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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.

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.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, organizations that use one unified enablement platform are 80% more likely to increase their win rate. So, how can you optimize your tech stack to improve adoption and drive 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 Jacob Dinsdale, the sales enablement leader at Molina Healthcare. Thank you for joining us. Jacob. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jacob Dinsdale: Thanks. Happy to be here. My background, I’ve been in sales for a long time, a couple of decades now. My sales career started in financial services, working for one of the largest global investment managers. Everything from the trading floor to wealth management moved on the technology side there. Ended up moving into the tech side of sales in general during the.com boom. I was the first sales hire for a European company moving into the United States. Built that into a large company. So I’ve worked in pretty much all areas of the sales process. Whether it’s carrying a quota as an individual rep, running a team, or running a sales organization full of lots of teams and lots of sales channels. SS: Well, Jacob, we’re lucky to have you here. Given your extensive sales experience as well as the experience that you have with Molina Healthcare, I’d love to understand from your perspective, what are some of the unique challenges that sales reps in the healthcare industry face, and how can enablement help overcome these? JD: That’s a great question, and I think that’s one of the things that makes us unique. For those who aren’t familiar, Molina is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States. I think at the last ranking, we are number 1 76 in the Fortune 500. But unless you live in a particular state, you may not be familiar with who they are. Specifically, we handle healthcare for people that are in some sort of a government-sponsored healthcare situation, whether that’s Medicare, Medicaid, or they bought their own individual plan through the Affordable Care Act in the marketplace. So that’s one of the things that makes us unique and in healthcare as a regulated industry, especially when we’re engaging in government-sponsored sales operations, having. The right and trustworthy material is very important to us. So, you know, all of our agents are, you know, fully licensed in the state and federally. And then as an organization we have responsibilities there. So making sure that we are only giving correct and timely information in the approved methods, and all of our methodology and communication is compliant with our customers. So with those constraints. We’re somewhat unique and we realized that also created bottlenecks for us. SS: I see. And you also recently implemented an enablement platform for the first time. What were some of the challenges that your team faced that led you to invest in a solution and, and how have you overcome some of those since implementing an enablement platform? JD: One of the things that we realized is we had a lot of problems that we solved individually, and that created a lot of different and disparate systems that we use to solve those individual problems. Whether it’s using SharePoint to manage documents, using Salesforce to communicate, using whatever random tool or individual sales organizations might be using to communicate with potential new members. So, from our standpoint, having one kind of unified location that we can have confidence in the governance of what we’re doing, knowledge about the processes of what we’re doing, control over what can and can’t happen, and that creates confidence for us as an organization. But I think also that lets us move that confidence back to our salespeople who don’t want to really. Focus on a lot of the details they’d like to be sewing. So if they know that the sandbox that they’re playing in is fully compliant, fully usable for them, then they can take that sandbox and really be free to do what they do best as a salesperson. So, you know, that was kind of our goals, is to try and come up with a unified message in that and having unified tools that all of our organization can use. SS: I love that. And you played a key role in the implementation of Highspot, so I’d love to learn from you, and I’m sure our audience would as well. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption from the start and really engaging the teams you support in your enablement programs? JD: You know, and this might come from my background, working in sales to begin with, but one of the things that I always believe is. Having a destination in mind and working backwards. So when you’re talking about driving revenue and driving sales at a company, ultimately you wanna have that dotted line. You wanna complete a transaction from us as a process, knowing where we want to be, knowing that we want to have strong, rich content that empowers our different sales channels to do really well in what they want. That lets us. We’re backward to have that and build what we need along the way so we don’t end up building a road to nowhere. We’re building the road to our destination, and I think that was important for us to make sure that defining the route, defining the map, working backwards to where we want to go, helped us get all the stakeholders aligned because anytime there was a disagreement, we could always work backwards to that north star, right? That guiding privilege that we have as an idea we want to get to. SS: I love that. I always think that it is a fantastic philosophy to start with the end in mind. Now, I know that you guys have seen success in a lot of areas, but I know one of the areas that you’ve seen success in is through the use of digital rooms. I’d love to learn from you. Could you share more about how you’re using digital rooms to optimize workflows for your teams? JD: Digital Rooms are a great compliment for us in one of our sales channels. So we sell directly. We have our own licensed insurance agents that bring in new members into Molina Healthcare, but in some markets that doesn’t make sense. And this also exists in the insurance industry in general. There’s a lot of independent brokers, so we have a broker channel sales. Department around the country that works with these independent brokers who are then working with members. They generally work with many different companies, but what we want to be able to do is to make it easy for them to do business with us and to make it easy for them to do business with us is, is having quality content and information on their fingertips. So if a customer says, hey, is this medication gonna be covered under this new plan? I live in the Bay Area and I practice traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Is that something that’ll be covered under this plan? To be an expert on all of that with the different companies isn’t something an independent broker can do, but we’re able to use these digital rooms as a microsite to have this information that these external brokers can use, but also for us to make sure. We know that we have the most timely information and we’re seeing some changes in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid with CMS right now and new leadership. That required us having new, updated documentation, what we have there. So we’re always using the current and most approved documentation, but we can also be dynamic in our communication to our sales channels. SS: I love that. Can you walk me through that a little bit? The strategy in particular for the Digital Rooms, for your broker channel sales partners. How are they structured and delivered and what impact have you seen so far? JD: They’re structured by our market. So in any particular market, we’re working with various, uh, levels of different health plans and the health plan, we’re going to be providing basic information. So they’ll have access to, you know, enrollment forms, basic government documentation, but they’ll also have important things like, hey, is my transportation to see the doctor covered? You know, do I get a OTC benefit spent at CVS every quarter, little bits of information and have that in the same location is important. I think, again, this is something that we’ve seen both with our internal sales channels and our external sales channels, having the buy-in and confidence from the users that know, oh, I don’t know where to find it everywhere, but I know that I can probably find it in Highspot. That gives us a really good ability to get that stickiness from the user base that we wanna see. SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic. To pivot a little bit, I know you also plan to utilize AI features in Highspot to elevate your enablement efforts. How do you envision leveraging AI capabilities to improve productivity across the teams you support? JD: Well, as a mature long-term industry, you know, using AI is something that I think a lot of organizations find scary in including us as well, and knowing where we can or can’t do that. So from our standpoint, it’s going to be very, very subdued in what we do. But where we’re going to use AI is the ability to generate summary content, to generate ideas about. Hey, you might want to try and look to this, either look to this as an option that you’ll be able to use that might be successful in this particular type of interaction. So from our standpoint, I think our first implementation of AI is going to be to help support the efficiency of our sales channels and our sales teams rather than two. Have anything externally facing. SS: That makes a ton of sense, and I’m excited to see what you guys are able to do within Molina Healthcare on that front. Now, since launching Highspot, what results have you seen? Are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share? JD: Well, I think key wins that we’ve seen, and you know, one of the things that I appreciated with our relationship with Highspot is that we do have customer health check-ins. We’re looking at where we’re growing and we’re seeing a lot of interaction and usage with what we do. So external shares, quality content, number of digital rooms, number of plays, active users, those are all going up. On a quarter by quarter basis. I think some of our bigger wins have been since we realized the reliability of our content that we have hosted. We’re having other divisions within our company that want to use Highspot again, is that it’s a term that’s used a lot, but in sales, that single source of truth, right? We’re getting to a point where we’re seeing our sales and marketing departments that normally want to have a communication that they’re hosting internally. They’re now saying, hey, HighSpot is a great tool for us to use that internally as well. And so I think our biggest win has been. The adoption of using it again, it’s almost to the point that we’re selling and providing information to all of our internal customers as well. So having these other departments come in and want to utilize the features that they see that kind of surpass what they’re currently doing, and that’s made us busy, but it’s, again, that’s building a reliability for us as a tool. SS: That is phenomenal. Last question for you, Jacob, to close. If you could give one piece of advice to someone who’s looking to drive adoption and engagement of their en enablement programs, what would it be? JD: One of the things, you know, I mentioned this at the beginning, begin with an end in mind. I have that goal, have that target, talk to all the stakeholders that are involved. So some stakeholders only want to look at KPIs and engagement and look at the metrics. Some people really only want to care about revenue. Some people want to care about training and all the details that we have along the way. So there’s a lot of stakeholders along the way. And what I would say is, find out the goals that each of these departments and stakeholders in the company have, articulate those goals with the tools that you’re developing, and really kind of have a strong point of view. So whenever anyone asks, you can say, this is why we’re doing this. We’re doing this to overcome these struggles that we’ve had already. This will let us do this, this, and this. And this also puts us on a launching pad, which for us is, uh, expansion of our capabilities and how we’re using this that we see happening later on this year and in 2026 as well. So I think having that strong point of view. That you begin with, right? It might be a charter that a company or a vision statement, whatever that might be. But have that with your implementation as well. So whenever you, again, have a question, you can always refer back to why are we doing this? What is our end goal and how are we gonna measure success? And do these decisions align with doing that as well? SS: I love that advice. Jacob, thank you again so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. JD: I’m happy to be on the podcast and thank you so much for the interview. 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 2024, organizations are 80% more likely to increase their win rate when using a unified platform for all of their enablement needs. So how can you leverage a unified platform to drive sales productivity?Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Karl-Philippe Clement, the VP of Sales and customer experience at RIB software. Thank you for joining us KP. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Karl-Philippe Clement: Yeah, well the pleasure is all mine. I’m responsible for everything which is sales operations. We very often call it, or sales excellence related to software company RIB software. We do sell software for the construction industry. We were acquired by Schneider Electric. It was a lot of smaller company, and now we are consolidating our approach, working much closer with the software. Of Schneider Electric, and we have possibility also to improve our sales enablement, but also our sales approach and sales operation for our market. So I’ve been hired two years ago by this company specifically for this approach for sales operation. Previously I worked for Bosch Rexroth and Siemens, and I was there 6 and 16 years respectively. I was able to really focus on growing sales operation and sales improvement along the way. SS: Wonderful. Well, we’re excited to have you here, KP Now you have a lot of experience in both sales, marketing, as well as customer experience. How does this experience across go to market teams really helped to influence your approach to sales enablement at RIB? KC: Well, the experience has a lot to do because when we talk with sales very often, it’s uh, you have multiple age group. What I’ve been seeing, and you have people which are much more familiar with new technology and some are less familiar with technology, some are less ready to go with new technology while the. Looking back at the experience that I was faced with a different job, it was really about not only the customer experience, but the user experience of our salespeople in order to bring sales enablement to the next level. If we cannot tackle our users, our people enablement, I’ll have a big problem to reach our objectives with sales enablement. That’s definitely one of the biggest experiences I gathered in the last years. SS: Absolutely. And RIB actually recently implemented Highspot as its enablement platform. What were the main challenges that led to this decision to invest in enablement and, um, how do you see a unified platform helping to overcome those challenges? KC: There was multiple challenge, right? The user challenge was definitely one, right? Fortunately, with HighSpot, I must really be honest. It helped us a lot because it’s really user friendly. It’s also part of our approach to roll out our new CRM, where HighSpot will be able to help us getting a better user experience within Salesforce. That said, there were also multiple objections to getting another tool. Why I say another tool? Because we are submerged with quantities of tool and different company coming to us, hey, my tool is better than the other tool. Which tool should I use? And there’s so many different tools and we come to an IT stack, which. Unsustainable. So it’s really about how we approach to rationalize what do we really need and what will be the output. So this was a challenge to bring IT organization and make sure that we have the money to fund a new approach, because this is definitely one of the challenge. What do you get? And everybody has their own answers – hey, you can make a lot of money with the tool. So it was one of the challenge we were able to, with the help of Highspot supporting us there for the use case, we were able to resolve those challenge and a much nicer way I would say, which facts very clearly that we could put in front of our. SS: I’d love to learn a little bit more about that, especially as a leader in the evaluation process. How did you go about building the business case for enablement and, and securing that stakeholder buy-in? KC: If I can be honest, Highspot helped us a lot. That’s what I mentioned a little bit prior, they took the time and, and I must say that working with Burak, who work with us from Highspot, really taking a deep dive on looking at our process and really taking the time to analyze and build a pilot and get the right data out. And then we are able to go forward. It’s not rocket science in a way, but the support made it a reality, and that’s mainly how we took the problem to fix it. SS: I love that. I’m curious, as you go about implementing this new platform for the first time, how do you plan to drive adoption and, and really build excitement amongst your sellers? KC: It’s all about the value they can get. It’s quite simple. It’s all about the value they can get. So far from what we’ve been doing during the pilot, the value that the sellers could get out of Highspot was quite high. It was pretty good user journey and they got a lot of value. They were able to tackle, uh, lease much faster. They were able to focus on the leads that are interested in what we sent, and see directly activities in the Digital Rooms and everything. So it’s really about what values the users get so they sell more, they get more incentive. Everybody’s happy. And that’s really to the basic, how can I sell more and faster? Everybody’s focused on efficiency, so it’s as simple as that. SS: I love that. And I know RIB has a diverse set of products and use cases. How can enablement help sellers effectively navigate that complexity at RIB? KC: Well, having the right documentation in the right place. And this was one of the reasons we selected to go with a sales enablement tool. This was one of our challenge, finding the right documentation, making sure it’s adapted in the right way. This was one of the main thing. We have a lot of a portfolio, not everybody is an expert of everything. Onboarding new sellers is definitely one of the challenge. So in this way, we’re able to navigate and help reduce complexity on this aspect. The other aspect is to focus where we need to focus. We need to focus on all these, or do we need to focus on the one that has a real interest. So that was mainly the two main aspects in it. SS: Amazing. And one of your current initiatives is transitioning to a new subscription-based business model. How do you plan to leverage your enablement tech stack to help drive this transition? KC: Well, like I said earlier, a seller is about efficiency and it’s about how much money can you make based on an incentive, right? So from a strategic perspective, we can say from a company, this is where we wanna focus, but it’s really to put the means at the right place. So the enablement will help our seller to be more effective to follow up on the right leads. The incentive, I must say, is a big portion on how will we get more into subscription, or how do we wanna focus of getting the maximum outta subscription. So whether we use annual contract value, a CV, or conditionable a CV to help our people focus on the. More focus. More focus on those needs. The proper needs. SS: I love that. So, shifting gears a little bit, ’cause you just mentioned the importance of, you know, that agility and speed as well as the results in your enablement approach. How do you bring this philosophy to life in your enablement efforts using data and insights? KC: Well, there’s always two sides, right? There’s the side that we have. Data needs to be perfect, needs to be exact, and we need to use the data. And there’s the the other side to say, let’s look at the big picture and not necessarily too much on the details of every single data point. If you’re in sales, it’s about speed. It’s about making the right decision and looking at the data will be perfect. So on speed and on right? From this big, it’s really about speed. SS: Absolutely. I could not agree more. And one of the ways that seems to be creating a lot of expediency these days is AI. So I’d love to understand KP, I know you plan on leveraging AI to enhance seller performance. Can you share more about how you envision using AI to elevate your enablement effort? KC: Well, I can share more a little bit on my expectations. We have not used AI yet since we’re, we need to roll it out on our new CRM platform. We just had the pilot project. Again, it’s about speed. How can AI help us have the right insight, make the right decisions? Increase speed to grab the right customer or grab the right leads and make the most out of it. For me, that’s really where AI is. It’s not gonna replace anybody. I don’t believe it’s gonna replace sellers. I believe it’ll be kind of a co-pilot, don’t want to use this word, but it’s. Being beside our sellers and supporting his approach to really, maybe he’s missing a few points, he’s missing some comments, coming outta discussion. He’s missing some different views to help him make him the right decision. That’s how I see that AI will help a lot. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I’m excited for you to get started on that front. What do you think is the potential long-term value of embracing innovations in technology like AI to both help the seller and improve the customer experience? KC: It’s about trying right? Try and error to a certain point. Better try and find out as fast as possible. Competition will do, try and if it works well, well much faster than in. So for me, trial error and always keeping up to date and keeping the speed and trying to make it faster because nobody sleeping and definitely not the competition. SS: Absolutely KP. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice you would give to other companies that are considering investing in enablement for the first time? KC: Do your homework. Look, but also be very clear on what you’re trying to achieve and where do you want to go. Keep the end in mind of where you wanna go. Speed is a key essence of any implementation and rollout to make this a reality supported by the user experience, your user experience, your sellers to embrace and make the most out of it, because there’s a lot of technology there that even looks great on paper if the users are not using it. It’s not gonna make the best. A fool with the tool is still a fool. So make sure that you get the right tool to make sure that the people will use it properly and will get the most out of it. SS: Thank you KP. Appreciate the advice and thank you for joining the podcast. I’ve greatly appreciated your insight. KC: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much. 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, an estimated 90% of organizations now have enablement functions, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. So with this growth in mind, how can organizations successfully implement an enablement platform that ensures long-term 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 Shara Simms, the Director of Global Revenue Enablement at Cloudinary. Thank you for joining us Shara. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Shara Simms: Thanks for having me. My name’s Shara. I am from the San Francisco Bay area originally moved down to San Diego and never left, married. Two beautiful little girls. I’m the director of Global Revenue Enablement at Cloudinary. The scope of my role is not just the sales teams, but also our customer support teams as well as our partners. So the revenue enablement kind of umbrella hits all of those different teams. And I think something probably really important to call out around the role is when people hear the term enablement, a lot of times they hear or focus on just the training aspect of it. But I think it’s, it’s so much more than that. It’s strategic partnership, it’s sales process, efficiency. It’s the connector between everything going on in the product world and the go-to-market motion and how that information gets filtered down to sales or again, partners or customer support. So that’s a little bit about me and my role. Shawnna Sumaoang: Thank you Shara! We’re glad that you’re here with us. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen the evolution of the enablement profession just absolutely change from kind of being focused on content or focused on training to really taking a strategic seat at the table to help lead the strategy for the organization and how we bring kind of all the go to market motions together. So I love to hear that you’re kind of overseeing that for Cloudinary today, and you have a ton of experience in both sales enablement and leadership roles. I would love for you to talk to us a little bit more about that journey into enablement and how has your approach to sales enablement evolved over the years? Shara Simms: So I actually started out in the finance world working really closely with financial advisors in a customer support manager role. Just supporting day-to-day operations internal systems processes. I was in my, my young twenties, still trying to figure out, you know, what direction I really wanted to take my career. And there was a part of me that had considered going into teaching. I had realized this, this passion that I had for just taking complex situations or overwhelming scenarios and breaking them down into digestible information. And so with that in mind, and while I was working in this support role, an opportunity came up at the same financial company to do some internal training, onboarding for financial advisors, industry best practices, that type of thing. And I think that that was really the first turning point in my career where I realized I can take my business degree and this learned, you know, financial and business literacy and combine it with adult learning. Yeah. So adult learning quickly became not just a job, but really a passion and spent a good amount of my career at this. Finance company going beyond operations and into more marketing and sales type training. From there, I eventually made a jump into tech. I was with ServiceNow for a couple of years, doing a variety of roles from strategy to learning design, and then leading a team of instructional designers and trainers. And then I eventually made the move to Cloudinary and I would say after what has been my career so far that the background of adult learning mixed with the operational and business fluency is really what has served me well. And I think even though I don’t have a background as a seller per se, that’s really the background. The adult learning background and operational and business is what I’ve been able to effectively apply into the world of tech sales and enablement. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I love that operational background that you have. I think it will apply to a lot of what I’d like to talk to you about today. As I mentioned in the introduction,sales enablement is becoming more and more mainstream for a lot of organizations, and those same organizations are trying to figure out, you know, what are the right people, processes, and tools that I need to have in place. Place in order to really do enablement. Right. You know, to your point at that sort of strategic level, and I know that you guys at Cloudinary had been on a previous enablement platform, and moved over to Highspot. I’d love to understand what motivated you to reevaluate and change your enablement tech stack. Shara Simms: So yes, we did move to Highspot a few months ago. I would say there were two really big motivators there for us. The first one, one of the largest ones would be the G Suite interability. There are a lot of platforms out there that have G Suite integration, but Highspot was able to support more of an advanced use case that we had, and the specific example, the previous platform we were on, so they did integrate with Google Drive in the sense that you could make updates to your master Google documents and then those updates would flow through to the version that the sales reps accessed on the platform. I think most platforms can do that, but beyond that basic integration, we had to jump through some hoops to achieve kind of what we really wanted, which was ultimately to take our internal customer data, have that flow through the platform, and then automatically transpose onto our templated customer facing slides for things like account reviews, which saves our CSMs and our account managers just hours of time Highspot can support this, which was really important for us. Whereas the previous platform, we would’ve needed to get virtual machines like parallels, for example, which came at an incremental cost. But more than that, our security team just they weren’t thrilled with that, and it was just extra workaround. So that G Suite Interability was huge in being able to apply our internal data to the slides. And then the, the second big motivator was the administration piece of it. We are a very small team, but a mighty team. But we spent a lot of hours trying to maintain and effectively administrate our previous platform. So the ease of use on Highspot, specifically ease of use with Salesforce integration, that and G Suite was the two big motivators. Shawnna Sumaoang: m. Well I’m glad that you are now a Highspot customer and I think when you make an investment in the right tools for your teams, you wanna make sure that it’s getting adopted and, and they’re able to take full advantage of it. And I know there can be challenges sometimes when rolling out a new enablement platform in driving that adoption, along with maybe, you know, a few other challenges that come along with kind of that change management, what are some of the biggest challenges that you think enablement practitioners might face when they’re rolling out a new enablement platform, and how have you overcome some of those challenges as you prepare to launch? Shara Simms: Yeah. I think first and foremost, the challenge of having a really good and realistic strategy for the rollout and the adoption. I’ll circle back to that thought in just a moment, and the other would be, again, the hurdle of maintenance and administration. It really is time consuming and if you’re a small team without a dedicated resource, it can be challenging. So with that in mind, circling back to my original thought, which was that realistic strategy for rollout and adoption, what we did was recognize, okay, we don’t have a lot of resources here. What is going to be the most impactful thing to our teams and drive, I wouldn’t say drive adoption right out the gate, but drive that initial buy-in and the excitement from our sales teams. We all love our salespeople, but we also know that behavior change and new system adoption can definitely be a challenge. So what’s going to get them excited to where they want to use this platform? For us, we determined it was seeing that Salesforce integration before even getting into building out landing pages and navigation and fancy training curriculums. Just having that Salesforce or whatever, CRM, you may use integration with Highspot so that. The sales individuals can see the recommended content to use right there within their opportunity page. Rolling that out. Got them really excited and bought in and, and it got them asking me on a weekly basis, when are we getting this whole platform? So we took a phased approach, realistic expectations of what we could do within our given resources. Phase one, Salesforce and Highspot integration Phase two, which is where we are right now, Digital Sales Rooms customizing content and sales facing landing pages. We purposely did not want to rush this portion of it because having a really well thought out organization of content on the various landing pages or HighSpot calls ’em spots, we use the term landing page internally. I think that’s probably a really important piece. So that went into our phase two. Then lastly, phase three will be the second half of the year, all of our learning and training curriculums. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I know building strong professional relationships is another key focus of yours. As you implement a new enablement platform, how do you plan to drive adoption and build excitement? As you mentioned, how critical that is just a moment ago for your programs amongst the sales teams that you support. Shara Simms: Yeah, retouching on, you know, the strategy of our phased approach, but beyond that, I think maintaining really close relationships with our sales leaders is very important. It’s something that I do, you know, ensuring that they’re bought in and that we have a measurement of success that the teams will be held to as well is critical. So for example, we’re currently tracking our sales collateral usage. Are the teams using it effectively at the right stages, what’s working, what’s not? And as part of this tracking, we have an agreement with our sales leaders going into phase two of our Highspot rollout. And the agreement is we will be tracking that the teams are using certain pieces of collateral that have been deemed. Essentially a required piece of content to share for all deals. And we’re tracking that. They share it via Highspot. So if they have their own version or own copy of the material that they send directly, we aren’t tracking that. If they didn’t send it through to Highspot, it didn’t happen. And again, the sales leaders are partnering with us to hold their teams accountable. So that kind of strategic relationship at the sales leadership level I think is really important and it’s what’s helped driving our success with adoption of the platform. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. As you mentioned in your introduction, shara, you have a lot of experience in training. What are some of your best practices for designing and implementing effective training, and how do you see a new enablement platform optimizing these efforts? Shara Simms: Yeah, so first and foremost, always having clearly defined and stated objectives. This is your North Star. It’s gonna help you define if the. Expectation is a behavior change if it’s truly just knowledge retention, if it’s more so a communication versus training. So without a doubt, I want to call that out as probably the most important thing, and not only stating the objective, but also having really clear alignment and agreement of those objectives with your stakeholders. Beyond that, which was maybe stating the obvious. I think a blended learning approach is always the best tactic to use as well, which is one thing I’m really excited about to build enablement on Highspot with this kind of mixed learning. We’re gonna have the ability to pull in my live webinar schedules combined with any on-demand training courses, then technical product documentation that I need the team to read as part of the overarching curriculum. And it’s all going to be on one platform and one curriculum. We also use a tool called Second Nature, which is like an AI simulation tool for sales. It’s pretty cool. And we can also integrate those AI role plays into the same high spot curriculums. So just the ease of pulling in all of those different types of learning elements into one place. It’s gonna be a really exciting second half of the year for us. I’m also really excited to build out curriculums that are role-based or skill-based. So tying in not only the learning component, but then any collateral or resources from the platform into one place based on the specific role or the specific skill gap that I am ultimately trying to solve for. I think lastly, of course, the measurement component is also key. Being able to get insights that I can actively move against and identify, you know, where do I need to spend more of my time? By rep, by individual rep scorecards. So really, really excited for all of those kind of components and pulling in the best practices of learning. Shawnna Sumaoang: On the topic of insights, as you move forward with the implementation, how do you plan to use data and insights to continue to refine your strategy and really ensure a successful launch? Shara Simms: So I mentioned before that we are tracking collateral usage. Obviously we want to know what reps are using, not using how that correlates back to one or lost deals, but also from a behavioral change perspective. We want to also use that data to help us see how well our reps are following the sales process and where we might need to double down on either reviewing the content because it’s not working or reviewing our actual process because there’s some hurdle in the way for them that we need to solve. There’s also the customer engagement cracking that we’re hoping will help move the needle. So for example, as our reps start using the digital sales rooms, if they share a proposal there and the customer views it, great, there’s an indicator for the rep to follow up, see what questions they may have if the customer doesn’t view a case study that was shared. Okay, follow up with an email, highlight the key points from that case study to ensure the customer sees it. The customer engagement tracking is going to be a really big one that we’re going to to build off of. And then the last thing I’ll say in regards to data is. Specifically sales leaders or the manager’s insights, it’s going to be really important that my team actively works with the sales managers so that they understand, you know, how to read their teams. Data and their team’s insights. Again, I keep talking about behavior change, but really putting a focus on helping the manager turn into an effective coach for their team versus just a manager, right? Manager versus coaching, and really being able to use that data to help their teams get better. So I think those are the three big points. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. And, and while we’re on the topic of data, and as you mentioned earlier, you’ve been working on making sure that you have the integration set up between Salesforce. And Highspot, what value do you see in this integration and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Shara Simms: Yeah, the Salesforce integration is wonderful. I absolutely love it. We are definitely trying to drive better use of our internal collateral. Not only just using the content, but using the right content at the right stage, and being able to easily track that. Right now it’s very manual for us. Another big piece of this is. Time efficiency. You know, no more searching around to find the piece of collateral that, that a salesperson might need. It’s gonna appear right there in the opportunity for them. And then lastly, selfishly, from an administrative perspective, gaining a lot of time back in maintaining the Salesforce integration already. The integration works seamlessly. I’ve not had. Any trouble versus our, our last platform, we really just never got it to work correctly. Anytime we would update a field name on Salesforce, we would need to manually update the field, you know, in the platform. And that’s just not the case with Highspot. It’s just all in automatic flow. It’s saved us a ton of time. Shawnna Sumaoang: I’m glad to hear that. And as we look ahead, as you look to post-launch, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’ll be focused on driving? And how will your enablement programs help support these? Shara Simms: Yeah. Our biggest initiative right now that I think is we’re gonna support is the sales process. Adherence the right collateral. Right messaging, right process, all at the right, you know, time and the right stage. This is a mix of the SFDC integration and the landing pages we’re creating in Highspot, which are going to follow more of a sales process versus product-led theme. And what I mean by that is basically being guided by the opportunity situation versus having a seller go in and say, Hey, I just need information on this product. Well, do you really? Or are you jumping straight to solutioning? Where are you right now? Are you in discovery? And you need to pull in this material and have this type of conversation? So it’s really the entire go to market. Sales process that we’re trying to refine and ensure that our sales team is again, following the actions that should be taken versus jumping straight to product or solution material. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. This has been fantastic. Shara, last question for you, for our audience, for folks that are looking to roll out a new enablement platform, what’s maybe one piece of advice that you would give them to set them up for success as they get started? Shara Simms: Before you start organizing your content, have a solidified agreement behind the scenes on the methodology for how you want that content to be served up to reps and what content you want to be served up for your reps. It can be really easy to fall into a bottomless pit of content. On a platform, all of the internal resources, all of the FAQs, everything that product or product marketing has ever created, and it contend to get out of hand for reps really quickly. I think it’s fine if you want all of that internal material available, but just have a really smart way that you’re organizing and serving up the content. And I’ll give you our example. So I’m sure there’s, you know, a hundred different ways to do this as a best practice and the way that I do it might not be the best way for you, but again, that’s why we did the SFDC integration first, so that just the key content. Was rolling into the opportunity while we gave ourselves extra time to really think about content organization on our backend and align with product marketing on how we were gonna organize it to be fed out to the teams. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I do think that’s a fantastic tip for our audience. So Shara, thank you again so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. 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 from Gallup, training can improve a company’s productivity by 17% and profitability by 21% when offered to engaged employees. So how can you train and coach your reps to keep them engaged and help them hit their quotas? 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 is James Petkovski, the director of enablement technology at MetLife. Thank you for joining us, James. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. James Petkovski: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here. And a little bit of a background on me and my role, so I was born and raised in New Jersey, entire family is there, I ended up venturing off to Arizona for college, trying to really experience life on my own, met my beautiful wife there, and then after about 10 years, we relocated back to New Jersey for a little where we had our daughter and I ultimately got my start at MetLife and started my career. At MetLife, I’m providing support for our sales teams in regards to their state licensing and FINRA registration. And I was in that role for a little over a year before I transitioned into sales enablement. Progressed through the enablement role from a consultant to a manager, and now to a director where I currently oversee the technology for our market enablement organization and can’t be happier. Enablement was one of those things I attended an ATD conference and was like, wow, so much sales enablement. And it just struck a chord. And I was like, I’m home. This is exactly what I want to be in. SS: It really is a career calling, I think, for the right folks, so I’m glad that it pulled you in, James. And, you know, as you mentioned, you have a wealth of experience as a sales enablement leader and as a technical analyst at MetLife. You walked us through your journey a bit into enablement. I’d love to understand how does your analytical background influence your enablement strategy? JP: So, always had a passion for the creative arts and One of the awesome parts of enablement is being able to blend both of those from that business analytical side with the creative side. And that really helped me excel in my role in enablement as I was able to solve the business needs with creativity, whether that was developing a learning path, creating videos, podcasts, e-learnings, like really thinking outside the box when it came to how are we going to deliver this in a fun and interesting way. And pulling into my analytical nature, some say I’m crazy, right? But my enjoyment in looking at data really helped me to think through and deliver the best strategy based on, you know, what were we needing? How can we take advantage from data from past learnings, like looking at trends on how our, you know, sales and service reps were engaging with, you know, that format that we provided? Did it, was it effective? So data really helped me tell the story and direct where we needed to go to make sure we’re putting that best learning forward. SS: I love that. I love that you’re applying both that creativity and that analytical component to it as well. It’s both art and science, I guess you could say. Now at MetLife, you’re responsible for developing and managing the training programs. What did training look like at your organization before you started to leverage Highspot and how has it evolved since then? JP: I think some aspects are similar, right? Before and after, we still do e-learnings. We still do videos, webinars, podcasts, the whole kind of learning gamut. I think the real difference came from, previously was a lot of manual work, from pulling reports from various platforms to derive. How effective was the learning? Was it attended? Excel trackers to guide a user through their quote on quote learning pathway. There was just a lot that was done manually, which took time, right? It took resources, and capacity. And this applied to the reps taking those programs as well, having to email their weekly trackers and take all their activities in different systems. So they were bouncing around. I just thought really put that experience together in providing that one-stop shop area for everything. So all those learning activities were all done and access right from the Highspot platform. So it really made that training journey truly about learning and not about how do I need to complete this and what system was I doing it in and kind of the nuances of that. And not only did it simplify the journey for the learner, but also like on the admin side, allowed us to capture that needed data, to be able to quickly look at completion statuses and see, Hey, where were opportunities, right? Like how I think having that quick insight allowed us to adapt quicker. SS: I love that. I love that. I want to circle back to that, but you had mentioned something earlier about all of the variety of learning content, including videos, simulations, and I should have known you had podcasts in there because you were a pro and you hopped on this podcast line already. But in your view, what are some of the key building blocks for effective training content? I JP: I think the biggest key is understanding each training is unique and you really need to come at it from that angle. What are you trying to get across to the audience? Like how quickly do you need to get that message across? And is it more in-the-moment learning or is it a big announcement that was changing the way people were? I think videos really allowed us to get information across quickly. It made things a little bit more bite-sized where we could also include best practices with it, which best practices really resonated. Podcasts allowed for that more conversational, to dive a little bit more into some of the nuances that just sometimes don’t come across in like maybe a direct webinar. And then e-learning and simulations allowed that. You know, hands-on experience and gave a little more interactivity and engagement to some longer form training. And I think the nice thing with the e-learnings and simulations is when you have systems that you’re training on, like being able to have a user get in there, click through some things like, hey, here’s what this area does. Those simulations help in that fail proof environment. And one thing I’ll share is. I don’t feel like a training needs to be one or another, right? Like I think series played a big part in what we do. And that could be starting with a quick introduction video, getting people grounded in a topic, then a webinar to really talk about the meat and potatoes. And then, you know, finally a podcast to wrap it up with some of those conversational nuances. So I would say like just each training come at it from a fresh angle. Thinking through what needs to be done and don’t be afraid to experiment and take that longer form, maybe like shorter tidbits, as opposed to just kind of, Hey, we’re just doing this, right? I think we have a lot of technology at our fingertips. SS: I love that. So going back to what you were saying, you really are at MetLife fostering a culture of continuous learning amongst your sales teams. I’d Love to understand how you, you foster that and you motivate them to enhance their skills and knowledge over time. JP: So I think having Highspot be that one stop shop really allows us to blend in with that continuous learning, right? Like having the resources all on the Highspot platform allows reps once they’re out of, say for example, like a new hire program or an academy program. They know that that content is still there in Highspot and they know how to locate that. So they’re getting accustomed to that being able to leverage the managed content feature within various other content in Highspot allows us to continue that training when needed mindset where for rep pulls up a certain marketing content, it’s, hey, have you taken this training or, hey, have you reviewed these speaking points? So being able to meet the reps where they are, whether they know they need it or not, I think is really how you kind of foster that continuing education is getting them set up with that structured program, having an area where they have access to continuing education on bite-sized topics. And then, Lastly, make sure that you’re kind of connecting that content with the past trainings that have been done. SS: I love that, that continuous learning journey for the folks that are in there. And you have achieved an amazing adoption of active learners and Highspot. I think you guys saw a 38 percent increase in active learners recently. How do you ensure reps consistently engage with and adopt your training programs? JP: So I attribute that to really the amazing work our training team do in our market enablement organization and by giving them a stellar, concise pathway, the reps that are, you know, that they know will walk them through the journey and get them to the finish line, building that rapport with not only the learners, but managers as well, like giving them that confidence that we got you, right? We got, we got them, right? Like for managers, we’re going to make sure they’re prepared with the knowledge. That’s part of those learning pathways is that managers also get that insight into how their reps are performing through it all as well. So they can keep in touch and really align with those opportunity areas that I was speaking a little bit about how on an admin backend side, like being able to quickly look at those analytics, it really allows you to tailor, hey, how do I focus my energy and efforts? SS: I love that. Now, going back to your analytics background, when you’re evaluating the success of your training initiatives and the overall sales readiness of the team, how do you leverage data to optimize these programs? JP: So we look at a lot of items and I would say it’s kind of a never-ending review on effectiveness. It’s taken us a while and we continue to this day, to grow in our understanding of what to do and how do we change and make things better. You know, from the time that rep starts to well after how have they been performing months, years after a training program, after taking it, looking only data and analytics, but gathering feedback too, is there anything we could have changed to prepare you better? Feedback is king, good or bad, I think, never be afraid of it. SS: I love that. And since implementing Highspot, what are maybe some of the business results that you’ve achieved and do you have any wins you can share? JP: Yeah, so I think from an admin side, the time to build pathways, courses, lessons has drastically decreased, you know, we have saved days with this as everything is really simple to create and previously where, you know, my team would have a large hand in building out the courses throughout the year after we set up the initial framework and templates. We have really been able to pass that down to some of our other devoted training teams within our market enablement to continue that process. And the process is straightforward that, you know, we just provide that guidance, but they’re the ones adding in that new content for the program. So this saves them time as well. Saves us time really allows us to really put our efforts toward guiding the reps. And then also thinking, hey, how do we innovate and push the boundary next time. And then from a ramp up timeframe, we’ve been really able to give reps not only a quicker timeframe to get ready for their role, but also get them familiar with the platform that they will be using day in and day out with Highspot. This helps with that easy transition, right? When they go to their full-time role, the dedicated courses and pathways with everything captured in one spot really allow them to get their learning done. And focus on the day to day work and shadowing afterwards. SS: I love that. And I have to say another win I saw was that you shared on LinkedIn that MetLife was named to Fortune’s world best workplaces list. And from an enablement leadership perspective, how do your training programs help cultivate a strong and healthy sales culture? JP: Yeah, so we have amazing onboarding and continuing education training teams and programs. I think having a great team definitely helps. I think the best part that we do is really setting up a rep with a fresh start. It’s not muddy. It’s direct. It gives not only reps what they need, but managers too. Becoming a leader, knowing that from the leadership side that my reps are being taken care of, and I don’t have to do all this work myself. And I have, you know, this amazing team around me. It really makes the process of preparing reps to do what they’ve been really brought here to do, and that is to achieve their best. So being able to get everyone on that same starting ground, just set them up for success and drives us to that healthy culture. I recently just had a new hire come on board my team and. Just the way we onboard them and get them all set up. It was nice because I didn’t have that much pressure on me. So it really allowed me to know that they were in that trusted hand. So that is one of the things that I think sets in a healthy culture of the manager has that confidence. And then that rep also has that confidence as well, getting started. SS: Amazing. Last question, James. To close, if you could give one piece of advice to someone looking to enhance training within their teams, what would it be? JP: I would say don’t be afraid. Whether it’s of feedback, of change, of data. Use that to cultivate and adapt the world of training and technology is ever evolving and the beauty of the connection we have nowadays from forums and conferences and you know, the works we have so much education out there that don’t be afraid of it. Take it one at a time. Don’t know how something will come across to your team? Implement a series, like have that be a portion of the learning. Maybe have a pilot group — pilot the idea with a certain team, see how it does, ask for feedback. Don’t be afraid and be bold. SS: Fantastic advice. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate your time. JP: Thank you. Have a great day. 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 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.

