces and where did that go? And it used to be there, but it’s no longer there. And so enablement stacks, some of the other go-to-market motion players that really do this well.It’s allowed people to get back to—especially our sales groups—doing what they want; putting together really a rich set of value propositions that they can go back to their customers with. And it’s meaningful they do it with pace. It’s timely for what their customers are looking to see.And then it allows all of the analytics to understand how is it being consumed and did I get the right thing. And did I give them what they needed at the right time? And, by the way, if it’s a Digital Room, I did it in a way that can be very intimate with the partner so that it feels very personable to them.I think that’s changed the way people think about it. And I really think it’s become table stakes in terms of how sellers expect to have that information available and expect to be able to act with pace, that they’re able to quickly put together what their customers want in a very personable fashion.SS: That’s a really interesting segue to my next question, which is how do you see innovations like AI helping teams achieve even more efficiency? And how are you beginning to leverage AI today? BT: So like many organizations, we’re studying AI at this point, trying to understand where the right use cases are. Obviously [AI] has incredible promise. It’s going to be transformational, I absolutely believe that. But, I also think that many times RevOps groups and sales ops groups, really serve a unique purpose in an organization of being one of the true great knowledge workers inside of an organization.They’re stitching together many times marketing, products, engineering, finance, all of the executive needs, all these different things. So, AI comes into play in terms of where we see people needing to be more effective in that. We’re still early in our journey exploring that. I do think AI’s a tremendous capability to drive some different kinds of insights and help people. become much more effective in their particular execution of something. For example, I sat on a panel not too long ago and there was an individual [who] talked about some of his CSMs. This was not at my current organization, [but] he talked in terms of using AI where they are deploying where every morning a CSM might wake up and see a 15-point action plan that they were expected to execute.AI had generated and drafted that 15-point plan down to the emails, down to the invites, and down to the CRM updates. But where the CSM got better, is they were then supposed to review that action plan and make tweaks to it. So they’re not spending eight to ten hours developing all of that content and action plan.They spent 30-minutes reviewing it and making it really tailored to their customers. Now making that CSM much more effective in their job. They’re able to apply a lot more intelligence to it, a lot more personal touches to it, because the hard work is done and now they can say, “You know what, my customer X doesn’t like to receive emails on Monday because it’s just a bad day for them in terms of what they get. I’m going to re-tailor this thing for a Tuesday type of thing.” That’s tactical, but it’s a really unique example of what it does. We’re [on] our journey to find out how AI can do similar things. SS: Last question—in terms of your journey looking ahead, Ben, what are your key priorities for the future of sales operations at your organization?BT: Like I’ve done and looked at prior roles. I look at, RevOps, sales ops, and our capabilities on a scale of one to five. One might be, it’s a process or a capability that is in its infancy or still very manual or reactive, to a five, which is it’s highly predictive, it’s sophisticated.Maybe it’s that process now providing insights in advance of it happening and allowing the organization to pivot and be prepared for it. It’s delivering a different level of value to the business. One of the things that I look at is we step into that AI journey, and as we step into the next, changes in our industry, is all these tools provide new capabilities.One thing top of mind is to look at all of our existing processes and capabilities on that scale and say, “Okay, I need to reset that scale and understand: where on our sales ops capabilities do we need to go from one to five? Or, if we’re at a three, where do we need to go from three to five? So that’s where I’m going to be spending some time and focus, is how do I mature those next set of capabilities, in light of how AI will make some of those transitions possible.That maybe where it was going to take us a long time to get even from one to three, perhaps I can leapfrog that and now go from one to four, or from two to five. The old scale is broken and now my new thing is to figure out: what does that new scale look like, and how do I go measure it against what we’re currently doing.SS: I absolutely love that and I think you are looking around all the right corners, Ben. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciated you sharing your expertise and insights here. BT: Shawnna, for having me. It’s been a pleasure. 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.

A Gartner study found that organizations prioritizing revenue enablement see a 41 percent increase in revenue attainment per seller. So how can you build an enablement strategy that drives results?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. Here to discuss this topic is Anthony Doyle, the director of sales enablement at Turnitin. Thanks for joining us, Anthony. I’d love for you to tell us all about yourself, your background, and your role. Anthony Doyle: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Shawnna. My name is Anthony Doyle, I’m the director of sales and development as Shawnna said, at Turnitin.A little bit about myself, I started my career back around 1998 working in the education sector, building interactive multimedia learning materials for education. I started out on the tool side of the game and really building materials and building learning programs for UK institutions.And that was at the time when the VLE space, the virtual learning environment space had just started being created. So I was working on some of the early prototypes and software development for those types of systems. That led me to a sales role for around nine years, and that’s where I really learned my sales craft and my different selling methodologies. I think of solution selling, Milleheim, and those types of frameworks.Through that career, I built a massive knowledge of sales and marketing and went on to lead sales and marketing organizations at various ed tech companies. And what I found at those companies I was doing a lot of enablement. Before enablement was a thing and before it was coined as a type, a term, or a category, I was naturally developing sales teams, developing sales processes, selling systems, and things like that.So that led me to a bit of a consulting career, working with organizations to develop their sales and marketing practices. And then a couple of years ago, I decided I really wanted to get into a long-term role and join an organization where I could have a good tenure with, and be part of something from a longevity perspective, rather than going in and fixing and putting things in and then putting it in the hands of somebody else, to really see the long term development.I’ve been familiar with Turnitin since probably the late nineties. So when Turnitin was first founded, I’ve seen Turnitin grow up as a company and mature. So it was good to join them and get on the other side of that. And now I lead the sales and development practice here at Turnitin, which is part of the RevOps organization here. SS: Anthony, as you mentioned, you have extensive experience in enablement and you also have a very clear vision for your enablement strategy at Turnitin. What are the core components of your strategy and what are the key strategic initiatives you’re focused on driving this year through enablement? AD: It’s first important to say that when I joined the organization around just under three years ago, this strategy wasn’t what I led with initially. I led by really trying to figure out where the organization was at, what the goals of the org were, and figuring out some of the kind of key gaps initially that we needed to put in place in order then to be able to develop a strategy for the long term. So we focused initially on some of the competency development and a competency framework around what we wanted to really be driving in terms of our sales process and the skills underneath that. And then at the beginning of this year, I got together with my team ahead of the sales kickoff to really develop the sales and neighborhood strategy that would take us from 2024 through to 2026. And where we’ve landed with that, is we’ve got three pillars in the strategy. The first of those is: align and engage. And that pillar is around really aligning with the different sales regions, the different sales leaders, and, factoring in their regional intricacies and figuring out where their teams are at. And engaging those teams in a dialogue for development, for increasing all the key metrics and KPIs that you would expect. And then really moving into the next pillar, that’s around educating and inspiring, so it’s: educate and inspire. And that area is really around developing the training programs that will be inspiring sellers to engage and to develop their skill sets. The aim of, obviously, to develop the sales practice. The next pillar underneath that is: elevate and impact. And that’s really where the rubber meets the road, right? It’s about. impacting results and elevating the practice to a world-class sales level. So when I was hired, the MO was to develop a world-class selling organization that other people in the ed tech industry would recognize and want to be part of and want to come here because of the way that we do sell and the level of practice that we have.So that last pillar is about getting us there. Now, some of the initiatives, obviously that come under that, there’s many initiatives that we have. Some of those range from, at the align and engage level, just having a regional management cadence, so having a regular cadence. We restructured our sales enablement team to have a regional sales enablement manager in each one of our three key regions.And what we’re really looking to do is have that regular cadence with the first-line managers to understand what’s going on, and get coverage on where the sellers are at from a competency perspective and a sales capabilities rating. And then see what, we can drive programmatically down from that. Then we feed that into the next pillar, which is obviously, the education-focused pillar, the educate and inspire, where we’ll be looking to drive tailored training programs and we’ll be driving that through Highspot. And then obviously as we get to elevating the practice and driving impact, some of the things that we’re exploring there in terms of initiative is looking at Meeting Intelligence to figure out, where there’s coaching opportunity and where we can really drive that elevation of practice.SS: Amazing, and I love how you really centered them around those three core principles. How does your enablement platform, Highspot, help play a role in effectively executing your enablement strategy and supporting your strategic initiatives? AD: It’s a great question. First of all, you need, a place to be able to gravitate around and a place to be able to drive content, and programmatic training. We need somewhere to put that, and we need somewhere to drive that as well. So Highspot is pretty much our sales enablement hub. It’s where all of our content to do with messaging [lives], it’s where we do all of our onboarding, so when somebody first joins us, and we’re developing as part of the strategy role-based onboarding pathways.At the moment, we’ve got quite a generic onboarding pathway. So, we’re developing more personalized onboarding routes, depending on the role that you take within the org, and all of that first engagement starts with Highspot. And then the ever-boarding, things like sales systems training product messaging.Plays and we’re going to be looking at development sales kits as well. And we have got a strong partnership with our product marketing team and they develop well-built sales plays for our product motions. So a lot of that, all of that has to be housed somewhere, and it should be in one place, and it should be somewhere where you can understand how that’s being leveraged, and what impact that’s making. If we think about elevation and driving impact, we want to be able to know what’s working, and what’s not working. And if these motions and the training that we’re delivering is being consumed, how is that impacting on results?We look at correlations between where people are exhibiting certain behaviors, pitching more regularly, involving certain pieces of content within the sales cycle in Highspot, and how that’s driving back-to-end results. SS: Now, you mentioned the importance of driving regional alignment. How does this defined enablement strategy help you drive that alignment to execute against your strategic initiatives?AD: I think this is the key component really. What we found over the first two years when I joined the org being more transparency we weren’t seeing the traction we wanted with the adoption of some of the programs we’re developing. We built out a competency framework with really high-quality training that existed under that, we built customized frameworks for lead qualification.We have a framework called Nitro, and we felt the need to do that because of a lot of qualifications LMX, put things like budget – if you think of band – budget is at the top. You think of Adam, authority at the top. Whereas in our sector when we’re selling, the need is the key thing, right? You've got to have need at the top of the cycle.So we developed resources like that. As much as we try to drive awareness and adoption of those things, we weren’t really seeing it at a macro level. What we quickly recognized is, it was missing that regional engagement piece.We had to align, we had to figure out what the challenges were in the regions and then eat our own dog food, really, in terms of, if we’re trying to push a problem-based selling approach. Really, we should take the same approach ourselves as enablement and figure out what’s going on and diagnose before we start prescribing things like nitro and, sprints, prospecting frameworks, and things like this. And certain training, we should try and figure out first, where are the sellers are, and what’s their biggest opportunity to improve. And even if they’re really high-performing sales teams, it’s like any sport, right? You can be the world’s heavyweight champion of the world, right? Of boxing, but you know where you want to develop muscle and you want to develop strength or, refine certain techniques.But you can probably talk to that very quickly if you’re engaged and say, “Hey, if you’re going to coach me for two hours, Muhammad Ali, and bring him back this is what I want you to work with me on.” So that’s the approach we’ve now been taking, and we think it’s crucial to get the alignment.Because then when we’re asking those questions to the first line managers and they’re saying this is where I want your help. When we offer that help we’re going to get the adoption. We’re going to get the engagement because they’ve asked for it. SS: I love that notion of elevate and inspire. How do you think about that when structuring your coaching programs, especially across regions and how can real-world coaching help drive consistent execution of your strategic initiatives around the world? AD: So one of the first things we did, one of the first things I did when I joined the org is redevelop the sales process. We merged about two or three separate organizations together and they all had slightly different sales processes. So what we said is really what we feel is important is breaking down the sales process and looking at what are the capabilities that sellers need to really craft, and work on to be successful in any buy-in journey. So we now have is we have ten core sales competencies or sales capabilities that are mapped under our sales process. So what we’ve done is develop material around them, developed job aids, a pre-discovery planning worksheet, a vision engineering worksheet, and things like that.Frameworks for mitigating objections using things like layer, and another approach is mid labels and mirroring and techniques like that, psychological selling techniques, and negotiation techniques. And we’ve developed assets around these things. So what we’re effectively doing when we’re aligning with the regions is talking to the regional manager about what they’re seeing in results where they’re seeing the average pipeline velocities and the kind of metrics around pipeline health.We’ve got that presented now in dashboards. We’ve got a fantastic BI team here, so they’ve looked at a lot of depth on the pipeline, and our regional sales managers can have that dialogue with the sales manager in the region and say, “Hey, based on this, what capabilities do you think we can further develop in your teams?”And then what we’re doing from there is building a programmatic approach to that. So instead of just doing a training and saying, we’re done, we’re actually building a four-week program or a six-week program around that, and we’re layering in different training, driving bespoke activities and workshop activities and different fun ways of engaging the teams.And then we’re driving that and we’re rolling that out through Highspot on a learning path, and then we’re seeing how the teams that we’re engaging on Zoom, to get like feedback and where you’re struggling. How have you applied this over the last four weeks? What are you finding?What’s not working, what’s working? We’re getting that kind of tribal knowledge culture moving across the teams. And that we feel is the right approach. SS: Now we’ve touched on this a bit, but, as we’ve been talking about this, you have helped to globalize your Highspot instance and you’re seeing amazing impact, I think you guys are at 86% adoption. Can you tell us more about this effort and how it has helped to keep your teams aligned across regions? AD: When we first deployed Highspot, what we did was we took quite a wide approach to it. And obviously, we’ve got many different regions. We’ve got teams in Asia, and we’ve got many different languages that are spoken.We’ve got teams whose primary language is Japanese, so we’ve got content that’s translated into Japanese. We’ve got folks in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Spain, in Mexico, we’ve got people in the Philippines, in all over the world, Australia, et cetera. Now, when you think about collateral and marketing material, and when you start translating that, what we’ve done and a mistake we made, to be honest, is we put that all centrally in one kind of like product by product, we had different Spots in Highspot.  But what happened is that quickly became overwhelming for people because when they were searching or when they were trying to service content, they were finding lots of content that wasn’t applicable to them. It was in Japanese and their clients don’t speak Japanese.And, obviously, once people were leaning into that content and some of the teams are leaning in and using it, that was bubbling to the top in some of the lists and on the smart pages and things like on the Spot overviews. So what we did is we restructured Highspot to take more of an approach where our core, primary language content, that’s American English or British English is in a central spot, and then we created regional spots.We used the group feature of Highspot to collect all these teams into groups so that they only had access to the materials and the regions that mattered to them. And that helped a lot because it meant that content was easily found. It was more applicable. They also had their own spaces where regional marketing teams could start driving certain motions and specific. Materials that are right and relevant to those regions. So that helped in just thinking more thoughtfully around the process of structuring Highspot in the way that’s going to best serve the sellers.  And then I think the key thing is a partnership with product marketing. So in enablement, we don’t own the messaging. We don’t own how we message our products. How we necessarily train the products as well into the market, but we’re a key partner in building some of those programs. And I have a learning developer who’s fantastic, her name is Ren Narciso, an absolutely amazing learning designer and developer. And she develops a lot of our product training, but she’s not an expert in each product, right? And I’m not an expert in the product. So, that partnership with product marketing is absolutely key. And we started working with them to leverage frameworks like PIC: problem, impact, root cause – different frameworks to really think about how we position our products.And they have done a fantastic job of developing materials and assets. Without that partnership, I think it’s very difficult for enablement to drive that value. I think we work in proxy in some instances, and we work to support those teams to help them craft a very valuable experience in Highspot.I think that’s probably why we’re seeing some of the adoption we are, it’s because people like the product market and really leaning in and being a very strong internal advocate for the use of Highspot. They even do things like building out like how-tos in Highspot. Here’s how you use digital rooms and good practices around it.So even though you think shouldn’t an admin be doing that? Actually, because those people are really building out these assets, they want to see them utilized effectively. So they’re leaning in and they’ve got the enthusiasm and the willingness to even push more tutorials and things out to sellers.SS: Now you touched on the importance of learning programs and the key role it plays in really driving that consistent execution. What are your best practices for designing effective learning programs and how do you leverage Highspot to help? AD: So I think you’ve got to go right down to what’s the intended outcome, right? When you’re looking at a learning sort of program, you’ve got to think about what are we trying to drive in terms of the learning outcomes. So our learning specialist, she really does look at that level when she’s developing these modules. She thinks okay, what are the intended learning outcomes?So there’s like a training docket for each one of the courses we build. And the key thing that’s in mind there is what are the key learning outcomes we’re looking to drive. And then we back into that, right? We make sure we’ve got the coverage on the resources. We make sure we’ve got the situational knowledge and the subject matter experts feeding that in.We try to drive things like interactivity and drive curiosity too. We just try to make it fun, and engaging, but we’re very purposeful and we don’t we don’t put it. A fun exercise in there just for the sake of it. We make sure that it’s driving towards a learning outcome. SS: Now, in addition to enabling your internal teams, I believe Turnitin also leverages Highspot to enable your customers through programs like customer onboarding. How is your company helping to ensure customers have a great onboarding experience and how is Highspot helping with this? AD: In terms of our customers who we sell to or we’re onboarding, when I started enablement, the enablement team was actually within the customer experience part of the organization. I reported to the chief customer officer but we moved into sales under the revenue, the chief revenue officer as when that new member of the exec team was hired. But we’ve still got quite strong connections with the CE org and we have fantastic members of that team in terms of who do the onboarding. What we find the onboarding team utilizes Highspot for, I know a number of the consultants use it to actually provide the glue to the onboarding experience and now they’re using the Digital Sales Rooms to put materials in there and send that to customers and have them go through the onboarding experience, and they can update the resources at the right point in time. Things like the help guides and such things, different resources, links to our help center, and presentations that they’ve delivered on the virtual sessions or in-person sessions if they’re doing in-person onboarding. So, a lot of the use we see with the onboarding team is more around that level. SS: I love that Turnitin is really on the cutting edge here because you guys are creating a consistent experience for your customers by really leveraging Highspot from the moment they’re a prospective customer all the way through their customer experience with you. Do you have any wins from that team that you can share? AD: I think what they’re saying, what they’ve said to me is when they said, “Look, we need this.” It was like, we get really good feedback on that. And it’s like a valuable resource. It was something they were unwilling to give up, it was providing real identifiable value. I think as we scale and as we deploy new products as well into the market, there has to be scalable ways of onboarding. And I know we’ve been leaning in really heavily on digital onboarding. So this provides another way to, to provide not just the training, but the resources that then help nurture and bring customers to a high level of initial deployment and success. What I’m keen to understand is how that’s going and looking into how can we even support that team more, and provide them with the connectivity back into Highspot. Now I know this is a really hot topic at the moment, cause I see on the community side, there’s lots of discussion around it, right? People are curious around, I wonder if this is something we can do. And I’ve covered a bit in a couple of those chats, but I think it is a really important area as we think about Digital Sales Rooms. Not just Digital Sales Rooms, but digital engagement spaces where actually post-sale, you can keep nurturing that customer. If we want to use the kind of HubSpot terminology to delight. We want to delight the customer, we want to bring them in and some of that experience they’ve had throughout the sales process, they can then continue to have into implementation. SS: Shifting back to impact, you have defined success metrics for each of your key initiatives. What are the core business metrics you focus on impacting through enablement? AD: Yeah, so it’s probably not really too dissimilar to most people, right? We have time to revenue, like what the average sales cycle looks like from net new, or to an upsell or a cross-sell initiative. The sort of that where that falls into sales cycle length, of course, what’s the content usage and performance looking like of the material we are putting in Highspot, is it getting utilized? We’re starting to really lean into that in a governance project that we’re working on. It’s a core docketed project in our PMO office, our project management office. And we’re looking at really figuring out where’s the content performing, where’s it not. Things like the closing ratio, things like sales process consistency too, that’s an issue in every sales organization. But then, and that kind of goes down with DRINTS and we’ve got training we’re developing and deploying on that, so we want to see that improve because we’re driving initiatives in Highspot using training programs in there to try and improve forecastability and things like that. So obviously you’ve got win-loss rate, I don’t think that’s a huge issue for us, what is more of an issue to us is it probably wasn’t an opportunity in the first place. The process wasn’t adhered to that cleverly and we’ve got to get more robust around that. So all the kind of call metrics you would expect, size of the deal, velocity through the stages, those types of things.So we have a lot of those already mapped out into our Tableau dashboard and we are tracking those. And what we did very roughly last year is when we deployed that dashboard, we looked at about an eight-month period, and we looked at just a simple metric of who has been through the training programs and completed them versus who hasn’t across a number of different product trainings and sales capability trainings, and how are those metrics aligning?And every single one of the KPIs was positively trending for the people who were completing the learning programs versus those who weren’t. Which is probably not surprising, but it was good to actually prove out and see in the data.  SS: Fantastic. Last question for you, Anthony. A big aspect of your enablement strategy is also that it serves as a roadmap for your future vision, which for Turnitin includes leveraging innovation like AI. How are you beginning to leverage AI in your strategy? And how do you plan to continue to evolve that? AD: Yeah, so this is a great question. So we’re currently just piloting and trying out the Meeting Intelligence tool at Highspot. So one of the reasons we wanted to do that, there’s a couple of reasons really.One, it’s to understand and try and figure out the behaviors, and are the capabilities getting put into practice and how consistent is that happening. But the other thing is around really trying to drive those coaching opportunities as well. But what we found is we had Gong actually in place a number of years ago, and we had about four and a half thousand recordings in that platform, sales meetings, four and a half thousand sales meetings. But when we looked at making a decision on whether we were going to continue with that tool or not, what we’ll find is nobody was reviewing them.Nobody was actually doing anything about them. There was no top-down push for people to do it, but also there was no bottom-up real kind of drive or even asks from teams to get that commentary and get that coaching and that reinforcement. So in terms of coaching, it’s a really big challenge. And when Highspot was looking at developing this tool, actually spoke with some of your product managers and tried to input into some of the early thinking around how you would implement a tool like this in Highspot.And this is one of the things I rose in that conversation and I raised in that conversation and what I was delighted to see is the introduction of an AI in terms of setting a rubric around what you expect in these types. So take a discovery meeting, for example, and be able to set a rubric around what a good discovery meeting looks like.What are the capabilities you expect? What are the outcomes you expect to see from that discovery meeting? How do you expect the rep to manage the meeting and be able to capture that? And then if you ingest that meeting at the Meeting Intelligence, I have an algorithm that can understand that and score that.So I was delighted to see that as part of the product when you initially launched it, and we’re really keen to test that out because we have this concept as one of our initiatives around quality assurance and being able to drop in on a quarterly basis lessons in Highspot on a pathway.Where sellers are asked to go and identify their top discovery meeting or identify a sample of discovery meetings. And we want those to be run through the algorithm, run through that rubric. And then we want managers to be able to get some quick feedback immediately and be able to try it again if they want and put another discovery meeting in there.Maybe, two weeks later, have another discovery meeting, try it out, and then get more feedback. But, then on a kind of summative basis, maybe once every quarter, once, twice a year maybe, be able to drop that in and across all of our capabilities. The key meetings for discovery and for vision, establishing a buy-in vision.We generally have other meetings to present and demo so how are the reps demoing? We want that to go through the system and be stored. And then we want managers hopefully to go in there, review the AI feedback, give their own feedback, give a grade, give a result. And build that as a quality assurance piece to the practice.So that’s how we’re hoping to leverage some of that technology, but we haven’t really got there yet. We’ve got the model in place, and we want to try it out and see where it gets to because what we know is it’s very difficult to engage managers in that coaching dialogue, but we feel if we can give them a bit of a crutch or a bit of a lead in with some suggestions and this is where to look, we think we can get there much easier.SS: Thank you, Anthony. I greatly appreciate your time and your insights. AD: No problem. Happy to share. 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.

In a study conducted by Sales Enablement Pro, organizations where training is led by enablement teams see a six percentage point increase in customer retention. So how can you maximize the impact of your training programs?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.Here to discuss this topic is Sofia Arroyo, the revenue enablement programs lead at Clari. Thank you for joining us, Sofia. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Sofia Arroyo: Thanks so much for having me, Shawnna, I'm excited to be here. My name is Sofia Arroyo and I have been in enablement for over six years. I started as a sales rep as an account executive and transitioned into enablement, and have never looked back. So I’m based in the San Francisco Bay area and very excited to talk today. SS: We’re excited to have you here. I know you recently joined the Clari team, and as you mentioned in your introduction, you bring a lot of frontline sales experience with you. How does your experience as a frontline seller guide your approach to enablement? SA: Yeah, for me the biggest thing is understanding and emphasizing the “what’s in it for me” and “why does this matter?” So often enablement, in a good way, is very sought after. People want to learn, people want to teach others, and get in front of sales teams overall. But, really answering the question: what’s in it for me as a seller? Why does this matter? How is it going to help me sell more, and have better conversations with customers?That has helped me in my own experience deliver great enablement overall. A second part of this is giving focused learning. So, delivering focused learning and reducing the noise that often hits sales teams. I remember as a seller myself, feeling overwhelmed because we had so many meetings all the time. There were tons of people coming to talk to us and thinking, “Man, what would I have wanted or what do I wish I had when I was a seller?”, and taking that focus and applying it to enablement overall. So really emphasizing, again, what’s in it for me and what do we want sellers to be able to do has helped me deliver impactful enablement programs at the companies I’ve worked for. SS: Absolutely, it sounds like you really know what it’s like to walk in their shoes, and I expect that is especially helpful on this front. Now, I noticed something on your LinkedIn profile, and it mentions that you aim to promote a learning culture. I would love to understand, how do you foster a culture of learning amongst reps, especially with your background as a seller? SA: I would say two ways. The first is, again, making things very relevant. When I think back to being a seller, as I mentioned, I was eager to learn and I wanted to talk to other people who were seeing success, and at the top of the leaderboards. And so I knew at that time, but I really wanted to think about, okay, what do I want to see as a learner? And who do I want to talk to? So, a lot of that is how we make enablement and training relevant to learners and sellers to really make sure they see why it’s impactful. And then that creates that learning culture overall. So really, “Hey, I’m hungry to learn because I know it will directly impact my book of business, and it’s going to directly impact how I talk to prospects and customers, and I’m going to see success from it overall.”The second thing is peer-to-peer learning. One of the things we don’t always emphasize in enablement is the importance of actually teaching others when we learn something. It’s that defining moment of, “We’ve actually really effortlessly implemented a new learning or behavior change when we can teach other people something.” So leveraging peer-to-peer learning to create that culture of learning from, not just folks like myself and enablement, but people who want to hear from other folks like themselves, and making sure you can connect others to people who are experiencing exactly what they are on a day-to-day basis is a great way to promote that culture of learning internally. SS: I love that you’re driving that. And your team implemented Highspot’s training and coaching capabilities. How does having a unified enablement platform help you deliver more effective learning programs? SA: I will have to give a shout-out to the strategic enablement framework overall that we’ve talked about at Highspot and we’ve talked about internally here at Clari and at the companies I’ve worked at.It’s that consistent execution piece. Training and coaching is something we all know is necessary, but it’s about implementing it in the workflow of our reps and in our learners. Having one platform where people can go to not only get the resources, and content they need to be successful, but then have access to coaching opportunities in mere real-time or when they need it makes for that flywheel of the equip, train, and coach to work effectively. It’s the only way that we can make sure that we are capturing the right behaviors and promoting the right outcomes within our organization by having a single pane of glass that we can look at when it comes to implementing enablement programs overall.SS: Now, you mentioned earlier that you focus on designing outcome-based learning. What are some of your best practices for helping reps put learning into action and how do you leverage Highspot to help? SA: First and foremost, it’s meeting reps where they are. I can’t tell you the number of times, and I think part of enablement is also learning from mistakes. No one’s perfect, I’ve tried, and there’s a trial and error piece of what I’ve done and my success as well. But I think one of the biggest things I’ve heard from reps is, “Oh man, I have to keep going to all these different tools or systems to access what I need to be successful. I’m not really sure how it applies to my book of business, or what I’m doing on a daily basis.”So, the first thing is meeting reps where they are and really making sure that you are designing enablement that again meets them in their workflow but also applies what they need to be doing on a daily basis. So if we do something on prospecting, we’re talking about, “Hey, we’re going to talk about how we prospect.”It’s not just a 30-minute webinar on how we prospect. Death by PowerPoint is never fun, but it’s actually, “Great. Let’s pull up an account list. Take your account list. We’re going to walk through those personas that we’re targeting and best practices for that.” So, make it action-oriented when we can.That is the benefit of the remote, virtual learning and training that we can do, is utilizing break rooms in Zoom to make it, again, action-oriented, then hit those outcomes that we’ve identified at the beginning. The other thing here is making sure that we clearly define what outcomes are at the beginning and having that conversation up front, not just with sellers, but also with our cross-functional stakeholders and partners as well.So whenever someone comes to me and says, we want to train on this, we want to enable the field. It is, “Great. What do we want our sellers to be able to do? And how do we make sure the enablement matches that to make sure that we are hitting those outcomes?” And lastly, it’s about repetition. We have to move away from the one-and-done enablement, but really push ourselves as enablement leaders and as enablement professionals, as well as our cross-functional stakeholders, to say, “Great, you want to train on this now. What do we do in two weeks from now? In a month from now, next quarter, to reinforce that learning?” So I think making sure that we’re constantly tying back to those outcomes. We’re utilizing things like Highspot to look at what assets are being leveraged. We’re taking analytics into account to really measure the success of our programs, not just in one moment, but also over a longer period of time as well. SS: That is fantastic. And you’ve been so thoughtful in the way that you’ve designed this that I imagine you want to make sure that your reps are taking full advantage of these and really adopting the training. What are your best practices for driving adoption of your learning programs amongst your reps? SA: I feel like a little bit of a broken record, but I will say making it relevant. I think that paired with peer-to-peer learning, as I mentioned before, it’s been really helpful for us. Really making sure that we have voices from the field. I think one of the key learnings I had early on in my enablement career was just taking enablement and working on it in a silo and delivering it without getting input from the field, from sellers, and from leadership. One of the ways that we’ve seen the most success from driving adoption is not just taking a top-down approach from having directors or our CRO talk about the importance of enablement, but actually having peers and other sellers talk about, “Hey, this was really impactful for me. I was able to close this deal because of X, Y, Z.”So I think one thing is again, making it relevant, utilizing voices from the field, not being afraid to get other people involved in that way, to make sure that we can really have the biggest impact possible. The other thing I think is really supporting managers. And I think that’s something that Highspot allows us to do differently, is making sure that we are training the trainer in some cases, but also just giving them the tools and insight they need and make that readily accessible to them so that they can then drive adoption within their own teams. So, I think it’s a combination of making it relevant, but also setting our managers, our frontline managers up for success to be able to support their teams on a more individual basis as well. SS: I love those best practices and it’s clearly paying off. You guys have had tremendous progress on this front. I think Clari is at an 81% active learner rate with an 11% increase in just the last couple of months, so absolutely amazing, and a testament to the work you and the team are doing there. On that particular topic, I’d love to understand how do you measure your progress and use metrics to really optimize your results in your programs? SA: Yeah. So first and foremost, it’s really centered around rep productivity and that starts with: can reps find what they need? And when they do find content or assets, are they leveraging them in ways that drive pipeline? The other way that we measure progress is by looking at true metrics, top-of-funnel metrics, so pipeline generation, looking at deal velocity, really connecting back to those, the key metrics that are fundamental and really crucial to healthy sales teams overall.And I think being able to connect enablement back to those true sales metrics is a key part of how we measure progress. It’s not just about are people learning? Are they actually attending learnings, but are we actually seeing pipeline being impacted? Are we driving more pipeline? Are we talking to the right people, really making sure that we are leveraging metrics and KPIs, as well as just looking at the data at every single turn to make sure that we are seeing true impact from the programs that we are delivering overall? SS: How does high adoption of your enablement programs help you drive the business outcomes that you aim to achieve? And do you have any wins you can share? SA: Yeah, the biggest win so far that was really exciting was following our sales kickoff. So we launched a new solution, sales motion at our kickoff this year and following RKO, we made sure to actually create post work within Highspot. So we created a learning path and leveraging some of the things I mentioned earlier, getting frontline managers involved, making it relevant, bringing in those voices from the field. We really saw high adoption and almost excitement to finish those courses, because it was very impactful for our reps and actually drove better conversations with the people they were trying to sell to. So that was a big one for us. And what we’ve been able to see is from our call intelligence platform, from the Highspot analytics within the learning path as well. And just, anecdotal feedback as well is that we are actually seeing deals move through the pipeline faster. We’re seeing more impactful discovery being made with our prospects and customers. And we’re actually seeing increased deal size as well. So one of the big parts of our solution sales motion was, how do we really provide and talk about value versus just focusing on product features and functions to sell the full platform of Clari, and we’re actually seeing our reps being able to have more of those conversations, which is very exciting.When you have high adoption, when you create that culture of learning, you actually see that impact the business directly. And it’s a really exciting time for us overall. And we’re excited to see what happens for the rest of the year. SS: Amazing. And very tangible, concrete business results there, so fantastic work. Last question for you, as you look to the future at Clari, how do you plan to leverage innovation like AI capabilities to continue to optimize your learning programs? SA: AI is the hot topic these days for sure and we’re knee-deep in it as well here at Clari. I think for me, what’s really exciting and what I start to think about is imagining a world where we could deliver hyper-personalized and effective training in the workflow of our sellers, leveraging AI, and being able to align training with an individual’s past performance. What if we could leverage AI, and I’m imagining a world pretty soon, I feel like, where we could take what we’ve learned, individuals past performances, look at what their strengths are, look at what their growth areas are, and then create a hyper-personalized enablement program for them. I think that’s the tough part and the answer that we’re all looking for now is how do we create enablement programs that are personalized at scale, right? We can’t do one-to-one coaching all the time, that’s where leveraging frontline managers is so important. I think AI is going to give us the opportunity to analyze the data based on where are reps struggling. Are there certain points within a deal where, whether it’s stage three or stage four, or at the close, where they need extra help? And when we see those triggers, can we then push them content they can then review and learn again in their workflow? I think those are the things where while AI is again, such a hot topic right now, it’s really exciting to think about ways in which we can really impact, not just people’s lives, but also their ability to be successful in role, and to have that overall. So we’re excited to see that. I know Highspot’s doing a lot on the AI front too, in terms of coaching. I think coaching is what everyone is asking for. That’s the number one request from our reps right now is, “Give me more coaching.”And I think that it’s really exciting to see, to think about how we can leverage AI to support our team, not just again, in terms of being successful from a seller side, but also impacting retention. Imagine what it would do if you could in real time, have someone coach you on what you could do better and implement that the next day, right? It’s that real-time impact that I think will not only have an impact on the growth of the business but also keeping sales teams happy, keeping people happy where they want to be at a company and stay there for a long time. You’re very excited to see where AI goes and definitely think about it on a daily basis.SS: I love that, Sofia. And I have to say, I think you might have a crystal ball, not that I can confirm or deny the Highspot roadmap, but you are definitely onto something there. So thank you again so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and your insights. SA: Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to building an even stronger partnership with you all. 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.