According to Salesforce research, sales reps spend only 28% of their time actively selling. So, how can organizations help cut through the noise and maximize rep efficiency to drive success? 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 Kevin Lewis, the global director of sales enablement at Milliken & Company. Thank you for joining us, Kevin. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Kevin Lewis: Thank you. Sure would be happy to. So I have been with Milliken for a little over 40 years. Started in manufacturing for a short time, spent some time in corporate HR, corporate training, but then spent 30 plus years in one of our divisions as a salesperson, sales manager, marketing manager, and then about the last 10 years of that in a sales enablement role. And then currently, and for the last four years have been the enterprise-wide sales enablement director, which was a new role that was formed about four years ago. So I’m the first. SS: Well, congratulations on the new role. Now, given your experience in the manufacturing industry, I’d love to understand from you, Kevin, what are some of the unique challenges that reps in that industry face and how can enablement help them navigate these challenges? KL: So, I’m not sure if it’s unique to manufacturing necessarily, but the majority of our products. Our ingredients go into other finished products. And so because of that, the supply chain is a very long supply chain and we have to be involved. At multiple points within that value chain. And in many cases, the value we bring, our products bring are not necessarily captured at our direct customer level. They tend to be more at further downstream in the downstream customers. So that’s a real challenge for our salespeople to be able to. Navigate through that supply chain and have the ability to call on the various points within that chain. And those customers are very different type of customers. They could be a very large chemical manufacturer. They could be a cut-and-sew operation. It could be an end user like a Walmart or a Starbucks. And so the capability of our sales force has to be Such that they can effectively call on all of those various points in the chain effectively. And so, Sales Enablement allows us to provide the coaching, the tools, the assets that they need at those various points. So that they can be more successful and not spend their time creating or locating those necessary tools to be successful. SS: Absolutely. And I know, and you mentioned it just now a few times, but how important sales efficiency is. And I know that’s a key goal for you. Why is that a top priority for your company this year? And what are some of the initiatives that you’re focused on to help achieve it? KL: Yes, it is a priority for us. We are challenged to grow just like most any company and many of the industries that we in are not necessarily growing industry. So it’s a real challenge. And so we have to be more effective and efficient without adding SGNA and adding more headcount. So we have to improve our efficiency and our effectiveness of our sales force. Two of the real key things that we’re focused on this year is sales training. We have implemented a lot of sales methodology, training, market training, product training, as well as a lot of other types of. Sales focus training, and then I would say that the other thing that we focused on is marketing and how we can connect our marketing efforts to our sales force in a much more streamlined way. Big part of that is both of those initiatives is the utilization of our sales enablement tool, Highspot which allows us to provide that content, whether it’s training or assets or whatever it may be to our sales force at their fingertips. SS: Well, you may have already answered my next question then. I’d love to get your perspective on the strategic advantage of having an enablement platform for boosting sales productivity. KL: I would say just like with having CRM as the one place to go for salespeople when they want to talk about or understand their customers, their contacts, their sales opportunities, having one enablement platform where we have the ability to house all of our assets and our content. And give our salespeople tools and functionality to communicate with our customers, like utilizing pitches, digital rooms, things of that nature. And having the two of those connected is one of the key ways, in our opinion, that we have the ability to, again, improve that efficiency and effectiveness so that we can cut down on that time spent looking for things, creating things. And give them more time to effectively prepare and then go out and execute. Obviously it’s what the ultimate goal is. SS: I love that. How do you effectively collaborate with key stakeholders, such as some of the cross-functional partners you mentioned, like marketing, maybe the frontline sales reps themselves to continue to enhance sales efficiency? KL: So I mentioned that the role I’m in is a new role that was created about four years ago. Prior to that, I was in this role in one division, but we have four divisions and the other three divisions did not have a sales enablement leader, nor was there a corporate person. And part of our digital roadmap was we wanted one CRM platform across our organization. And at that time we had seven across four divisions. So the first part of that business case was to create this sales enablement team so that each division had one and there was a corporate one that was going to at least initially drive adoption of that one platform, but once that was in place, which it is, to continue to drive sales efficiency, sales effectiveness across within their division and across divisions. And so that hub and spoke model has been very effective for us in the fact that our sales enablement leads, and myself, we see our role as how can we make salespeople better. And when I say that we really focus on process systems and people. And so we are across the entire spectrum. So whether it’s people meaning sales methodology or training processes, improving internal processes, whether it’s things like sample requesting or things of that nature, and then systems, which be our CRM system and our sales enablement platforms and making sure that we connect all of those together. So that has been very effective. For us as a team to work together, but then to take that out to the field so that it’s someone within each of the divisions that’s really driving that. And then the other thing I would say is we work hand in hand with our corporate marketing team, who is driving a lot of the demand generation and a lot of the marketing automation work they’re doing that obviously is feeding into our salespeople in the form of lead generation and things. That collaboration is truly a hand-in-hand effort that we have been working together for the last couple of years once we got that initial CRM platform in place. SS: And that is a massive undertaking. So congratulations to the team for getting that all underway in the last few years. Now, I want to shift gears just a little bit. I still want to talk about rep efficiency, but I want to talk about it in the context of content governance. Because we’ve heard from a lot of our customers and enablement practitioners, how important that is in helping to improve rep efficiency. Can you share a little bit more about your strategies for content governance and how that helps your team optimize efficiency? KL: Sure. So what I would say is the sales enablement platform actually fell under one of our corporate marketing folks. When we initially started utilizing Highspot and quite honestly, it was about number 18 on their priority list, probably. So I would say it was not given a lot of focus and effort. And the governance was extremely ad hoc, if at all, we made some changes and a sales enablement tool seems natural to be in the sales enablement team, very logical. So I, and our sales enablement team, we actually assumed that responsibility about eight to nine months ago. And since that time, we’ve tried to do a lot of cleansing of assets and of the platform in general. But in the last two months, actually, we have put a focused effort on governance around that to move it from that ad hoc to where we now have a full-time admin working on sales enablement that one of the focused areas is around governance around our sales enablement tool around training around an improved utilization to also provide additional functionality because our tool has been so underutilized up until we’ve assumed this responsibility that we see a lot of potential for improving that. But part of that improvement is a strong cleansing effort that we’re doing right now, but then putting in specific governance with not only that admin, but specified admin within each of our divisions to ensure our content stays fresh and relevant. SS: Well, in addition to helping reps find the right content, you guys are also helping them to leverage it effectively. You guys have seen a 58 percent increase in adoption of external shares. Like pitching, like digital rooms. What are your best practices for helping reps effectively engage their buyers? KL: One of the things that we do is we track and measure and share out that information. Salespeople are highly competitive by nature, and so anytime you can measure and share out how salespeople are doing, that will tend to stimulate some competition just naturally. So we track and measure and we share that information. It’s not in the form of a KPI necessarily, but allowing our salespeople who are not utilizing it to see others are doing this. And by the way, I happen to know that that person’s being successful, so maybe I should take a look at this. So that’s one of the key things that we’re doing is measure, tracking, and sharing. The other is training. We put a renewed emphasis over the last few months. On training and it’s only going to be enhanced because we’re actually going to be adding a number of new sales reps who currently are not licensed, but will be in the next few weeks. And so there’s going to be an even new emphasis, renewed emphasis, I guess is appropriately way to say it on training of not only those new associates. To the platform, but our existing ones so that we can ensure that we continue to drive that utilization of the tool and the functionality that’s there.That’s we’re seeing success. And the other thing is within the divisions, we have 1 division that tends to be at this point, our highest utilization, and they’re seeing a lot of success and the. Admin or the person in that division that’s really driving that has certainly been very instrumental in sharing out those best practices with that sales force. So it’s a combination of those things. SS: Amazing. Well, you talked about this. You touched on this a little bit at the start of your last answer, but I’d love to revisit a little bit more and dig a little deeper. What are the key metrics that you track to measure the impact of your programs on sales efficiency and effectiveness? KL: So the number one, I mean, salespeople are in the business of closing business. So the first key metric and number one key metric is one opportunities. We are, that is by far the number one thing, because that’s ultimately the objective is to make the sale. So one opportunities is certainly one of the keys that will always be in place. Tracked, measured, shared very frequently. In addition to that, we are looking at win rates, we’re looking at cycle time, we’re looking at lead conversions, we’re looking at things like time due to convert leads, how many leads we get that are not acted upon within 24 hours. So a lot of those types of things that we track and some of which are actual KPIs. But like I said, one of our focuses is sales training, and so we’re tracking and measuring sales training courses that our folks are taking. And it’s actually a KPI for all of our sales people this year that they have to take a minimum of X number of classes. So we’re tracking and measuring that. And we’re also looking at things like our website, how our customers are interacting, but then how that flows through to existing contacts and tracking that for our salespeople, which is something that is relatively new to the salesforce. So a lot of things, but bottom line, still top of the list, one opportunities. That’s the name of the game. SS: Always, always. Since you’ve implemented Highspot, do you have some key results that you might be able to share with us already? Any wins you can share? KL: I would say one of the biggest wins is within one of our divisions. We have a sizable number of sales reps in that division that are constantly interacting with the A and D community. So architect and design community and that community, of course, even though they’re not our direct customer, they’re a heavy influence in that marketplace. And what’s important to them most of the time, not 100%, but a large majority of the time. Our aesthetics and looks, those soft things, it’s not specifications, and it’s not price, and it’s not hard things, it’s the soft things. And so, our reps in that division have been very successful in utilizing pitches to that community to share with them a lot of the design work we’re doing with the products that that group sells, as well as our capabilities of creating new designs. And that has been very well received in the A& D community because again, they’re all about aesthetics and looks and art. And creativity. And so getting that word out to that group of Customers has been very successful with that group as far as influencing the sale. SS: I love that. That is a fantastic win. Kevin. Amazing. Last question for you as you’re looking ahead, how do you plan to evolve your enablement strategy to continue to drive sales efficiency? KL: In the case of our sales enablement platform, as I mentioned earlier, we have a renewed emphasis this year. Adding people training, focused admin efforts on cleansing, governance, training, new functionality, all of the sales training that we’re doing. And so this year we’re really about executing, that’s kind of the word that I use the most often internally is this is the year of execution. This is not the year of let’s go find another new tool or that kind of thing. We’ve done a lot of that in the past five to eight years. We’ve built the ecosystem in my opinion, very well, and we’ve done a pretty good job. We’re not quite there, but we’ve done a really good job of integrating our ecosystem. So now it’s about execution. And so I think as we move forward, we’re going to need to continuously evaluate how are these things doing? Are we getting the value that we need? What do we need to change or pivot to or from to make it more effective? We have a sales advisory board that we utilize on a regular basis as a sounding board for the sales organization. So in addition to our sales enablement leads interacting on a daily basis, that’s another way that we can collect that feedback to ensure that the strategy and the execution that we have in place, it’s working and whatever we need to tweak, we can tweak. And if we find a major hole somewhere, whatever it may be. Then let’s go address it. But right now we feel pretty confident that we don’t have any big holes. We know we have some little ones here and there that we’re always going to be trying to work on, but. It’s really about execution and then changing our strategy to make sure that that execution is going well. Our sales enablement team deals with so many things, sales training, we deal with customer journey mapping, we deal with customer segmentation, we deal with customer surveys and customer experience things, we deal with CRM and all of the systems. So, I mean, it’s such a broad spectrum that it’s always going to be evolving, but we feel like we’ve got it at a place now where we don’t need any major changes. It’s more about execution and tweaking, I think. SS: I love that. You guys are focused on executing with excellence. I think that is phenomenal, Kevin. Thank you again so much for joining us and sharing your perspectives with our audience. I really appreciate it. KL: Thank you. Glad to be here. 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 Forrester, organizations that align their go-to-market teams grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. So how can you foster effective cross-functional communication to break down silos and secure leadership buy-in for your enablement strategies? 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 Sonal Patel, the director of GTM enablement at Rakuten. Thank you for joining us, Sonal. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background and your role. Sonal Patel: Thank you for having me. So my name is Sonal Patel. I’m born in the fantastic city that is London, UK. Shout out to any fellow Londoners listening in. That was my base until about two years ago where I got an opportunity to relocate to US. I’m now living in a much warmer climate based out of Frisco, Dallas. So a little bit about my background. I started my career in digital marketing affiliates client side, which led me to join Rakuten Advertising, managing clients and leading the UK client services team. From there, I moved into a strategy and sales engineering role, supporting sales teams this time with deal analysis, pricing profitability, which was a great transition into sales enablement where I now support commercial teams globally. SS: We’re so excited to have you here now at Rakuten. You have held roles across the go-to-market organization from account management to client services and operations. Talk to us about your journey into your current role and how this experience influences your approach to go to market enablement. SP: Yeah, sure. How much time do we have for this one? Okay. So as I said, I started my career in client services and account management, and this gave me a deep understanding of client, needs and the challenges of building strong relationships and really driving that customer satisfaction. Managing complex accounts, leading high performing teams taught me what it takes to really deliver results. This experience, I would say shaped my approach to enablement. I focus on supporting commercial teams today with the right tools, a clear messaging, and content that really aligns with client expectations and business goals. I also, in this role, work very closely with our delivery teams to help our commercial groups really navigate that internal noise, ensuring that we’ve got alignment. So this spans across teams like product, product marketing, marketing, sales solutions, and more. SS: I love that journey. On LinkedIn, you also mentioned that you specialize in helping leaders overcome challenges to drive success. Can you share an example of a challenge that you’ve been able to help overcome for your business through enablement? SP: Yeah, a big challenge I came to understand is for our sellers really tailoring the experience to buyer needs while navigating really lengthy sales processes to stand out in the market. We really needed to streamline our messaging and make that experience more impactful. So one way I tackled this was by implementing digital showrooms, taking you back a bit. It started when a seller ran out of time during a pitch process to demo our dashboards. So we created short bite-sized demo videos showcasing our features. That prospects really cared about the most. And from there, I developed custom digital room templates that basically allows our sales teams to share our full product suite, as well as RFP documents and all of those documents that is needed within that sales process in less than five clicks. So this has been an absolute game changer. It’s helping us deliver tailored, engaging experiences, while really most importantly, simplifying that process for our sales teams. SS: Another common challenge I hear a lot about, I know a lot of enablement teams face, is gaining leadership buy-in, and this is an area where you have had a lot of success. I’d love to understand, what are some of your best practices for securing support for your programs from your executive leaders? SP: Yeah, sure. Great question. Securing leadership buy-in is tough. It’s not just about getting your foot in the door, it’s about keeping it there. It’s taken me years to figure out, if I’m honest. For me, it comes down to three things. Identifying the right stakeholders. Understanding their pain points and keeping the relationship ongoing and fluid. One aspect I’ll talk about here is early in my career, I thought I was a good listener, but I was really just waiting for my turn to talk. I’d latch onto a keyword and start crafting my response instead of actually processing what was being said. But when I started truly listening, things started changing. Leadership tells you exactly what they care about. And problem solving becomes a two-way conversation by focusing on their needs. And showcasing how my programs address their priorities. I’ve been able to build that trust and secure their support. But like I said, it’s taken years to really figure that out. It’s not a one-time effort. It’s really about maintaining that dialogue, staying adaptable and really continuing to deliver that value over time. So a lot of perseverance, I’d say it doesn’t come overnight. But yeah, I would go back to