According to a Gartner study, about 40% of businesses have implemented a formal coaching culture for their reps. So how can a unified platform help drive a coaching culture within your organization?To watch the video of this episode, visit our YouTube channel here.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. Here to discuss this topic is Bernie Borges, the vice president of global content marketing, Blake Graves, director of sales enablement, and Chris O’Connell, the director of global sales operations from iQor.Thank you for joining us, Bernie, Blake, and Chris. I would love for each of you to tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Bernie, let’s start with you.Bernie Borges: Sure. Thank you, Shawnna, thanks for having us. I’m Bernie Borges, vice president of global content marketing at iQor and I’ve been in content marketing for the better part of the last 20-plus years in B2B. I had my own agency for a while, and joined iQor about three years ago, really focused on driving the brand awareness for iQor in the marketplace. It’s a very competitive marketplace and producing content that can really help to amplify the brand as well as provide content that the sales team can leverage in their day-to-day selling efforts. Everything from starting conversations through the whole buyer’s journey all the way down through closing. So that’s my role and a little bit about my background. Blake Graves: Yep. Thanks again for having us too. So yes, Blake Graves, director of sales enablement at iQor, been with iQor for almost eight years now. So I’ve got to see a lot of transformation at the company.Really cool stuff that we’re doing with sales and marketing. My area covers sales readiness, that training aspect, and what new things are we doing from a technology perspective. Just bringing that to the sales team and this is how we should pitch it and This is the information you need to empower you or better inform your selling practices.And of course, along with that comes the tech stack like Highspot or anything else that we’re using to enable sales from a prospect’s perspective. Highspot is an exciting new tool for us and we’re ready to start closing some deals quickly. SS: Wonderful. And Chris, last but not least, tell us a little bit about yourself. Chris O’Connell: I am Chris O’Connell. I’m the director of global sales operations. So I’m responsible for our CRM instance and working with our sales team to help them. And I’m really excited about the Highspot opportunity. This helps us get better information about how our content is being consumed, how it’s being deployed, which things are resonating and perhaps how they’re helping us win more business. SS: Wonderful. Well, thank you three for joining us. Now to start, tell us about some of the challenges that your teams are facing prior to Highspot. What was the impetus for deciding to invest in a unified enablement platform? Bernie, if I could start with you, that’d be great.  BB: Sure. So, the content marketing role at iQor is only about three years old at the time that we’re recording this. And so over the past three years, we’ve been able to produce a fair amount of content that we put out into the marketplace.And along the way, we’ve made a strong attempt to have the sales team embrace the content, use the content, and then of course, enable them to help them get into more deals, more conversations, and close more deals. What’s been missing though, is a couple of things that I think the three of us will speak to in this conversation.  One is an intelligent platform that allows us to organize the content intelligently and make it easily accessible to them, and then also be able to track how the content is being used, who’s using it, and how it’s being used. What’s the contribution to pipeline and what’s the contribution to deals won as well as deals lost, that’ll help us not only measure the impact of the content, but also feed us information that we can use to drive our strategy going forward.So we know what content to produce more of. As well as what content we should either stop or scale back producing based on the data and how it’s used.BG: I’m going to add to that if that’s okay. The biggest challenge for me was, and this is no offense to Microsoft at all, but we have been a very SharePoint-focused type of company for, organizing content and building, what you guys call Smart Pages. So we’re we’re attempting to do that kind of effort within something that’s a little bit more static environment. And that was very challenging because one, there’s a heavy lift on my team from the design to thoughtfully trying to lay out pages. It’s like building websites, basically is how I would compare that to. And over time, content’s going to get stale. We’re not, it might not be being refreshed enough. It’s not easy to find. That’s another big piece of that is, it’s not easy or intuitive. And that was a big challenge for us.And Highspot is changing that entire landscape for us, because it’s a little bit more intuitive and the intelligence built in. SS: And Chris, let’s hear from you on this front. CO: Yeah. So, I think for me I really like the notion of providing content to the salespeople – the right kind of content – at the right time where they’re not having to hunt around and find it. And, with the integration with the CRM, Like Salesforce, depending on which stage the deal is in we’re able to surface content that would be helpful for them to deploy, and know when it’s being used and, again, what kind of results we’re getting from that. But I like the way that your product allows us to pre-package a play or a type of content delivery that we’re going to share with a prospective leader, or client.And so we’re really excited for, as we roll this out, how we’re going to see these wins and be able to track them and tie them back to the actual opportunities they’re working on. SS: Thank you for giving us a little bit of that grounding context. Now, as leaders in your organization, we’d love to hear your perspective on the value of an enablement platform for your areas of expertise. Bernie, if we could start with you. What does the impact of a unified enablement platform have on your role as a marketing leader?BB: Shawnna, I really look at it holistically. I don’t look at it just from the lens of my focus in content marketing. I look at it holistically, and what I mean by that is now I view our tech stack to be comprised three pillars, right? A three-legged stool: you’ve got CRM. Of course, you have to have CRM. We’ve got marketing automation, and now we have a sales enablement platform or revenue enabling platform, depending on what vernacular you prefer. But I think that rounds out our tech stack. Because now we have the ability, as we’ve been discussing here, to organize the content in an intelligent way using intelligence built into the platform, as well as – we haven’t gotten to yet, and I’m sure Blake will get to this – the ability to empower salespeople to utilize that content in ways that I’ll let Blake comment on that because that’s a very exciting element. But the point I’m driving at is that we’ve rounded out our tech stack, right? CRM, marketing automation, and now a sales enablement platform. Now we’ve got everything we need to deploy and measure the impact of content. BG: Exactly. And it’s obviously my cue to piggyback off of that because it’s a really good point. I think that the Digital Sales Room is also going to be a big piece of this for the sales team. And I mean that because it gives the sales team an opportunity to tailor and personalize the experience for their end user, the prospect. That is something that we’ve been missing for a while, too. We personalize our messaging and emails and LinkedIn outreach is whatever that sequence looks like. But, when it comes to building an environment where I can take my prospect and say, these are the things I feel are relevant to you, whether it’s your industry, your role the challenges that you’re having, and it looks like your environment, this is your logo.And I think that’s a really sweet touch. But, the sales team also, the three of us continue to talk about this when we’re meeting internally. And I say this out of a lot of respect, the sales team everywhere in every industry, any company are very special people. They’re wired very differently than the rest of us and we like that, we embrace that, because that’s what makes them, so successful and in selling, and we have to cater to that. We have to curate our tech stack and how we roll these things out very carefully because once the salesperson says this doesn’t work for me, you’ve almost lost them, and it’s hard to get them to come back. And with Highspot, because of that intelligence that’s built-in, and because the three of us are thoughtfully curating the internal experience, this is going to be so much more of an easier lift for the sales team to adopt. And from a sales enablement perspective that’s a huge deal.SS:  Blake, how about you as an enablement leader? How do you envision leveraging Highspot’s unified enablement platform to help bring your enablement strategy to life at iQor? BG: I gave a preview of that answer a minute ago, because this going back to the Digital Sales Room, video is certainly a high-value piece of content and our sales team historically, that’s not really been something we leverage as far as like recording themselves to present something and sending it off to a prospect. But, we’re excited to say that’s something that we’re going to be introducing to the sales team, because we know that it’s going to add that extra layer of personalization, something special. And I think that’s been a gap in the strategy all along is just that hyper-personalization of content to your prospect.And just that digital sales from experience. Again, you have this nice curated environment thats, “I made this thoughtfully for you because I know what your challenges are.” And I know that these are the pieces that I need for you to read and inform yourself about iQor. So I think that’s a big piece.Another, part of that strategy is I will always go back to sales, readiness, and that training piece. This will make it a lot easier to build that library of having our SMEs internally, having their videos and what they’re recording on all the updates they’re doing to our tech stacks, to the processes, whatever would make the selling journey a lot easier. I think that’s going to be a really powerful piece too.SS: Thank you, Blake. And Chris, again, last but not least, as a sales operation leader, how will a unified enablement platform help you drive sales productivity? CO: I look at it from a couple of different ways. The first is whenever we hire a new sales rep, they don’t often have some of that tribal knowledge of what’s possible or where things are located.So organizing it in an easy-to-find place and making it easy to deploy helps us get our new reps up to speed faster. One of the other things that really struck me is I always like to learn about sales by how we’re being sold to, and one of my favorite stories about sourcing this product for us was a story with Bernie.Bernie had looked at this product before, they had shared a digital sales room with him, he had a renewed interest and went back in to look, and this tripwire sort of functionality that your product has alerted the sales rep to contact Bernie and say, “Hey, what’s up?” And so that’s one of the cool things I was looking for is, boy, I want to trip wire like that for our team.When somebody renews interest to get back in front of them to know when it’s that time, it’s having that secret weapon out there of how. This thing lets us know when it’s time to re-engage, right? Or somebody is doing research again. I think that’s really a fantastic opportunity for us.SS: Thank you for sharing each of your unique perspectives. I’d love to understand how you all partnered together to build a business case for the investment in an enablement solution. And do you have any best practices for gaining buy-in?  BB: Sure. So, there are a few things that came into play in the internal buy-in and decision process. One is the fact that we have been producing a lot of content over the last three years, as I said, but with little ability to really measure the impact on sales. We’ve also, and Blake can elaborate on this, but we’ve also made a bigger investment in sales enablement. And again, Blake can elaborate on that.And then from the CRM side and sales operations side, I think that investment has been in place for a while. So getting back to these three pillars that I’ve alluded to a few times. It was really just the right timing, and as Chris said we revisited this after looking at it maybe a year prior and it was the right timing, there’s investments that are being made in the sales organization in general, as well as marketing. So, it was just the right time, and we really drove it through the head of marketing, senior vice president of marketing really bought off on the concept. He works very closely with his counterpart, executive vice president of sales.They’re really, tied at the hip, so to speak. And senior vice president of marketing said, yes, let’s go do the evaluation, and let’s select someone to partner with. And we went through the evaluation process. And elected to partner with Highspot and the EVP of sales at that point, but just signed off on it because he just needed an executive summary and he was in, so it was an elaborate process.Your team did a great job, but it was that internal buy-in where things really came together from a timing standpoint that really got us there. BG: Yes. And I’ll add to that. Of course, the very beginning, it all starts with what our personal challenges are, which I listed out for Bernie and Chris, too. And because we are making, we’re expanding that investment in sales enablement some of the biggest feedback is data. We need more data, like what’s working? What’s not working? That’s a broad use, but specifically, as it relates to Highspot, what content is working? What seems to be grabbing people’s attention? What seems to be the most popular thing that the sales team is using? Stuff like that, and attributing that to an open opportunity in Salesforce, which is huge.So there was that need to be checked off. And the second thing, of course, is just how can we make this so much easier for the sales team to consume and use what we’re making available to them content-wise. And so these were no-brainers and that’s when the evaluation started and, of course, again as Bernie said, you guys nailed it in that demo period. It always helps when you can select a few people on the sales team, reliable ones who embrace new platforms, who are hungry to test something new. And get their buy-in as well by getting their hands dirty. And that was helpful for us too.SS: That is some fantastic advice. And I know one of the key reasons you decided to invest in Highspot was to deliver coaching with meeting intelligence capabilities. In your opinion, what is the value of coaching in today’s sales landscape? Blake, I’d love to hear from you.BG: I think we can all agree, and Bernie had shared a Gartner, crazy little mind map of what the buyer’s journey looks like today specifically in B2B. And B2B has always been a little bit more complex, in my opinion, than B2C. I’ve been in B2B for, at least twelve years now. It’s getting harder to understand when the right time is to strike when a prospect is researching you, or researching the topic that’s related to your industry and your intent signals. And that’s relevant to your question because when we think about coaching, we have a wonderful team that’s senior. They’ve been selling for many years, so there’s a lot of experience here. But that changing landscape, we have generations coming in now that have decisions in this buying process that see things a whole lot differently, especially when technology is at play and just listening to how they’re selling us, listening to what’s not being said, even I think that’s a key piece right there, is what are they not talking about all these calls? That might be that linchpin that turning point in that sales journey. And I think that’s going to be a really interesting piece of the puzzle that I’m excited about, trying to solve. SS: Thank you, Blake. Chris, what are maybe some of the key results or business metrics you’re aiming to achieve with a dedicated coaching program? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help deliver these results?  CO: Following up on what Blake said, is it’s very difficult for us post COVID now. If you look at the three of us, we’re all working from our home offices today. And so our sellers are now challenged because they don’t typically go in and present to a boardroom full of people anymore. And so, what we’re really looking to gain and some of the things we’re looking to measure is the engagement of the buyers and which ones play their different decision-making roles, but getting them engaged with the content that we’re sharing and seeing if they are showing up and are consuming the content. How long are they watching the videos? How long have they dug into the presentation slides? Are they engaged? Are there any hidden buyer influences that may have shown up in a conference room, but now they’re in the back scenes. Maybe they didn’t attend the Zoom call, but they did consume some of the content, right? So identifying who those other buying influences are I think it’s going to be something I’m really keen to look for and see how those results are going to start showing us more about the selling environment that we’re in today.SS: In your opinion, what is the value of having one unified solution to equip, train, and coach your teams rather than multiple separate siloed tools, Chris? CO: The most important part is just ease of use and single point of consumption. If we have to jump to a learning management system and we have to jump back to the CRM system by using your tool integrated with Salesforce, then they don’t have to jump from those three different places. And so I think there’s a big advantage to try to simplify their selling tool set to accomplish what they need to accomplish and save manual steps, right?They’re not finding a presentation, putting it into an email, and then sharing it, and then we don’t know if it gets delivered. We don’t know if it gets viewed. And so just bringing that information full circle where the salespeople can utilize and understand it better, right? SS: Couldn’t agree more. What advice do you have for other teams considering implementing a unified enablement platform like Highspot? Blake, I’d love to hear from you.BG: It’s a good question. There’s a lot of good advice, but I think if I could think about one thing that I know we did right, and I mentioned this earlier, actually, it’s important that your biggest customer internally, which is going to be for us, our sales team is going to have some buy-in here.Otherwise, this is not going to work exactly how you would imagine and mapped out. So for us, to understand how they consume content, and taking that user experience approach, user experience has a whole lot of, there’s a lot of schools of thought there and how they navigate a website, how they navigate or select things on a page.Things like that, and I think that was very helpful in our evaluation phase with Highspot. We selected, like I said, a few people to join us in the demo environment, takes a week, I think maybe even two weeks to interact with the content that you see there, and share it out. We gave them a very basic overview, and the rest of it really was left up to them to figure out, and it’s not how we rolled it out, of course, it’s just, that’s more of, let me see how you engage with this first, because I want to see how intuitive this is from your perspective because that will inform how we train you on it, and how we need to build out the different Spots.So, that is the biggest advice is to think about your end user. I know we say this all the time in marketing and every company, everybody’s going to say that, but you really need to do it. Don’t just say it, do it, take a few people, take not just the ones who are quick to adopt technology, but take The ones who are also a little slow to adopt as well, because there’s a lot of value there and what they’re going to say because you want everybody to adopt this. So that’s the biggest piece right there. SS: Now, as you look to the future, what are the key business initiatives you’re aiming to drive at I Corps this year? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help? I’d love to hear from each of you.BB: Sure. So, again, from my perspective since I’m focused on producing content, I’m really looking forward to enjoying the benefit of having content that can find our salespeople. So in the past, we were dependent on an environment where the content library was very static, as Blake said, so it was challenging for them to find the content.So now, in the Highspot environment, because of the built-in intelligence, the content’s going to be able to find them. That’s going to inform us how the content is being used. It’s also going to surface for them content that they have not previously used because it was difficult to find. They didn’t even, in some cases, didn’t know what they didn’t know.They didn’t know what to look for. But now with built-in intelligence, it’s going to be able to surface the content to them in a very structured, organized, practical way, a pragmatic way. So I’m really looking forward to getting more value from all the content that we’ve been investing in and will continue to invest in for both marketing value and sales value.BG: Agree. And I’m gonna go ahead and piggyback off of him again. I haven’t mentioned this yet, that obviously, the biggest piece for me would also be the data aspect. There’s a need for us to understand just a variety of different perspectives.One, what’s specifically working and what’s not working from our content strategy. And really who on the team is really spending a lot of time and these platforms because I want to know the ones who are not. And I want to be able to understand what’s going on. Is there a block? Is there something we don’t understand? Is it something that’s uncomfortable? That’s a very important piece. And that’s part of an ongoing strategy for me. And then I think, step one is just, as Bernie was saying, we had a very static environment where all this stuff lived.Now we’re bringing this into an intelligent, intuitive environment and what I look forward to seeing is how we can now thoughtfully build out content that’s meant for different stages of the funnel. And I think that’s going to be key with Highspot is helping us understand, okay we might need to spend a little bit more time expanding our middle-of-the-funnel type of content. This seems to be a sweet spot. So that'll be very interesting.CO: That’s something that we really thought about when we selected this product. And as I said earlier, with the selling environment we’re not able to get all of the decision makers together. And so measuring how engaged they are and what we’re able to accomplish by sharing content, sharing the right content at the right time, I think is going to be something that’s really going to be key as we take that data and what that data is telling us and servicing, the right things at the right time for the salesperson is one of the things that we’re really hoping to accomplish this year to increase sales win rates and to increase the sell-through or the success rate. And by doing that and even cross-selling, a lot of times we’ll be presenting to somebody specifically at an organization about a certain solution. And we offer a lot of other things as an organization. And so having some cross-selling opportunity with a Digital Sales Room, or making sure that we can surface some other content that they’re interested in, or knowing what to share and when to share it, I think will be a real game changer for our current sales reps.SS: Bernie, Blake, Chris, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and your insights. CO: Thank you BG: 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.

A Gallup study found that organizations with high employee engagement report a 21% higher profitability rate. So how can you unify the rep experience and drive engagement through enablement? 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. Here to discuss this topic is Donny Miller, the project manager for the remodel sales training at American Woodmark. Thank you for joining us, Donny. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Donny Miller: Yeah, you bet. Donny Miller, my background is mostly in sales. I have worked with mostly remodeled building materials. Originally from the West Coast, moved around a little bit, had different roles from selling through about every different channel in our part of the industry found my way to American Woodmark about 10 years ago, I’ve loved it ever since. That probably says a lot about our organization being here for 10 years and I’m excited to be on this podcast SS: We’re excited to have you here as well. As you mentioned, you’ve had a lot of different roles, but the majority of your career has definitely been in the manufacturing industry, and you’ve held roles in both sales and sales management. And I’d love to understand, given that experience, what are some of the unique challenges that reps in the manufacturing industry face? DM: Yeah, thinking about all my different positions, I think one thing that kind of rings true is complexity in manufacturing. There's a lot of complexity, especially in building materials and the products that we work with, and not only are the products complex, but the sales processes can be different. They can be different in the different channels and you have a wide range of different types of customers that you’re selling to. But, I think the big thing in manufacturing is you have a complex product that goes through a lot of different phases from when it comes in as an order to when it gets placed out. And so being in sales and working in that, you got to have a lot of different answers. One of the things you’re looking for is I know this isn’t like a job that’s is common these days, but you’re looking for an operator sometimes, like a telephone operator where it’s like, “Hey, what answer can I find given all the complexities?”, and finding that answer very quick can be a unique challenge that we face sometimes. SS: And how does having an enablement platform like Highspot help companies like yours to overcome some of those challenges? DM: Yeah, I think really connecting you to what you want, what you need, and when you need it is how an enablement company like Highspot can help you. For us, it’s going to a single source of truth. We have multiple platforms and multiple ways in which our users potentially go into those and lots of departments that feed the front end of the business in sales, right? We have finance, HR, marketing, customer service, et cetera. To me, enablement helps overcome those complexities that we face and allow us with all of those variations to potentially give the user a tailored and unique experience. SS: I love that. Now, you’ve shared that you actually see the value of Highspot at your organization extending beyond traditional sales-centric enablement to more broadly deliver business enablement. I love that, by the way. How does Highspot help you better enable the business as a whole? DM: Some of it’s a mindset, it connects us out of silos. Looking at the whole process from the front end of the business to give you more of a tangible example is you’ll have somebody like my current role in training on the sales side. So I’ll be working with marketing. We could be working on a similar type of thing during a product launch or something like that. And so to have something that allows us to both collaborate and work in different platforms, one may be working in Adobe, one may be working in Microsoft, et cetera. And to have those cloud services be able to connect and deliver in a content space that’s tailored to that individual user is huge. And I think another big part of that is when I think of the front end of the organization, I think of like how CRMs work and making it the business, is that the CRM platforms are not just sales related. Sales have a lot to do with it, but if you think about it, a lot of those services provide cloud services for marketing, and customer care services. And so there’s a lot of different elements.A lot of what your customer care could be saying and what your sales team could be saying could be similar, but they could also be different. And so there’s a lot of synergies you can find there. For me, it’s really looking at the content and the learning and how all of those potential uses that Highspot has with being a CMS and an LMS allows us to connect everything to all the cloud systems that these different departments potentially use. And that all sounds complex, but the end user getting it in a simple form is huge. SS: Absolutely, and delivering that consistency to your buyer and customer at the end of the day is absolutely essential. That said, what are maybe some of the unique ways that different teams from sales to, as you mentioned, customer care services, how do they use Highspot at your company? DM: That’s actually a great example: customer care and sales, Shawnna. I like that because for us, like our sales team and our customer care team, they’re both looking for the operator that I mentioned earlier, right? They’re both trying to call in and go, “Oh, I need this answer when I need it, how I need it.” And so for the sales team, it’s more mobile-based. Like our sales team is all over the country, they’re spread out. And so they’re not centrally located and they’re not always at their computer, so to speak. So a lot of what they’re looking for is an answer ‘mobile-y', and a lot of times they have a chance to prep for that answer or that thing that they’re looking for content-wise or learning-wise. Customer care is a little bit different in terms of they’re sitting generally in front of a laptop, right? They have that desktop experience, but also the pace in which they need it is a little bit different too, because they, like you and I are on this podcast live, could be talking to somebody live and going, “Hey, I need an answer right now.” Like, “I need an answer about that complex, specific part of the cabinet and I need it right now.” So the different needs are different, but we’re able to meet those needs through Highspot in really connecting those differences here, or really, the mediums in which they’re searching. And potentially the content that they’re looking for, right? A sales rep might be looking for a video on how to set up a display whereas someone in customer care might be looking for that specific cabinet part for an order that was placed a couple of years ago. So it can be different needs for different parts of the team. SS: I love that Highspot's able to address all of those needs across the organization. To shift gears just a little bit because I know that a big reason you brought on Highspot was to help deliver learning programs, particularly to a diverse set of learners across a multitude of regions. How do you tailor programs for these different audiences? DM: Learning battles that complexity just like any other part does. And I think, for us, we really needed more self-paced learning to maximize everyone’s experience. We’ll have mentor learning and we’ll have times where we spend in groups at meetings and you’re able to maximize that learning when you’ve gone through something like the LMS part of what enablement through Highspot offers.And I’ll give you a prime example, Shawnna, of me with Highspot: you go to something like the Spark Conference, and before you go there, you probably want to go through a few of the learning modules. You probably don’t want to come in not having gone through that, and so it allows you to – having gone through some of that self-paced learning that isn’t classroom-based, but then it is when you come to something like Spark – you’re able to gain so much more out of your experience and learn and it helps you do more with whatever it is you’re doing. It’s similar for us, different processes, whether we’re trying to sell more or give a better. Customer experience, that’s how to me, we’re able to then tailor it to what they need, customer care, the different sales channels. And having that self-paced learning and then tailoring it to each group because their sales processes can be different is really big and is how we’re going about it in using the Highspot platform. SS: I love to hear that. Now you talked a lot about kind of the complexity of the sales process and the product in your world and all of the audiences obviously that you need to help enable your teams on. And I know one of your top goals is to simplify the rep experience. What are some of the key ways that you’ve been able to achieve this with a unified enablement platform? DM: Yeah the first thing that comes to mind is I think it was in like 2020, we were doing an icebreaker scavenger hunt virtually. And we basically sent everybody out from the different channels and we said, “Hey, go and find these things.” And what we learned a lot about ourselves and searching. It took a lot of time and whatnot. And so that complexity is really what we learned, and we learned we need to find ways to simplify that. And to me, it’s true of just sales in general. It’s an equation of possibilities of the number of potential answers that you could come up against that someone could ask you. Same with the customer service side and really looking at, how do we minimize that search. How do we get – maybe, a better way of saying it – how do we maximize to the correct answer? How do we find that correct answer as quickly as possible? And so in ways that we’re using it is we’ve loaded our content in there. I think a lot of the search functionality that’s within Highspot allows us to get, really the goal is a speed to answer so that it simplifies their path to what they need. Like I said in the beginning of this operator concept, right? “Hello, operator. Can you tell me about this”, right? “I need the answer to that and I need it in the way that I need it.” And that’s really where an enablement platform like Highspot takes all these different mediums, right? Whether it’s a video or an Excel document or whatever it is you’re looking for, and then within the search function allows us to get that, tailor it in spots that are specific for the user, and that really allows for simplification of the user experience. SS: That’s phenomenal. And, it looks like your reps are already responding really positively to the work that you guys are doing to simplify the experience. I think you guys have seen a 14% increase in recurring usage just in the last couple of months. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption of Highspot across the business? DM: Thinking about having a bad system might help drive that adoption and then show them, Highspot. I think that helps with that 14% a little bit. In all seriousness, like the whole scavenger hunt example is, we went from multiple cloud services. If you’re like us, you have multiple storage solutions, emails, communication platforms websites, types of websites, CRMs, and types of CRMs that you’re potentially going to begin to adopt that stuff.And I remember at a sales meeting recently I asked the question, “How long does it take you to find–?” And I was interrupted actually by my counterpart who filled the spot that I left when I came into this role. And she said, “–before I stop looking?” And back to the same example here. But in all reality, we needed a system change, and more tangibly how we go about doing that is taking an approach of champion leadership. I might be the administrator, but I’m not the expert per se, in terms of articulating at a peer-to-peer level, what somebody needs and why they would need something like this enablement platform. And so I think one of the more tangible things that we’re doing around adoption is having that peer-to-peer connection. If you’re a regional sales manager in one channel to a regional sales manager in that same channel, you’re able to articulate and speak to, “Hey, here’s how this solved the problem for me”, “here’s how it simplified it for me”. And I think that’s really one way that we’re seeing adoption. We have just great people and great leaders in the organization that see that. SS: Oh, that’s fantastic. Beyond adoption, what are some of the key metrics you track to determine the impact of your programs, and how do you leverage Highspot to help? DM: Yeah, we’re looking into ways in which it could potentially help impact our sales or our business. Maybe that’s our customer experience really at the end of the day, how can it help us sell more? We’re looking at the speed of the sale. I really feel, can you reduce in that complexity in the sales process to less time and, time is money. And on top of that, it’s opportunity. And in sales, opportunity is a lot, right? Because that also leads back to money. So, in some ways, I feel like it has a compounding effect with that time. And so a way in which we’re learning or looking at this more tangibly beyond adoption, is looking at someone who’s new. We have, like I said in manufacturing, you may have a complex product where it takes a while to learn that product and become a seasoned sales professional. And so how can we take that ramp-up time and lessen it so that they have more opportunity from being new to being that seasoned professional? Really that’s how we’re looking at leveraging Highspot. SS: That’s fantastic. Last question for you, Donny: what advice would you have for other manufacturing companies that are considering investing in an enablement platform? DM: Yeah the first thing that comes to mind is plan, and you need to look at what you need. There is a lot. I’m sure if you’re listening to this, you’re like, “I probably have a lot of complexities in my business” and taking that, and all the different things that happen in manufacturing: making that product, and going through the whole cycle, all the departments that are involved – like I spoke to earlier – and all the content that you have, the ways that content is made and looking at how all of that affects the front end of your business. And to get all of that, it takes a lot of planning, and it really takes you time to get to that point where you go, okay, what is our single source of truth? What will help us whether it’s sell more, do more, less time, more time, or whatever it is you’re trying to work towards and to me, Highspot does a really good job. The service team does a really good job of helping you plan, but the more you do that in advance and look at your goals. And what you need to get out of an enablement program, I think is only going to help you have success with it. The other advice I would give is just around looking at your CRM cloud services that you connect to and looking at a product that does cut out complexities. Having an LMS and a content management system, what I’ve seen is, you need both, right? Because for what we work with, you need to learn it as a new employee, but then you also need to know, “what is that, when I need it?”. If my product is complex and I deal with something once a year, I need to be able to go back and find it, which is the content management side. The first part of learning it, and going through a path of learning and understanding it is part of it. And having those two things together with some of the other capabilities that Highspot allows, and working seamlessly with your front-end solution, like your CRM platform is to me, the advice I would give in terms of looking at it is: plan those things out and see if there’s success there potentially for your business. SS: Fantastic advice, Donnie. Thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate it. DM: You bet. Thanks, Shawnna. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Get ready to be enthralled as I, Grant McGaugh, team up with the remarkable Shawnna DelHierro — an IT prodigy with a 20-year journey in the tech world. Together, we explore the intersection of technology and leadership, shedding light on how innovation can be a force for good, particularly in healthcare and retail. Shawnna, an expert in IT strategy, imparts her knowledge on building impactful teams that excel in openness and the freedom to innovate. Experience her distinctive approach that redefines IT leadership, moving beyond conventional tech discussions to a domain where strategic vision is paramount. Additionally, we celebrate the crucial role women play in shaping technology and emphasize the importance of making this field accessible and exciting for the younger generation.In our captivating conversation, we tackle the significant impact of automation, not as a threat to the workforce but as a catalyst for human creativity and progress. We delve into the nuances of driving organizational change, where passion and a committed team are key to achieving real progress. Venturing into the essence of what it means for companies to embrace their true purpose, we explore how automation and AI can unlock creativity, particularly in a world reshaped by a global pandemic. You'll discover how businesses can use technological agility to adapt to today's uncertainties, from the Great Resignation to climate-induced disruptions, while strengthening their cybersecurity defenses. It's a journey through how technology not only drives us forward but also enhances our collective capabilities, ensuring a future where every talent is utilized for the collective benefit.Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you found valuable insights into the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. For more insights and updates, make sure to follow us at 5starbdm.com. See you next time on Follow The Brand!Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest marketing trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates from us, be sure to follow us at 5starbdm.com. See you next time on Follow The Brand!