those kind of three things that I really identified to really help secure a leadership buy-in. SS: And what would you say is the impact of having strong executive support for enablement? SP: Strong executive support, I’d say is critical for enablement because it really drives that credibility, the prioritization and the adoption across the organization. It also ensures enablement is seen as that strategic function that it really is that impacts business outcomes and it’s not just a nice to have. I’m a pretty lean team here at Rakuten Advertising. So that again has taken. A good few years to really establish when leaders champion enablement, it really helps break down those silos. It aligns teams towards shared goals, secures the resources. I really need within enablement to really scale programs. And most importantly, I’d say, it fosters a culture of continuous learning, really empowering those teams to perform at their best and deliver better results for the business, ultimately, is our shared outcome. SS: Now, beyond executive leaders, how do you build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders at all levels of the organization, like cross-functional partners and frontline reps? SP: Yeah, great question. Another one that could probably spend a long time talking about. Building strong relationships with key stakeholders, especially reps. It’s all about the three pillars, if you like, which is consistency, collaboration, and trust. I focus on building rep relationships first, since they’re the ones using the tools and programs we create. One way I’ve done this is by launching a champions program. So partnering with our early adopters to test use cases, gather their feedback and then refine programs. So these champions also provide testimonials that have really helped me drive adoption across the various projects and deliverables that I’ve set out. It does take time and perseverance to build that trust and credibility, but it’s incredibly worth it. I also lean on my support system. What I mean by support system, this is my mentors at work, external enablement resources and events, coffee chats with other enablement professionals to really stay sharp and learn from their experiences. And I bring that into the activity that I’m running as well. So I’d say staying connected and open to feedback has really helped me build those kind of strong and lasting relationships. SS: And how have these strong stakeholder relationships helped you optimize and innovate your enablement programs? SP: Great question. The stakeholder relationships are really key for any enablement leader, in my opinion, because enablement is a partnership with sales leaders. We’re not the stick when enforcing things. We need sales leaders to really drive that accountability and frontline managers as well have to get behind the programs that we create for them to really succeed. My role, or an enablement role if you like, is to execute, really protect our sellers. And keep that chaos down by streamlining their experience. So when you have that trust and buy-in from stakeholders, from frontline managers, it’s easier to get that honest feedback to make improvements and create programs that actually work and are embraced by the team. So you’ve got that buy-in across all levels. SS: I love that. Shifting a little bit, one area where you’ve started to see a lot of traction with your reps is in the use of Digital Rooms. Can you tell us about your strategy for leveraging Digital Rooms and some of the results you’re seeing so far? SP: Yeah, so Digital Rooms have been a game changer for our reps. I spoke about this a little bit earlier. I’m going to go into a bit more detail. It all started when we couldn’t do a live demo during an RFP pitch. So working closely with sales reps and sales solutions, I created our first digital showroom tailored to our client’s needs, including 25 plus custom videos, centralizing resources, such as RFP decks, commercial proposals, and case studies. From there, I worked with sales leaders to get their buy-in. And what I mean by that is I took this one room that we created. Showcased it to sales leaders, and that led to the creating of regional and then vertical-specific rooms. After a lot of, I’d say, initial hand-holding and training, reps can now create a bespoke room in just under five clicks. We’ve scaled to over ten global templates, and these rooms are really helping reps deliver more tailored, impactful experiences, while making the process so much easier for them. A recent win for the business. That we secured in our sales or prospect actually called out the digital showroom as a standout feature versus competitors. They were speaking to it’s building that kind of trust, building those testimonials, going back to having your champions on the field. That’s really helped us kind of elevate digital showrooms and get the adoption that we have today. SS: Fantastic results. And on that note, how do you measure the impact of your enablement strategy and demonstrate that impact to your stakeholders? Are there any key wins you can share with us? SP: One way I measure the impact of enablement strategy at Rakuten is using heat maps to track activity on playbooks and initiatives. So we have a number of different plays that we push out to the business using high spot as well as digital room and pitch activity. So I share this with leaders to really show that engagement. I also work very closely in conjunction with sales leaders, as well as. Working closely with our content SMEs. So all of our subject matter experts that are producing a lot of this content to review the success of it. So the metrics that I focus on here are internal usage, as well as external engagement, especially through digital rooms by setting shared goals with all of these stakeholders quarterly. It helps my efforts stay aligned and focused on delivering business outcomes that we’ve set out. So it is a shared best practice there. SS: Last question. For enablement leaders looking to gain leadership buy- in within their organization, what is the biggest takeaway you’d leave them with? SP: I’ll share three takeaways with you that have really resonated with me. First is listen first, then act. And what I mean by that is take your time to truly understand leadership pain points and priorities. This took me years. Build trust by showing you’re solving their specific challenges and you’re not just pushing your own agenda. Second, I would say align enablement to business goals. Really clearly connect your programs to measurable outcomes that matter to leadership. So things like revenue growth, pipeline acceleration, or improved rep performance. Show them the why behind your initiatives. And then finally, the last thought I’d leave you with is around building those ongoing relationships. It’s really key. Leadership buy-in isn’t a one- time effort. Keep that relationship fluid by regularly sharing progress, results, and feedback, and really make them feel like partners in the process, not just stakeholders. SS: Thank you so much, Sonal, for joining us. I really appreciate it. SP: Thank you. Closing remarks, if I may, I would like to give a quick shout-out to some of my enablement coffee chat mentors that I talked about. The impact that a lot of the individuals I’m about to share with you have been really pivotal to my enablement journey and where I am today, my coffee trap mentors include Sheevaun Thatcher, Del Nakhi, Kate Jack, they’re all pretty big influences in the enablement space and they were fantastic to take some time out to speak to me about. They started their career in enablement and I was able to take a lot of those learnings and apply them to my day-to-day. Highspot leaders. We’ve got some fantastic mentors that I leaned in a lot and I continue to lean in. Raksha, Lisa, Laura in EMEA, and Matthew. And then finally my manager, mentor friend who gives me the space to really grow, test and learn and has been and is instrumental in contributing to my enablement success in recent years. And that’s Eric Nakano. 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 2024, 20% of organizations see sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you streamline your sales process and equip reps to win more and win faster? 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 Scott McNabb, the chief sales officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Scott McNabb: Yeah, I'm thrilled to death to be here. Thank you so much. As mentioned, I'm the Chief Sales Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions. I have been in and around the world, solving problems for major brands, major carriers, major tech companies, et cetera, for the better part of the last 20 years, so since I was nine years old, that's a joke, and have been leading sales teams, both in the data world and also in the SaaS software world over the course of my career. SS: Amazing. Well, Scott, we are honored to have you here. Given your extensive experience as a sales leader, you have seen the landscape evolve. I'm sure throughout that journey, but especially in recent years. What are some of the top challenges that you would say sales teams face today? SM: You know, I would say as relates to my use of different tools in the sales cycle, what I continue to evolve and learn from is the notion that sellers may not understand analytically where a Buyer stands in their buyer's journey. And it's evidenced by the fact that, again, going back to the conversational topic, they don't know the right material to provide to the right buyer at the right time that might resonate with them at the proper deal stage, more importantly, at the proper. Sort of category of ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. So sending the wrong material to the wrong buyer at the wrong time in the stage, and before you know it, you get lost in the deal cycle. And it is the number one challenge that sellers face, both in my current role and in previous companies that I've worked with is understanding where they are from a situational awareness perspective in the deal sort of cycle. I've got a military aviation background, and one of the things that we teach in fighter pilot school is helping the aviator understand where they are in the fight at any given moment, right? Where's the nearest, you know, fuel stop? Where's the enemy line versus the friendly line? You know, where do you stand three-dimensionally in relation to the buyer? In this particular example, but in relation to the enemy, you know, am I positioned properly to either fight and win or escape and save myself for another day? So to use the vernacular, that situational awareness is something that we teach in, you know, in our aviation community. And it's a construct situational awareness is a construct that we try. To guide, teach, coach, and sort of replicate for the sellers so that when they're in the deal cycle, that they understand where they are in relation to the challenge that the buyer faces. Does that make sense? SS: Absolutely. And I have to say, Scott, also very cool that you are in the aviation space. That is amazing. SM: It's 15 years of my life, lots and lots of time doing it, and it's amazing the corollaries between that situational awareness, the thing that you have to teach, and oftentimes young up-and-coming aviators, they get that they're flying the plane, and they get that it's moving in a forward direction, and they get what they have to do to get from here to there, do the thing you have to do, and return safely. But, you know, sort of advanced instruction is understanding three dimensionally where you fit in the fight. SS: I can see how that is a great analogy to sales. Now, from your perspective, how can enablement help sales teams overcome some of these challenges to achieve more success? SM: Well, let's be clear. So there's training and there's enablement. I think we get these two things confused. Training is what you do when you're trying to show somebody how to lift in the gym, right? Enablement is when they're thinking from a, again, three-dimensional perspective when we're guiding them to have critical thinking skills and understand if I'm here, then my next move is there, and we call it in our world, next best action. We built our entire sales enablement model around MBAs and the most often reasons why sales reps won't put deals and commit is because of the fear that if I asked you to commit, or if you're willing to stick your neck out and commit to a deal, Then somebody is going to ask you to have a plan for how you're going to execute on the mission. Right? And so it is the number one challenge. They say that I learned this from an amazing sales leader. Light is the world's best disinfectant, right? So enablement is about bringing deals into the light and via example, leading from the front, guiding, coaching. Enablement is not something that lives exclusively in an enablement department. It is something that is truly something that is to be led by the leaders. They have to exhibit and exemplify these skill sets so that the seller will feel as though we're all in the same set of airplanes after the same mission. And so enablement. Is that guidance tool, but again, it's not the enablement department exclusively. It is the seller, the sales leaders function. This is what, uh, I've got a sales leadership summit next week in Chicago with all my leaders and a big part of what I'm coaching on is how do you coach and enable your sellers? You can't just depend upon the enablement department to solve for the challenge. SS: I love that. You've essentially made enablement a cultural priority across your organization. And I know that you're passionate about developing high performance cultures. What are some of your best practices for building that culture within a sales team? SM: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's an old school book that's been around for 30 years and it's still never more true. And so culturally we have to guide the sellers from a culture perspective. Around the notion of franchise ownership, right? They have to own, understand the mission, be clear on the goals, be clear on the steps, and then accountability comes with culture. So again, a big part of what we're teaching next week is really just sort of an agreement between the sales leader and the sales rep on what is accountability and what does that mean, and then finally, Culture, whereby our one on ones are designed around four key concepts. Revenue first, right? Where you stand in the revenue picture, people, right? What people are you struggling with process? What processes are kicking your butt? And then finally innovation, right? Where we make it the responsibility of everybody culturally in the sales team to constantly be looking for ways to improve and innovate our process, right? So it's just not do it because I say that you do it. They have to be bought into that concept. And more importantly, they have to be challengers who look at the process and go, all right, well, look, that's kicking my butt. That's stupid. Why are we doing it that way? I got an idea. Why don't we do it this way, because we can shave three days off of the opposing cycle, or we can accelerate our deals because finally, culturally, it's all about velocity of deals. Culture has to be sort of digging in on the notion of increasing the velocity at which we move deals through the cycle. Because, you know, they say an army travels on its stomach, a sales team travels on velocity. SS: I could not agree more. So we talked in the intro and you mentioned it just now about the importance of a solid sales process. How can the sales process influence a high-performance culture? And what have you done to streamline the sales process to help kind of boost sales performance? SM: I love the question. Look, I think first and foremost, there's a massive change around this notion of servant leadership. So it's important that we start backwards from the challenge, which is a high-performing sales organization. It's funny. 10 years ago, servant leadership was not in vogue and as our sales teams have grown up, and we have Gen Z and we have Gen X and, and et cetera, all of a sudden they come from worlds where maybe they were not guided and coached the proper way. So weirdly enough, serving our teams, serving to the people that we were responsible for is back in vogue all of a sudden. So I think that step one is let's make sure that we start with the servant leadership methodology. Two, I think it's remarkably important that we pivot our sales model from a sales-led model to a customer-driven model, right? Our sales processes historically have been, where do you think you are in the deal? I'm at stage three, which means that I'm going to push them to do a thing. And then stage four, I'm going to hand them, these are the things that we do to manage our process. Whereas switching to a buyer-centric methodology, which is if I call the customer and ask them questions about where they are in their buying cycle, stage four, stage three, stage five, would the customer say that's where I am in my process for acquiring the thing that you sell, right? So switching to a customer centric model away from a sales centric model, this still exists and pervades. All over the industry, when it comes to sales organizations, we're tracking where you think you are in the deal. I want to know, where do you think the customer thinks they are in the buying cycle? If that resonates with you. SS: Oh, it absolutely does. And from your perspective, what would you then say is the strategic advantage that an enablement platform provides for improving the sales process? SM: All right, I'm going to go back to situational awareness. Sorry. At the end of the day, it helps the seller know more about where the customer is in their buyer's journey. Whereas in the old days, we would just, you know, enablement wise, we'd send out stuff and, you know, I wouldn't even know necessarily what they're looking at or what they're engaging with or what of my content resonates with them. But with an enablement platform, and I've used your platform in. Now, this is my third company and purchased it in two previous companies. You know, I find that it's a game changer because you're competing in a world whereby many don't have this thing and therefore the seller is blind. Again, going back to the military flying example, there's a notion called no joy, which means when I'm looking for the enemy and I can't find them. On the radio, you click off no joy, which means I don't have sight of where this guy is. This human that is my adversary. These kinds of tools provide the seller with that no joy moment where they go. All right. I do know exactly where they are. They're 300 feet below me. They're there at this speed and this course. And the enablement tool is a, for lack of a better term, it's a game changer for knowing where The customer is and where I as a seller can make better decisions about where they are in their buyer's journey down to the point of this materials not resonating. I sent the wrong stuff at the right time. In my current company, we use our enablement tool for both sales and CSMs and our solutions consultants and our marketing team, obviously to replace SharePoint so that we not only I can see as a leader. What's working? What's not? Where are they using? What pieces of content and what stage of the buyers journey? Wrong time, wrong content, wrong message, et cetera. So now I've got analytical knowledge on why is the deal stalling in stage, right? So I can run analytics out of salesforce that goes, all right, you're in stage four. We've shipped over a raft of content, but why is the deal, why is it not resonating with the buyer at this stage in the journey? Let's go backwards a step and figure out what did we miss and let the data then tell us and analytically help us understand where are we stalling in deals. And what's causing a velocity change? You get what I'm saying? SS: I do. I love that data-driven approach. How do you leverage data? If you have a few examples to refine and optimize the sales process? SM: Well, look, I think it comes down to and sorry, I'm going to go off track just two seconds, but know that I feel like that present company excepted. I have led sales leadership teams before where they were managing using analytics as a crutch. Instead of trying to understand what's going on, we're managing to the metrics. Activity wise, instead of managing to the metrics again around velocity around understanding what pieces of content resonates best, we're using analytics the wrong way. In my opinion, accountability. Yes, but activity for activity sake. No, right? Can't work that way anymore. So the less mature sales leaders are the ones that are basically sitting behind the steering wheel, looking at analytics to give them a false sense of security. Right. We got to take the analytical information and help us understand and make better decisions about what's working in the deal cycle. Why are things not progressing? Where are things stalling? Let's get a better picture about the deal cycle and not just lean on old school metrics. You know, email open rates and click through rates - they don't tell me anything. It's a vanity metric, right? Understanding how many sales meetings that they had this week, while that is a core metric for activity, it doesn't really tell me the quality of the meetings that you're having, right? That's what I care about. Yes, I certainly want you making the dials and I want you making the connections, but what I care most about is that Those amazing interactions with the buyers are turning into a valuable velocity change in the deal cycle. SS: I love that. And I know that all of that data is helping to inform a lot of the innovation that's coming out of AI. And I know that AI sales tactics are an area of interest to you. I'd love to hear directly from you. How do you plan to leverage innovation like AI to improve the sales process and the performance of your teams? SM: Again, great question. Timely topic. Obviously, at the beginning of that journey is where I would say that we are, but just getting sellers to use AI to even sort of have it guide them on what conversation would resonate with the buyer at this stage. With this problem, it's really not about AI. If you think about it, it's about building a library of AI prompts, because I find that the reason why sellers don't use AI is not because they can't figure out how to ask a question they're asking the wrong. Questions of the AI engine, and then they're surprised when they get a really, you know, stupid or flat line answer from the AI tool. It's not the AI tool's fault. It's we're asking the wrong question. So what I've asked my enablement team to do is build and load into my enablement platform a library of AI prompts that will provide the proper response. SS: I love that. I think that's phenomenal. Scott, last question for you. If you could give other sales leaders who are looking to improve their sales process one piece of advice for the year ahead, what would it be? SM: You know, I think it's impossible for me to give one piece of advice, but I think the predominant one is be a servant leader first, right? Have the team that you support. Accountability comes with servitude, right? So if we're serving the teams that we're supporting, then they will feel supported and guided and coached. If you've ever worked for a company that does not espouse the notion of servant leadership and is the opposite of that, which is often known as top-down leadership, then you don't feel very supported and you're not pulled Up, right? Servant leadership, I think, is back in vogue because people weren't feeling guided and coached and pulled, right? It's, I'm going to stand on you for what you're not doing, but not guide you on what you could be, what's possible to be done. And so that's, if anybody asked me, that's my number one thought is start backwards from servant leadership and Okay. Get really amazing at guiding, coaching, teaching, leading from the front. You know, it's the old-school model. I never am going to ask anybody to do something that I wouldn't do myself. That's an old school military term, but at the end of the day, it still works. Still works like a dream. SS: Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much for sharing your advice with our listeners today. I greatly appreciate the time. SM: It's my pleasure. Good luck, everybody. 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 2024, 20% of organizations see sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you streamline your sales process and equip reps to win more and win faster? 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 Scott McNabb, the chief sales officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Scott McNabb: Yeah, I’m thrilled to death to be here. Thank you so much. As mentioned, I’m the Chief Sales Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions. I have been in and around the world, solving problems for major brands, major carriers, major tech companies, et cetera, for the better part of the last 20 years, so since I was nine years old, that’s a joke, and have been leading sales teams, both in the data world and also in the SaaS software world over the course of my career. SS: Amazing. Well, Scott, we are honored to have you here. Given your extensive experience as a sales leader, you have seen the landscape evolve. I’m sure throughout that journey, but especially in recent years. What are some of the top challenges that you would say sales teams face today? SM: You know, I would say as relates to my use of different tools in the sales cycle, what I continue to evolve and learn from is the notion that sellers may not understand analytically where a Buyer stands in their buyer’s journey. And it’s evidenced by the fact that, again, going back to the conversational topic, they don’t know the right material to provide to the right buyer at the right time that might resonate with them at the proper deal stage, more importantly, at the proper. Sort of category of ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. So sending the wrong material to the wrong buyer at the wrong time in the stage, and before you know it, you get lost in the deal cycle. And it is the number one challenge that sellers face, both in my current role and in previous companies that I’ve worked with is understanding where they are from a situational awareness perspective in the deal sort of cycle. I’ve got a military aviation background, and one of the things that we teach in fighter pilot school is helping the aviator understand where they are in the fight at any given moment, right? Where’s the nearest, you know, fuel stop? Where’s the enemy line versus the friendly line? You know, where do you stand three-dimensionally in relation to the buyer? In this particular example, but in relation to the enemy, you know, am I positioned properly to either fight and win or escape and save myself for another day? So to use the vernacular, that situational awareness is something that we teach in, you know, in our aviation community. And it’s a construct situational awareness is a construct that we try. To guide, teach, coach, and sort of replicate for the sellers so that when they’re in the deal cycle, that they understand where they are in relation to the challenge that the buyer faces. Does that make sense? SS: Absolutely. And I have to say, Scott, also very cool that you are in the aviation space. That is amazing. SM: It’s 15 years of my life, lots and lots of time doing it, and it’s amazing the corollaries between that situational awareness, the thing that you have to teach, and oftentimes young up-and-coming aviators, they get that they’re flying the plane, and they get that it’s moving in a forward direction, and they get what they have to do to get from here to there, do the thing you have to do, and return safely. But, you know, sort of advanced instruction is understanding three dimensionally where you fit in the fight. SS: I can see how that is a great analogy to sales. Now, from your perspective, how can enablement help sales teams overcome some of these challenges to achieve more success? SM: Well, let’s be clear. So there’s training and there’s enablement. I think we get these two things confused. Training is what you do when you’re trying to show somebody how to lift in the gym, right? Enablement is when they’re thinking from a, again, three-dimensional perspective when we’re guiding them to have critical thinking skills and understand if I’m here, then my next move is there, and we call it in our world, next best action. We built our entire sales enablement model around MBAs and the most often reasons why sales reps won’t put deals and commit is because of the fear that if I asked you to commit, or if you’re willing to stick your neck out and commit to a deal, Then somebody is going to ask you to have a plan for how you’re going to execute on the mission. Right? And so it is the number one challenge. They say that I learned this from an amazing sales leader. Light is the world’s best disinfectant, right? So enablement is about bringing deals into the light and via example, leading from the front, guiding, coaching. Enablement is not something that lives exclusively in an enablement department. It is something that is truly something that is to be led by the leaders. They have to exhibit and exemplify these skill sets so that the seller will feel as though we’re all in the same set of airplanes after the same mission. And so enablement. Is that guidance tool, but again, it’s not the enablement department exclusively. It is the seller, the sales leaders function. This is what, uh, I’ve got a sales leadership summit next week in Chicago with all my leaders and a big part of what I’m coaching on is how do you coach and enable your sellers? You can’t just depend upon the enablement department to solve for the challenge. SS: I love that. You’ve essentially made enablement a cultural priority across your organization. And I know that you’re passionate about developing high performance cultures. What are some of your best practices for building that culture within a sales team? SM: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s an old school book that’s been around for 30 years and it’s still never more true. And so culturally we have to guide the sellers from a culture perspective. Around the notion of franchise ownership, right? They have to own, understand the mission, be clear on the goals, be clear on the steps, and then accountability comes with culture. So again, a big part of what we’re teaching next week is really just sort of an agreement between the sales leader and the sales rep on what is accountability and what does that mean, and then finally, Culture, whereby our one on ones are designed around four key concepts. Revenue first, right? Where you stand in the revenue picture, people, right? What people are you struggling with process? What processes are kicking your butt? And then finally innovation, right? Where we make it the responsibility of everybody culturally in the sales team to constantly be looking for ways to improve and innovate our process, right? So it’s just not do it because I say that you do it. They have to be bought into that concept. And more importantly, they have to be challengers who look at the process and go, all right, well, look, that’s kicking my butt. That’s stupid. Why are we doing it that way? I got an idea. Why don’t we do it this way, because we can shave three days off of the opposing cycle, or we can accelerate our deals because finally, culturally, it’s all about velocity of deals. Culture has to be sort of digging in on the notion of increasing the velocity at which we move deals through the cycle. Because, you know, they say an army travels on its stomach, a sales team travels on velocity. SS: I could not agree more. So we talked in the intro and you mentioned it just now about the importance of a solid sales process. How can the sales process influence a high-performance culture? And what have you done to streamline the sales process to help kind of boost sales performance? SM: I love the question. Look, I think first and foremost, there’s a massive change around this notion of servant leadership. So it’s important that we start backwards from the challenge, which is a high-performing sales organization. It’s funny. 10 years ago, servant leadership was not in vogue and as our sales teams have grown up, and we have Gen Z and we have Gen X and, and et cetera, all of a sudden they come from worlds where maybe they were not guided and coached the proper way. So weirdly enough, serving our teams, serving to the people that we were responsible for is back in vogue all of a sudden. So I think that step one is let’s make sure that we start with the servant leadership methodology. Two, I think it’s remarkably important that we pivot our sales model from a sales-led model to a customer-driven model, right? Our sales processes historically have been, where do you think you are in the deal? I’m at stage three, which means that I’m going to push them to do a thing. And then stage four, I’m going to hand them, these are the things that we do to manage our process. Whereas switching to a buyer-centric methodology, which is if I call the customer and ask them questions about where they are in their buying cycle, stage four, stage three, stage five, would the customer say that’s where I am in my process for acquiring the thing that you sell, right? So switching to a customer centric model away from a sales centric model, this still exists and pervades. All over the industry, when it comes to sales organizations, we’re tracking where you think you are in the deal. I want to know, where do you think the customer thinks they are in the buying cycle? If that resonates with you. SS: Oh, it absolutely does. And from your perspective, what would you then say is the strategic advantage that an enablement platform provides for improving the sales process? SM: All right, I’m going to go back to situational awareness. Sorry. At the end of the day, it helps the seller know more about where the customer is in their buyer’s journey. Whereas in the old days, we would just, you know, enablement wise, we’d send out stuff and, you know, I wouldn’t even know necessarily what they’re looking at or what they’re engaging with or what of my content resonates with them. But with an enablement platform, and I’ve used your platform in. Now, this is my third company and purchased it in two previous companies. You know, I find that it’s a game changer because you’re competing in a world whereby many don’t have this thing and therefore the seller is blind. Again, going back to the military flying example, there’s a notion called no joy, which means when I’m looking for the enemy and I can’t find them. On the radio, you click off no joy, which means I don’t have sight of where this guy is. This human that is my adversary. These kinds of tools provide the seller with that no joy moment where they go. All right. I do know exactly where they are. They’re 300 feet below me. They’re there at this speed and this course. And the enablement tool is a, for lack of a better term, it’s a game changer for knowing where The customer is and where I as a seller can make better decisions about where they are in their buyer’s journey down to the point of this materials not resonating. I sent the wrong stuff at the right time. In my current company, we use our enablement tool for both sales and CSMs and our solutions consultants and our marketing team, obviously to replace SharePoint so that we not only I can see as a leader. What’s working? What’s not? Where are they using? What pieces of content and what stage of the buyers journey? Wrong time, wrong content, wrong message, et cetera. So now I’ve got analytical knowledge on why is the deal stalling in stage, right? So I can run analytics out of salesforce that goes, all right, you’re in stage four. We’ve shipped over a raft of content, but why is the deal, why is it not resonating with the buyer at this stage in the journey? Let’s go backwards a step and figure out what did we miss and let the data then tell us and analytically help us understand where are we stalling in deals. And what’s causing a velocity change? You get what I’m saying? SS: I do. I love that data-driven approach. How do you leverage data? If you have a few examples to refine and optimize the sales process? SM: Well, look, I think it comes down to and sorry, I’m going to go off track just two seconds, but know that I feel like that present company excepted. I have led sales leadership teams before where they were managing using analytics as a crutch. Instead of trying to understand what’s going on, we’re managing to the metrics. Activity wise, instead of managing to the metrics again around velocity around understanding what pieces of content resonates best, we’re using analytics the wrong way. In my opinion, accountability. Yes, but activity for activity sake. No, right? Can’t work that way anymore. So the less mature sales leaders are the ones that are basically sitting behind the steering wheel, looking at analytics to give them a false sense of security. Right. We got to take the analytical information and help us understand and make better decisions about what’s working in the deal cycle. Why are things not progressing? Where are things stalling? Let’s get a better picture about the deal cycle and not just lean on old school metrics. You know, email open rates and click through rates – they don’t tell me anything. It’s a vanity metric, right? Understanding how many sales meetings that they had this week, while that is a core metric for activity, it doesn’t really tell me the quality of the meetings that you’re having, right? That’s what I care about. Yes, I certainly want you making the dials and I want you making the connections, but what I care most about is that Those amazing interactions with the buyers are turning into a valuable velocity change in the deal cycle. SS: I love that. And I know that all of that data is helping to inform a lot of the innovation that’s coming out of AI. And I know that AI sales tactics are an area of interest to you. I’d love to hear directly from you. How do you plan to leverage innovation like AI to improve the sales process and the performance of your teams? SM: Again, great question. Timely topic. Obviously, at the beginning of that journey is where I would say that we are, but just getting sellers to use AI to even sort of have it guide them on what conversation would resonate with the buyer at this stage. With this problem, it’s really not about AI. If you think about it, it’s about building a library of AI prompts, because I find that the reason why sellers don’t use AI is not because they can’t figure out how to ask a question they’re asking the wrong. Questions of the AI engine, and then they’re surprised when they get a really, you know, stupid or flat line answer from the AI tool. It’s not the AI tool’s fault. It’s we’re asking the wrong question. So what I’ve asked my enablement team to do is build and load into my enablement platform a library of AI prompts that will provide the proper response. SS: I love that. I think that’s phenomenal. Scott, last question for you. If you could give other sales leaders who are looking to improve their sales process one piece of advice for the year ahead, what would it be? SM: You know, I think it’s impossible for me to give one piece of advice, but I think the predominant one is be a servant leader first, right? Have the team that you support. Accountability comes with servitude, right? So if we’re serving the teams that we’re supporting, then they will feel supported and guided and coached. If you’ve ever worked for a company that does not espouse the notion of servant leadership and is the opposite of that, which is often known as top-down leadership, then you don’t feel very supported and you’re not pulled Up, right? Servant leadership, I think, is back in vogue because people weren’t feeling guided and coached and pulled, right? It’s, I’m going to stand on you for what you’re not doing, but not guide you on what you could be, what’s possible to be done. And so that’s, if anybody asked me, that’s my number one thought is start backwards from servant leadership and Okay. Get really amazing at guiding, coaching, teaching, leading from the front. You know, it’s the old-school model. I never am going to ask anybody to do something that I wouldn’t do myself. That’s an old school military term, but at the end of the day, it still works. Still works like a dream. SS: Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much for sharing your advice with our listeners today. I greatly appreciate the time. SM: It’s my pleasure. Good luck, everybody. 