What's your sign, Roomies? Join your hosts as they kick off the Toxic Zodiac Series. They set off the first episode with Gemini! You'll get a brief lesson in Astrology 101 and take a deep dive into the third sign of the zodiac. Shawnna and Kristel share insight into the positive and down right negative traits of the Twins. Kristel introduces you to (in)famous mobster, Henry Hill and Shawnna tells you about Lou Pearlman, the conman behind some of the biggest boy bands in the world. 

In this episode of The Round Room, your hosts are ringing in 2024 with a SURPRISE! Kristel and Shawnna have picked out secret topics to surprise each other with. They also chit chat about BookTok, scary movies, and things that'll give you the creeps. Welcome to 2024, Roomies! 

Ms. Hoffman is an accomplished leader and expert in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, with a distinguished career spanning industry and government. Prior to her current role, she served as the Chief Technology Leader of Legal Strategy and Operations at Dell Technologies and spent a decade at IBM in Digital Transformation and Strategy, including as Co-Leader of the Global Watson AI Legal Practice. Her expertise in AI and Blockchain has earned her invitations to speak at prestigious events such as the Blockchain for Impact held at the UN in 2018 and the UN Data Forum in 2020 and 2021. Her expertise in AI and Blockchain has earned her invitations to speak at prestigious events such as the Blockchain for Impact held at the UN in 2018 and the UN Data Forum in 2020 and 2021. Ms. Hoffman was also appointed as Chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) Distributed Ledger Technology and Market Infrastructure Subcommittee for the 2018 – 2021 term. The world woke up to the power of AI in late 2022 when OpenAI's ChatGPT sprang fully formed as if from Pandora's Box. Since that time the progenitors of Generative AI have proclaimed it an "existential threat" to the human race. Others proclaim it the savior of human kind. What is fact and what is fiction? This podcast will clear the air to answer the the following questions: * What is AI's proper role for humans? * What is Responsible AI? * Are there guardrails for the development and use of AI? * How do we shape a future where AI serves as a force for good? * Can AI protect human well-being, fairness, transparency, and accountability?

Are you ready to expand? The Leadership Mastermind is a 10 month all-inclusive strategic consulting & coaching immersion to expand your business and evolve your leadership! Learn why Shawnna decided to join the Mastermind & work with Emily, the power of the retreat experience for her, how she overcame challenges in a business growth year leveraging the support of the Mastermind, and her primary intention for joining. Tune in now! IF YOU ENJOY THE PODCAST… We would love for you to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts! This helps more people find the show and give it a listen. Thank you in advance :) WMNûp IN YOUR BUSINESS + LEADERSHIP: ⁠www.wmnup.co/membership⁠ - Join us inside our annual WMNûp Community Membership + save 15% off when you use the code PODCAST at checkout!  ⁠www.wmnup.co/mastermind⁠⁠ - Learn more about the 2024 Leadership Mastermind experience! ⁠www.wmnup.co/events⁠ - Check out our local IRL events in Charleston, SC! ⁠www.wmnup.co⁠ - Download the FREE Evolutionary Leadership Masterclass today to start your WMNûp journey.  CONNECT WITH EMILY: Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/emilycasselofficial⁠ | ⁠Instagram.com/wmnup⁠ Website: ⁠www.wmnup.co⁠ CONNECT WITH SHAWNNA: Website: ⁠https://ampersandcopyandcontent.com/⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/shawnnarstiver/ https://www.instagram.com/ampersandcopyandcontent/

Research from McKinsey found that only 22% of new businesses launched in the past ten years have successfully scaled. So, how can you successfully scale with enablement? 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 Gracey Cantalupo, chief marketing officer at MentorcliQ, Inc. Thanks for joining, Gracey! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Gracey Cantalupo: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. I love this topic and I love helping other marketing leaders understand how to manage their content, enable their sales team, and ultimately help us all get more revenue and help us scale. As you said, my name is Gracey Cantalupo. I’ve been in marketing for over 15 years. Some B2C, some B2B, so I’ve had both. I’ve been at startups and I’ve been at large companies as well. I’ve been in the beauty industry, entertainment, commercial real estate, and now SaaS, Software as a Service. All this experience gives me a very unique perspective. I love infusing all the fun from my B2C days at MTV and Viacom with the results-driven B2B experience of my SaaS roles. I really try to create a human-to-human approach to marketing, so that it’s effective and also fun because, at the end of the day, we are marketing to humans. In my role as CMO at MentorcliQ, we help make employee mentoring and ERG management easy for enterprise companies. We help employees at those companies develop their careers, hone their craft, and develop a community at work. We believe that every employee deserves a great mentor to help them thrive in their career and to help them find community and belonging in their workplace. I get to infuse all of that fun and helpfulness from my B2C days to help enterprises make a better workplace experience. SS: That’s fantastic. I love the mission of what you guys are trying to do there. Now, I want to focus a little bit on enablement. Thinking back to when you were first evaluating enablement platforms, what were some of the key reasons you selected Highspot, especially in comparison to your existing solution and maybe other platforms that you evaluated? GC: Absolutely. At MentorcliQ, we did not have a comprehensive marketing tech stack when I joined. I joined MentorcliQ six years ago, so I was able to see a lot and help the team build out a lot of things. When it became time for us to look for a sales enablement solution, it really came down to three things. Number one, is this going to be easy for our reps? Great salespeople are lazy and we want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for them or else they won’t use it. We also wanted to make sure it was easy for prospects and clients as well. We didn’t want to have to do a password or make them sign into LinkedIn. We wanted to make it really easy for them to see our content. Next, we wanted to make sure we could track what the sales team was using and what the prospects were looking at. Last, but certainly not least, we needed some dang version control. I mean, we had some reps that, I swear, must have broken into an old storage unit, scanned old ass PDFs of really bad content, and we needed to make that stop for sure. Making it easy, tracking what’s being used, and version control were really the three things we were looking for. SS: I love that. And I’ve definitely lived through those experiences. Now, when you were first rolling out Highspot, your sales team was also in the midst of nearly doubling in size. Can you tell us a little bit more about how implementing Highspot helped you navigate that change while you were also scaling? GC: I started MentorcliQ again, six years ago, they were a few years in. They had a great product marketing fit and they were looking to scale and over time, the sales team grew from founder selling to real enterprise B2B SaaS salespeople selling. They need structure. They can’t just figure it out. They’re used to resources, they’re used to playbooks, and they’re used to having a process and a sales methodology in place for them to execute flawlessly. We just didn’t have that. Consistency ended up being the key for us to help us get these reps onboarded as quickly as possible and Highspot was so great for that. We were able to start to build that blueprint of a playbook. In the first call, you do your discovery, and you send this Highspot pitch with this content. Cool. In the second call, you do your demo, you send this follow-up. Okay, the third call, after you do your proposal, you send this content. We really formulated it out for them and helped them be consistent. That was the key to being able to scale while we were launching this sales enablement program, and also while we were growing our team at the same time. SS: I love that. That’s fantastic. Not only were you guys scaling while you implemented Highspot, but you also had a really fast implementation. How did you ensure that you were able to both implement quickly and effectively? GC: This is what we call a compelling event, or in our case, multiple compelling events. Smart Links, which was a product by Sales Navigator, was being sunset and it was supposed to be sunset in January of that year. We wanted to make sure there wasn’t a big gap for our sales reps, and we had deals that might’ve started in Q4, but aren’t going to close until Q1 or Q2. We wanted to make sure there was a smooth transition there. So a big, compelling event there. The second big, compelling event is Q4. For most companies and B2B SaaS, Q4 is huge, and we did not want to distract our salespeople. Those two compelling events really motivated us to move quickly and make it as easy as possible for the sales folks. SS: Now you’ve already seen some great results since implementation. I think you guys are at about 86 percent recurring usage of the Highspot platform. What best practices can you share that helped you drive such high adoption from the onset? GC: There are really two keys for us. Number one, again, is making it easy for reps. Our reps are working on deals in different stages. They’re getting new deals coming in the door all the time. We just need to make it easy, plug and play. Like I said, great sales reps are kind of lazy so we needed to make sure that this was very easy for them. One of the things I really loved about Highspot is its integration with Salesforce and within Gmail. It just made it really easy for the salespeople to use it in their own flow of work. I think I’m actually stealing that from the sales pitch from Highspot, but that really resonated with me to get the salespeople to adopt it. It just needed to be where they already were. I didn’t want to send them to another place. It’s right there for them and Salesforce, all the activities in Salesforce, and also there’s that plugin for them in Gmail, they can grab a pitch and send it right away. So number one is just to make it easy for your reps. Number two, it’s a repeatable, very clear process. After the first meeting, send this pitch. After the second meeting, you get a demo, you add this content to the same pitch. That also makes it easy for your prospects and your clients. They’re just going back to one link and one pitch and that’s where the magic really happens. How do you make it easy? It’s a repeatable process and our prospects actually love our Highspot pitches and they comment on it all the time as well. SS: On that very note, another area where you guys have seen amazing adoption is leveraging Highspot to engage buyers, as you said, and you guys are at an 80 percent pitch adoption rate. How are your teams more effectively engaging buyers with Highspot? GC: They send it and they keep sending the prospects back to the Highspot pitch. I hear our reps on the phone, oh yeah, so I’m going to add it to the link I sent after our first call so that’ll be there for you when you need it. The proposal will be right there. Everything you need is right there. That really makes it easy for the prospect has be super helpful. The other thing, I think, that has been helpful for the sales team in particular, is they get notified anytime anyone engages with a pitch. Maybe that deal went cold. Maybe that deal ghosted us, or they said, oh, it’s budgeting season, I’ll come back to you when we get our budget numbers in Q4. The sales reps can see people engaging with the Highspot pitch and that’s a good flag for them to reach out early and see if they can be helpful. That has really helped the salespeople adopt it not only in the front end of the sales process but using it as a tool to do timely engagement back out to prospects that have gone cold if they’re engaging with Highspots pitches. SS: I love that approach. Now, your organization also recently launched a new product for a new buyer type, so getting your reps up to speed was essential to engaging those new buyers. Can you tell us how you were able to certify your reps to sell this new product using Highspot? GC: We acquired a company called Diversed. That’s our ERG management platform. We needed to quickly train our reps and make sure they understood what the product did, what the value proposition is, and what’s the combined value proposition of MentorcliQ and ERGs. Most employee resource groups have mentoring happening organically. Let’s bridge those two things together and offer mentoring to those ERGs as well as smooth management. For them to understand quickly the combined value proposition and how it worked was key. We did training on that and we had our reps get certified. They actually had to pass a test do an interview and communicate the value prop back to certain senior leaders in the company. This was all tracked in Highspot using all of the pitches we built for Diversed as well as all the content. To make it easier for reps, the whole Highspot instance of ours was built with spots, which we kind of think of them not as file folders, but as isles of content you can walk down. We have a special spot for Diverse, which is our new product. We make it really easy for the reps. They don’t need to hunt around in the product features and functions problem solutions or any of the customer stories. Anything related to that new product is in one singular spot, one content aisle they get to walk down. That also made it really easy for the reps to quickly go in, grab content, or create a pitch that’s specific to Diversed and send that out as well. They didn’t get access to that content, though, until they passed the certification, which was a cool part of it. We had it locked until they passed and then they got access. SS: I love that. Use that as an incentive to get them to get through that. That’s fantastic. Just shifting gears a little bit, what metrics or key Highspot to kind of really optimize a lot of these programs you’re running? GC: I’ve been in marketing my whole career. I started as a graphic designer. I worked for lots of different companies, and whether it was a real estate company, a beauty company, or reality TV, MTV, there was never enough content. Sales teams always want more content. They are a bottomless pit of need. They always think their prospect needs this thing and their need is special. If it works for them, then everyone should have the thing. This list is huge, right? There are never enough resources and there’s never enough time to produce all of the asks that sales think are really important. The thing that I love so much about Highspot is it lets us track what’s actually being used, what’s actually being engaged with by the prospects, and what is actually influencing revenue. That influenced revenue metric was a game changer for us after our first year of using Highspot. What we did is we looked at the influence revenue report, and then I narrowed it down to, okay, there are five key pieces of content that are influencing the most revenue. It’s our demo highlight video, it’s our one pager, we’ve got a highlight deck, there’s this one client testimonial montage, and then we’ve got this one very powerful mentoring impact report that talks about mentoring and the Fortune 500. It’s those five. So, don’t F those five up was what I came back with. It’s like, okay, those have to be perfect. We’re going to review them every quarter. We’re going to make sure they’re up to date. We’re going to make sure those are amazing because those are what’s driving the most impact. You don’t need to get everything perfect, but that helps us focus on the top five most impactful pieces, make sure they’re glitzy, make sure they’re shiny and make sure they’re getting used. Sure, there are going to be one-off requests or someone’s going to need a particular case study for one deal they’re trying to close. It won’t kill those requests, but it does help you narrow those requests to a very manageable five that our team can focus on. That’s been the game changer for us, is the focus on the top five and how that influences revenue. SS: Wonderful. Last question for you, Gracey. Just as a marketing leader, what has been the impact of Highspot on your top business priorities? Do you have any wins or key results you can share? GC: I’m a designer at heart. That’s how I started as a graphic designer. I love how flexible the pitches are. I have a graphic designer on my team, so I’m very lucky in that respect. One of the things that we’ve been able to do is not just have a PDF attached to an email that goes to a prospect, but you can design this gorgeous pitch that has your branding on it, it has your messaging and that’s not just in the header. In each section, we can kind of wrap our messaging into the background of the pitch so that there’s great context around all the great content, kind of like a friendly contextual hug around all of that great content that we produce. That’s been extremely impactful from a branding perspective and set us apart in the market. Sometimes people just open that thing and they might see that messaging over and over again. Maybe they don’t go to page five and your slide deck where you like always hit on those messaging points. For me, it’s been wrapping all of that messaging and that value ad into the actual pitch itself. I truly believe it helps us become the vendor of choice faster because we’ve got that branding opportunity. So for me, it’s having that brand control, being able to get across that messaging, as well as the thing we talked about earlier, which is being able to track not content that I’m in love with, or that the salespeople are in love with, but the content that actually influences the revenue. Those two things have been the most impactful for us. SS: I love hearing that. Gracey, thank you so much for joining us today. GC: Absolutely. 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.

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Jay Shephard at Bentley Systems join us. Jay, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Jay Shephard: Thanks for the invite. I’m thrilled to meet you and spend some time with you. Where do you start? I have been doing this for a while. I started my career 25 years ago selling, and when you start your career in selling you start to pick up some things that seem to go well. All of a sudden I started being asked to do some coaching with new hires that were coming in by my boss. What I found out, Shawnna, is I loved it. It’s a lot of fun. I thought, is there a career around this? I love selling, but I also love the coaching element. That’s how I kind of, we’ll call it backdoored into this thing called enablement. Specific to enablement, it is an evolving picture, which I’m sure we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit more about. I’ve had an opportunity to work primarily in the enterprise software space in both sales effectiveness tools as well as software platforms. I started with Bentley in 2023 and really took on a very cool challenge and that was to redesign, revamp, and repurpose enablement to be more of a strategic aligned value add to our CRO. That’s where I am today. SS: We’re excited to have you here, Jay. Now, a key focus for you at Bentley Systems is really, as you’ve stated in your intro, reframing the way that your organization thinks about enablement. From your perspective, what are some of enablement’s core responsibilities and what is the value that it brings to the business? JS: I think enablement, the industry, the space, whether it’s in the United States, Europe, or Asia, doesn’t matter, it is in flux. In other words, if you ask 15 people what the definition of enablement is, you can get 25 answers. When it came to coming to Bentley, what we figured out early on was the fact that there is this talented group of people that make up the enablement team, but they were misunderstood. They were almost pushed into a corner and almost like enablement became the department of broken things, as I always call it. They were an afterthought. It was the last thought, like oh yeah, we better get enablement involved. Well, that’s really not the purpose of enablement, but it was created to be that way based on just general culture and a lack of definition of the value of what enablement brings. SS: Jay, I know that you created a sales enablement charter, which really kind of focuses on outlining the mission, the goals, the strategy, and the responsibilities of your enablement function. Tell our audience more about this. What are your best practices for creating an effective enablement charter? JS: I’ll start off by saying the reason I went to Bentley. It had everything to do with the CRO. He wanted to lead a transformation project, initiative if you would, company-wide to drive the strategic value of Bentley Solutions to their end customer. The CRO realized that there were some significant gaps in there, which of course was enablement. I took this position first and foremost because it was aligned with the CRO. I think that’s really important for your listeners to know. The CRO is critical to the direction, as well as the strategic value of what enablement brings. Knowing that, connecting with our CRO as I did through that interview process, I knew this was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of. Knowing that we were going to start from scratch, we went out and essentially asked individuals who were key to the business all throughout the globe, 1, what is your definition of enablement? You would not believe how many different definitions I had. 2, what are the current challenges here? Why are we not winning business? Why are we winning business? For that matter, what are the opportunities? We then used that information to build a charter that was strategically aligned to not only Bentley’s business priorities but also the CRO's MBOs. We built it from that perspective and then worked backward. Here are the metrics that we knew that we needed to hit to drive the priorities and the MBOs of the business. How do you design enablement to make that happen? We literally created functions as well as areas of responsibility to help drive those initiatives, those metrics, if you would, and of course, that strategic alignment, which was so critical to the CRO and myself. SS: Absolutely. I love those. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on how an enablement charter helps to drive alignment with the broader organizational strategy and the objectives of your company. JS: Since I have been here I probably have had no less than 50 conversations with people asking me, what does enablement do within Bentley? These are Bentley employees. First and foremost, that charter that you’re talking about, the reason it is so important is to ensure everybody’s on the same page in regards to expectations and what the possibilities could be in working with enablement or us working with that particular function of the business. That to me sets in motion a transparent relationship of our capabilities and what it is that we can deliver. Anything you do when it comes to a charter has to be very clear in communicating what it is that you do, what you’re capable of doing, what your capacity is that you can be doing, and here’s how you are measured. SS: It’s amazing to achieve that level of alignment. Jay, how are you driving strategic buy-in of this charter with your key stakeholders and in particular, perhaps some of your executive leaders? JS: Well, first of all, executive leaders are measured just as well as enablement is measured. If we can align our agenda to their agenda, then we are in partnership. One of the first things that I did was I reached out to all of our global leaders and understood a little bit more about what their metrics were, what they were measured by, and really what the gaps were. Once we identified those gaps, we discovered ways that enablement could close those gaps. Let me tell you something, when you can help someone else achieve their objectives, you don’t have a problem getting a phone call returned. That’s where they knew that I was working towards helping them with their agenda. I can tell you this team immediately got the credibility and the opportunity to drive value far more than they’ve been able to up until that point. SS: The buy-in that you’ve been able to secure at Bentley is fantastic. Now, since Bentley is in a rapidly evolving business landscape, how do you ensure that your sales enablement strategy remains adaptive to emerging trends and industry changes? JS: Well, that’s such a great question. Asking it in a different way, it’s almost like the old belief that when you train someone, they’re automatically trained. You never need to touch it again. We know you and I both know, Shawnna, that’s not true. To ensure that your enablement strategy and alignment are real, you have to have a continuous conversation. You have to be able to ensure that it’s not a one-and-done type of relationship. For me, anyway, I have ongoing, anywhere from between two and four-week conversations with all of our respective leaders across the globe. I also have a similar relationship and frequency of meetings with the CRO. Here’s what we do that I think is uniquely different. I’ve taken my team and we have geographically dispersed ourselves from a coverage point of view. I have, for example, a European lead. I have a US lead. We’re going to be bringing on an Asia pack lead and so on and so on. Because of that coverage, we now are closer to our customers. We are consistently asking not only in our coaching work that we do with them or the training work that we’re doing with them, we’re constantly getting feedback in regards to what’s missing, what we need to do differently, and so on and so on. We’re not necessarily looking for negativity, what we are looking for are opportunities to improve. SS: Along with the adaptability of enablement, it’s also important to ensure reps are adaptable to change as well. I know a key way to do this is through coaching, which is an area that you have a lot of expertise in Jay. What role does coaching play in your enablement strategy? JS: Coaching is critical. In fact, I would even say I put more of an emphasis on coaching and implementation than I do the training itself. Think about this. It doesn’t matter what generation you are in. If you’re millennial, if you’re Gen X, Gen Z, I don’t care. I mean, what’s the newest one now, Shawnna? I think it’s Generation Alpha, but I don’t know if they’re even in the workforce yet. My point is they all learn differently. Some are attracted to badging, some people are attracted to microlearning, and some people want a dissertation with all the details. Then you got the audio and you got the visual and the kinesthetic elements that go into learning and transferring knowledge. That’s all well and good, and yes, you need to touch on some of those elements, but coaching is where it is applicable. You take that learning and you apply it. It’s so different from reading a book. I don’t know about you, but I love to read. I’m always reading, but I always have that challenge that everybody else has too, like you just read a chapter, what did I just read? Right? You have to come back and reinforce it, revisit it, and that’s what coaching does. I would say that probably makes up 70% of our actual work is applying the learning that they picked up, either through a white paper, through micro-learning, through some type of course, or maybe even an assignment that they needed to reach out to, or we’ll even use learning where we’re using both virtual and live training as well. Trying to tap into not only how we learn, but most importantly, how we retain and sustain. SS: Absolutely. To that point, to drill in, one of those areas where you coach is your sales methodology. You mentioned that having an integrated go-to-market sales methodology is a key focus for you next year. How does a methodology help drive alignment and consistency, and how are you bringing this to life at Bentley? JS: A couple of things. We’re actually going through that process right now. The first thing we did not want to do, despite levels of background experience and experience, was pick something out of a box or go into a padded room and say, this worked for me here, so therefore it’s going to work here. There’s a lot of great methodologies out there. In fact, just pick one. If you focus on whatever you pick and reinforce it properly, I’m going to tell you something, you’ll have success. It may be measured that success, lower or higher doesn’t matter, but the key point here is to pick one and then deliver on it and coach to it. You’ll have success. Now that all being said, we are going through the process right now of selecting a methodology, but we’re not doing it in a box. We involve people globally at all different levels of the sales process and role, and they have now made up a series of advisory teams. We created some decision criteria, collectively, and we are now going through a series of discussions with various methodology providers. Bottom line, though, Shawnna, it’s not a decision that Jay’s making. It’s not a decision even the CRO’s making. It’s a decision that is based on a group collaborative effort where we come to a consensus. That, to me, I think is critically important. Everybody that you and I have ever worked with in the world of sales has been through training and has also experienced that training of the month club. It works. We’re going to try something different. Now, we can’t afford to do that. Why not get the collaborative buy-in from the beginning, that’s exactly what we did through this process. SS: I love that you’ve built a committee around that. Last question for you, Jay. How do you envision your enablement strategy continuing to evolve in the next year and beyond? JS: That’s a fascinating question because I am not one that has patience and I would imagine, Shawnna, you in sales, and anybody else in sales, you totally get what I just said. We want to deliver now. Probably the greatest challenge that I have in my career is to actually take a deep breath and understand you’re not going to create everything and change everything within a period of time, three months, six months, even a year. Our strategy is built all the way out through 2027. Now, let’s be honest, are things going to change? Absolutely, they’re going to change, but at least we have a direction and a target in mind of where we want to be. Then you work backward to make that happen. That’s exactly how we will continue to evolve. You’ll do that as well through these advisory teams, through that give and take and the feedback that we get from our various regions all over the globe. The bottom line is, if you listen, everybody’s on the same page. We all define enablement the same way in what we’re trying to do. Buy-in, as well as moving towards that target, just isn’t the issue that it used to be. SS: Wonderful. Jay, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you sharing your insights. JS: You bet. Nice to see you again. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

In our recent research study, 100% of sales leaders agreed that you need both an effective tool and strategy to succeed in enablement. So, how can you maximize the impact of enablement at your organization with an effective platform and 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 Dustin Day, senior manager of global sales enablement at Coursera. Thanks for joining, Dustin! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Dustin Day: Thank you, Shawnna. My name is Dustin and I am on the Coursera Global Sales Enablement team. I’ve been with Coursera for a little bit over a year now focusing on everything from manager enablement, product enablement, go-to-market motions, and supporting the Highspot initiative and how we position it, and how we grow it with the team. My background, I grew up in a company called CEB, which is now called Gartner, focusing on L&D research, which is really where I started to get my sales support background. I went into education publishing, now branded EdTech today, and focused on the finance and strategy aspect of sales. Then I went to an organization named Challenger, which is where I worked with global companies supporting their sales leadership, and sales enablement team around the challenge of sales methodology. That’s where I got interested in more of the perspective of sales enablement and becoming more of the practitioner as opposed to the thought leadership kind of execution side of sales methodology. I am happy to be here, Shawnna, and looking forward to our conversation. SS: I’m excited to have you here as well, Dustin, and it sounds like you have a phenomenal background to answer our first question, which I’d love to start with. What does good enablement look like in your opinion? In other words, what are some of the key components of an effective enablement strategy? DD: I think this is the big question in the industry today and I think it’s one that individuals like myself, do not struggle with, but are constantly trying to reimagine. Historically, if you looked at sales enablement, it grew out of a pure sales L&D motion, pure training, getting in front of the field, and training them on the skills that are necessary for them to succeed. That’s still a huge component of sales enablement, but being at the center of how you support the team and the growing nature of sales, we have started to see sales enablement grow into looking at the sales cycle and trying to find efficiencies within our sales cycle, the buying process and trying to identify the buying process and build those play cards to support the field and how they engage with and the customer journey. As sales enablement evolves, I think there still needs to be that mix of formal sales training or skill-building exercises if you want a position like that, but also how do we get the field to be equipped for the future? This virtual environment has changed the nature of sales, changed the nature of the buyer, and organizations like ours and our sales force are constantly learning how to navigate that as the buyer has gotten smarter and started to evolve faster than we’ve been able to evolve from a commercial engine perspective. SS: I love that. We talked a little bit about when you joined Coursera, but I know it was right at the start of the team’s partnership with Highspot. Tell us a little bit about the enablement journey that Coursera has been on since you implemented Highspot, and how has your enablement strategy evolved from then until now? DD: In the original use case for Highspot, we were hosting all of our materials on a central intranet site, and that naturally created a ton of pain points in terms of finding content, engaging with content, and proactively providing feedback for us to keep things fresh. There were a lot of inefficiencies built in just the pure commercial support engine. As we looked at Highspot, the original use case was let’s get our content onto Highspot, get it organized in a way that at least helps the team build and have those resources and the collateral available to them today. That was stage one. I think stage two has essentially defined our sales enablement strategy more broadly, which is that we created additional pain points by just uploading resources. We started to say, how do we organize, create that feedback loop and essentially help our marketing team skip a lot of steps in their process as it relates to building content and getting content onto the platform? As we developed that strategy and started to do the change management with marketing and the sales team, getting more content collateral in front of them, they created an additional pain point, which was governance. Our strategy and our problems have grown in a good way. We’ve created pain points that we needed to solve, but that is good because we are not doing what we originally did today. What we did in Q2, our team essentially built a content governance strategy that we now maintain on a quarterly basis where we archive pieces of content based on the criteria that are really important to us as it relates to content freshness. We start to track those KPIs and report on those KPIs as part of showing the value in sales enablement. We’ve started to build this governance structure to make sure that that content support engine is running on all cylinders. Our marketing team understands utilization and we’re continuing to grow that as we start to build out our Q4 and our next year strategy, which is sales play specifics. Organizing everything in one central spot so nobody has to go find things and search for things in random areas, but also as we build those sales plays focusing on getting stronger at, it’s probably the best way to say it, our customer personas. Also, the outreach Salesforce reports that we can put into one place custom-built for the AE. The What to Know section has everything that you need to know about content. We are a content company. Anytime we work with a customer, there’s a lot of moving pieces in our product. Then also what to show, so clearly breaking down that sales process aspect and making sure that the team can see before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting, or if not leadership, here are the things I should be bringing to our customer. That’s how our strategy has evolved. Our KPIs have moved with it, and our pain points have evolved in a good way as well and we’ve kind of continued to evolve the strategy. SS: I love that. It does sound like you guys are moving up that maturity curve. Fantastic work there. I definitely want to come back and revisit the work that you guys are doing on Plays in just a little bit, but to help context that too for the audience, what were some of the key business challenges that Highspot helped solve at Coursera? DD: First it’s just content. We have a very large marketing team at Coursera and if you’re familiar with the Coursera go-to-market, or who we are, we have a very large consumer B2C revenue stream. It’s where most of our revenue comes from. We have a lot of B2C marketers that create a lot of B2C kind of content and collateral. As we started to clean things up, some of the original pain points were how do we get ourselves organized, get some of that more B2B content front and center, remove the noise from a content perspective from the peripherals, and get the team focused. That was the original pain point. It was a pure play of we are unorganized from a content organization perspective. We need to put some rigor behind it as we mature as a business. We did that. I think we’re a year and a half in at this point. As we continue to build that muscle, we feel like we’re growing in our maturity and the problems and the KPIs have started to grow with that. SS: How has Highspot helped you solve some of those challenges? DD: Well, first of all, we love to organize our content. We haven’t been able to organize it effectively to date, and so we are able to do two things. One was tagging our content to make it easier for the rep to navigate Highspot quickly. While it is a great platform for us in sales enablement and our colleagues in marketing, we really don’t want our field spending 20 to 30 minutes anytime they’re in the system to find what they need. The tagging and getting the content front and center have been super helpful for us to measure the utilization of our content as well. We have so much like what are people using, why they use it, and how we can be smarter in creating or building off of content that has been wildly successful as opposed to just putting it there and letting it sit underutilized. So that’s one use case. The other use case, which we’ll talk about a little bit is from a sales play organization. We’re also about to pilot our first newsletter launch here this week. From an enterprise perspective, we’re going to be consolidating all of the communication channels using the Highspot functionality to kind of pitch it out to the team. We’re going to start to look at utilization, start to look at click-through rates, and start to use the tool almost like a selling tool internally to engage with the field and start to measure how we can better support the field. SS: I love that. Actually, recently your team also expanded to use Highspot to include Training and Coaching capabilities. What was the impetus for making the change to invest in a unified enablement platform? DD: Originally we were using Lessonly. That originally started with onboarding as part of our onboarding learning paths. We were having new hires go into Lessonly and then be pushed to content and support materials on Highspot. It just felt kind of like a weird user experience. As we started to assess that, the Highspot account management team started to talk to us about the learning platform component, we made a decision to have that consolidated platform where at the end of the day, simply said, it is one place versus many places. I think particularly in sales enablement, there are a ton of new platforms and products and support tools out there. I’ve even seen Slack starting to get into certain things. Microsoft Teams has a content organization aspect to it. For us, it really simplified the one-stop shop for our team to go to as it relates to their learning paths, as it relates to new go-to-market builds, as when we went to upskill, reskill the team we’ve been able to use some of the recording functionality, have managers listen and sign off, build best practice pages around what a good pitch looks like and start to flex that muscle a little bit better than we had in the past. It also aligns with our content. We can easily say, this is content number one. There’s a great best practice pitch from a recent training and we can link to that as well. It’s really helped solve a lot of those really minor but tedious steps that our field would have to take prior to getting anything done or just to navigate any type of system we have. SS: I love that you guys are taking that unified approach, though, because it makes it a lot more seamless for your reps, and obviously we want to be where your reps are to make them more productive. Another way that you’re thinking about it from a unified platform perspective and you’ve touched on this a little bit, so I’d love to drill in, is that big initiative around the sales plays aligned to training. Can you tell us about this initiative and why it’s a focus for your team? DD: Historically we have built Highspot pages essentially in a silo, which is here’s the one-stop shop for just all pieces of collateral as it relates to an academy for example. We got feedback that, oh, how do I navigate it? Where do I go? What we did is we’ve taken the structure that Highspot provides, which is what to know, say, and show, and we’ve taken that and really run with it. We organize every one of our sales plays now around a very specific product suite. We start with what to know, which is typically something around the customer persona, or we may separate it out, depending on who the customer persona is. The customer persona is a deeper dive from a Coursera perspective into the content, and the demo environments that we have related to that. Then we go into what to say, which is much more of that, that go-to-market narrative, objections, key talking points, use cases, for example, that we can speak to. Then what to say, and that’s actually helped our team really at the end of the day, organize their thoughts and know how to quickly navigate. Another output of that is now we organize our field training around that exact same structure. It’s given us a new structure to engage with the field from a live virtual training perspective when we’re talking about more of our go-to-market motions as opposed to skill-based motions. From a product go-to-market motion, we bring up the sales play and we work through the sales play as the structure of our field training. That’s also been helpful. Sales play will continue to evolve and we’ll continue to build on it, but it’s laser-focused on, it’s got us, from a go-to-market perspective, much more deliberate than I think we had been doing in the past. I think that’s been an incredible output, and one that we’re starting to see the field feedback be, this is great, and the questions are more focused on very specific product nuances and or talk tracks as opposed to where is this hosted. How do we navigate this? It’s much less technical highspot questions and more of what we hope they’re asking questions about. SS: I love that. You guys are already seeing some amazing results. I mean, you guys have driven a 77 percent increase in play adoption. How did you effectively launch this initiative to your sales teams? And maybe what are some of the results that you’ve seen so far? DD: We piloted it with a launch probably back in July or August 2023. As part of that, it was a new motion and it required change management. We used to just, for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 launches, we used to just go through Slack and or email channels to get the communication out, link to the Highspot main page for our vertical, and then say, here are the links that you need to be effective. What we did is we launched training that was designed, yes, to equip the field but also an introduction to the Highspot page itself. Now it’s just pure behavior change motions. Now we bring it up constantly for any new sales play launch. We break it down in our communications. Here’s your know, say, show. In any training, we’ve been following up with training more than we have in the past to help kind of reinforce that know, say, show. It’s just kind of hammering the nail over and over and over again in a productive way for the field. From our perspective, we’re also driving that behavior change by making it front and center as this is the way we’re going to operate. A Little carrot and stick approach, but from our perspective, it was a behavior change play and part of that behavior change is getting people bought in that this is how we’re going to operate first and foremost, and then hopefully they see the value and they see the benefits that they get out of it. SS: Now you guys have also just seen some incredible traction with Highspot overall. I think you guys have 85 percent recurring usage. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption and how has having a unified platform helped? DD: This may pain some sales enablement practitioners but early on, we used Google Suite for Gmail and Docs and Sheets, and every time an announcement would go out, that colleague would share a Google Doc. This is the link to the Google Doc, and in the title, it would say, make a copy. You have this plethora of random copies out there to the team. One of the things that we do constantly day in and day out to anybody that we ever see send communications is if they don’t share the Highspot link to the resource, we always literally will follow up and say, hey, recommend that you share the Highspot link instead. Here’s the reason why. We can track if people are using it, seeing it, clicking on it, et cetera. We just have to get the links for Highspot out there as the single source of truth. The other bit is from a recurring use perspective, we have started to leverage Highspot for more of our knowledge management side of the aisle. This is definitely a work in progress and we’re continuing to think about and trying to understand the use cases, but we’re building playbooks for our roles. As part of building playbooks for our roles, we’re going to host that playbook on Highspot in a knowledge management center. Again, with links out into the different resources that are on Highspot to help these roles execute. It’s identified areas that we don’t have very tangible support in now. It helps us prioritize what we need to build and when we build those, we build them in Highspot. Reoccurring uses actually are more of a muscle that we need to have from a sales enablement perspective as opposed to the field. If everything is in there organized and it’s the single source of truth, as you mentioned, the unified platform, if that’s the case, they have really no choice but to go in to get the information, to get the details, to get the content that they need. SS: I love that philosophy and I love that you guys are driving that to change the behavior of your field teams. Now, you have a lot of big plans for evolving Highspot going forward. Can you tell us more about your vision for continuing to evolve your enablement and how you plan to leverage Highspot to help? DD: There are four key initiatives that we’re continuing to think about for some and explore for others in 2024. The first one at the forefront is the constant governance muscle. We do quarterly governance, like sprints we’re calling them, where we identify the content that hasn’t met the criteria for freshness. We get that content in front of our product marketing and customer marketing teams for them to vet if it needs to be there. Then an archiving sprint in the latter half of the quarter and measure in the following quarter. Constantly building in that muscle. That’s a priority at the end of the day that we cannot forget about, but we can’t deprioritize as we do everything else. The other three things I mentioned briefly, which is getting smarter about our sales plays. How do we continue to build those and make them more effective on a yearly basis? As we’re looking at our yearly strategy, what are those sales plays, those go-to-market priorities that we have to hit on, and how can we build out a sales place for that? It’s giving us more face time to be candid with senior sales leaders, and sales executives to include us in those conversations because they know to execute on that, they’re going to need our team’s support around the sales plays. Candidly there’s like a quid pro quo in that approach and that’s good. The third piece is the knowledge management aspect of it. Building that knowledge management base, that’s going to be a big priority. We’re still learning and adapting to that. The fourth piece, which we haven’t explored yet, but I know Highspot has a lot of great research around, is salerooms. That single source of truth, where you can see how the customer interacts with the content, what they’re clicking on, it’s more customer-facing. There’s a huge opportunity for us to have that more customer-facing digital rooms approach. How can we build that into our motions today? I think we have to get the sales play right, and we have to get the governance right, so people can trust the content, they can trust the source of the content. The digital rooms are kind of the next step in our maturity to ensure that we can get analytics and real-time feedback from customer engagement. SS: Absolutely. I have to say I love the evolution of digital sales rooms and the visibility it gives you into what is really resonating with your buyer at the end of the day. I really appreciate all of the time, Dustin. Thank you so much for joining us today. DD: 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.

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Rodney Umrah from Forcepoint join us. Rodney, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Rodney Umrah: Thank you so much, Shawnna. I am delighted to be here. My name is Rodney Umrah, and I’m the global head of enablement at our go-to-market organization here at Forcepoint. SS: I’m excited to have you here. Now, I know that you've shared that enablement found you rather than you finding it. Tell us a little bit about that career journey. Why and how did you transition into the enablement field? RU: I’ll take you back a little before I get to the transition because that will help to inform why that experience was so interesting to me. I was born on the lovely island of Jamaica, Shawnna. I’m not sure if you have been there before, but that’s where I was born. I went to the University of the West Indies and I studied computer science. I was fortunate to be hired right out of school by IBM. There's a gentleman who did that, and I don’t know how I can pay it forward to him, his name is Carl Foster. He’s still my mentor and friend today. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. While being at IBM, there were 366,000 people in the organization. That was the largest IT company at the time, but it was like a university really, and I learned a lot. That’s where my true professionalism was honed. I migrated to Canada, that’s where I live now, and I was in technical roles between IBM Jamaica and IBM Canada, but I always wanted to be in sales. I transitioned from technical roles at IBM to sales, specifically software sales. Now, a little bit of context, Shawnna, is that my mother is actually a teacher and my brother is a professor. I used to do that part-time, I was a part-time professor myself, so, as a result of that experience, enjoying the IBM experience, and doing well, I said I wanted to transition to Microsoft. I spent about eight and a half years at IBM, then over to Microsoft. I was there for five and a half years and then moved over to NetSuite. This is where, now, your question comes in, Shawnna, which is a transition. I was doing well in sales at NetSuite, going to club every year and especially leveraging my manager at the time. He was very instrumental in my success. My GVP or Global Vice President of Sales, invited me into his office one day, and just asked me the question: are you interested in leading enablement? Now, the truth is I didn’t know what that term meant, enablement. I was like, enable what? I didn’t know because I was used to the term training. He asked me to speak to the leader of that organization because the GVP wanted me to lead enablement for his organization. As a result of that, the rest is history as they say, because here I am 10 years later and really, really enjoying it. I've been all over the globe, Shawnna. I was in Australia, the Philippines, Europe, across the US, Canada, you name it. I just have a great passion for the enablement vocation. SS: I love that career journey, and I’d love to understand more about how you think that your non-linear career path and your background in roles, spanning sales and academia, have helped you in your role as an enablement leader. RU: It certainly did, especially because I came from a sales background. It was, as I said, my group vice president who saw it in myself and also my manager. At the time, my manager asked me to do some best practices training with the team that we had at the time and it kind of grew and so they saw it and I didn’t. As a result of having the sales background and then being able to enable sellers, there is instant credibility there. The reason for it is not because I’m brilliant. The reason for it is that you’re coming from the same vocation that you’re enabling. You don’t only talk the talk, but you have walked the talk. People can see it. Whenever you present, they can understand for sure that you have been in the trenches before. This is not a theory. It’s not just words on a page. Coming from that background was really, really instrumental in my success. Now, the other area is academia as a result of being a part-time professor. Being able to stand and confidently deliver content, I took it for granted. Shawnna, you probably are aware, presenting in front of an audience is like one of the top three fears that people have. All of those pieces coming together and the experiences there really bode well for me in being in enablement and I’m absolutely enjoying the ride. SS: I love to hear that. That is fantastic. What would you say are some of the challenges that practitioners might face when they’re trying to make a career transition, and how did you overcome some of those challenges as you pivoted into the enablement career? RU: Wow, that’s, that’s a loaded question there, Shawnna, and we don’t have the time to go over the list, but the truth is, when you transition into enablement, just like any other new role, especially if it’s different from the one that you’re coming from, you will often feel less than, meaning it’s almost like you don’t feel like you are qualified to be there. That’s a feeling that one would need to overcome with time. So, I struggled with that, which is why I asked my GVP at the time. I was like, why are you asking me to do this? I don’t know how to do this. You know what he said to me, Shawnna? I’ll never forget it. It was in his office. He said, Rodney, all I need for you to do is to teach others what you do and what you do well when you’re in sales. That gave me the comfort level to say “Oh, what I’ll be doing is very similar to what I’m doing today. All I’m doing is really imparting my, or paying forward, my knowledge in this field.” That really helped feeling less than is one of the areas that you need to watch out for anyone transitioning into enablement. The other one is that there are very high expectations of individuals in enablement. Very high. In fact, we all know that in sales there is always high velocity, right? The expectations are high, and there’s an anticipation that you should make an impact now, and that can cause stress. It certainly can, but of course, as long as you are pacing yourself and ensuring that you’re doing the best you can, working with the resources that you have, ensuring that you’re aligned to the strategic priorities and you have ruthless prioritization, you will certainly overcome. The demands are high, Shawnna. They’re coming from all over. They’re probably coming from your CRO. They’re coming from the RevOps organization, legal product marketing, et cetera. Managing all of that can be really challenging, but of course, just like anything else, you will figure it out over time as you work with others and learn from others. SS: I love that advice. I want to drill into this a little bit. What are some of the key skills that have helped you succeed as an enablement leader? What skills do you think other enablement leaders should look for when they’re building out their teams? RU: I was fortunate, as I mentioned earlier, to have 10 years of experience in sales, software/cloud sales to be exact. As a result of that background, I wasn’t just enabling because it was on a slide. The content that I was delivering was coming from the heart and the brain at the same time because of my experience. I think people can see through that. People are looking for transparency so that decade of sales background really helped me. As I transitioned in, and even today, going into my eleventh year, I think I have also shown the leadership skills that I’ve gathered along the way, even when interacting with clients when I was in sales. I’ll give you an example: When I was at Oracle NetSuite, I had fifteen strategic accounts in the northeast of the U.S. Going through that process, we had lots of challenges, but we had to overcome those to be able to ensure that those organizations thrive. You had to exhibit, on a consistent basis, leadership skills and helping your customers. It’s the same when you are in an enablement, because, especially when you’re dealing with a global company, people are scattered all across the world. Being able to deal with so many different individuals with diverse backgrounds and thoughts is very important. I will also hasten to say that exhibiting empathy is key as well in our roles because the sales role is stressful. It really is, and I guess because I’ve been there, I know that. As a result, when dealing with that audience, and when I say sales here, it could be business development, it could be sales themselves or sales engineers, it could be renewals, it could be customer success, those are stressful roles. Executing your job in an empathetic way is very key. Always having an open mind to continuously learn, which is why we’re in this enablement role because we’re supposed to be life-learners. SS: I love that, and I love the life-learner approach. What benefit do you think organizations can gain from diversifying their sales enablement teams and bringing in people with different or maybe unconventional backgrounds? RU: It is absolutely powerful, Shawnna, and I’m saying it not because it’s the right thing to say, I’m indicating that clearly because I’ve experienced it. Let me tell you what I mean. I had the awesome privilege and opportunity to lead and develop an organization that had about 30 people located in 10 different countries around the globe—Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, France, Spain, the UK, the US, and Canada—and that experience, for me was absolutely breathtaking. The reason for that is that I was able to work with a totally global audience and be able to understand the differences in the region. Now, Shawnna, the truth is, sometimes we over here in North America think that we’re the world. We’re not the world, okay? What I mean is, there are so many different perspectives that you can learn from. What works in North America is not necessarily what will work in Australia, you see what I’m saying? The same thing in France and et cetera. Having that experience for me really taught me that listening is very important. Having that open mind, as we both spoke about just now, is very critical because I truly believe that whenever we get different thoughts or diverse ideas, and we put them in a pot and we mix it up, we will always get something richer and more and more impactful than the original idea. I have done it over and over again with my team. I tell my team all the time, please do not box yourself in. Just leave your mind open to creativity, because you never know what gems can emerge. SS: I absolutely love that as well. Last question for you, Rodney. What advice would you give people who want to transition into an enablement role from another department? How can they set themselves up for a successful career in enablement? RU: I do believe that talking to individuals who are successful in enablement is key. We spoke about earlier, Shawnna, the life-learner attitude. I’ve been in enablement now for 10 years. That is just formally, because even prior to that, as I mentioned, I was a part-time professor and was at IBM and other places. I was doing enablement in different spheres. The point is that I’m still learning. I still today challenge myself to think about things differently whenever I’m executing my role, even if it’s the same thing that I did in a previous organization. I’m challenging myself to ask if there is a better way to do onboarding. Is there a better way to do continuous learning? Is there a better way for manager enablement or partner enablement? The list goes on and I continuously do that. I would advise someone coming on board in an enablement role to have an open mind. I would also say, join Sales Enablement PRO and other enablement communities so that you can absolutely learn from others. What I’ve found that is interesting about enablement and those who are here is that we love to share ideas with each other, and I just love that. If someone is coming on board and you’re selfish, this is the wrong place, because in enablement we love to share our best practices with each other. We love to see others succeed. That is what gets us up in the morning: to see others actually win in their roles. If that is what you have in mind, if you have that attitude, if you have that passion, this is indeed the place, a neighborhood for you. SS: I could not agree more. That’s fantastic advice, Rodney. Thank you again so much for joining us today. RU: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. It was a blast. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Research from KBV Research found that the global sales enablement platform market size is expected to reach $9.1 billion by 2028. So, how can organizations begin to globalize their sales enablement efforts to stay ahead of the curve? 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 Conrad Walsh, director of global product marketing at Light & Wonder. Thanks for joining, Conrad! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Conrad Walsh: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Shawnna, I appreciate it. My name is Conrad Walsh, and I am the director of global product marketing at Light & Wonder. A little bit about me, going back before I even got into marketing to begin with, I was actually in a very different field. I was a history major. I was very interested in local politics and public policy, so I wasn’t even considering doing anything in business at all. I went on to get a master’s degree in public administration, and the reason I’m telling you my life story, don’t worry, it’ll make sense as we go, is that what I have found fascinating in my journey is that a lot of those same skills that I was acquiring in that first act of my career. I was working for public policy think tanks, doing a lot of research, doing a lot of analysis, doing a lot of campaign messaging development, and a lot of those same kinds of topics or skills, I found that they did translate when I made a pivot over into consumer product marketing. I have found that whether the product is like a public policy issue or a widget that you’re trying to sell, at the end of the day, this is what kind of drives my passion in my career, is trying to chase that why of something. Why is this issue resonating with this certain group of people? I found that that did really translate as I pivoted over into product marketing, so I’ve spent about 10 years focused on mostly consumer brands at work, but recently have pivoted over again into B2B. It’s the same story everywhere you go, you’re trying to find out what content is resonating, and what’s going to work. You need to hone in on your audience, you need to figure out what is being engaged with and what’s not working so that you can make sure that you’re spending your time best serving your customers. My role now as the director of global product marketing is to manage a globally distributed team that is focused on really bringing the best games to our customers. Most of our customers are casinos and resorts across the world, so we also like to think of our sales force that we are supporting as our kind of internal customer. We’re trying to set them up to win those deals. It’s a really fun dynamic industry to be in and it’s been a pretty exciting journey. That’s a bit about me. SS: Awesome. I love that backstory. By the way, I was also a history major, so on that point, let’s reflect a little bit and let’s think back. Before Highspot, what were some of the trends and pressures that led you to invest in an enablement platform? CW: I was fortunate enough that when I arrived here with this company, the team that I work with had already gotten us on this Highspot track. It was still early innings for sure, but to paint a little bit of color on the context here, what our team was discovering is that we had a real pain point across the organization. This is, this is a global company. We’ve got more than 6,000 people in this company, and one of the pain points, honestly, that we’re still trying to work through is what I would call document scatter. SS: Content chaos. CW: That sounds cool. I don’t know if I just coined a phrase right then. I don’t know if that maybe that’s like a phrase that’s already out there, but that’s what it is. It kind of felt like you have people on many different teams that are looking to find something, and how much of our day are we spending just trying to chase something that shouldn’t be that hard to find because it’s like a key asset. What we found is that we had too many options for people. We had too many places where you could find something, and it’s like the more places that you can find it, the more chaotic it’s going to be, the less convenient, the less easy it’s going to be for our sales team, for our product teams and everyone in between to get what they’re after. That was really one of the key drivers of what led us to start to look for a solution like Highspot. SS: I love that. Now that you guys have implemented Highspot, how have you started to solve some of those challenges and kind of alleviate hopefully some of that pressure? CW: We’re still on that journey, but we have made a lot of great strides in the time that we’ve been on Highspot. I think that just like anything in life, it takes a while to build a habit of something, especially when you’re working across an organization as large as this one. What we’re finding is that we’ve made great inroads in trying to cut down on the amount of time that people are spending just trying to find what they’re after. Again, these are key documents that all of our products require. We’re actually in a very highly regulated industry, so these documents are required to have. Just the amount of time that we’re saving in having kind of like a one-stop shop if you will, has been really cool to see. I think we’ve only just kind of scratched the surface. SS: I love that. Now, as a product marketing leader, I have to say nine times out of 10, they are an absolutely key partner in making sure that we bring to life enablement strategies across organizations. I’d love to understand from your seat as a product marketing leader, what role Highspot plays in your overall enablement strategy. CW: Honestly, Highspot has become key to us in redefining what our go-to-market motion is as a company. When I was brought in for this role, part of my task that I’m still on the journey of trying to bring about is to really operationalize our go-to-market approach. What that means to me is how can we create a repeatable pattern. How can we create muscle memory for this is how we launch products at the company? What has really helped in terms of the Highspot tool, as far as that goes, is that it’s allowed us to have something to rally around, if you will. It’s just our go-to tool that we can use really prominently in creating that go-to-market motion. What that really means to me is that when you do something like a sales kickoff call, for example, we wanted that to be a key part of our go-to-market strategy. This is a really key internal event that we want to be almost like a pep rally in some respects. We’re trying to hype this thing up, whatever the product is, we want the sales team to walk away from this meeting feeling energized and feeling really clear on what the messaging is and the positioning for where this product sits in their market. Being able to close out a kickoff call by introducing a sales play that we’ve curated that is just like polished up, beautiful, and ready to go. Not only have we already solved the pain point that we talked about at the beginning of our chat about, well, where is the stuff? Well, we’ve already answered that question before we’ve even had a chance to ask it. The stuff’s all right here, and it’s all been conveniently curated for you. Just to be able to close out a call by just sending a link out and saying, here you go, that’s been really well received. I think it’s brought a lot of energy and excitement to what we’re trying to do in creating that kind of repeatable playbook for us for launching products. SS: I love that. I also know that in addition to your product launches, one of your current initiatives is rolling out Highspot globally amongst your sales teams. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to realize that it was time to globalize your enablement strategy? CW: We were getting such great feedback from the North American region where we first rolled Highspot out. It was really starting to make an impact on the business. Teams were really buying into it and we were getting really good feedback. At the time, I had only been with the company for about six months, but I’m still kind of on that journey of trying to figure out how to create this more standardized global approach to our product marketing strategy. I thought, well, it would make all the sense in the world if we could try and replicate this across each region. Going back to that document scatter that I was referring to before, I mean, it’s a global scatter. There are multiple places across each market where we’re just finding these little dark holes where people are storing content and so I thought, well, wouldn’t it be great to have everything above board and all on the same platform? Certainly from an efficiency standpoint, the way that the product marketing team is working would make a ton of sense for us to just be able to drive consistency across each market using the same tool. Fortunately, my supervisor was immediately supportive of the idea when I pitched it to her. She thought that that’s great and we should be doing that. Once I started to have some conversations with different stakeholders in these different markets, they were really excited. I would do a screen share and show them, here’s what we’ve built for North America and if you could build one for your region, what would it look like? When I started to have those conversations, I could see people lighting up with that topic, and they started to imagine, wow, what if I had a little hub for my market, for my sales team, where I could have everything I need and it’s custom to my market. I knew it was a winning idea because of the feedback early on from all these different stakeholders. It’s been really exciting to be able to do even small things like just being able to customize the way that the individual spot looks for their market. Each market has nuances in a different context. We can key in on visual components of the spot that, sound like such a small thing, but if a sales rep from EMEA logs into their spot and immediately gets a greeting message at the top of the homepage, you are in the EMEA Highspot, they’re like, wow. That was a mind-blowing concept to some because they had never had a little hub that was just for their team and just for their region. I think you had these different teams that were feeling really seen and really thought of from the center of excellence. I work out of the headquarters office in Las Vegas and I think it’s really also helped to have kind of an internal impact because it’s brought our teams closer together by using that tool. SS: Conrad, can you share with our audience, what your vision for a global enablement strategy looks like and how will your strategy change from North America to EMEA, to Asia, to Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America? CW: It’s mostly about what content we’re offering in the spot that’s really where the nuance is coming in because, on the one hand, we’re trying to create a more standardized approach to our go-to-market, so we want it to feel very familiar or similar to what we were doing in North America. At the same time, how can we do that in a way that is more thoughtful to that region? I think we’re still on that journey. We’ve recently built out all of these different spots for the regions, we’ve rolled them out, and we’ve introduced and trained the sales teams on what they have available to them. I think we’re really still in those early innings of trying to figure out how we can customize this further. We’re getting some good feedback already on some adjustments that we can make. Simple things like the way that we organize the flow because different markets have different points of focus or emphasis for their market. Just being able to tweak the visual aspect of it, even the navigation aspect of it, I think it’s not like a wholesale change to our approach in the different regions, it’s more like fine-tuning in that way. SS: I love that. You have driven fantastic adoption of the Highspot platform with a 90% recurring usage rate. What have been some of your strategies for capturing such high amounts of user engagement? CW: I’m still a little bit new to understanding the different benchmarks, like, is 90 % good? I had to ask our Highspot team, Josh and Olivia, to shout out to them, I’m nothing without them. They’ve helped me a lot on this journey. I had to ask them if that was good. Is that above average, well above average? And they’re like, it’s well above average. I think as we kind of chatted about that, I thought what I’ve concluded is that we’re an organization that is very hungry for a solution that could help solve rather quickly a pain point that had been existing for a long time. I think a combination of having the right tool at the right time combined with a marketing team here that has been really diligent about just repeating the message, just repeatedly getting the word out about when we have a new wave of content that comes in, we send it out. It is just like messaging, messaging, and messaging. The team that I work with here in Las Vegas, they’ve done an incredible job on the training aspect of it as well. We’ve taken a really thoughtful approach, I think, to after the initial rollout, it’s tempting to just say, okay we did it. Great. Good job. Let’s move on, but that’s only the beginning of the journey. You have so many sales reps that even though they’re engaging at a high rate, they still have a ton of questions. A lot of them are quite basic because it’s a new tool, so we’ve tried to be really intentional as a team by just following up individually with reps and getting feedback. That’s really opened a lot of opportunities for us to realize, oh, you know what? We had assumed that the team already understood this, but they don’t, so let’s re-message it. It has pushed us to not get too comfortable with being done because it’s an ongoing project for sure. SS: That’s fantastic. Conrad, what metrics do you look at to measure the business impact of Highspot globally? Do you have any results or key wins that you can share with us? CW: Yeah, interesting question. We recently did a key product rollout in Australia. Australia is a key market for our company and I think that the team in particular was extra hungry for this tool. When we rolled it out, the response was just incredible and the numbers show that. This team is really bought in. As far as making an impact on the actual business, I think referring back to what we were chatting about before with using Highspot as a key moment in the go-to-market process, having that sales enablement kickoff call, where we have product leaders, sales leaders, other executives that dial into this call and rally around the launch of this product and really hype it up. It’s kind of that first training moment for the sales team. If you nail that moment, it can have a huge impact, I think, on the business. It cascades through the organization. What I like to think happened in part is that because we were so on point with our planning for that key product launch. The product has gone out into the market now and it’s performing at a very high level, but the pre-sales were through the roof as well. I mean, we can’t give all the credit to marketing or Highspot. We can give some of it, but ultimately the product is fantastic. The people that develop the product have a winning product and that’s the key. I do think that it was a perfect storm for the business because we had just started to refine this sales enablement kickoff process at the time that we were ramping up to do this key product launch in Australia and yeah, it has made a huge impact on the business. I think it gave us a lot of momentum going into the market. SS: Last question, Conrad, as you continue to evolve with Highspot, how do you plan to leverage the platform to help drive business results that really align with the goals of your executive leaders? CW: I think looking ahead into 2024 and beyond, we’ve really started to see an opportunity on the training aspect of it. Now that we’ve built all these different spots for the different regions globally, we now want to kind of build on that foundation. We want to start to build out some proper certifications for products. Also build out some really valuable, useful modules for scenario planning. I think that in talking, especially to some of the markets internationally, it’s come up that it would be a really great resource to have, like a course that would walk you through different scenarios. I think the more hand-holding that we can do, I shouldn’t call it handholding, but the stronger we can make the connection between the market, what the marketing team is doing, and what the sales team is doing, the bigger impact we’re going to have on the business. Being able to support a product lineup as robust as the one that we have at this company is no easy task. We have three key lines of business. We have thousands of products. Especially from an onboarding perspective, if you’re a new sales rep and you come in and you’re like, okay, what are we selling? Well, we have this line of business that has 50 products in it, that’s a mountain of information that you have to learn just on that one line of business. Then you have two other lines of business. The breadth of the portfolio is so large that having a chance to catch our breath for a second after we’ve built these out for the regions and pause and reflect and think, okay, what else can we do to elevate this experience for the sales teams? How can we make it even more of a valuable experience when they log in each time? That’s something that we’re already starting to work on. And we’re very excited about what that could mean for the business. SS: Conrad, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. 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 Highspot found that more than half of CROs report a 5X return on investment from their sales enablement platform. So, how can an enablement platform be used effectively to elevate your 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 Julie Wolfe, the director of global revenue enablement at Glassdoor. Thanks for joining, Julie! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Julie Wolfe: Thank you so much, Shawnna. I’m thrilled to be here with you today. As you mentioned, I direct the enablement team at Glassdoor. I have been at Glassdoor for just about two years now, and I have an amazing team. We call ourselves Revenue Enablement because we are the engine that helps the go-to-market organization drive speed to revenue. We really are focusing on not just our sales partners, but our customer success partners, our business development reps, and all of our go-to-market organization. SS: I love that. I’d like to start with just some context setting. From your perspective, what does good enablement look like? Maybe if I reframe that or say that slightly differently, what are the key components of an effective enablement strategy at Glassdoor? JW: Shawnna, enablement is about three things to me, and those three things are helping your reps understand your products, your processes, and your systems and doing so in a way that is entertaining and that helps them learn. Ultimately our end goal is driving speed to revenue that helps them do that faster. To me, those are the three things we focus on in terms of enablement. We also talk about simplifying for our users and our sales team. Our customer success team are our users and we want it to be the most easy-to-use experience for them possible. SS: I love that. To the latter two points on the systems and processes front, what role does an enablement platform play in helping you bring your enablement strategy to life? JW: I love that question. It plays a giant role. To me, the enablement platform is our single source of truth. I’ll probably say that again during the course of our conversation. If it’s in Highspot, that’s the single source of truth. That is the correct place. Process Change, for example, we rolled out a giant compensation plan change for this Q3 that we are in and did a whole page in Highspot around everything that you would need to know. What we found is that when we communicate with various documents, it’s easy for things to get lost, but if we put it in Highspot, this is the single source of truth. This is your answer. Go there. SS: I love that. What were some of the challenges that you were maybe facing that Highspot has helped to solve and how does it go about solving some of those challenges? JW: One of the best things about working at Glassdoor, and Glassdoor is an amazing company, is that we truly have a knowledge-sharing culture. At Glassdoor, people are very willing to share what they know about a product, a process, and a system. We have robust Slack channels, and what sometimes happens when you have a knowledge-sharing culture is people share knowledge that hasn’t been approved by legal and hasn’t been approved by marketing, which, you know, it’s great when someone asks does anyone has a case study about something that can help me close this deal? Like, that’s exactly what you want your teams to be doing, to support each other. At the same time, marketing and legal exist for a reason, and so we want to make sure that we are being good stewards and good citizens as Glassdorians. Highspot, for us, solves some of those challenges. When I see someone in Slack sharing things, I say, Hey, here’s the Highspot page. Go here for this product update. Hey, here’s the Highspot page, go here to learn how to do this new process in Salesforce, for example. We’re really pushing people back to the source in Highspot to know that that is the one that’s been approved by marketing, approved by legal, and is the right document to be sharing. SS: Another thing that I really loved about your LinkedIn profile, you actually mentioned that the focus of the enablement team at Glassdoor is to simplify and deliver. Tell us more about this mantra and how you infuse it into your enablement strategy. JW: One of the things we know is that people can only retain so much information. The ‘simplifying' is taking lots of dense content and boiling it down to the nuggets that people really need. If I tell you, Shawnna, these are the two things we’re going to talk about today, that’s much easier to follow than sending you a 15-page document and saying, could you pre-read this and like share your thoughts with me? We all work asynchronously a lot now, but what our goal is in simplifying is to take complex information that comes across the organization and really condense it down for our sales and CSS teams so that they know exactly what they need to do and it’s maybe one or two steps. That’s the simplification. Also simplifies their user experience. We have done a lot in Highspot to make it more user-friendly, and to make it more clear where you go for what. We’ve done a lot to tag our content so that when you’re searching, you are finding the right content. Again, that’s simplifying that user experience. For ‘deliver', there’s an old phrase, a good enough something is better than a perfect nothing. We want to be able to deliver things to our reps that are good. We’d love them to all be perfect, but we’d rather them be good enough and help them get where they are, or where they need to go as quickly as possible. Ultimately, delivery for us is helping our teams. We use a hashtag at Glassdoor a lot, #oneteam. As one team, our goal is to help speed up revenue. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again, that’s why if it’s revenue-driving, that is part of what we have to support. That’s the delivery. Simplify the user experience, simplify the content, simplify the asks, and then help our teams deliver. SS: How do you go about leveraging Highspot? I know you already gave some great examples of how you’re tapping Highspot to help simplify things. How do you leverage Highspot to simplify and deliver initiatives? JW: I love that question, Shawnna. We did an audit of our Highspot content about 18 months ago, and we did a giant archive of things that were outdated. We looked and started improving governance because we had not really had a lot of governance around the content that went into Highspot. We’ve been improving our governance around all of the materials that we put into Highspot. We restructured Highspot so that when you open the homepage it’s very clear, no matter who you are, where you’re supposed to go. There is a product button and there is a systems button, and so you can click on either one, and then there is a button for each of the teams, so you click on that button, and that opens up a page, which then has playbooks, it has expectations, it has roles and responsibilities. It’s very practical and tactical with the idea that we want our reps to be able to self-service and use Highspot as that tool to reinforce the things that we’ve trained them on in onboarding and everboarding and all the things we do. When they click into Highspot, essentially, they’re getting a very well-crafted, narrated experience of where to go to find all the information that they need. SS: I know we’ve, we’ve chatted about this, what you’re doing is clearly working. You guys have an 81% recurring usage of Highspot, which is great. What are your best practices for driving adoption for your reps in addition to just making it really simple for them? JW: One of the things that we do is we do a weekly newsletter that we use through Highspot. When people open the newsletter, they have to go back into Highspot, so there is a strategy involved in that as well. That’s part of their strategy. Again, making it the single source of truth and knowing if you go to Highspot, we’ve done the audit, we’ve cleaned it up like the content is there, it’s easy to find, it’s accurate. That’s another thing, we have been making it visually appealing. We’ve included photographs that we’ve taken when we have on-site and when we have events. We’ve added memes, things that just make the content come to life. We’re adding more videos as a new thing we’re doing this year and more quick tutorial videos because we all struggle with the TLDR. We use wiki a lot, and in a wiki, sometimes there are 50 pages to explain a process. I don’t know about you, but if I want to figure out how to do my hair, like in beach waves, I go to YouTube. I will watch a tutorial on how to curl my hair in beach waves. Our reps are the same. We have to think about that as enablement professionals. Our reps don’t have time to read a long document, a tome full of processes, they need a quick video that explains things. It sits right on the page that explains the product. If I’m going in and they’re talking about a product, I can watch a quick video and everything’s right in the same place. Again, this simplifies the user experience for our teams. SS: I do love that example, by the way, I have to say. What are some of the business results you’ve achieved since leveraging Highspot? JW: We are working on looking at sort of an overall health score. Our goal is to look at what our teams are doing, like what tools are they leveraging. Are they leveraging our content management system, of course, which is Highspot? We use other tools and wouldn’t have a sense of what they’re using, and then tie that to outcomes. Where I want to go with this is saying reps who use Highspot are two times more likely to fill in the blank. What I would like to say is like, hey quota, or, you know, something that’s very tied specifically to the business outcome. What I can say is that I think Highspot makes us more organized and makes us think in a more organized way, which helps us be better cross-functional partners. In Highspot, we have a number of access-only licenses. Our goal with that is to let executives and cross-functional partners have access and be able to see everything that we’re doing in the go-to-market organization. Again, in some ways, that’s part of our communication strategy. There’s a lot of visibility with what we’ve created in Highspot in terms of process, product, systems, and compensation that is shared with the broader organization. SS: I love that. And to your point, those are essentially efficiency and ultimately likely productivity gains for your field teams as well. Doing that correlation over the fullness of time, I think would be a really interesting data point to look at for the business in terms of what enablement is helping to drive. JW: I think you’re right, Shawnna. I think if I can add one more thought there, I can tell you personally that if it’s not in Highspot, and I know it’s somewhere else, I probably spend 20 minutes hunting through things to find the document. I definitely personally see a productivity gain in using Highspot when I’m like, where is that document? It’s right here. I can search by title. SS: I love to hear that. Last question for you, Julie. Looking ahead, what do you envision as the future of enablement at Glassdoor and how do you plan to leverage Highspot to support that vision? JW: I love this question. One of the things we’re looking at is whether can we incorporate more of the learning management features that Highspot has into our current platform. We currently use a different learning management system, but we’re exploring how we can truly use Highspot with all the features that it provides. Something that we’re doing that we just started and launched literally last week in Highspot is a manager coaching page. One of our goals was to create a single source of truth for our managers and directors, as well as for the rest of the go-to-market organization. What we found was we had not employed our own best practices for our managers and directors. We were communicating with them with a lot of Slack and emails and shared documents and we said, you know what? We need to create a page in Highspot just for them that has all of their things. We said here’s all the information about onboarding, here’s how to listen to call recordings and use scorecards, and we’ve included tutorial videos. Here’s all of the training information about the new compensation plan, but just for managers only. We changed the permissions so only the managers are able to see it. I think that it was something we had not done previously and I’m so happy we are because it looks gorgeous, it’s easy for them to use, and again, it simplifies that experience for them. Pitches are also something we really want to get our team starting to use more. I saw our QBR for Highspot just this past month and I think we were up like 15% in pitches. Don’t quote me exactly on that number, but I think that’s what it was and the goal with pitches is of course, for our teams to be able to track what people are doing with the content that they send, I want us to lean in more on that. I think that’s an incredibly valuable tool and it’s incredibly valuable data to our sales teams. I’d like us to do even more around that. I just want us to keep exploring all the myriad functions that Highspot has. Again, for true enablement, it’s not just a content management system. We think of it as our CMS, like it holds the content, and I recently had an executive ask me like, well, how is that any different than, like, the wiki? I was like, oh, it’s so different from a wiki. I had to explain it, and when I was done, when I could show all the statistics about our usage and all of the content and just the design and the look and feel, I had converted that person. That’s where I want us to keep going. Really thinking about how we can take everything that Highspot can do and really be fully utilizing it. SS: Absolutely. I mean, a platform should be reinforcing your revenue enablement strategy, which to your point is about making sure you’re increasing productivity to hit those revenue targets. Julie, thank you so much for joining us today. I greatly enjoyed this conversation. JW: Shawnna, thank you so much. I was thrilled to be here and really appreciate your time. 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 Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Regan Barker from Grant Thornton, Australia join us. Regan, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.  Regan Barker: Absolutely, Shawnna. It’s great to be here. My name is Regan Barker and I am the head of sales and sales enablement here at Grant Thornton Australia. Part of my role is to work closely with the business on their sales activity and sales coaching. Grant Thornton is an accounting audit and consulting firm. We have six offices across our beautiful nation and seven service lines. We sell over a hundred products and services across 11 industry specializations with about 170 partners and 1,300 people.  SS: Thank you for joining us. We’re excited to have a guest on the podcast from the Australia region. Now, one area of expertise for you is coaching. I’d love to start there and understand why sales coaching is so important.  RB: Great question. I think for particularly working in professional services, slightly different from more product-based businesses, our partners are the owners of the business. They’re also the experts and they’re actually the product. For me, coaching and advising our 170-odd partners is pivotal.  In Australia, we have an ever-changing landscape across the business, regulation, and market pressure. We need to ensure that our partners and our people have the confidence to cut through the noise and really provide essential insights around business operations, regulatory change, and emerging issues for those businesses and senior leaders to make sound business decisions. Helping our partners in their activity helps them be more efficient as well as to be able to make sure that they’re talking to the right people around the right insights as well. SS: Absolutely. From your perspective, what are some of the key components of an effective coaching program, especially in today’s sales landscape?  RB: I think for effective coaching, it’s really about meeting people where they are. Most sales programs are based on supporting sales operators, our partners are the owners, and service providers, they’re the team leaders. They have to run the billing, run the client programs, absolutely everything. Our effective coaching has to be integrated as a part of their everyday life to make sure that it is effective and efficient.  When I say meeting people where they are, really it’s about understanding their business, how it operates, what the sales cycles are, whether it’s heavily compliance-driven and you’ll be advising an organization and their CFO, for example, on a regular basis or cyclical basis versus some of our financial advisory experts that are heavily transactional. Meeting them where they are, both in how they operate, but also in terms of their own capability as well, some of which are extremely effective sales operators and others may be more introverted. It’s really about giving them confidence. One of the pieces that we try to focus on is just focusing on one skill or development area at a time. Fine-tune that, making sure we find our efficiencies, and then as they build that confidence and capability, then we move on to the next area to help fine-tune something else, another skill.  SS: I think those are absolutely key components to effective coaching programs. In your experience, what does good coaching look like? In other words, what does it take to be an effective sales coach?  RB: I think the most powerful tool you can have is to also be a practitioner. In professional services, obviously, I’m not going to be a tax expert, I’m not going to be an auditor, but what I am is an expert around sales. A key thing that I’ve adopted here is in the last financial year, I took over inbound sales and really developed that channel.  Everything that I coach on, I test and I use as a part of our inbound sales program as well. That’s led to great success. It means that we frequently on a daily basis run alongside our partners in a framework that I like to call coach to close. We are working with the client, working with the partner, and ensuring that the tactics and communications, the cadence, and our tools are all adopted as a part of those sales opportunities. We can then give them to the partner and they can use it in other opportunities that they’re working on. What we’ve seen in terms of our adoption of inbound sales as well as sales enablement means that we’ve actually increased our revenue by that channel by over 93% in comparison to the previous year. We’ve actually qualified and won more opportunities from it as well. Our median opportunity fee has increased exponentially as well. With that, it means that we can give our partners practical tips to adopt within their sales programs rather than the more high-level traditional coaching that has occurred in the past within professional services. SS: That is fantastic advice in terms of what good looks like. On the flip side, a common challenge when it comes to sales coaching is ensuring that sellers and sales managers are able to make the time for it. It feels like productivity and staying on top of quite a few things are definitely a challenge for folks these days. How do you get buy-in from the sales team and sales leadership to lean into coaching?  RB: I think that one of the challenges for us is, again, because we are in professional services, the partners are everything. There is a power behind what we call the billable hour. There has to be enough time in the day for partners to be able to bill and provide services to their clients as well as sell. I think there are a few pieces to this one.  We’re not going to be able to influence every partner across the firm some of them are already great operators. Really it’s about working with the people that want to work with us as well. Really focusing on from their perspective, tapping into their growth mindset and their willingness to learn and more on the flip side for us is about integrating it into partners every day. We try to integrate our sales coaching into our pipeline meetings. Everything from our inbound sales, everything from our outbound prospecting, working across the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel with our marketing team. Then, making sure that we support them across as many interactions as possible, rather than only focusing on carving out time for that one-to-one coaching. SS: I think that is a great way to go ahead and get buy-in from the leadership organization. How can coaching help sellers better engage their clients and deepen those client relationships?  RB: This is probably my favorite question. I think that any good sales tool or anything that you can have in your arsenal will help you be a better provider to your existing clients. Take questioning, for example. We try to create a framework to ensure that we cover not just current questions, but say future and past questions to ensure that we can get the most information and the most effective information to help support our prospective clients, but also our current clients. Even adopting those components will help be able to ensure that we get accurate scoping with our existing clients and make sure that we’re delivering on our promises as well.  SS: I’d love to hear that. Last question for you, Regan. What are your best practices for measuring the impact of coaching? RB: We measure a few components around everything from the usability and adoption of our CRM. We obviously look at the bottom line, so from a partnership, it is individual partner revenue and service line revenue. Whether they’re in tax consulting or financial advisory, the average days to close opportunities obviously would be dependent on the service line and the products we’re offering.  One of our key focuses, however, at the moment is around client mix. Making sure that when we are winning work, are we winning work with the right type of client that we want to work with? Given its services, there has to be a level of profitability as well. Also, we want to work with great clients that also want to work with us. Also, from earlier stage sales, it’s around outreach activity, the number of opportunities created, also that cross-collaboration between partners and service lines. Really looking to focus on introductions given, whether it’s across our firm, but then also our friends in other professional services like banking and law, for example. The overall engagement, particularly through say NPS scores, as well, because we want to make sure that while we’re growing as a firm, we really focus on delivering against the objectives of our clients as well.  SS: I love that. Regan. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. RB: It was great to be here. I really appreciate it.  SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