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 Enablement Report 2024, organizations that leverage technology to power sales training are 50% more likely to improve quota attainment. So how can you optimize training technology to amplify your enablement efforts and drive business 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 Donda Daniels, the GTM Learning and Development Manager at Vehlo. Thank you for joining us. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Donda Daniels: Thanks Shawnna for having me today. I’m excited to be here. So I took kind of an unconventional way, started out as an elementary school teacher, and I’ve actually listened to enough of your podcast to know I’m not the only one that has started in that area, but I did elementary, mostly like fourth grade ish or whatever, and then I went into interventions and that’ll be important to some of the other things that we talk about going on in this interview. And then because of some life changes, I ended up going into sales and I went in kind of kicking and screaming, but realized I was pretty good at it. I liked all of the strategy. And there was actually a lot of teaching components in sales skills that transferred pretty well. But I realized even though I was pretty good at selling, you know, doing all the president’s clubs and whatever, I miss teaching and training and really wanted that to be my focus again. And so that’s when I made the change into sales enablement and ultimately into my role now is go-to- market learning development manager at Vehlo. SS: Amazing. Well, Donda, thank you again so much for joining us. If you’ve heard this before, I have tremendous respect for teachers, especially in elementary school, given that my two little ones are there. And so amazing, amazing career path. Now, because of that, because of that experience in learning development, especially the classroom teaching and life coaching, how does that experience impact your approach to sales training and coaching? DD: So I’ve had some pretty big aha moments as I’ve gone along and one of the things that I realized as I got into sales enablement and was really focusing on my sellers was that it was actually a lot like being an interventionist in my classroom where I was in a pool to look and find out what were the barriers that were keeping my students from reading. I now was in a position that I was looking at what are the barriers that are keeping my sellers from attaining their quotas, reaching their goals. So really taking the step back to identify is where’s the skill gap. Or the knowledge gap, you know, do they not know their product as well as they should? Or do they not understand the systems or the processes that we’ve put in place? And do we maybe need to provide job aids or extra training for them? Do we need to simplify our systems for them? Are they actually bogging them down from getting to where they wanted to be? And so putting in those interventions or supports for my sellers. So that they could move in the direction we wanted them to, as far as connecting it to what I learned in life coaching, coaching is really about identifying what our thoughts and how did they connect to our results. And so having a really strong mindset in sales is probably the number one tool that you need. And then taking that approach as I build out resources, understanding that our brain’s number one job is to keep us safe. When things come up that are going to challenge us, our brain is automatically going to be like, ah, you know, what’s going on here. And so for training, really approaching it. How can I make sure that we lay this out so that it’s very clear, concise, intentional that we can kind of calm things down so that they can actually take in the material and do what we need them to do so they can grow. SS: I love that. And on LinkedIn, I noticed that you also mentioned system optimization plays a really key role in your learning strategy. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and how you’ve leveraged your enablement platform to streamline your tech stack? DD: Yeah, so at Vehlo, it’s kind of a unique situation. I mean, I’ve been in other companies where we have had acquisitions. Vehlo was built up of 17 smaller companies that came together to serve the aftermarket in the automotive space. And so they all came with their own systems and processes and onboarding and whatnot. And so being able to use a platform like Highspot to centralize all of that information and set expectations to be a single source of truth has been paramount in us being able to grow at the rate that we need and want to. SS: Amazing. And you’ve already seen some amazing success. I know that you’ve been working to develop product training for new hires and you’ve been able to reduce ramp time by 50%. Can you tell us more about this effort? DD: Yeah, that effort has been intentional, organized, and then providing accountability, which Highspot gave us the ability to do all three of those. And so, being able to create tech stack training and product training that we know we’re delivering consistent. Training to everybody across the board, no matter what product they’re attached to and then really using the platform to provide for our learners to absorb the information, but then to make it their own before they’re practicing. On our customers, like we want to give them that space to make that content, that messaging their own before they’re in an actual selling environment. SS: I think that’s phenomenal. And just given your extensive learning and development background, I’d love to hear from you about some of your best practices for designing effective training programs. DD: So one thing that I live by when I’m creating out content or resources is that people say adults, but really everybody, we don’t learn things until we actually have to. And so, you know, we can put forth what we would call training to our customer success or sales reps, whatever team we’re working with, but if we don’t give them that space to make the information their own, then it stops, it’s just awareness. And so understanding that and then identifying, do our people need some deep training where we’re providing that space for them to make the messaging or the process or whatever their own and giving them space to practice it and then check for understanding, making sure that they have it, or is it just awareness? Sometimes it’s enough to give them the information. Here’s the feature update. This is how it impacts your customers. And here’s a job aid to support you in that moment. As opposed to, no, we really need to make sure that you have this down pat. And so using the features in Highspot where we can do the training and then being able to make a recording and turn it in and get feedback as that space, because you know that they’re going to record themselves more than once. And so we’re giving an artificial timeline. Really for them to learn the information and make it their own before they take it out to their customers. SS: Amazing. How are you encouraging your reps to consistently engage with and adopt your training programs? DD: We branded our instance of Highspot “the garage”, which is appropriate that we serve automotive shops and dealerships and all good mechanics keep the right tools. In their garage, and so we work on keeping our garage organized and maintained and always with the intention that they’re going to find what they need in this few clicks as possible. And so then also adopting the mindset that build it they will come. If we build it so that it is purposeful and useful, they’ll know, and they will come and be in there. And so it really just. Trying to always be intentional to keep them foremost and build it so that it serves our end user. SS: I love that philosophy. That’s spot on. Now, another thing that I noticed on LinkedIn was that you mentioned you specialize in cross-functional collaboration. And I think this is absolutely essential to anyone in enablement. How do you go about partnering with your go-to-market teams across the business to align your programs to key business objectives? DD: Yeah, I work really closely with our revenue enablement leaders. For each of our divisions, and they really have a pulse on what’s going on with sales operations and marketing and product and whatever for each of their divisions. And so working closely with them so that they help me get to the right tables. And sometimes kind of pushing my way in to be at the right tables and not because when I come to the table that I’m necessarily changing the direction, but so helpful for me to hear how the ideas are being created and what the end goal is supposed to be so that I can start connecting it to the platform and resources and training and whatnot to be able to support my stakeholders in this is how I think we can roll this out. And so really just a lot of communication and hearing. Listening and seeing what the issue or the problem really is that we’re trying to fix. SS: Amazing. Pivoting a little bit, I’d love to understand from you as well, some best practices around how you think about leveraging data to optimize your training programs. DD: So you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher. You know, we always used summative and formative data when we were working with our students. And it’s no different when you’re working with adults in sales. And so using the hard data that we have from Salesforce, Highspot, the other tools that we’re using, but also taking the time to get that authentic feedback from our end users, our sales leaders, our sellers, and being able then to take that information. And really ask what I think is the most important question, based on what we’re seeing in the data, why? Why are they performing better than we had expected? Or why are they meeting the goals that we thought they were going to? Why are they underperforming? And being able to connect that to what did we do that we know impacted them positively. And what do we do that? Maybe we need to go back and rethink that it maybe didn’t serve the teams in the way that we had thought that it would. SS: I love that approach. Last question for you, Donda. With the new year just getting started, what are you hoping to achieve as you continue to enhance your learning and development programs in the year ahead? DD: Yeah, the biggest is going to be our adoption of Highspot. We’ve done kind of a tiered rollout with teams and so really supporting that adoption and working with our sales leaders and the stakeholders in the company to make sure that it’s serving them. The way that it needs to continue to build out more product training for some of our different brands and just courses in general for onboarding and also further development of our existing teams, then really supporting my leaders. And the stakeholders to know the data that is available in our platform and how they can use that for coaching and supporting their teams as we go. SS: Donda, again, thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited for what’s to come ahead for you all, um, but really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today on this podcast. DD: Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. 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 38% of reps say that their sales managers help them develop the skills they need to be successful in their role. So how can you empower skill development for your frontline reps to drive predictable 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 Niyati Parikh, the Dean of Sales College for Visa University, and Christina Catron, the Senior Experience Producer at Visa. Thank you both for joining us. I would love for each of you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Christina, maybe we could start with you.  Christina Catron: Yeah. So I fell into L and D really intentionally. I got my master’s degree in instructional design and I have been loving it ever since. So I’ve been at Visa for about four years now with the sales team, but I worked with call centers and things before. Niyati Parikh: This is Niyati. Thank you guys so much for having us. I have been in learning and development for 25 years now, and Christina gasped once you heard that number, but I’ve been with Visa for seven and actually, interestingly enough, started our compass knowledge management, which is what is now currently migrated to Highspot and have been focused on sales training and effectiveness for the last five years. SS: Well, given the topic, we are here to discuss this today. I am so excited to have both of you here, given your subject matter expertise. Niyati, I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about what Visa University is and the role of the sales college within that. NP: Perfect. So Visa University is really our internal employee training arm. So we do sell client-facing training, but we’re focused on enabling our training for Our employees. So we’ll do things like enterprise-wide leadership skills training, they’ll focus on compliance training for our 30, 000 employees globally. But our team, the sales college is really focused on how do we enable and drive successful sales through about 4, 000 globally. So things like sales methodology, product training, skills development, all. fall within our world, specifically for our sales and client-facing audience. SS: And just to double-click into that a little bit, what are some of the core components of your strategy for sales training and coaching at Visa? NP: Yeah. So we have a long-term strategy here at Visa or longest around the 2030 strategy. And we Break that down over annual OKRs or smaller KPIs for our sales organization. And what we’re really trying to do is make sure that we know what our sales people are accountable for in the short term and figure out how do we put the right strategy together to enable them. And so That could involve business initiatives like sales plays, or trying to figure out how we onboard our new hires more effectively to the program. We’ll also spend some time really on sales methodology. So what are the skills and the artifacts to enable those skills for consistent delivery across different platforms. So that’s a lot of what we’re doing. And this year we’ve really started to add AI to that arsenal. So how do we leverage AI for them to get better at finding the information that they need quickly? And also how do we make sure that they have the ability to leverage AI to practice and get real-time feedback? In the absence, as you mentioned, of possibly some of the leader coaching with 38 percent doing what they need to, but we’ve got probably two-thirds of our population that needs some more real-time feedback so we can get into that today. SS: I would love to. I know that that is a hot topic across the enablement industry, especially with enablement personas that are trying to figure out how to bring this to life at scale inside of their organization. So I’m excited to dig into that a little bit. Before we do, Christina, given your expertise in instructional design, what are some common challenges to developing effective learning for sales teams? And how have you overcome some of those challenges? CC: Yeah, I think that the number one challenge with any kind of training is time, right? You know, with any job with metrics. Time spent in training is time away from doing other tasks. And so they often, especially sellers, can see training as a distraction rather than a tool that’s going to help them succeed. So I think the number one thing that we need to do is to make sure that that training is really valuable to them and something that they see and they feel is going to help them in their job. So it’s going to have an immediate impact on their job. And I think another challenge is Just making sure it’s really relevant to a really big population, right? We’ve got 4, 000 sellers globally, and they are in different regions with different types of clients. And it’s really hard to scale really personal training that they know is really relevant to them. And I think that’s where AI has become such a helpful tool is being able to really scale global training that is still really personal to the seller. And they feel really, really valuable. SS: Absolutely. And one of the key initiatives your team’s been focusing on supporting this year, as you’ve mentioned, is quarterly sales accreditation for product launches. Niyati, how are you helping sellers successfully execute these product launch efforts through Visa University? NP: Yeah, that’s a great, great question. So we’re still completely refining our accreditation strategy in partnership with our business stakeholders to make sure that it is achieving what it needs to. But AI has been a big part of accreditation and also non-accreditation-related practice environments. So if we focus specifically on accreditation, the first component is always. What do they need to know? Right. So do they actually understand the what of what they’re being asked to sell? And so we generally are doing that still either via e-learning or we’ve started to use the curriculums within the compass T’s and C’s functionality. Right. So we allow them to know what. The content is, and in addition to the training, we’ve also started to create the sales toolkits that have the enablement materials right on Highspot as well. So we have cheat sheets and pitch decks and competitive landscapes, all of that stuff exists. So the first component of our accreditation is making sure that they understand the what. But probably more importantly is really like, how do we ensure they can actually sell the solution? So it’s great that I know and can answer a knowledge test, but can I really do something with it? And that’s where we’ve seen really, really great initial results around using AI to give them a practice environment with real-time