It's no surprise that many people around the world would like to lose weight. In fact, between 2017 and 2021, 55% of all Americans have expressed the desire for weight loss. And unfortunately, many people who are single and would like to find love in their life are instead putting it off until they're at their desired weight.  That's the case for 41-year old Shawnna, our guest in this episode of the podcast.  Shawnna would like to lose about 50 pounds, and find a more peaceful relationship with food – one where she's not constantly thinking about what, when, and how much to eat. As she shares, she's tired of feeling like food and her weight is holding her back from following her dreams, including finding a significant other.  But despite her best efforts, Shawnna has struggled over the last decade to not see her weight as one of the most important aspects of life to overcome.   She's tried every approach she knows to lose weight. And she's tried everything to try to forget about her weight, move on, and have a happy life.   No matter what she does, Shawnna feels limited by her relationship with food.  So what should she do next?   As Marc David shares with Shawnna, part of the solution is remembering that our relationship with food is a great teacher – one of the key tenets of eating psychology, otherwise known as food psychology.  When we understand that our eating challenges are here to help us learn and grow, we can then turn to a powerful question: What is my relationship with food and body trying to teach me? What can I learn from this situation?   And for Shawnna – like so many of us, part of the answer lies in being clear about what we truly want from life – and learning how to prioritize and put those things first.   Episode highlights: ✅ How our family “tribe” influences our eating challenges, and what's important to know as you're healing your own relationship with food.  ✅ Why learning to pay attention to our desires is key to transforming our food and body challenges — and how to start. ✅ How to be the “real” you now and have the life you want, even if the weight isn't gone yet.  Tune in for a beautiful episode on not waiting to lose weight to find love. Because we all deserve to experience love in our life…  ---------------  Learn more about us at The Institute for the Psychology of Eating: https://psychologyofeating.com/   Ready to call a ceasefire in your battle with eating, and find peace and freedom with food? Learn more about our newest program, The Emotional Eating Breakthrough! https://learn.psychologyofeating.com/  Interested in becoming a certified coach in eating psychology? Then tune in to hear Marc talk about our Mind Body Eating Coach Certification Training, and download a copy of our School Catalog: https://psychologyofeating.com/info-kit/ Learn our powerful, cutting-edge approach, and discover how you can create a unique career helping others find peace and freedom with food.  Follow us on social:  - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Psychologyofeating - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IPEfanpage - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eatingpsychology/ - Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/eatingpsych #weightloss #weightlossjourney #bodyimage #selflove #selfimprovement #foodfreedom #eatingpsychology #foodpsychology #marcdavid

It's SPOOKY SZN! In this episode of The Round Room, your hosts ring in the most wonderful time of the year with celebrations of death. Travel south of the border to Mexico with Shawnna to learn about Día de Los Muertos. Head East to China as Kristel tells you all about the Hungry Ghost Festival. Get ready to take a trip to the other side, Roomies. 

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Marja Moore join us. I would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience. Marja Moore: Thank you, Shawnna. Hi, everyone, my name is Marja Moore, and I am in the Seattle area. I have most recently worked at companies like SAP, Concur, and Infoblox. Right now, I’m taking some time off to explore some new adventures, but I have worked in everything from marketing to business development to sales enablement and value methodology building. I have a diverse background in many industries and I use all of that to inform how I go forward with every new role, especially with enablement.  SS: Wonderful. I’m excited to chat with you. There was something on your LinkedIn profile that caught my eye. You mentioned that you lean toward being a human-centric leader who is also focused on data-driven outcomes. I’d love to understand from you, why are both sides of this coin important as an enablement leader.  MM: I would say it’s an important thing to have for any leader. First of all, we’re dealing with humans every day. You need to know what’s going to compel people. What’s going to get them to do what you need them to do, not only perform in their roles but also in the organization? How are they expanding their view? How are they becoming greater than what they were before? Understanding who you’re working with, whether that be people on your team or people that you’re trying to enable, you need to understand their values and what makes them tick is important. I think every enablement leader will say, you always have to give them what’s in it for me. I think this is true for literally any leader you need in order to compel somebody, you’re going to need to know who the human is behind it. That’s important to me, not only knowing the people that I help lead, but those that I help enable. What are their needs? What compels them? What gets them to do the things that we need them to do, and how does that make them feel?  On the other side of the coin is the data, and that is really driven by the need to say, okay, we see a hurdle, what does the data tell us? I think all business data is important because it tells you a story. How you interpret that story may differ, and it may tell people different things. For me, it’s important for me to look at the data, not only to help lead in the right way but also to help innovate and grow in the right way. Whether that be growing people or growing the business, the data is important, but the human element of it is always there. You need to make sure that you’re looking at both in order to make the right decisions. Data is only part of the story. The humans that interact to create that data or make that data are also important. Going behind the data to see what that looks like from a human perspective is important. SS: I love that. I know on the human side, one of the ways that you focus on this is by developing a sales council to support your enablement strategy. Tell us about that program. What did it entail and how did it impact your enablement strategy?  MM: This goes back to that human focus part of it. What we learned from interviewing a lot of our sales personnel was that we were hearing things like, we need more experts, more SMEs teaching us. We need a better way to actually understand what we’re supposed to be doing. To me, that human element of people coming to us saying what we need is a data point. You take that human element and that data point and you say how do we fix that for me?  There were two things. One, you always know that people in your organization are trying to move up or trying to better themselves, and often It’s the ones that are excelling in their specific roles so if you look at your sales field and you say okay, I have this top 10% and they’re just kicking butt at everything they do. Why is the other 90% not performing as well? Well, we should be leveraging that knowledge those skills, and that experience to help teach the rest of the field.  I think a lot of times we go outside or we use a sales coach. I’m not saying that we don’t need those things. I’m saying that you have a lot of knowledge in your salespeople today, how do you leverage that to give back to the rest of the field? How do you lift those salespeople? Who is that 10% to give them something to work towards? The program was really built around how we take the top salespeople who are interested in growing, who are interested in evolving, who are maybe one day interested in leadership, and how we build them up to help them achieve their goals while also achieving the business goals. That whole council kind of came together and there were a lot of different facets of it. Not only would the participants be nominated and have to keep a certain threshold of meeting their quota, but they would have the opportunity to take part in special different programs. Those things could be mentorship, mentoring someone who is new in their region, or being a part of our field studies. Once a quarter we would bring them together to talk about what the issues are and get their best practices every different quarter. Every quarter it would be a different kind of subject so that we could gather more information and skill building and then take it from there to put out to the rest of the teams.  They would also be featured on the enablement webinars. They would get some special training as well. All of this bundled together is a way to lift up your people who may want to continue to grow, learn more about the business, and learn more about leading by example. Transferring that knowledge to the less experienced sales reps, or even to those that are just coming into the business, and so we built it as a one-year cycle. You have to be nominated and once you take part in it, you’re basically on the bench for leadership. Then if you want to become a sales manager or some other leadership role within sales, this is a great boost for those people to do so because they’re learning more about the business and about the ways that we need to really focus in different areas in order to be successful.  Of course, one of those is enabling the field. It gives both sides of the coin. You’re getting some people who are really great at what they do to share their experiences and their best practices with your field, but you’re also giving them the opportunity to take on increased responsibility and participate more in the growth of the company as well.  SS: I love that. The other thing that I love about your background is that you have a blended background that incorporates customer success. How has that customer-centric approach to enablement?  MM: That’s a really good question. I would have to say that if you’re thinking about customer success, one of the most important things that’s happening in the industry, especially if you are a SaaS company, but this actually works for all kinds of companies who are providing a measurable service for their customers. The thing that you’re going to see is customer success is where all of those proof points for sales come out. If you’re looking at building a value methodology, which is what the industry is working towards, how do you show value to your customers?  We’re not talking nerd knobs here. We’re talking outcomes and value to your customers. What is the bottom line that that CEO is going to say? Yes, I need that product or I need that service because it’s going to save me money, help my people, reduce my risk, and save me time. All of those things are important to getting to that economic buyer. If you don’t have a value methodology, the one place you can look is your customer success team. They’re the ones that are going to know the success of the customers using the products or services. They’re going to be the ones that are engaging with them on a regular basis. That’s where you can do most of your learning to see where that success is.  For me, customer success is important because that really helps you understand the customers and then it helps you dive further down into those customers to really get that clear understanding to then build. On the front end of the customer life cycle, how do you go about approaching those kinds of customers in the future? When you think about enablement, you take all those learnings and you kind of transfer them into the value methodology to make sure that you’re starting with that at the beginning. What value are we providing our customers? How do we build that to help the sales teams actually understand the technology the service or the product?  You have this ability to really empower your sales teams to have better discussions. They’ll get to the C-suite a lot faster. Your customer acquisition costs will go down. All of those things. Learning from customer success is extremely important. It’s extremely important to organizations because that’s where the customer is having success, and then you can leverage that in the sales cycle to make sure that you’re finding those customers that have those similar scenarios to kind of push that sales cycle through based on the knowledge that you’ve learned from customer success. SS: I love that. So you blend your understanding of your customer. You’re also leveraging feedback from sales, and then there’s also the data side, which we talked about earlier in the conversation. What are some of the ways that you leverage data to inform and optimize your sales enablement programs?  MM: This is going to be a tricky one. We touched a lot of parts of the customer life cycle. We were enabling a lot of parts of operational and administrative things that sales need to do in order to keep the engine going. I think for me, it depends on where we are involved in enablement. What are we responsible for enabling? In that vein, if we’re looking at all of that data to say, are we being more proficient in our activities that we have to do when they’re engaging with the CRM, what does that look like? Your very first indicators of success, in my opinion, are how they’re doing in the prospecting and getting everybody through the pipeline. If you’re seeing that they’re holding on to prospects for too long, there’s something going on there. They’re not qualifying them out or disqualifying them, if you will. They’re holding on to them and that’s not really efficient. You need to look at all parts of the sales cycle and where you can influence. For example, if that was a problem that they’re not qualifying their customers and they’re sitting in there for months and months and months on end, what kind of qualifying framework do you have? Do you need to adjust that? Do you need to reinforce it? How many people are actually paying attention to it? That goes to how you are enabling and how you are graduating folks. We look at data all the time to say how we are performing in the business relative to what enablement is doing, but also what is enablement doing to qualify those people out to say, yep, they’re ready. Is it an individual looking at something? Often people do a pitchback practice and then they have the manager say yes or no on it. Well, the manager needs a butt in the seat. Is that really the right way to go about it, or do you really need to have a panel of people that are going to provide a more holistic view as to what that person pitched and say, no, you didn’t quite hit it, you need some more education here? That’s another way to look at data. Not just looking at strict numbers, but also the stuff you can’t quantify, the skills, the abilities of those salespeople. I think when you talk about data, there’s so much that could go into it. It’s hard to pick one specific data point that’s going to matter the most to you because it really depends on where you fit in and where you have influence or ownership. You might not own all the parts that you could influence, but along that customer life cycle is most important for you to focus, to be more productive, and to make sure that your enablement programs are functioning the way you need them to. SS: What are some of the key metrics that you look at to quantify enablement’s impact and value to the business? MM: This goes back to what do you enable on? A lot of companies have separate enablement groups for different activities. For example, some people will enable the operations, and then the enablement team will enable the skills the product, and the way that we do things. The companies that I’ve worked at, have owned all of it. It depends on what I have to look at as far as my span of influence or my span of ownership. If I’m looking from my perspective, I’m going to look again at how long it’s taking them to either qualify or disqualify a customer or prospect. I also like to look at the end. Once they’ve already purchased, they’re going to go through another sales cycle at some point. A good way to think about enablement is if you are enabling your customer success teams and you do have a value methodology. You’ll notice that once you sell to them and customer success is able to prove that value, the next sales cycle if they’re going to be buying another product or service from your company in CrossSell is going to go much quicker. You’re actually going to reduce that sales cycle for the next iteration of whatever they buy. That’s one way to tell that your value methodology is working, not just that they get through the sales cycle, but then their continuous sales cycle that you’re doing with them at the end. Is working and is moving faster. Those two things are really important because they are the bookends. You’ve got the prospecting, how quickly are they churning through their pipeline, making sure that the people that they are looking at are qualified? If I’m looking at that, I’m going to look a lot at things like the scores. Are they focusing on the right customers? Are they getting the right customers through? Are they disqualifying customers that they shouldn’t have been? Doing a review of their books of business sometimes will be helpful and that’s a really good metric to say okay, they disqualified out all of the D’s and C’s of their scores, they’re focusing only on their A’s, and B’s. Great.  What happens when all those A’s and B’s are gone? Do you need to adjust that behavior? I think it’s a matter of really where you fit into the customer life cycle, picking the bookends and then pulling in from there. If you’re pulling from prospecting, then you’re going to go to how long it takes them overall in the sales cycle, I always like to look at how high are they getting in the organization. That’s a data point where we can take that through and say, okay, you’ve got your list of contacts, but you have no one from the C-suite that tells me that you’re not getting to, the real decision maker.  Even if you’re getting to a VP, that’s great, but how are you going to evolve that into your sales enablement to make sure that they are getting higher up in the accounts that they are able to sell to that decision maker and that economic buyer? For me, it’s a matter of what you touch, what you influence, what you own, and then taking a deeper dive into all of those facets, from start to finish to say, where can I pull this through into my enablement and make sure that we’re doing the right things for the field to make the company successful.  SS: I love that. Last question, Marja. This one I think is going to be of a lot of interest to our audience. AI has rapidly advanced and evolved in the last year. How do you envision AI impacting both the human and the data side of enablement programs in the future?  MM: I love this question because I have been working with a lot of this AI since I think before it became the latest and greatest thing out there. It’s a funny transition for the world. I think we’re all experiencing a little bit of wow, and then some people are scared that it’s going to take away their jobs. I don’t think that’s the case. I think AI is going to help us both do things a lot faster. One of the things that I used it for is taking meeting notes or a meeting transcript and distilling it down into some of the points that were most important from that meeting. That helps sellers too, to even understand what those points were in meetings that they’re having that were good points, bad points. Were they stuttering? Were they saying the wrong words?  I know a lot of AI is now integrated into a lot of the products that are being used by the fields. That’s the sales fields that are collecting information on their calls and analyzing it and telling them when they’re saying the right things and when they’re saying the wrong things. I think that can only really help us in the future because it’s going to make us more efficient. We’re going to be able to look at that data and say, okay, you said X 12 times during that call, and X every single time made the customer hesitant. What’s something else you can say in place of that to move the customer forward and not have them have that kind of visceral reaction to it where they make a face or they grunt little things like that?  Then we can start to get into the nuances of how you actually treat that human on the other side of your sales call to be a more engaged and fruitful relationship. I think that AI is going to help us grow. It’s going to help us learn. It’s going to help us evolve. We need to use it carefully as well because you need to remember that if you’re going on to some of these different platforms, the information you put in is now in there. You have to be very cognizant of what you’re providing what you’re trying to get back and, where that information goes. You don’t want to put anything proprietary in there, of course, because then it’s in the system, but at the same time. You should be able to leverage it to get the things that you need. What are some of the best trends in certain industries used to help sellers and giving them education on what to look for is another way that enablement can be helpful in the whole sales cycle. What should they look for? How should they prompt the AI? If they need to understand more about their customer, what kind of questions should they be asking the AI? These are all opportunities for enablement to be a part of that journey and to help them maximize their interactions with AI if they are going to use it as a salesperson to do research.  The one thing again I will say is to make sure that you’re talking to your legal department about using AI because you want to have some rules and regulations around it to say, hey, don’t put this kind of information in there, but you can use it for this kind of information. I think it’s a requirement going forward for every sales enablement team to learn how to use it, to leverage it, and to make sure that you are focusing on moving forward and evolving with technology. I also think you need to be careful and cognizant that it is basically sharing with the world. You need to work with your legal departments to make sure that you understand where those lines are of what you should share in those kinds of programs and what you shouldn’t.  SS: Fantastic advice, Marja. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve enjoyed all of the insights that you’ve shared with our audience. MM: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. Much appreciated.  SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Our internal research reveals that since deploying Highspot, customers have seen an average 16% increase in win rate. So, how can you maximize the impact of your efforts with an effective enablement platform? 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 Molly Sestak, the head of enablement at SEDNA.Thanks for joining, Molly! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Molly Sestak: Thanks so much for having me, Shawnna. I’ve actually been around sales my entire life. My dad’s company is actually a manufacturer’s representative, which basically means they’re the middle people between manufacturers and wholesalers for really large commercial bid jobs. I grew up hearing him on the phone, spending time in the office, hearing how people make calls, and so on. I actually started working there when I was like 15 or 16 until I graduated from university. The funny thing is I started as the cleaner and all of a sudden one day it was like, oh, can you file a few things? Apparently, I was good at that. I don’t know how you’re bad at filing things, but a few days later my dad’s secretary actually asked me to answer the phones while she was away. Apparently, I was really good at that, so they actually started having me do inside sales. I really was only like 16 or 17, still in high school at this point. I really got my foot in sales early. I worked there pretty much every summer for five, or six years. I think after uni, I thought I was definitely not going into sales. I didn't want to be like my dad because all he does is talk on the phone and travel and all sorts, which seems nice, but I didn't want that. Well, unfortunately, that didn’t work out for me because I found tech and I absolutely fell in love. I fell into enablement naturally. It was BDR and then became a bit more senior in the team. As we started to build out that team on board new people, I took on that training person role within the team. It started off a little bit ad hoc doing team training and then they’re like, okay you are pretty good at that and I can see you like it, why don’t you help us onboard some of the new joiners? Fast forward a few months later, a job opened up in the enablement team specifically for BDRs, so that’s really where my background focus is. I went for it and never really looked back. I think that really made me realize that I love teaching people how to sell even more so than I actually love selling. I joined SEDNA about a year ago to help with coaching the sales team, building out playbooks, and so on. It’s definitely been a journey. I think every company has really had quite a lot of hardships in the last year. It pretty much has touched every tech company that I know of. I even did a short stint heading up our BDR team, so a slight shift away from enablement. We’ve finally hired somebody amazing to take over that team so I can announce that I’m finally back into enablement as of about a month ago. I have just been promoted to head of enablement and I’ve never been in that strategic role before. It’s been a really big learning curve, but slowly finding my feet and am excited to see my plans come to life. SS: Wow. When you say you have been in sales for your lifetime, you really mean from almost start to finish. That’s amazing. I’d love to understand, now that you’re focused on enablement and gravitated towards that, from your perspective, what does good enablement look like? Maybe if I was going to reframe it due to your new role, what are some of the key components of an effective enablement strategy? MS: I think that’s a really great question, Shawnna. I can of course say what everybody else says in this, I think what the key pillars are, which are content, training, and coaching. I think those are the three key things that we look for in driving enablement in a company. You can create the best programs in the world, but if they aren’t aligned with those company goals and you don’t collaborate heavily with other teams and get those stakeholders bought in, it’s just not going to move the needle. I’ve actually spent some time thinking about this and what I do differently to the above to hopefully help those who are listening out there. I think one thing that has really helped me is actually having that sales background, doing sales myself. I always bring that into everything that I do, but I also go back to that feeling of being bored in training and not being able to sit still when you have someone talking at you. When I build my programs, one of the things that I try to do is make them as engaging as possible. Does that mean that I’m asking them questions throughout? Do I make it fun? Do I put a game in there? I know when I was at Okta, I actually made a board game called Okta Land. It’s kind of like Candy Land, but it actually was with Okta questions and you had to answer questions about the product or do a cold call role play or handle an objection to move forward on the spaces. So again, it is just how we make it fun and drive that engagement throughout. I think often as enablement professionals, we get so caught up in that idea of like, we have to have this big strategy. What are we going to do for next year? I’m already thinking about 2024. What’s going to happen? What do we need to leverage to really hit those goals? I think it just turns into that tick-box exercise sometimes. I’ve thought a lot about this recently, which is funny why you’ve asked me this question. I think one of the answers to that is actually having bite-sized training that can influence the now. How do we help people do their jobs better today, not three-quarters from now? Of course, that’s super important, but we’re already doing that anyway. One of the things I actually just implemented as of last week is called Mondays with Molly. I tried to make it fun with my name, and it’s just in time snackable style enablement. It’s about three to five minutes. It’s a bite-sized video. I’m not a perfect editor, but I just threw it in iMovie and made a little jingle on Canva just to make it a little bit fun. It doesn’t take me very long. I just recorded it right before this podcast and it took me about 20 minutes to come up with the idea and actually record it edit everything and get it ready to send out Monday morning. The idea is that they listen to it while eating their breakfast or drinking their coffee on a Monday morning in the hopes that that’s something that they’re going to start doing that Monday. That’s what I’ve been doing a little bit differently than the usual enablement strategies that we see all over enablement teams today. SS: I love it. You have a creative flair that you bring to your enablement strategy to keep it engaging. I mean, attention is a hard thing to capture with sales reps, so kudos to that. How does your enablement platform help you bring that enablement strategy to life? MS: I definitely couldn’t live without it. I think that’s probably because in enablement we’re constantly faced with this idea of spinning plates and managing multiple stakeholders at one time, there’s like this huge element of collaboration. Not to mention the amount of content that we’re in charge of and making sure that people are actually using and then giving that feedback back into marketing. I’m sure that many of the people listening have just dealt with the sheer number of questions that go a little something like, hey, where can I find X document? I’ve had so many of those questions and to be honest, I made an emoji in Slack, that’s the Highspot emoji, and I just now sent it to them. It’s kind of a funny way to deal with it, but they do then get used to actually going and finding it themselves. I was absolutely buried in these. Before we had a sales enablement platform, and I really think that they helped bring that structure to the chaos. Besides that, I think the main thing is, first of all, they provide that single source of truth for all the up-to-date content that can be shared with prospects and customers or used internally to inform or upskill the team. Then, not only can you ensure that your team has access to the right content or information at the right time, but they can also share that content with their prospects and customers and get those analytics into what they’re engaging in. Not only does this help enablement, but marketing and reps, it pretty much helps every team that we touch really understand what content is resonating most with buyers. That helps us make much more data-driven decisions over time. On the training and coaching side of things, It’s a huge manual output. If you don’t have a platform it’s all live sessions, tracking things on Google Sheets. I mean, not to mention if you want somebody to do an accreditation or some sort of certification where they have a role-play involved. It is really difficult to manage all of that with the rubrics and all sorts. This really helps to roll this out and ensure completion on that, those kinds of things like training and certifications or even an onboarding program, for example. SS: Absolutely. I love that. Those are fantastic examples. Before Highspot, your team leveraged a different enablement platform. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and maybe some of the challenges that your team faced? MS: Yeah, absolutely. When I joined SEDNA, the previous enablement team had actually already chosen Seismic, so they had been using it for about eight or nine months by the time I joined. I think before that they were using Google Drive, which is just horrible to think about now that I can’t live without an enablement platform. SS: Was there an impetus for deciding to make the change and implement Highspot instead? MS: I think once the team actually got their hands on Seismic, the realization that actually Lessonly in Seismic, they actually weren’t integrated at all. There were two completely separate logins. I think for anybody listening, who’s had to deal with two separate platforms when doing enablement, that’s just double the enablement that you have to do, double the management, and double the admin. That was a huge problem for us. I think one of the main reasons that we did switch was that I like having content with context. On pages, you have your content and then you have your context, which is your training and coaching around that. You couldn’t really do that with Seismic unless you hacked the page and it was kind of just like a click here type link. There weren’t any buttons. It wasn’t kind of like that smart navigation that you have on other platforms. With the digital sales rooms, they also kind of fell short a little bit, and the team felt that they were really difficult to create and they just weren’t used, even though that was one of the main drivers for purchasing the solution in the first place. Reps couldn’t find the content. Your platform is only as good as the content that they can find, so it was a huge problem there. That search wasn’t really optimized, and the pages weren’t that easy to navigate. Speaking of the pages, the overall look and feel of the platform just felt a little bit too clunky for a small organization and we really found it difficult to make the lessons and the pages look customized to our brand and the feel of our brand. I think you could have if you had a lot of design experience and had a team dedicated to doing that, but we didn’t. We had to be a little bit scrappy, so that was really challenging. Then finally, on the analytical side of things, it was really difficult to pull out the data and analytics on what was working and what was being used to really help us make those data-driven decisions. It actually took one of our team members multiple days to pull that data out for QBRs. She really struggled with this and would go to Seismic and ask for help and they would kind of just send her a help article. She’s like I already read the help article like I don’t know how to do this still. We really didn’t get the help that we needed. On the flip side of things, when I joined SEDNA, I did know that they were already feeling a lot of these challenges, so they were already in talks with Highspot. I think it was basically that our Highspot contact knew that we were coming up on our renewal, and also knew that you guys were launching your Training and Coaching side of things, which was a huge thing for us at the time. The Highspot reached out to my previous boss, like well before renewal, so I think that the Highspot team did a really good job reaching out and being proactive and following up because I really think that that helped us drive the change even further. That was like the nail in the coffin, like, hmm, actually we should look into Highspot again. That was really cool from the team. SS: Well, I love it, and I’m glad that you’ve joined the Highspot family. After implementing Highspot, how have you been able to solve some of the challenges your team was facing with your previous solution? MS: I think there were three main things for us that have actually solved a lot of the challenges that I spoke about earlier. The search was a huge win for us. Highspot search is absolutely amazing. I find things in one second. It’s funny because our platform is also renowned for search, so we feel very comfortable with that. Whereas sometimes when you’re searching on other platforms, you don’t really get what you’re looking for and then you have to try to figure out what page is it on. Or what folder did I put it in? This was a huge win for us. I don’t get any questions about where to find content anymore, so that was a huge sigh of relief for me. Pitching has also been a huge win for us. The team wasn’t really adopting this before, even though it was one of the absolute main reasons we purchased Seismic in the early days. My team absolutely loves that you can add multiple pieces of content in a branded environment rather than just kind of sending those one-off links to each of the pieces of content. That’s been a really big thing for us. Also just ease of use not only for the team and just how nice the platform looks in general from a UI perspective, but I think from my perspective as an admin. We completed our entire migration, tested it with the team, and rolled it out in literally about two to three weeks. It’s insanely quick. It didn’t feel quick, by the way. It was definitely a bit of a roller coaster for me trying to figure out cause I had never implemented a sales enablement platform before, but we could not have done that with our previous solution. That was huge for us in terms of the admin and upkeep. SS: To that point, I think getting buy-in from executive leaders on the impact of enablement and the value of your enablement platform is absolutely crucial. What are some of your best practices for securing buy-in from your executive stakeholders? MS: It’s pretty interesting. I think it’s about getting them to see the value through salespeople. Shouting positive things about it rather than me. I think the second it drives a deal forward or a prospect is like, oh, wow, that’s pretty cool, it definitely will catch their attention. I’m going through Sandler training right now with my new VP and it reminds me a bit of the Sandler Methodology that you have to get your prospect and realistically my sales stakeholders are my prospects and customers, but you almost have to get them to realize it themselves. The impact of something or the challenges they’re having rather than it coming from you. It’s much more powerful. I think that’s definitely the way to go, almost making them realize like oh, yeah we do have those challenges and wow that actually is a huge impact rather than you saying it yourself. I also, as I mentioned previously, include them up front in the process, and make sure they’re aware and informed throughout because that will really make sure that they’re bought in up front. They know exactly what we’re signing up for and you can already start to have key metrics that you want to measure and make sure that you’re holding yourself accountable for getting the ROI out of that platform. SS: Absolutely. Now, in addition to having leadership support, you have seen really strong adoption across all of your users. You have a recurring usage rate of 84%. What is your advice for driving adoption amongst your sellers? MS: It’s really interesting because our team was not really a fan of Seismic. In the beginning, we actually struggled to get people excited about Highspot because they thought it was like, oh, it’s just the same. We kept saying, no, it’s not, but of course, they don’t listen to us. We tell them things all the time. They need to find it out for themselves. What I did was I actually tried a few fun things when we launched it. One of those things was a holiday scavenger hunt where we provided clues that led to the most important pages that we wanted them to land on. Let’s say product or partnerships or personas pages. It helped them get the navigation down and understand where everything was located. We basically put holiday emojis on the piece of content that related to the clue so they had to go and find those. SS: I love that. Taking those skeptics and making them champions is absolutely clutch. Now, I want to ask because you’ve talked a lot throughout this podcast about the importance of a unified platform that can help you not only with content but also training and coaching and seamless experience is driving adoption. How have you started to leverage Highspot Training and Coaching and what are some of the results that you’ve seen so far? MS: The first thing that we did with Highspot Training and Coaching was actually a Highspot certification, naturally. That got them used to the features and functions of how to use it and how it was a little bit different than Lessonly, so we got them comfortable with it. Since then, we’ve done quite a lot of certifications. One of which was like a discovery demo certification that included not just some videos and some live sessions, but we actually took it one step further and did a video response with some test questions and had a rubric attached to that, that then matched our rubric in Gong. When we started to do call coaching later on, that was like the real-world example and not just kind of the role-play example. We could then take that rubric and use that later down the line and they were comfortable with it and familiar with it and knew exactly what they needed to change. That was the first real instance of using this. We were not able to do this with Seismic. The video uploads never worked for us, so we always had to do things like a manual send via Slack, which is just not ideal. With Highspot, we’re actually able to take the best video responses and I was able to then build a page with all of the best ones where people could then go and watch here’s what good looks like off the back of this. That could be Gong calls, but it could also be the video responses that they’re using. The next thing that I’m building out is actually an onboarding program for both BDRs and AEs. They join on the second of October, so I actually only have about a week left to be able to build this out, and maybe only 60% of the way. Onboarding just has so much content. I think it’s great that having that kind of platform that has both the content and the training and coaching is an absolute necessity for new joiners because not only do they have a place to go when it’s like oh I finished everything for today for my onboarding. They can go in, they have Gong calls to watch within Highspot, they have different video training that is bite-sized like my Mondays with Molly that they can go watch, they can see QBR decks, they can go kind of peruse product personal information. I think it’s just super helpful for them to have access to that content on day one and just in time when they want to discover it. On top of that, from my perspective, I can see exactly where they are in their onboarding journey. What have they completed? Pretty much every day they have pre-work, which tends to be like a series of e-learning videos or articles that they need to read, and some live sessions that we’ve run outside of Highspot. Then we throw them back into the platform in the afternoon for their post-work, which could be a presentation that they have to create, and then they need to upload the link into Highspot so we can grade it and give them feedback on it, or an objection handling role play that they need to do. We use test questions a lot, and we also use the free video response a lot. That just means that as we grow our new joiners and we have people go through onboarding we can start taking best practices and link the videos that they do within that without having to download upload and record them via Zoom. It just makes that way easier. Just having everything in that one unified platform. SS: I love that. On that note, last question for you, Molly. This has been fantastic by the way. What has been the impact of having a unified platform on sales productivity, and do you have any key wins or business outcomes you can share? MS: I think getting our top seller on board was a huge key win for us because I think if we didn’t manage to do that, I think we would have been in trouble. That was probably our biggest win of really driving that adoption and making sure that sales are productive with it. We’ve also done some additional things, like refresher training. Some of those will also be coming up on Mondays with Molly. Just little things, like if we get updates in Highspot, I know you guys are always launching new, amazing features. That Monday with Molly is a perfect outlet to then be like, hey, this is actually something new that you can do on the platform and I want you to start doing it today. I can start measuring that. In general, I don’t get any more questions, like Where can we find X? The search function is working really well. It means that reps can find the content that they need in a matter of seconds, rather than doing the whole waiting for somebody to answer on Slack, which could take hours if not days. If I’m really busy, sometimes I forget to respond. Actually, there’s a funny story that happened the other day that I think brings us to life. We have a new RevOps contractor who’s doing some territory planning and books of business for us. She actually asked me the question the other day and fair enough I didn’t train her on Highspot and she said, hey, do we have a document on ICP or something like that? I said no, actually we don’t have that document. I need to build it, blah, blah, blah. She said this back to me and I quote, I am glad I’m not crazy. Things are so well organized here that I have to keep reminding myself if you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. I thought that was like a true testament to what we’re trying to do with not only the search function but really optimizing that guided selling experience so that if you don’t know where something lives and you’re not really sure exactly what you’re looking for and what it’s called, that you can navigate and kind of discover that content as it comes up and as needed. I think we need to refine that a little bit more moving forward now that we know what people are searching for and updating that content. I think we have a really good, strong foundation to start with and it is clearly working. Marketing was able to pull out all of the most used external content, which really provided the foundation on which they were able to prioritize which pieces of content they should actually update first. I think that was really helpful for them. We, of course, don’t have a crazy amount of content. I think we have maybe 400 or so assets in the platform, but if you had to go through 400 and try to prioritize, just kind of finger in the wind, that would have taken them a really long time. I think it saved them quite a lot of time on that front. In saying all of this, I actually wish that we had really concrete and better metrics, but with my role shifting so much, we haven’t really measured enough or properly used the governance side. It’s actually something that’s on my list to work on over the next few months. As part of the refresh, we’re actually going to dive a little bit deeper into some of these and what KPIs we really want to measure moving forward to really make that impact of the platform a lot greater. I am really excited to see where we end up. If I talk to you in a year from now, I think it will be amazing. SS: I can’t wait. I would love to have you back, Molly. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. MS: No problem. Thank you so much 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 maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Research from a survey by Gartner found that the average quota attainment for sellers who are highly motivated is 1.7 times higher than those with low motivation. So, how can you drive productivity through enablement and motivate your teams to succeed? 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 Carly Foerster, senior manager of enablement at Classy. Thanks for joining, Carly! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Carly Foerster: It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Hey everyone, my name is Carly Foerster. I’m the Lead Enablement Manager over here at Classy, and I have been so thankful to have been with Classy for the past seven years. It’s wild to think that it’s been that long, and really what I love so much about this work is that we’re able to work every single day with incredible nonprofit organizations and help them raise more money to support their mission. I’ve worked at various levels of our sales organization. I was an SDR back in the day and I’ve been an account executive on the front lines. For the past five years, I’ve been on our enablement team. Again, I am really just grateful every day to learn something new, even seven years down the line, and to work with nonprofits as we mobilize the world for good. SS: I love that. Now, to start, because you’ve been with Classy, as you said, for seven years, tell us about the enablement journey at Classy, and what were the core components of your enablement strategy? CF: It’s a work of love here. It certainly has taken a while to get up and running through those five years, at least that I’ve been with the team, and really appreciative to our small but mighty team over here for making it happen. When I think about the enablement strategy at Classy, it really breaks down into three key guiding principles that we use to direct where we go with enablement in the now and in the future. The first one is that we focus on ensuring that every seller is successful. This truly is the guiding principle for our entire program. From the moment that a new hire in our sales or customer growth organizations is extended an offer for the team, we get right to work on curating what that pathway for success looks like. We have an onboarding and everboarding experience that’s centered in a 30, 60, and 90-day framework because we recognize that the first 90 days are crucial to that new hire’s development. That’s no new news to anyone in the enablement space. There are so many reports online where you can find that. We know that that is such an integral and crucial part of that development. Through those first 90 days, we are carefully crafting a mix of live training with experts, certification pathways, on-demand content via Highspot, of course, and coaching and anything we can to help them be successful. Ultimately, we set that strong foundation for sellers so that they can provide the best experience for our incredible nonprofit partners. That’s part one. Part two, ties actually hand in hand to part one, which is this drive to always be learning. That’s actually a personal core value that I’ve taken on in my time at Classy because this hunger for development is a philosophy that’s essential to personal and professional growth, especially in the nonprofit industry that we work within. We’re constantly seeking out ways to learn more about the future of fundraising and how we can better position and grow our product to help our nonprofit partners raise more to do more for their missions. Our ongoing enablement program for our sales and customer growth teams is going to be a varied mix of live trainings from industry experts, both internally and externally from our team. We assess and have strategic conversations with leadership to figure out what’s the next growth point for enablement, and have built out a lot of on-demand content and pathways through Highspot. That list goes on and on. Lastly, our third guiding principle here, I’ll wrap it up, is that we win as a team. This is something that I feel really fortunate about having been with Classy for the past seven years, is that we truly have this collaborative environment that’s across enablement, sales, marketing, operations, product, and any team that we have here on the ground. We are working together to ensure that we’re making every single seller successful, and by extension, we’re helping our nonprofits do more. We are leveraging and leaning into each other to build content in Highspot, to deliver live trainings, and to do as much as we can to be successful. Those are our three guiding principles and I’m always happy to share more about them. SS: Those are spot on what makes a strong team and a strong culture within an organization. Now, I do want to ask a little bit about the role that the enablement platform plays in your overall enablement strategy. CF: In this case, it’s Highspot for Classy, of course. That’s the reason why I’m on this podcast. In my mind, an enablement platform is central and integral as a component of a successful and scaled enablement program. I want to focus on that word scale because that’s where you can really create this trajectory for the future. There is very little that we do on the enablement team that doesn’t include some sort of play or asset that’s tied to it within Highspot because this serves as our source of truth hub of resources for our team that they’re able to send out to our nonprofit partners, but it also serves as that strategic training tool that we’re leveraging again every single day to teach our team new concepts and processes and products and soft skills and anything that’s needed for the future. As I said, if you’re looking to build out a really, really successful and solid scaled enablement program, having an enablement platform like this is absolutely essential to that journey. SS: I love that. Now, prior to Highspot, you had a different platform in place. Can you tell us about that experience and maybe some of the challenges your team was facing? CF: I’d love to focus more on the reasons why we found such value in Highspot because that’s what it all comes down to. Previously we had leveraged a similar platform that allowed us to store and share our content across our team and by extension, our nonprofit customers. Unfortunately, as happens in the technology space, it wasn’t the just right Goldilocks fit that we were looking for. That happens and that’s why we’re constantly evaluating and growing. I think on top of that, another challenge we had run into was just adoption of the platform itself was pretty low percentages we were seeing from sales and customer growth. We hadn’t quite built that trust in this system with those teams. Fortunately, we discovered Highspot as we were looking to evaluate some new tools and we discovered. It’s extremely easy to use a comprehensive toolset. In my mind when I look back, what it helped us do was really elevate our team’s ability to learn more at a faster pace and have extremely easy access to all of the resources that they needed to provide the best experience through sales and the customer journey for all of our nonprofit partners. On top of that, I talked about adoption being a little bit lower with the former platform we were using. With Highspot we’ve seen just astronomical adoption rates and a big piece of that is that we built trust early on with that team. We are really appreciative of the true partnership that we’ve seen, the human element with Highspot as well, and the intentional support we get from the team. Together we’re creating a more successful enablement environment at Classy. SS: You mentioned that with Highspot, your team has improved productivity and you are no longer bogged down with questions like, where’s this piece of content or where’s this training? Tell us more about that. How has a single source of truth helped you boost productivity? CF: Yeah, if I could put it in one word, it’s just immensely. I was thinking about this and remembering back to the days when we were answering questions. It felt like almost every half hour, and I’d estimate that roughly 30 to 40 percent of the daily work time of my team was spent just answering questions like, where is this resource, or do we have a resource for X, Y, Z? That’s a significant amount of time and energy that we were spending directing traffic for our team. I can’t say that I crunched numbers exactly, but if I were to estimate on the Highspot side of how much this has cut down that 30 to 40%, I’d have to say that I’m now down to about like 5 to 10% of my day is answering some of those directional questions. Even more so, it’s often that it’s a directional question paired with a, how do I use this? It’s a little bit more of an amplified question. I mean, what a difference that’s made for us, especially our enablement team where this frees up our time to focus on more proactive approaches to enablements and deliver more impactful resources to our sellers at a really fast pace. On top of that, we’ve heard great feedback from our sellers, and from our teams, since we’ve implemented Highspot, particularly around how easy it is to find the resources that we need. That’s really where we’re able to cut down on that time and pivot and focus on things that matter even more to us. SS: I love that. Now on the rep side of things, obviously in addition to improving productivity for enablement, how have you seen productivity improve for your sales reps? CF: Our sellers have provided great feedback since this has been implemented. It really underlines how Highspot is adding to its success with that productivity focus. It’s an easy-to-use single source of truth. That means that our sellers are spending less time waiting through the floating PDFs, the emails, the Slack messages, all of those sources where you’re like, where am I supposed to go here? They’re able to just go to one single source and easily use filters or search bars to find access to what they need. For me, when I take a look at that, that saves time for them to focus back on activities where they can invest more in meaningful conversations with our nonprofit partners, which is the ultimate goal of what we were looking for when we moved to Highspot as a partner. SS: The numbers speak for themselves. I mean, you guys have had a really strong adoption of Highspot since the onset. Your recurring usage rate is consistently at 85% or higher, which is amazing. What are some of your tips or best practices for driving the adoption of the platform amongst your reps? CF: Well, Shawnna, I’d like to say it’s all on me, but no. First things first, I really do have to give a shout-out to the amazing people that I have the good fortune to work with every single day. There’s a reason why I’ve stayed here for seven years. A lot of it goes back to the people that I get to surround myself with every day. I bring that up because it is due to the collaborative environment that we’ve built with this team through enablement, sales, customer growth, ops, marketing, and beyond that we’ve been able to build trust in software like Highspot so that when we deliver it to our sales and our customer growth organizations, they are ready to jump in head first and make it happen. As far as best practices go, I think the first part is just to make sure everyone’s on the same page so that when you go to deliver and implement a system like Highspot, everyone is trusting of what’s about to happen. The second thing that we’ve really focused on, and honestly could still be doing a better job of, is pulling in the keen members to the fold when we’re going through the planning process with new content and new plays and new spots that we’re launching to ensure that it’s meeting the needs of the people that it’s actually intended for. Reaching out to relevant teams, reaching out to even just high-performing reps to say, can you take a look at this before I put it up for everyone to see? I’d love to get your buy-in here. Then, on top of that, can you also be the person who shares this with your team because now it’s not just coming from one single source? It’s coming from the network and the collaborative environment that we’ve built out here. Those are two really big learning lessons that we had. A third one that I just thought of that I absolutely have to call out is the accountability piece. In particular, we got buy-in really early on from our leadership teams for this purchase of Highspot. I’m extremely thankful that we’ve been able to lean on them as what I’m going to call accountability allies. It’s not just that the assignments or the plays are coming from enablement, they are woven into the framework of what our leadership team is bumping down to their teams to focus on. It’s accountability, it’s collaborative, collaboration, and it is pulling the right folks into the room so that you’re getting the right feedback and you’re, you’re heading in the right direction together. SS: Now you mentioned plays and another area where you’ve been extremely strong in traction on our plays, which you guys have a 95 percent adoption rate, which is amazing, Carly, I have to say. What are your best practices for building effective sales plays? CF: There’s been a few key learnings along the way here, and I have to give a shout-out to our Highspot team that supports us because from the beginning we’ve had incredible resources and best practices that your team has shared to make sure that we’re successful. I think the first part of the success we found was identifying a framework that is impactful and accessible to the audience it’s intended for. Highspot is great at providing some templates, and we also just have our own experience, and what we know lands well with the team. We don’t stop there. You can find a framework, but we have to validate it. We validate it by taking it again to the intended audience, whether it’s to a relevant team that’s set up for whatever we’re about to launch a training on, or again, just a top performer or somebody that has a really good eye for detail. We take it to them and say, is this helpful? Is this an impact? If the answer is yes, we know that we’re headed in the right direction. Tying back to my earlier answer, accountability is also huge here. That’s where we really lean into our partnership with managers and leadership to, I don’t want to say enforce, but hold teams and hold ourselves accountable to completing the plays, the lessons, whatever it might be that we’re sending out via Highspot. Lastly, there’s such power in simply integrating this into every single part of your enablement structure. It’s not just that, Highspot is one floating area of what’s happening or your sales enablement platform is one floating area. It’s that you’re integrating it and weaving it into the ecosystem of enablement. One great example to think of is onboarding. It is pulling up those plays during onboarding, which we do every single onboarding class. We have them bookmark the most important ones to be using. We walk them through how to use them and where to find those resources. If you start from the beginning as a new hire and it’s just known that this is a part of what you do for enablement. That is the behavior that we’re enforcing through the rest of their time at Classy. SS: I love that behavior change, especially with reps, it’s absolutely crucial to getting them to adopt those new behaviors. What are some of the results that you’ve seen since leveraging sales plays, and how do you leverage them to help boost rep productivity? CF: It really depends on the type of play that’s being launched, because the way that we develop plays is there some sort of in some cases, not all cases, there’s some sort of KPI or measurement that we’re using based on whatever the content of the play is. If I were to think of an example of what this looks like for us, we often create plays that focus on cause areas for our nonprofit partners and cause areas are the mission, and the work that they deliver to their communities. These plays are really built to provide our sellers with an opportunity to not only be industry experts and experts in what we know, which is the value of Classy and the value of what we bring to our nonprofit partners, but to also be knowledgeable about the trends, the challenges, the structures, and more of nonprofits in those particular cause areas. In the nonprofit space, we know that our partners are oftentimes wearing a hundred proverbial hats, different roles that they have to cover. They don’t have the time to dedicate to helping educate us on the work that they do. We need to take that on ourselves to help empower the conversations we’re having. We are preparing our sellers to be really intentional and have impactful conversations that are tailored to those nonprofits’ specific needs, and also know how we’ve helped solve those challenges with similar organizations that we work with. We may tie a KPI to that around how we have been able to move the needle forward with organizations in a particular cause area after we’ve released that play. That’s really where we’re, we’re taking some measurements and we have seen the impacts when we are providing that education opportunity to empower our sellers to do more and know more. It is showing results on how many nonprofits we’re able to bring to our organization. We’re thankful for the opportunity to have that education. SS: Love that. Carly, last question for you. How do you plan to continue to evolve your enablement strategy in the next year, and how do you envision leveraging Highspot to help? CF: It’s a really big question to ask. There’s so much that we want to accomplish. I love that you’re asking it. I think in this always-learning mindset, we are always looking for ways to evolve and elevate the way that we enable our sellers. Our core focus is ensuring that we’re providing resources content and training that quickly elevates the expertise of our team and sets them on a trajectory for success in their personal and professional lives, which we know ultimately empowers them to provide a better experience for our nonprofit customers. The way that Highspot plays into that picture is this really is the foundation of what we’re providing our sellers. Where do they find the resources the assets and the guidance to provide that best-in-class experience so that we can deliver a world-class experience back to our nonprofits who are doing so much in this world? We’re really thankful to have Highspot on board with us. I’m thankful for the team that I’m able to work with every day. We’re on this journey together. We’re walking the road and we’re looking towards having an even more successful enablement program. SS: Well, Carly, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today. I appreciate your time. CF: Absolutely. Shawnna, I appreciate 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.

Our internal research reveals that customers leveraging Highspot Training & Coaching report a 22% increase in average deal size. So, how can you optimize your training and coaching efforts to impact business results and gain buy-in for enablement from your executive leaders? 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 Chelsey Groh, director of enablement and training at Motus. Thanks for joining, Chelsey! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Chelsey Groh: Thank you, Shawnna. Thanks for having me. I’ve been specifically dedicated to enablement and training for about the last three years at Motus. Prior to that, it’s been some sort of version of my role. We all know that enablement is always an evolving force and it looks different at every organization. The last three years it’s been the main focus of what I do on the day-to-day. I am the director of learning and enablement at Motus. We’re a reimbursement company and prior to that, I’ve had about 15 years of SaaS experience in sales. SS: Well, Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us. It sounds like you’ve had a fantastic journey in your enablement career, and I know that you’re about a year into your journey with Highspot. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about that journey so far, and in particular, what were some of the pain points you were experiencing before Highspot? CG: Prior to Highspot, we were seeing a lot of problems in getting things in a really dedicated space that was highly accessible from an enablement perspective, not even just for our selling roles, but across the organization. We were looking for something that we could easily report on and create a combined space that as we move our enablement journey forward at Motus, encompasses everything that we’re doing. One of the things that really attracted us when we were looking at Highspot, as simple as it sounds, was the fact that we could seamlessly move everything over from SharePoint and correct our versioning issue in the blink of an eye. I’d love to tell you that it was this big masterful plan, but it was all made up of the smallest details that paint us on a day-to-day basis that made Highspot a no-brainer for us. SS: Well, I still love to hear that all of those details definitely add up. How have you been able to solve some of those challenges since you’ve implemented Highspot? CG: Some of the big things that we’ve been able to solve are number one, we finally have an eye on exactly what our sellers are using day in and day out and what’s productive from that usage. The other thing that we’re able to do is create a streamlined message across Motus as opposed to really every department being siloed and creating their own and marching with that. We’re finally starting to see this congruent message across the way that we’ve so longed for, especially with the evolving product lines and things that we have going on. Motus isn’t what it was even a year ago. We’re constantly growing. What we’ve been able to do and able to accomplish within Highspot is to create an environment where people can onboard successfully and quickly. We’ve seen a more cohesive voice across the way, but we’ve also seen an environment where people are hungry and eager to get in and actually see the data that’s available that comes with a platform like Highspot. SS: I love hearing that. You actually shared with your Highspot team that the platform is actually now a core part of your tech stack. As I mentioned in the introduction, your C-suite is fully bought in on its value. What are your best practices for gaining buy-in from your executive stakeholders? CG: To be honest, it comes from a fundamental point of how we run our shop here at Motus. We do everything with the utmost business needs to come front and forward. I think anytime you’re championing an initiative like this, you have to start from the top. Whenever we purchased Highspot, it wasn’t something that we just looked at and said, yes, these services are sellers. We looked at a long-term strategic vision across the business and how it could expand. We saw that Highspot could service those needs. Having the executive level buy-in that early and really being able to tell that story and show how it demonstrates to accomplish those business initiatives has allowed us to continue that excitement and that buy-in from the top down. I would say it’s just as simple as that. Including them at the beginning and really showcasing how it solves those business needs. There are a lot of times that we put in these features and how wonderful it’s going to be for our people and things like that, but when we actually take a step back and tie it to what we’re really supposed to be accomplished within the business, it just makes sense. SS: Wonderful. Now, what is your advice for continuing to prove the impact of enablement on the business and then communicating that impact to your executive leaders? CG: When it comes down to it, we’re all about how we can impact the revenue to the organization and tie it back to those business needs as I discussed before. It’s also about really speaking the language of the C-Suite and what matters to them. We want to create a highly repeatable process so that our outcomes are not only sustainable but predictable. Translating those training initiatives and how they tie to specific business KPIs and the metrics, and also tying the activity in Highspot and how those contribute to those, it’s not just a cost, but it’s that strategic alignment that we talked about before. Really building a case and showcasing how we can tie to those measurements. How we can create that repeatable process, but also speak the language of the C-suite of what matters to them? SS: I think those are key points and great advice. One area where you’ve already begun to see amazing results with Highspot is through training and coaching. In fact, you achieved 83 percent active participation. I’d love to understand from you, from your perspective, what good training and coaching look like. CG: I have to attribute a large amount to my team with Maggie and Somi. Maggie is our senior training manager and Somi is our instructional designer. I have a highly impactful team that is able to address the vision of what we’ve come up with in collaborating with the business need that allows an output that is not only engaging for someone who’s participating in the learning or the enablement but also takes into account the actual need that it’s fulfilling. I think the biggest reason we see such high adoption is number one, that executive buy-in that we’ve talked about, kind of is this trend across the podcast. Anytime you have a champion from the top down, of course, you’re going to see higher completion rates. It’s important to the business. They are also going to be vetted in that effort. Number two is creating meaningful material. I often hear people saying, well, who doesn’t love training? Just create a training for it. Everyone would love to be enabled. Everyone would love to learn more. That’s not always the case. There’s so often that we throw training or enablement at that thinking that that’s going to be the solution, but being very thoughtful in that process and really understanding what you’re creating what that expected outcome is, and what you want to achieve. If you don’t have an expected outcome and you don’t know what you expect to get from that, there’s no point. Just stop. SS: I couldn’t agree more. How do you go about using Highspot to deliver more effective training and coaching? CG: Well, I think what I like most about Highspot is the fact that we’re not limited to even just your traditional LMS. Training and Coaching is a wonderful platform and we have the ability to build out not only aesthetically pleasing training, but we have the ability to coach and train through other avenues as well. Training and coaching, of course, we use for onboarding. We build out these wonderful learning paths that are meaningful to the individual that’s participating, but going beyond that, we have sales plays and all of these wonderful opportunities to educate our people on the process and build out that understanding that I think comes full circle. I think that’s one of the things that whenever we look at the training and coaching platform and we look at Highspot as a whole it’s not just the opportunity for one-off learning. It’s the ability to build more. SS: I love that. Now, in the last few months, you’ve also seen a 32% increase in course completion in Highspot, which again is fantastic. What are your best practices for motivating rep engagement in your training and coaching programs? CG: That’s hard sometimes. We have a lot of reps at varying skill levels and at some point reps go, I know it. I’ve got it. I’m top performing. I’m the president’s club. I’m a peak performer. I’ve got it all. One of the things that we’ve really focused on in the last couple of years is creating an environment where learning is not only a part of what we do, but it’s a fundamental part of our culture, and we want to expand on those talents. There’s so much of that that contributes to our course completion average, but not only that, with that openness and that vulnerability that we are expecting from our people. They’re hungry to learn. There’s so much more that people don’t understand that we often overlook. I think in this role and go, gosh, nobody’s going to want to do this. We’ve already asked for their time in the last month, things like that. Many people are looking to consume more knowledge and want to have those growth opportunities within their roles. It comes from things like this. I think when it’s communicated and it’s part of your strategy, you get people more excited to get in and complete those learnings. SS: I love that. Now, one thing I wanted to make sure I got a chance to chat with you about was a recent thread that you shared on LinkedIn about best practices for training sales leaders. Why is leadership training so important and how does that differ from rep training? CG: I often like to joke that they’re not all that different, but they are. Well, let’s start with the first part of that question. The reason that sales leadership is so important is that if you don’t have buy-in from the leaders in enablement, we’re not allowed to be with our sellers day in and day out. That coaching is sustained by their sales leaders, so if we do not take the time to actually get them up to speed on the initiative and the expected outcomes and how they are supposed to be holding their people accountable and really the measurable outcomes for the business, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s something that you’re going to see great success out of potentially for like the first 90 days, and then you’re going to see it fizzle. When we don’t take the time to bring our sales leaders up to speed, specifically on their skills that they need as leaders, but also within whatever initiatives we’re enabling on you’re not going to see continued success and you’re going to find yourself beating your head up against the board a lot trying to spin up these expected outcomes. Again, you find yourself really frustrated. I think the second part of that is, yes, your leaders are at an elevated learning level. That’s why they are where they are. It’s not so much about teaching them the fundamental skills so much as it is aligning the process that you’re teaching along with the information that’s going out as well. So often we get really comfortable with our leadership teams and I mean, I’m guilty of it as well here where we’re finally getting an ebb and flow where they’re like, we trust you put out whatever, and then we put out whatever and then your sellers are stuck learning and wondering why their leaders aren’t keeping up. You have to keep it as an important and crucial part as you roll out these new initiatives. SS: Absolutely. You hit on something there because as you said, a key part of equipping sales leaders for success is ensuring that they’re prepared to then coach their teams. How do you train and prepare leaders to be effective coaches? CG: That’s a really loaded question. The way that we are training our coaches today to be effective is not only addressing the KPIs and the metrics that they’re holding their teams to but also how to really encourage and motivate their people at an individual level. We do a lot of different things here at Motus. We utilize Gong, we utilize Highspot, and we also utilize a tool called Predictive Index that is issued by our PeopleOps team. Understanding how to access your people on a level that makes sense to them, but also, how do I coach and what does that look like here at Motus? We need to utilize our tools appropriately. One of the big initiatives that we’ve actually taken on this quarter is we’re getting really heavily involved in Gong and Highspot and really understanding how to utilize those scorecards and meeting notes and some of the great features that have also come out in Gong to enhance our coaching experience for our sellers. The hope is not only to create more effective coaches, but it’s also to create reps that are comfortable with assessing their own skills. To us, that creates a stronger team and it also allows our leaders to get back into some of the details and some of the more fundamental aspects of their roles as a leader. SS: I love that, Chelsea, last question for you. As you continue to leverage Highspot as a growth lever for your company, what is the value that you envision enablement having for the organization as a whole beyond sales? CG: In utilizing Highspot for our entire organization, as we expand our enablement efforts into the organization from customer success to product development, whatever it might be our well-equipped team needs better outcomes across the board. In order for us to create those better outcomes and really understand what that looks like, it starts at the beginning. You hear this trend of everboarding, right, which is essentially ongoing enablement. It goes beyond onboarding, and by having everyone in one system and enabling the org across the way and streamlining that communication and that voice, that’s going to give us the business outcome that we’re looking for and I believe in a much more rapid pace than what we could have ever expected. It’s about fostering that culture of learning and development and enablement that we talked about earlier but making sure that it permeates every department. We started at sales and I think I left that out of my intro. I started in sales enablement at Motus and now I’m over enablement for the entire org here. That just goes to show you how important it is to have that streamlined focus and voice across the way that’s going to provide a valuable and meaningful impact in those changed behaviors that you’re looking for at an org-wide level. SS: Well, again, congratulations on a fantastic trajectory there at Motus. Chelsea, thank you so much for joining this podcast. CG: 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 maximize enablement success with Highspot.

A recent survey by Gartner found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find information or data needed to effectively perform their jobs, which can negatively impact rep productivity. So how can you drive sales productivity through enablement? 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 Kara Huff, the senior global marketing manager of services, support & training at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence. Thanks for joining, Kara! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Kara Huff: Thanks so much for having me. I’m the global marketing manager for Hexagon. I’ve been in the marketing industry for 25 years. Throughout product development, portfolio management, and of course, how we enable our sales fields to be successful with our products and solutions. SS: Thank you so much for joining us, Kara. Now, I’d like to return to that question in the intro. From your perspective, how does enablement help drive sales productivity and what are some of your best practices to do so? KH: Great question. Sales productivity has changed so much over the past couple of years with all of the different technology that’s out there, and especially with the technology stack that you provide for your field sellers. It’s kind of been a learning game to figure out how we utilize all of those to come together. What we’ve realized is that the more tools that we have that are integrated, that provide a seamless experience for our field sellers, not only helps them to be productive but also helps them on their journey to assist potential customers with their digital transformation. It’s crucial in everything that we do from a Hexagon perspective. SS: I love that. A key piece of productivity is efficiency. We think about it in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Prior to implementing Highspot, this was a pain point of yours due to having multiple siloed platforms. Can you tell us more about the efficiency challenges you were facing and how you kind of overcame those with Highspot? KH: Absolutely. So pre-COVID, we had a lot of different platforms and we’re looking to evolve our technology stack. We had a DAM, so we had a data asset management platform, but we couldn’t see all of the analytics of how content was utilized, and what was hitting all marks with our field sellers. What were our potential customers and existing customers engaging with? We needed something that could give us some analytics and walk us through that buying journey to see what good content looks like and how it’s utilized. We had over 14,000 pieces of content and when we looked for any CMS and chose Highspot, we were able to narrow that down to about 7,000 assets then over the last couple of years we were able to utilize those analytics to really refine what was good content where we could spend more of our time producing effective pieces of content. Right now we have gone from 14,000 to about 3,500 representing over 78 products and solutions in our portfolio. It’s helped us to become significantly more efficient in our productivity from a marketing perspective. SS: It sounds like it sounds like you guys were really able to narrow it down to those key pieces of content that resonate with your buyers. Now, your governance strategy clearly has played a key role in helping you improve that efficiency. In fact, I was looking at the stats for your Highspot instance, and you guys are at 55 percent of your content being well governed, which is fantastic. What does your governance strategy look like? KH: That is also a great question. We worked with our Highspot team to understand exactly what good governance of a CMS looks like, and while 55 percent is great, we would love to increase that to around 70 to 75%. How we’re doing that is we establish a governance guide for our admins of the platform, for our spot owners, so that they can understand exactly what good content looks like. We set up some matrix for them to continuously monitor. We have monthly tasks that they should perform quarterly and yearly. Doing that, allows them to really dive in and do a couple of things, like a content refresh to understand what’s working and what’s not, what’s being utilized, and maybe things that are not getting as much visibility as they would have expected that it would. It allows them to review things like tagging accessibility or spot location to understand how we can refine it for it to become more effective. It also allows us to really look at the noise. As marketers, sometimes you have stakeholders that think more is better, more content, more explanation. With our analytics going through those as part of our governance strategy allows us to use data to say, hey, this is really what’s resonating and not, and as part of our governance, if we have content that hasn’t been viewed in 90 plus days, then that allows us to do a trigger to say, okay, it’s not working. You either need to retag or reassess the content in it, or we need to archive that so that we can allow valuable content to rise to the surface. SS: I love that. How has your governance strategy helped you improve sales efficiency? Do you have a few data points you can share? KH: Yeah, absolutely. Inside of our scorecards that we use for all of our spots, the governance that we have established that says, before when you’ve got a lot of different products and you’ve got a lot of different content types, we thought that it was great to have depth more so than breadth. Our governance strategy has allowed us to look at it to say, that we thought that solution sheets were beneficial for field sellers, but we’ve come to find out that things that we might have just provided as a little cherry on top, if you will, actually resonate more with our field sellers and has higher engagement with our customers. It’s really allowed us to refine that to say, here is what effective content is and where you should be spending your effort first which might take less time to create and implement than what we originally had in our scope. SS: That’s fantastic. Now, in addition to efficiency, as I mentioned, effectiveness is also a key piece of the productivity formula. One of your big initiatives recently was focused on boosting effectiveness by providing more than 25 plays on your different products. What was the impetus for this initiative? KH: Sales plays is something that we started going into our second year of having Highspot. We had all the content in there, and we wanted to enable our field to be able to sell it from a systematic approach through content. We set up those sales plays, we did a lot of checks and balances on what good looked like, and then we had a shift in our portfolio of how we were going to position ourselves in the marketplace. We determined that we needed to have enablement packages geared around those new initiatives. If we had an enablement package, we needed to have a sales play that supported those initiatives. We did an additional 25 sales plays for our sales kickoff that would enable our field to not only hear about the new enablement packages that were developed for them but also to have a sales play around each one of those that included things like what to know, what to say, what to show, and what to pitch. We provided that consistent approach with a refined asset list for all of those sales plays so that it didn’t matter which approach our field sellers or our account development reps were coming into the process with, they had a consistent method in which to enable themselves. They also share relevant content with our prospects and customers. SS: I love that. You already touched on a lot of best practices there, but do you have any additional best practices you would share around building effective plays? KH: Absolutely. It’s great to have a template that just establishes some guardrails. Of course, with all products, you’re going to have a little bit of variance on what’s relative and what’s needed. Sometimes the depth can expand, but by providing a template and saying, hey, guys, here’s the minimum of what you have to have in here, and here is the maximum of what you can have in here, and here is what every play should include. Having pitch templates with pitch styles has been hugely successful for us because ultimately it delivers a plug-and-play method for sales, which is really what they need. We want them to be able to come in and see the sales play, get the tools that they need to be able to be successful, and then really just have that pitch template that they can use over and over and over again to really gauge the engagement from their prospects. With all of our sales plays, another requirement that we did is building in the mandatory integration with our Salesforce opportunities. As a filled seller, no matter if they were inside of our Highspot instance, or if they were in GoSell, or if they were in their Outlook or email client, anytime that they were talking around a specific product of interest or solution of interest, that once that was determined, that it automatically populated those plays for them and included those pitch templates so that it created this almost automatic behavior for them to always utilize those plays and always utilize the content in it, which then allowed us to constantly measure the engagement and understand what was winning and hitting and further refine those as, as we go along our process and then building that entire governance. It’s really a full-circle process. SS: I love that. Now you’ve achieved 71% adoption of your plays, which is also amazing. How do you drive the adoption of your plays? KH: That’s a great question, and I would love to say that I have the answer to it. It comes with a lot of trial and error. I think that part of the success attributed to the adoption of plays is the confidence that we’ve just put in the platform. It comes with well-governed content. It comes with well-organized content and spots. Knowing that you have got resources that are dedicated to refining it and creating that consistency and collaboration with multiple teams. We actually have teams that come together and do our plays that span multiple different departments within our organization. We have product owners who are in that process, we have our portfolio strategy and enablement team, our marketing team, and our campaigns team. We have a lot of different key players at the table when we’re developing those plays. Of course, we put them up in that consistent manner, make sure they’re checked off and they meet our standards. Then, we communicate that to our field sellers to let them know that they’re available to them. After we make sure that it is working with all of the different systems that we have it integrated with, whether it be Salesforce or we utilize Salesloft for our account development team, it’s also integrated there. We get all of that setup and enabled, and then we communicate that in a method to all of the end users for those plays to know that they’re available. Then we just drive that home with continuing training and awareness of letting them know where they are and having them in the forefront inside of our platform. It’s a lot of different things that we’re trying. We have seen great success and now we just want to continue to refine that process while we continue to update the additional 50-plus sales plays that we already have in our Highspot instance today. SS: Now, to analyze the impact of plays, because you talked about how important it is to look at how things are performing, I know play scorecards are a key resource for you. What are your best practices for leveraging scorecards to monitor the success of your programs and really optimize the impact? KH: Scorecards are something that are relatively new for us. They were in beta, I believe, earlier this year while we were working on getting all of our sales plays up and launched. When they started coming out, it was really helping us to understand not just from the analytics. It's really just like that specific play or that specific spot, what was working and by coming in, it allowed us to look at the scorecards and say, hey, we can look at this by user role, or we can look at this from a content effectiveness perspective, or we can look at this from a pitch engagement perspective. Those are some things that it’s really helped us dive into to understand. As you had mentioned earlier, our sales play adoption, but also our pitch adoption. By having those scorecards when we set our goals for 2023, we had initially set a 25% increase in pitch adoption, which we thought was a lofty but attainable goal. Yet with those scorecards, we’ve seen 125% pitch adoption. It’s kind of blown our mind a little bit, but the analytics is where it allows us to look at not only what’s working, but also to deliver that data back to our stakeholders that are spending so many resources and time dedicated to developing those plays for them to understand that they’re resonating and that they’re working. The scorecards, while we do utilize those to help us, we’re just on the tip of the surface on sales plays and being able to refine those and We’re going to utilize some of those metrics and those scorecards to help us define what our 2024 goals are to allow us to dig even deeper into that and increase pitch engagement from an outside perspective. SS: Impressive pitch stats there, by the way. Kudos to you and the team for that. That’s amazing. Now, Kara, to close, what are some of the key business results that you’ve seen as it relates to sales productivity since implementing Highspot? KH: There’s been a lot of benefits that we’ve seen, actually. A lot of the points that we’ve talked about today, like providing a single source for our field sellers have been huge. Not only one area that they can come to but one that they know is integrated with our platforms. It’s updated consistently. They know that it’s the latest and greatest content. They know that our biggest initiatives from a sales perspective are at the forefront. They know that we can see how they are engaging with that content or not, which I think plays into the adoption part. Also, them being able to see the analytics and the engagement behind their pitches to know what’s working and what’s not. I think that it’s important and our initiatives to state while we do have guardrails right inside the platform, here’s all of this different material and different ways that you can utilize it, that we allow them to do it and what works best for them. If that’s a pitch link or an email pitch or a live pitch, or if it’s through Salesforce or their email client, we don’t care how they use the content and how they pitch the content. We just want them to be able to do it where they need it, how they need it, and help them see what productive content and engagement looks like. They’re our biggest users of the platform, so we use them and their feedback to continuously refine it. That helps us be more successful, and the more that we listen to them and the more we refine it the more confidence they have and everything that’s deployed within our Highspot. As I said, it’s definitely a team initiative and a team goal, and a lot of different contributors to it, but Highspot has allowed us to continuously grow and be successful in that. It’s developed a winning collaboration, so we greatly appreciate our Highspot reps and everything they do to help us be successful. SS: Well, Kara, thank you. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. KH: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Shawnna. 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.

According to the Salesforce State of Sales Report, 81% of sales reps say their managers are their most valuable source of support in navigating change. So, how can you enable sales leaders so that they can effectively support their teams and drive change? 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 Bree Liscinsky, director of sales enablement at Blancco Technology Group. Thanks for joining, Bree! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Bree Liscinsky: Thank you, Shawnna. I’m so glad to be here. I am currently the director of the global sales enablement team at Blanco Technology Group, as you’ve mentioned. Throughout my career, I’ve moved through sales roles and customer support roles, primarily within the consumer packaged goods and technology industries. I’ve always found my passion in those roles to be around helping others, making things easier, finding simple processes, and celebrating the successes of those around me. The transition a few years ago into sales enablement felt like such an obvious one because it was really where, where my heart was. SS: Well, Bree, we’re excited to have you here on this podcast. One of the things that you and I talked about before getting on the line was your area of expertise around sales leader enablement. Why, from your perspective, are sales leaders an important audience to focus on as part of your enablement strategy? BL: It is such a great question, Shawnna, because, to me, sales leaders are the people that are most critical to communicate with. They’re the ones that sellers listen to most. We can bang the drum from revenue operations and sales enablement, but when they’re in a one-on-one or a coaching situation with their sales leader, that is when they’re most receptive to information. Sales leader buy-in is critical for nearly every enablement program across our organization. That buy-in really starts even higher up though. Having those sales priorities set and communicated first by the president of our organization and then from there, the enablement team can continue to impart. The importance of providing the necessary content to our sales leaders and really allowing them to then drive the message home and without those continual reinforcements and touch points from sales leaders to their downline, we’ve seen enablement initiatives just fall by the wayside. Continually communicating with sales leaders and having them communicate with the downline is the strategy I’ve found to be most effective. SS: Absolutely. I have to say I’ve seen that work really well within organizations. I’d love to hear, from your perspective, What are the core components of an effective sales leader enablement program? BL: I think the core component is making it very simple. Sales leaders are extremely busy. Many of us are. What is on a sales leader’s plate is just so immense and the priorities are all high, so don’t make them go hunting for information or expect them to build content on their own. My enablement team provides the messaging and any relevant content for our sales leaders on a silver platter through multiple mediums. We make it as simple as possible to find the messaging and even the scripts that they need. We recently launched what we’re calling Manager Minutes, and these are three-minute videos providing the key messages for upcoming initiatives and projects, our expectations of managers, and that’s what’s in it for me. We always try to use data to prove what we’re working towards or what’s not working. Additionally, we build the slide for our sales leaders to bring to their team meetings and to bring into their one-on-ones. We outline the next steps within those slides for their downline. When we see that the enablement team is really proactive in supporting sales leaders’ needs and making it easier for them to do their jobs, we quickly build trust and our messaging is received with open ears. SS: I love that. Manager minutes are so catchy too. How do you partner with sales leaders to help them understand the value of enablement? BL: Here, I think it’s really about the why. We always talk about what’s in it for me and we think about it from the seller’s perspective, but the same goes for sales leaders with so many priorities to choose from. We always ensure that our sales leaders know our why as defined by our enablement mission statement. We’re here to drive revenue, make selling more efficient, to develop modern sales skills, all of which make the seller and sales leaders’ jobs easier. I communicate with our sales leaders on a very consistent cadence, and I’m always sharing the data to reinforce what our team is working on and why we’re working on these initiatives. SS: Absolutely. I think data is critical in helping to reinforce that story. Now, on that note, tell us how you built the business case to invest in an enablement platform. What were your best practices for gaining buy-in from your sales leaders to implement Highspot? BL: I’d say the buy-in was pretty simple because the Highspot product itself is second to none to any others out in the industry. Even going through the sales process with our Highspot salesperson was phenomenal because I could tell she was being enabled by the platform itself, and I thought, I want our salespeople to act the way you are. That’s where it was so obvious to me that we needed Highspot. To gain the buy-in from the sales leader, as I’ve said a few times, data always tells the best story. We launched a survey, which was provided to us by Highspot, and we adapted it for our own business needs. We launched that survey among the global sales teams to learn more about their habits around sales content management, and their awareness of the impact of what they’re sharing with prospects and customers. Then, their desires around how and when they want to learn. From that survey, we were able to build a really clear data-driven case for why we needed Highspot. We’ll be launching that same survey in a few months to evaluate the impact in our first quarter of Highspot at our organization and to see how these behaviors have changed. I will say the survey was pretty surprising. We thought that many of these behaviors were happening, but they were self-reported by our salespeople. For example, download content and save it on their desktop because it is easiest to find there. That content became quickly outdated. Being able to set timelines, create a governance strategy, and see how content is resonating is going to change the game for our organization. SS: Absolutely. Well, I love to hear that. To the point of data, I have to say you have an 88 percent recurring usage rate in Highspot, which is fantastic. Do you have best practices that you can share with our audience around driving the adoption of Highspot? BL: Absolutely. I would say that rate would be much higher if we weren’t a global organization. It’s summertime when we launched Highspot, so we have a lot of people out on their European vacations. They’re all rolling back into the office, and that will be 100 percent very soon. We’re driving adoption through many different avenues. We’re providing messages and metrics to leaders to reinforce with their teams. We’ve launched a drip campaign to highlight quick wins and recognize salespeople who are using the platform to further their buyer-aligned selling. We’re also sharing best practices in that drip campaign and using multimedia to make it exciting to open that email, and to make it easy to understand what you want me to do and why you want me to do it. Next, we’ll be launching leaderboards because every salesperson loves some friendly competition. Then we’ll start layering in gamification because we all know everything’s more motivating when you can win something. I do find that the adoption is so well received when it’s peer-shared, so another avenue we have is our Voices From the Field Podcast, which was very much inspired by you, Shawnna. There, we find people through the data who are really using Highspot accurately or any of our other platforms or tools. We bring them on the podcast and talk about the challenges and successes and how they have improved their selling skills by using these. That has been one of the most motivating things we’ve done for our salespeople is really sharing and amplifying their peers’ voices. SS: I absolutely love that, and thank you. It’s an honor. I would love to give it a listen. I’m sure you run a fantastic podcast. Now, last question for you, Bree. As you continue to navigate change, how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you drive business results that also align with the goals of your sales leaders? BL: This is a great question. Our next step is really connecting the sales content to business in the Highspot platform to the stages in our Salesforce CRM to really continue to drive that buyer-aligned selling motion. By serving up the right content for the right person at the right stage in their buying journey, we’ll be able to align our sales motions to their journey, to meet them where they are. We can quickly build trust, show we’re listening, and ultimately, close more deals quickly. The best part about that next step in change management here is that the Highspot data is so easy to understand and so easy to share that we’ll be able to prove this very quickly. SS: I love to hear that. Bree, thank you so much for joining us today. BL: 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.

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I'm excited to have Nicholas Gregory from Qlik join us. Nick, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Nicholas Gregory: Thank you so much, Shawnna, for the opportunity to speak to you and to speak to your audience here. My name is Nicholas Gregory. I started my career in sales after university. Specifically with a cybersecurity company called McAfee about 15 years ago, where I was given an opportunity to fulfill a very personal and professional goal of mine to work in Latin America, which is a different conversation for a different day. Nonetheless, the powers that be at the company, knowing my aspirations to work in Latin America, tap me on the shoulder to be a new member of a new global team of sales consultants placed regionally across the globe to deploy what we would call ‘enablement services today' in a globally consistent manner. I was brought on to that team to lead their Latin America efforts from a sales enablement services perspective and that’s where I found myself in enablement. Since that time I’ve led a regional, and most of my career now, global sales enablement teams for technology organizations such as Symantec, Veritas, Sabre, and Couchbase. Currently, I’m the global head of sales enablement and effectiveness at Qlik, and we’re a business intelligence, data analytics, and data integration company where we help organizations to better understand their data, whatever that might mean to them, to run their business and help turn their data into action. SS: Well, Nick, we’re excited to have you here joining us with your wealth of experience. One of the things that caught my eye about your background was the focus on improving sales productivity, which I think is the ultimate goal for most folks in enablement. In your opinion, what is enablement’s role in helping to drive productivity for the business? NG: Enablement’s role in improving sales productivity is very multifaceted. To answer, first, I’ll speak to what I feel is important to share with the audience, which is my opinion on what are the four key principle enablement services that enablement should provide to the organization itself. that we’re working for. This is from an end-to-end strategic discipline perspective. Those are four in this order. Technology services, so that is, we may not own the sales tech stack or most of the sales tech stack, but we train on those particular tools, let’s say, or in partnership with whoever might own those tools, whether it’s marketing or other parts of organization, and also in some cases, we own part of the tech stack as well, where we are from an admin perspective, but we’re here to train on those tools, no matter where they reside and who funds them on how to be more efficient and effective with those tools. Whether it’s a conversation intelligence tool, a prospecting tool, whatever the case may be, or your CRM whatever the case may be, we’re here to help support being more effective. Number two, training services. We can’t forget where we came from in enablement. We’re born out of training, but that is a key component to the four services, training services. That is your onboarding, methodology, product training, business acumen training, industry training, and everything in between. Number three is coaching services, which is a critical component and often doesn’t get funded as much as it should with organizations today, especially in this changing buyer-seller landscape. Any of the investments we make that are imperative for the organization, be the actual organization itself or the sales organization, we should be supporting the organization through coaching services to protect those investments we’re making, whether those are financial investments from an enablement perspective, or be it that it’s like time, a soft cost investment, whatever the case may be, what’s the most important to the organization, we should be coaching to the sustainment of those investments. Last but not least is content services. A lot of times we create content and if you look at the research, sales themselves create a lot of content that they use in front of the customer or send to customers. Also, we work with partners in marketing that create a lot of content as well. Wherever the content comes from, we need to make sure that it’s synthesized for sales so that they make the most of that content and they’re not reinventing the wheel or having to edit a lot of that content that is being dispersed. Whether that’s through the technology services that I talked about before, integrated into the CRM, or however they get their content at their organization. That’s just to provide a perspective of the four key principal enablement services that I feel are most important that we drive from a strategic perspective. Second, let’s agree on a high-level definition of sales productivity. If we can agree on that, it means how we measure how the organization leverages those enablement services I just spoke about to achieve organizational outcomes while reducing the time and costs to acquire new business. No service that I just talked about is more important than the other on its own, it’s how many of these services work in concert to drive the outcomes, to achieve those results that we’re looking for across the organization. From my team’s perspective, the net on all this is that either we implement these services ourselves or work in partnership cross functionally to improve the efficacy and efficiency when using our sales tech stack as a part of our technology services, or reduce ramp time for new hires as a part of our onboarding to full productivity, or implement and drive adoption of the sales methodology that we might purchase from a methodology provider, or concentrate on the opportunities that will yield the most likelihood of winning or developing our most strategic accounts. That will increase selling time by focusing on those opportunities or on those accounts that matter the most as a part of training services. What I mentioned about coaching services, keeping our sales skills sharp and reinforcing the most critical programs and initiatives so that leaders and reps know what to focus on. Lastly, content services, whether we create the content ourselves or work in partnership with product marketing as I mentioned before, it’s about providing the right content to the right people at the right time internally so that they can then turn that content into Action or into customer-facing content through customer engagements, and they’re wasting time to find that content that might be outdated, not relevant, or requires a lot of updates from the sales reps as I mentioned before. It’s often these services working in concert to drive maximum productivity gains as much as possible, and we should always be measuring everything, whether it’s leading or lagging indicators across all these services. Especially at the cornerstone of productivity, whatever productivity might mean for you and your organization. SS: I love that. I love how crisply you’ve defined what productivity means within your own organization. Now, one way that we’ve seen enablement help enhance productivity is by enabling reps with a sales methodology. Can you walk us through why a sales methodology is critical for success? NG: First and foremost, you have to read the headlines over the last many years now that buyer expectations have dramatically changed and really sales, I would say more on the, maybe the B2B selling side, that our profession has truly changed and that what those buyer expectations are and the sales skills to keep up with those buyer expectations. It’s truly creating a gap. You can look at research to help show what that really looks like out there in the world today. Sales reps are having a difficult time keeping up with the exponential change on the buying side, so, in my opinion, sales methodology is one of the best investments a sales organization can make to help close the gap between the buyer expectations and the selling skills to make sure that we’re driving those predictable and repeatable results across the organization at scale. It provides that center line where we can be consistent in how our sales reps prepare for customer engagements through call planning or how they strategize on their most important opportunities, or the region’s most important opportunities, or from a global account manager perspective of the world’s most important opportunities for our organization and how they manage their most important and strategic accounts. With selling time at a premium, we can all agree that we’re not seeing more and more selling time across a given week, month, or quarter. When you establish a common way to operate. Internally away from the customer, as well as from an external perspective with the customer, a common language that is spoken by the entire sales force by the way of a methodology. Having a common scorecard to evaluate in a very succinct way, the most critical opportunities on the likelihood that they’ll close those opportunities that are worth pursuing the priorities from the organization on the opportunities that we should pursue now or later. After we look at the higher and higher sales methodology adoption rates that have higher and higher adoption rates of the sales methodology they institute or implement within the organization. Typically high adoption rate is anything above 75% of the organization adopting the sales methodology. This is according to Korn Ferry Sales Performance Research. Organizations start to see double-digit improvement and win rates on forecasted deals or opportunities and a double-digit increase in sellers, achieving quota and an increase in revenue attainment all the while decreasing voluntary turnover. More people making money, more people hitting quota, less and less likely to leave that organization. This is a very critical investment by the company to drive results that are most important to the organization. Oftentimes it gets overlooked in the place of more product training, or specifically just skills training or onboarding. They are all important, but if we don’t know where to place that new knowledge on skills training in a strategic way, through methodology, then it’s really missing a part of the formula to drive improved productivity across the organization. SS: I think that is fantastic. You talked about some of the key elements of key services of bringing enablement to life in terms of improving productivity. A couple of those were things like training and coaching. What are your best practices for training reps to effectively leverage a sales methodology? NG: I talked a little bit about the methodology as a whole and what it means to the organization, but in order to really start down a sales methodology journey, first and foremost, we have to understand that at the highest level, at the executive level, there has to be a commitment to change. That is demonstrated not only from a communication perspective, what is written and shared across the organization from senior leadership, but it’s also from a say, show, do perspective and leading by example. At the cornerstone of all of this is that leadership commitment shown across the organization way in advance of, hey, we’re moving down the sales methodology path of deployment. Let’s say we’ve got that buy-in from a sales leadership perspective. We are going to invest with a true sales methodology provider that is very wide in nature from focusing on how we engage with customers, how we strategize in our most important opportunities, and how we manage our most important or strategic accounts, full end to end, not just deal scorecard or things of that nature. Then it’s about making sure that we have that commitment from the top shown through communication. What are we doing, why we’re doing it, and what KPIs we are looking to improve? Also, a part of this before we even get to deploying the sales methodology is if we’re fortunate to have the funding to invest in a sales coach or a sales coaching team, a practice within the enablement team to help with not only deployment from a facilitation perspective, but ongoing reinforcement and sustainment adoption through the sales leaders as well as working one on one or one to many with sales teams. That would be a key component of this as a part of the investment. Then, we’re looking at deploying the sales methodology and we’re providing that center line of skills and behaviors and a framework. First and foremost, I’m a big believer in beyond the communications that really provide that fertile ground for making sure that we have some semblance of pre-work, whether that’s provided by the sales methodology provider, or we develop it internally or a mixture hybrid of both. We need to make sure that everyone is on a common playing field, if you will, before we head into what would be the next portion of the deployment and best practice is having the actual formal workshop. We have a coaching team, we commit to leadership, and we’re deploying pre-work that’s required before showing up at a virtual workshop, or if possible, an in-person workshop or various workshops to make sure we take care of the entire globe where they’ll apply their newly acquired knowledge. They got a lot of that knowledge from pre-work and they got a lot of that knowledge from the leadership commitment from communications and calls and things of that nature before deployment. Now it’s applying that knowledge, not just with hypotheticals, but if we’re talking about opportunity strategy as a part of our methodology, applying that knowledge with real opportunities for the sales team as a part of this workshop. If we’re talking about preparing for our most critical engagements, it’s about preparing for real customer engagements that we’ll have the buying side, leveraging the new methodology. If it’s about managing our most important accounts, it’s about applying that knowledge by using our real accounts. It’s establishing those skills and behaviors through workshops by using what’s real to the sales team. Also, part of this next is to establish a bi-weekly or weekly deal review. Now, a lot of companies already have that or should have that as a part of their operating cadence, but that being said, establishing a methodology is about providing a new way of going to market. It’s about providing a new way to strategize and opportunities. We should embed the methodology into what already exists and their deal reviews. We’re evaluating those deals through the methodology framework or a new method by which we strategize on opportunities. We’ll have a lot of success stories over the next three, six, nine months. Let’s syndicate those success stories as a part of this process and best practices across the organization. Let’s not make them isolated within one territory or one region of the globe. If we’re a global company, let’s syndicate those across the entire globe of the success stories of how the methodology is adding value to be more productive, reducing the admin time, and improving and increasing the selling time that we might have to give it across a given week or month or quarter. The number one thing when we’re thinking about those best practices I just mentioned is we have to define who was a part of this methodology as well. That goes back to the very beginning in some cases and what we’re going to deploy across the organization. While we call it a sales methodology, it’s truly an organization-wide commitment in many regards. We need to ensure that we are onboarding all members of the account team to the methodology and all of what I just said before, as far as those best practices are concerned. Most, if not all the people I’m about to mention should be a part of this journey, whether that’s through the full end-to-end methodology deployment experience or a subset of the deployment, depending on an individual’s role. Let’s take B2B technology sales for a moment that might take the form of fully implementing the methodology across account executives, solution engineers, partners, account management, teams, professional services, and customer success. Also, of course, all levels of leadership across those teams. Those are the core teams that engage with an interface with prospects and customers. Then we take the perspective of who else supports the account team across the company and my interface with customers from time to time. We may be on board to a lesser extent, marketing teams such as digital or social teams, field marketing, legal, procurement, and others who often, like I said, interface with prospects and customers throughout the sales or customer buying cycles. Sometimes those teams contribute in a variety of ways to opportunity and account-level strategy. Implementing a sales methodology is truly a cross-functional deployment, not just specific to the sales team. Number two, the last thing I’ll mention, Shawnna, is about partnership with marketing. While they will be going along the journey with us in many regards, maybe to a lesser extent from a full onboarding experience, we have to make sure that we support the sales team by partnering with marketing that supports us and enablement services so much and engages with sales directly with content and other ways. Our ongoing partnership with them shall provide that center line as marketing to engage with prospects and customers strategizes on those opportunities. They help us manage some of those most strategic accounts in a globally consistent manner. As our internal language shifts, so should the language that marketing uses externally and internally to be more customer outcome-driven, less product feature function-oriented. Therefore any content they’re creating that is customer-facing or sent to the sales teams internally, or like I said, in some cases, externally should evolve as well. That partnership with marketing to ensure alignment on content, the new language that’s used the intent of the content has to change with it. Whether that’s sales play content, competitive battle cards, or ongoing support through the creation of discovery questions to be used throughout the entire, that sales cycle, no matter the asset, it should change and align to the methodology in that common language. SS: I love that. You also mentioned coaching earlier a few times, actually throughout that. What role does coaching play in helping reps to effectively leverage a sales methodology? NG: Coaching, or the lack thereof, is one of the most critical determining factors if an investment is worthwhile. It truly is an investment financially in most regards, unless you’re fortunate to build one internally. Coaching can and should come in many forms. Coaching can come in the form of practice from a coaching practice perspective. If we’re fortunate to have a coaching team, like I’m fortunate to have here at Qlik, this team is dedicated to sales to the sales professionals, their leaders, and their leaders leaders and their remit is to coach leaders in the sales teams on the key imperatives for the sales team, the organization, such as methodology in this case that you asked about. Sales professionals can provide coaching themselves. It can come from not only the first-line, second-line leaders, a coaching team if we’re fortunate to have one, but also sales reps that are, I mentioned those success stories before. Sales can coach sales. I’m a big believer that sales learn best from sales. This is a great opportunity when we’re having success, We call out those sales reps to bring them into a pseudo-coaching role where they’re actually helping coach their peers from within their own teams, within their own region, whatever the case may be. Also, we can look at successful leaders who can request that other leaders, let’s say, provide a community of coaches from across the leadership teams where those leaders are not only developing and coaching their teams, but they’re also helping develop and coach other teams around on an ad-hoc basis, or maybe even a more formal basis, as well across the region or across the globe. That ongoing and effective coaching drives sustainment, adoption, and reinforcement of the methodology investment that can be very expensive on top of the commitment to change. It can be very expensive from a financial and soft cost perspective. Coaching is critically important to longevity and the likelihood of success as I mentioned before. On top of my coaching team being certified, I’m going to mention this point. Their responsibility is to facilitate the methodology training workshops and provide their own reinforcement in a variety of ways. My coaches are laser-focused when deploying a methodology to help those first-line and second-line leaders become better coaches. Oftentimes you’ll hear so many sales consultancy firms talk about how they are the most underinvested people in the sales organization with some of the most difficult jobs. That upward pressure from their teams, and downward pressure from leadership, but we provide little to no investment in them to be better coaches. A lot of times they weren’t really trained to be sales leaders. They were an individual contributor on a Friday promoted from within, let’s say five, 10 years ago, and they’ve just been in this leadership role for quite some time. Maybe successful, maybe you know, plateauing a little bit here and there, but they’ve never been invested in. It’s my team’s job to help them be better first-line and second-line leaders underpinned by the methodology. Sales organizations that have a sales methodology coupled with an ongoing and multifaceted coaching presence that I mentioned before, can see upwards of 28% of higher quota attainment and 32% higher win rates versus organizations that might have a methodology that made that investment. Leave coaching up to the leader’s discretion as I mentioned before, where they weren’t invested in their sales leadership career to be better coaches. This is an opportunity to have a coaching team drive true coaching in a consistent way, underpinned by the methodology to drive those results I just mentioned before. SS: Wonderful. In both training and coaching on methodology, I love that there’s this leadership-first mentality. Can you tell our audience about this approach and the impact that it’s had on the effectiveness of your training and coaching programs? NG: There are a few aspects to this that are top of mind and top of my list when deploying a true sales methodology. Let’s say that the org, as I mentioned previously, and the senior leadership have stacked hands, that there is a commitment to change, and that there are results that we’re looking to change and move the needle in a variety of different areas. From that commitment, we’re going to partner with a true sales methodology. Now, in order for that leadership-first mentality, you spoke of to really take hold. Number one, we need to bring leaders along with the pre-deployment journey. It can’t be something, hey, this isolated vacuum, we decided as a part of a senior leadership team that we’re going to be investing in a sales methodology and then all of a sudden it’s about to happen and they don’t get much of an advanced warning or awareness on from a change management perspective itself. We got to bring them along that pre-deployment journey to help with the change management side of the house because this is a huge change management initiative, a transformation. I think we agree that implementing a sales methodology is a big change management and transformational exercise. We need to work with those first-line leaders across all of the sales segments and across the cross-functional partners that I mentioned previously to help set expectations. What is their role during the actual implementation from a training perspective? What is the post-deployment? What are the expectations on how the leaders will reinforce, drive adoption, and sustainment? Sharing what the plan is, end to end, early and often prior to deployment, and what KPIs we’ll be measuring so that there are no surprises there. Gaining their commitment, now that’s not a hundred percent always going to happen there are going to be detractors. I think we can all agree that nothing that we do from an enablement services perspective or program or strategic comparative gets a hundred percent commitment, but that being said, let’s take the majority and get that commitment where possible. What changes should they expect there will definitely be changes moving forward. Also, what communications in some cases we would like these first-line second leaders to send out to their teams, to the region? A lot of those communications could be ghostwritten by us or others in the organization, but nonetheless, we need to make sure they put their voice behind the change that’s about to take place. In this regard, over-communication and constant engagement is key. With leaders, just as much as the individual contributors that report to them. The second is through the deployment from a training perspective. I’m a big believer, especially when it comes to methodology deployment or any large imperative for that matter, that leaders go first. What I mean by that is that leaders go through the same mandatory pre-work that their individual contributors or teams will go through. I typically have leadership-only training workshops. They go through pre-work first, then they have what we have. Leadership-only workshops where the leaders are trained ahead of their teams. They go through the training as their team is about to go through throughout the deployment. They go from learner now going through these leadership-only workshops to a second time going through the training because they’ll now be going through the training workshops with their team. They turn from learner to coach the second time around. As a quick recap, they take the pre-work, they go through leadership-only workshops, and they go through the workshop again with their teams when we deploy to the field at large, going from learner to coach. From that point, the individual contributors or field workshops become those coaches and start to reinforce and drive that adoption. That’s so critical during the workshop in real time, sitting next to their teams or at the same tables, if you will, or in a virtual setting with their team. This approach is where it’s front-loaded per se from a training perspective, but the large focus of leaders is critically important because they truly are the force multipliers when deploying a methodology or again, any large investment, because they’re the ones within the organization. That decides if typically a large investment like this, whether financially or soft cost-wise, is going to be successful or not. It really falls on their shoulders. We have to take that extra work, that front-loaded work during the rollout, prior to the rollout, and then of course, through any deployment or any sustainment or adoption reinforcement activities and exercises moving forward. Last but not least, this is for a very special group of leaders. In some cases, there are a handful of leaders who accept and go on a specific methodology deployment journey in a unique way by way of getting certified on the methodology themselves. While I’m a big believer in the enablement team, if we’re fortunate enough to have a coaching team or others across the needle, be certified to become facilitators. If we partner with an external methodology provider, sometimes these leaders also invest in themselves, their team, and the organization. by going through a very similar path that many of us go through an enablement to get certified in the methodology themselves. I may not be up to a facilitation grade certification if you will, but that being said, they go on some assemblage of that journey by being trained on the methodology in a unique way beyond the workshop by partnering with the methodology provider. Then going on this journey for this very special group shows commitment. In some cases, we can lean on those leaders because they’ve been on this certain journey up to a certain point to support other efforts within their region or globally based on their subject matter expertise and dedication to knowing the methodology at a deeper level than let’s say a traditional leader going through a leadership workshop only, as well as the workshop with their teams to drive that coaching. This is a special breed, if you will, of leadership that ops in and we partner with to help them on going through that unique journey to drive a different level of results. SS: I love that leader’s first mentality, Nick. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed this conversation and I think it’s fantastic the work that you guys have been doing to increase productivity at Qlik. NG: Thank you so much Shawnna for the time and look forward to a conversation in the future. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Rachael McCormick from Vonage join us. Rachael, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Rachael McCormick: Thanks, Shawnna, and thanks for having me here today on Sales Enablement PRO. As mentioned, my name is Rachael McCormick and I’m one of the managers for Vonage’s Global Sales Enablement Team. My journey actually started with a marketing degree. When I graduated, many of the marketing positions I was looking into required years and years of experience, which I think many recent grads tend to find, and instead, I got into sales. I had success in that role and learned a lot of skills that I still utilize today and incorporate that perspective for enablement. Ultimately, when Vonage acquired the first company I was working with, there were a handful of us who were promoted into an operations role. From there, I found my love and passion for enablement. As for our team, we focus on selling skills, systems training, and content creation for tenured reps as well as new hires. That being said, we’re also responsible for sales new hire ramp just overall in general. Being that there are only so many of us on the selling skills, systems training, and content creation team, our team tends to work closely with the product and technical enablement team as well. As one solid team together, we support all of our global sales route sales to markets. I’ve been with Vonage for about eight years now. SS: Rachael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I’m excited to talk to you. You mentioned you’re responsible for a lot of the new hire processes, including optimizing the ramp process for new hires on the global sales team. Now, in today’s sales environment where productivity is a top priority, why is effective onboarding so critical? RM: Great question. In general, an effective sales new hire program is critical because it helps acclimate, engage, and retain good employees. If we focus specifically on the impact it can have on sales productivity, the knowledge shared during onboarding, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or system knowledge, can really boost an individual’s confidence during a time that can be quite uncomfortable for some and simultaneously set them up for success to become a productive team member right off the gates. SS: I love that. Now if we drill a little bit to understand onboarding, in your opinion, what are some of the key components of an effective onboarding program? RM: I love this question. I’m going to focus on four components specifically. First, it’s important to integrate employees into the company’s culture and get them really excited about their career choices. A program should really embody the shared values, attitudes, and behaviors that your company aligns with. This specifically gives new joiners resources to also make professional connections. For example, make them aware of the employee resource groups that your company may offer. We work closely with the organizational effectiveness team to actually do this. Second, keep it engaging by utilizing different delivery methods or formats, which appease different learning styles throughout their entire ramp time. Before COVID, we had all-day in-person training and it was information overload. Our new hire survey scores actually increased by approximately 30% when we moved to a more flexible training because we were able to utilize different delivery methods I mentioned, like live webinars, microlearning, and gamification. We started to present information long-term to help with that information retention. Third, identify objectives that a sales new hire will need to achieve for effective job performance. You can identify the learning behaviors or techniques that a sales hire will need to execute that support the specific objective. Based on that, you can determine the enablement delivery method that supports the technique. I have an example of that. One objective could be that a sales rep needs to understand how to use a CRM. The behavior they need to execute might be to effectively use the CRM on their own to input leads or create a quote. Then you’d decide the delivery method to help them achieve that, which could be utilizing a test environment or even a gamified quiz. Lastly, number four, keep it modernized and continuously listen to feedback. Our team likes to joke that sales enablement is like changing tires on a moving car or an 18-wheeler during busy times. We have to keep what is currently running and continuously evolve our programs and content to be up to date while simultaneously keeping into account, feedback from our audience and department leaders for improvement. SS: Thank you. I think that is a great definition of the key components. What would you say are some of the common obstacles that sellers might experience as they are trying to ramp, and what would you say are some of your best practices to help mitigate those through onboarding? RM: I’ll start with identifying those three common obstacles that we tend to see. Information retention, which I did mention in the previous response, and then lack of confidence as well, and third is lack of feeling connected in a virtual or hybrid work environment. In terms of information retention, we’ve adopted a model for just-in-time learning so that resources are short, targeted, and at our audience’s fingertips whenever they need it. To support this, we’ve enhanced our resource repository tools and have standardized this by working closely cross-functionally with different departments, and we utilize the same tools altogether and align on the same messaging. This has been really impactful because, again, we have such a large audience across different time zones. Second, to mitigate a lack of confidence, it’s important to incorporate opportunities for simulated activities to practice. Whether it’s in a system test environment or role-playing sales skills, we really believe that repetition is key and we have a layered approach to that as well. Lastly, to help new joiners feel more connected in a virtual or hybrid environment, we’ve implemented a buddy program where another sales team member works closely with the new hire to further welcome them, address questions, and help them navigate a new organizational culture. SS: I have to say I love the buddy approach. It is like an instant friend whenever you enter a new organization. I think the other role that plays a key component in onboarding new hires is often the frontline sales manager. How do you collaborate with sales managers to reinforce the knowledge and skills learned in onboarding for these sellers? RM: Another excellent question. We collaborate with sales leaders in two ways. First, we have regular communication with them, whether it’s during live calls or written out via collaboration software and weekly sales update newsletters, where we tend to provide updates on existing enablement initiatives, taking in feedback for enhancements, as well as making sure that they’re aware of some of the improvements from an onboarding perspective. This really gives us the opportunity to continuously collaborate. Second being we’ve launched an enablement program for our sales leaders, where we’ve coached and collaborated on methods and tools that we also use during onboarding so they can continue to reinforce that message. For example, one focus for the sales leader training was data hygiene. We focused on that specifically on the ‘why' it’s important so that managers can continue that message. We’ve had really great feedback from sales leaders on those resources and the release of these collaborative workshops to help them and their reps be more productive. SS: I think those are fantastic approaches. I’d love to understand a little bit in terms of metrics or definitions. How do you define what it means for a rep to be fully ramped? What are some of those key metrics or maybe even milestones that you track throughout their ramp-up journey? RM: We support all routes to markets with various ramp lengths, but on average, I’d say about 90 days. We ultimately break milestones up into buckets, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or systems. For product, the rep might need to obtain all of their product badges that are specific to their role. For sales skills, the rep might need to submit a mock sales pitch that their manager approves and passes. For processes and systems, the rep might need to attend a training and then execute that process in a test environment to pass. In each one of those buckets, there are different milestones that need to be achieved over the course of those first 90 days or so. SS: Amazing. Last question for you, Rachael. How do you assess and evolve the impact of your own onboarding programs to continually optimize the ramp time? RM: Great question. We currently assess by evaluating NPS, so Net Promoter Score. We collaborate with sales leaders on the enhancements by utilizing internal cross-functional focus groups that our wonderful transformation manager actually does lead. As mentioned earlier, we’re really passionate about listening to feedback and hearing from our internal customers on what’s going well and where areas of improvement potentially sit. With recently launching our new enablement system less than a year ago, the next phase is to implement and utilize their integrated data analytics to further optimize ramp time in general, as well as further build out role-specific material for each route to market. SS: I love that, Rachael. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today. RM: Thank you, Shawnna. This has been great. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Shawnna Bolick is sworn into the Arizona Senate after being appointed by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

On this week's episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: a deliciously beautiful book subscription and some middle-marriage mayhem Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: we are trying a new Boss My TBR Segment! The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives As per usual, time-stamped show notes are below with references to every book and resource we mentioned in this episode. If you'd like to listen first and not spoil the surprise, don't scroll down!  We are now including transcripts of the episode (this link only works on the main site). The goal here is to increase accessibility for our fans! *Please note that all book titles linked below are Bookshop affiliate links. Your cost is the same, but a small portion of your purchase will come back to us to help offset the costs of the show. If you'd prefer to shop on Amazon, you can still do so here through our main storefront. Anything you buy there (even your laundry detergent, if you recently got obsessed with switching up your laundry game) kicks a small amount back to us. Thanks for your support!*   . . . . 2:19 - Currently Reading Patreon 3:44   - Bookish Moment of the Week 4:01 - Fairy Loot Book Only Box Adult and YA 4:21 - Spice Road by Maiya Ibrahim  5:04 - Scythe Series Three Book Set by Neal Shusterman 5:25 - Cinder by Marissa Meyer 9:43 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 10:31 - East of Eden by John Steinbeck 11:16 - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas 11:18 - Current Reads 11:29 - Laura Tremaine 11:38 - Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson (Kaytee) 14:00 - Jason's Birthday Carrot Cake Recipe 14:05 - Sour Cream Apology Cake Recipe 14:45 - Black Cake Recipe 15:41 - Aurora by David Koepp (Meredith) 20:45 - Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood (Kaytee) 20:54 - The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood 20:56 - S4E21 Our Top Ten Books 24:47 - Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (Meredith) 24:51 - A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes 27:00 - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 32:39 - For Every One by Jason Reynolds (Kaytee) 35:43 - All That is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay  (Meredith)  37:44 - Defending Jacob by William Landay 39:19 - The Local by Joey Hartstone 39:32 - Elizabeth Robinson Barnhill Meredith's co-host for All Things Murderful (patron content) 40:10 - Deep Dive: Boss My TBR #1   40:18 - S3E6 Are You Book Bossy? We Are! 41:35 - Kiara's Books: 41:46 - The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden 41:54 - Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo 41:57 - Light from Uncommon Stars by Rya Aoki 42:01 - Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 42:04 - The Change by Kirsten Miller 44:17 - The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb 47:32 - Shawnna's Books: 47:40 - 11/22/63 by Steven King 47:42 - Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry 47:44 - Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 47:46 - The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow 47:49 - The House of Scorpion by Nancy Farmer 50:31 - Meet Us At The Fountain 50:39 - I wish everyone would follow goodreads_reviews on IG (Kaytee) 51:04 - Anne of Green Gables by LMM Montgomery 51:10 - All I Want for Christmas by Maggie Knox 51:29 - Lobinzona by Romina Garber 51:56 -  I wish The Treehouse Series starting with The 13 Story Treehouse by Andy Griffith for MG would be more widely read (Meredith) Connect With Us: Meredith is @meredith.reads on Instagram Kaytee is @notesonbookmarks on Instagram Mindy is @gratefulforgrace on Instagram Mary is @maryreadsandsips on Instagram Roxanna is @roxannatheplanner on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast.com @currentlyreadingpodcast on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast@gmail.com Support us at patreon.com/currentlyreadingpodcast and www.zazzle.com/store/currentlyreading

Flashback Week: While John is out for Christmas break we pull out some interesting clips from the past. John talks about the anniversary of Sandy Hook and remembers the victims of the tragedy. He then takes a call from Dave in Washington about the new breed of Republicans in America today. Then he ponders the increase in hospitalizations due to flu, RSV, and Covid 19. Next he takes a call from Steven in Kentucky and they toss around JFK assassination theories. Mike in Michigan calls in to talk about Kyrsten Sinema and Shawnna from San Diego calls to discuss transgendered youth. Then finally Rich in Indiana talks about marriage equality and helping Puerto Rico.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Jason is joined by actress and singer turned entrepreneur, investor, and food and lifestyle advocate Daniella Monet!      Many may know Daniella from her television and movie performances over the last 20 years, including Victorious, Zoey 101, and Nancy Drew, but after years of appearing on television screens, she has gone on to pivot from acting to focus on the development of her nutritional  business and investments. She has been exercising her entrepreneurial spirit by paving the way for vegan companies to make a mark on the industry. Daniella gives insight to why she doesn't have an agent, how money was a topic of conversation while growing up, why she made the decision to be a vegan, how she decides to make her investments,  and how she started her app Daniella's Digest. Daniella also reveals how many different side hustles she has had and which was the most profitable, her secret to memorizing lines, why she chose to get her GED equivalent to give herself more opportunities in the entertainment space, and what she would invest in right now if given a million dollars. Do films or television shows pay better? What should consumers know when deciding to go vegetarian or vegan? What was the worst investment she ever made? What is next for Daniella?   PLUS, Jason chats with listener Shawnna about the world of copywriting. Shawnna breaks down what a day in the life of a copywriter can look like, the different education paths that can be taken, what the income looks like, and how she went on to double her income in less than six months by starting her own business. What exactly is copywriting? What is her best advice when it comes to taking a leap of faith?    All of that is revealed and so much more in another episode you can't afford to miss!     Be sure to follow the Trading Secrets Podcast on Instagram & join the Facebook group.   Sponsors: Shopify.com/secrets to start selling online today ZocDoc.com/tradingsecrets to download the FREE ZocDoc app today   Host: Jason Tartick Voice of Viewer: David Arduin Executive Producer: Evan Sahr   Produced by Dear Media.   Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.