AI feedback to allow them to continue to refine their pitch or their questioning strategy on the fly. And, you know, I’ve been able to really watch people practice live and see over the course of 30 minutes, how they’ve actually enhanced and refined and felt more confident about their pitch within 30 minutes of practicing. So our vision for kind of the end user accreditation is to apply it to their own client account scenario. And hopefully we can also start to see. business impact and business metrics as a result of this, because you’re taking a concept, learning the knowledge, practicing it, and applying it to your specific client account scenario. And what we’re trying to do is really make sure that the accreditation is tailored to what is the call to action or the ask of this individual? So are we asking them to find, create a sense of urgency and share insights with a stakeholder? Are we asking them to ask the right questions? Are they making a pitch? Are they actually overcoming objections? Like what is the true ask and call to action for this accreditation and customizing the AI and the experience within accreditation to completely align to that? SS: Amazing. And you talked a little bit about the component of the accreditation program where you’re trying to help validate rep skills aligned to specific solutions that you offer. Christina, can you tell us a little bit about how you built this program? CC: Yeah. We have a defined sales methodology within Visa and that outlines. Like the key behaviors, the key skills that they are doing throughout the sales life cycle. And we really wanted to overlay the product information and the product knowledge that they’ve just been trained on. And we have all these tools in high spot. We wanted to overlay that over the sales methodology. So what we did is we designed this program, this accreditation program, that’s. Essentially, you know, five or six really targeted questions that guide reps to think through their specific client scenario through this life cycle. So, for example, like Niyati was just saying, one of the first things that we have them do is take data about their client or about the industry and then put that into context for their specific client, right, and their specific client stakeholder. On the user end of this. There is some prep that goes into this. It’s going and finding data and we’re not leaving them alone for that. With every single question that we’re asking, we’re linking them to those sales enablement materials and just any relevant materials within Highspot. That’s going to help them develop those answers. And you know, on the backend, we’ve spent a lot of time deciding which questions are going to be written versus video. We know that videos can be really time consuming for the reps and the evaluators. But the path can be really big in terms of, you know, authenticity and engagement. So we wanted to mix, you know, the written in the video questions so that it’s really valuable to the reps, but it’s not too overwhelming to them. And so on the backend, we’re creating really strong rubrics and good examples to put in the backend. And then we are testing and testing and testing in the AI. And we have partnered with your, you know, Highspot’s incredible engineering team, because. We’re really asking a lot from Highspot or from the AI side. We’re really asking a lot from the AI. And it took a lot of testing to figure out how we can take these really complex things that we’re asking the AI to do and refine those settings so that. You know, when it takes these answers, it’s really giving consistent and really constructive guidance to those learners. So it’s been like this really powerful, really incredible environment for these reps to do their jobs and get real-time feedback as they go along. SS: Christine, if I could ask from your perspective, what role can accreditation and validation play in helping to close that gap between a rep’s ability to practice and a rep’s real-world execution? CC: One thing to complete a training module where we’re asking them questions and we’re asking them to apply it to a client scenario and then a more real-world application of that through accreditation. And we’re not at a place right now where we can have AI give live feedback during a client conversation, but I think it’s overlooked that a lot of what the seller does is not just in that live. Client conversation. They’re doing so much on the backend to prepare them for those scenarios. And so it really is real-world execution because we’re asking them to do their job, right? It’s not just a scenario that we’re giving them that they’re applying these things to. They’re going through these things. That they should be doing in their jobs. And the AI is giving immediate feedback to that. And what we’ve seen is that it’s really boosting their confidence and their competence. And we’re getting information on the backend too, so that we can also improve the way that we train in the way that we go about it. SS: Amazing. I love how you guys are already leveraging AI-powered skill feedback to reinforce the right skills. Niyati, how are you utilizing this to scale coaching and improve skill development? NP: I think all leaders are busy. All coaches, you know, have multiple things that pull on them. And so their ability to spend. One hour, two hours in role-plays with people is just not scalable, right? So we are really trying to take this AI again, whether it’s formally an accreditation or outside of that, and allow the reps to get real time feedback, to feel like they’re at a point of comfort, right? And confidence as Christina mentioned, to be able to then submit something to their leader for review. So as part of our accreditation or even some of our courses, they will practice and iterate, practice and iterate, and then submit it to their leader and their leader is ultimately responsible for reviewing and providing a final score on a submission. And so it’s a great way for our AEs to be able to practice and get real-time feedback, but our coaches are ultimately held accountable for it. And I think one, just making sure that they are the final reviewers has held them a little bit more accountable for reviewing and providing feedback on specific pitches. But two, I think what’s really interesting is the rubrics that Christina and team have created. And so if you go in and you review and you say, generate feedback from the AI, it actually gives leaders a broader subset of things to coach on than they might’ve thought of without the AI feedback. So they’re like, Oh, I didn’t think to talk about specific usage of data, or I didn’t really think to talk about this, but it’s actually broadened the coaches’ sense of what they should be coaching on based on the AI feedback that’s generated through Highspot. So I think it’s been a really big win for coaching the eight years and also enhancing the coaching effectiveness of the coaches who then ultimately provide the final score. SS: Amazing. It is amazing what AI is helping us do on the coaching front. I’m so excited for this. NP: And if I can add one thing, we also are seeing nontraining use cases pop up, right? So in markets where we’ve launched this, they also want to just say, hey, I want to have my AEs or reps use this to practice prior to a client conversation, even without leader coaching, right? So I want them to have a practice environment, which Christina helped to create called the Sales Simulator and they can go in and practice either written or video pitches depending on whatever stage they are at the sales life cycle and use that prior to a client conversation. And so I think the non-formal non-training use cases of AI also keep becoming more and more valued by people who go through it in a formal environment. SS: Yeah, I think that’s an amazing resource to offer your reps. That’s fantastic. Now, when you go about evaluating the success of your training and coaching efforts, I’m curious, what metrics do you use to measure impact, Christina? CC: This is a huge focus for us in this coming year is really nailing down these metrics. Right now, we’re at a place where we’re still using kind of NPS and pre and post-confidence scores. But one really cool way that we’ve been able to track with this new program is that we’re able to see, you know, what people have been submitting and the scores that they’re getting. And we’re able to see the gaps in our training and the gaps in skills and things like that. For example, we ask our sellers to create targeted questions, right? Aligned to this sales stage that they’re in with their client. And I was reviewing those answers with the first group that went through this program. And I realized that a lot of the sellers were writing this really, a very similar answer to each other, but it wasn’t as strong as it could be. It could be a lot stronger and much more of a probing question. Okay, so now we’ve got some actual data that shows us where our sellers are at and how well they understand, you know, how to create probing questions. And so we were able to say, okay, well, let’s go back to the training. Let’s put some of these real-world questions that we’ve seen from our sellers. And ask them within that training to make them stronger, right? And so we’re seeing that just from being able to review some of these initial groups that have gone through accreditation and see how to improve it. And this isn’t exactly a metric, but we’re starting to gather. These really good answers. And so with the permission of sellers, we’re going to be able to create this library of great examples. So just imagine being a seller and thinking, okay, this product fits really well within my client’s needs, but I haven’t sold it in a while. And then being able to go to Highspot and see five examples of sellers in different regions with different types of clients, but pitching that and seeing really good examples from your peers. So really excited about it. Being able to have those opportunities, but where we want to be is. We want to see how training affects business impact. So using these initiatives and these sales plays and being able to track, okay, the sellers that went through the training versus sellers who don’t go through the training and how are they improving their skills and their business impact. So that’s where we really want to be. And that’s. But we’re hoping to get there. SS: Amazing. I have no doubt that you guys, well, you guys are definitely ahead of the curve on this front now, since implementing Highspot to help support sales training and coaching. I’d love to understand what are some of the early results that you’ve seen? And do you have any wins that you can share? NP: It’s a good question. So we’re on the cusp of this journey and we tend to have fairly long sales cycles, right? That are months out. So our first accreditations and pilots were about six months ago. So we’re still trying to capitalize on that. But what we have found is that there has been a broader adding of opportunities and dynamics, right? To specific accounts based on this practice environment. So the coaches are really asking them to implement these opportunities and track them more formally in our CRM system. And we’ve also just non-business revenue related, just gotten a really good amount of feedback from our sales leaders and our sales excellence partners in the regions around. the quality of pitches that are being made, right? So as we think about a bootcamp that might’ve happened six months ago without AI practice and what we’re seeing now, there’s just a lot more credibility, confidence, and not just across people who are making the pitch, but the entire team, because they’re all accountable for the practice. So we’ve heard just more anecdotal feedback around how we are seeing an enhanced. On people’s ability to articulate things in the right way based on the access to the practice environments, CC: and I think people are really excited about it too. And that’s a win in itself, right? If people are really excited about training and they’re excited to be able to upskill themselves, that’s a huge win because they’re going to be motivated to go look at all those enablement materials and things like that. NP: I think it’s a good point. I don’t even think they see it as training, right? They see it as kind of a fun thing. They see it as a pitch. They are competitive against themselves. And Highspot has also helped us with just making sure that sellers can kind of see what their possible scores are. Right. And so they can keep competing against themselves to make sure that they’re getting to a place where they feel confident. So I think a lot of these like nuanced tweaks that we keep making as we get feedback from our users, we’ll continue to help people feel excited about the AI functionality. SS: I love how you guys are tapping into that intrinsic reward of, you know, helping your reps just with their professional development. I think that’s amazing. Now, Christina, correct me if I’m wrong. I think you are a gen AI ambassador at Visa. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about that. And how do you envision continuing to leverage AI to further enhance your sales training and coaching programs? CC: Yeah, one of many Gen AI ambassadors at Visa. It’s definitely a movement that’s happening here, and being an ambassador is in a lot of ways just sharing wins and figuring out ways and prompt libraries and things like that. So yeah, I really want our sellers to get to a place where they’re saying, okay, let me write out some of the things for my pitch. Some of the things about my client and asking AI, okay, what are some of the objections that you can foresee in this so that they can really prepare themselves for that conversation. And that’s part of the way that we’re designing our training, but also just a type of cultural mindset that, you know, throughout Visa, we’re trying to really to instill in our employees. I think one of the cooler things, something that Niyati already mentioned, is the Sales Simulator, right? How do we get them? So it’s not so formal, and they know that they can just go and practice any time without the pressure of their manager, getting email notifications and going through and grading it, how can they just go and get immediate feedback before a sales conversation? So I think there’s a lot around brainstorming and ideas and everything. But one of the ones we’re most excited about is the Sales Simulator. SS: I absolutely love it. Last question for both of you as we’re heading into a new year. What do you think is the biggest trend or opportunity that other sales and coaching leaders should be taking advantage of this year? NP: I think I’ll let Christina talk about the AI, but from a business perspective, moving beyond net promoter scores and time and training and all of that stuff is just so critical. Like I think everyone is more focused on what is the business impact? How do we measure that? And I know that the partnership with Highspot, there is a lot more that’s happening around correlating completions of either training or in our case practice to business metrics. So really trying to figure out how we do that. It’s of course, a tough correlation, but can we at least show directional trends? And then also the time impact, right. Is really trying to piggyback off of what Christina said is huge, right? So in the flow of work, how do we give them what they need when they need it? So whether it is the instant answers and getting some feedback from Highspot functionality quickly, or is it a matter of really trying to think about how do we provide them with the coaching and practice when they need it? Like just in the flow of work is just a huge area of focus for us. And however we enable that inside and outside the platform is what we’re focused on right now. CC: Yeah. I feel like that’s what I think about so much during my day-to-day is how do I get this in the flow of work? Because we need to eliminate barriers for sellers, right? That is part of my job is to eliminate the barriers that get them to do their job really well and really successfully, both for the sellers, but also for the clients, right? So AI can be a huge part of that. And that’s something I’m thinking about all the time. And also just how can we leverage AI to future-proof career development, right? AI is such a hot topic and how it’s going to impact our careers and our jobs. What does this mean for five years down the road? But how do we really take AI and get it to work for us? Like bringing their pitches to AI and really get them to ask questions around it and get them to help them think critically for their clients. So that is what I am thinking about every day. And I think there’s so much opportunity for it. SS: Amazing. I couldn’t agree more. The options are limitless, only limited by our imagination. So I am very excited about what you guys are doing at Visa. I can’t wait to see how you guys continue to evolve the program over time. Thank you both so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. 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, sales managers who coach reps to reinforce desired behaviors deliver a 14 percentage point increase in win rates. So, how can you design and implement coaching programs to boost rep confidence and improve the customer experience? 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 Paige Scott, the Vice President of Customer Success and Revenue Enablement at Reliance Matrix. Thanks for joining us, Paige. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Paige Scott: Terrific. I’m delighted to be with you today and happy to share anything I can. We’re all in this program together. I am 30 plus years in employee benefits, which are insurance products for employers who provide those benefit options to their employees. And I’m on the insurance carrier side. It’s been a terrific career in the past. I’ve served in operational roles, account management roles where we’re focused on retaining and growing the business. I was a process engineer, Six Sigma Black Belt, that is really focused on continuous improvement. And at one point, the chief customer officer focused on the customer experience strategies for our company. And now in my current role, I’m applying a lot of learnings from those experiences. So as you said, our role today at Reliance Matrix is head of customer success team. That’s our account management and service teams, as well as the revenue enablement team, where our objective is all about equipping the distribution organization with the tools, resources, training, and strategies that they need to retain business and sell more of it effectively. So I love this role because it really balances the accountability for customer focus, the customer’s experience, along with retention and growth of those relationships, but serves the critical needs of the organization and alignment with other departments that drive revenue growth as well. So I live with my family and my dog Maggie here in Nashville, Tennessee, and I love country music and line dancing. SS: We’re really excited to have you with us Paige. And as you mentioned, one of your key responsibilities is really growing and retaining the customer base. In your opinion, how can enablement help improve the customer experience? PS: You know, that’s actually there’s a myriad of ways that enablement enhances the customer experience. I’ll give you a simple example on how we’re focusing on it here in our current experience. state, and it’s really around the tools and training. And I think about this, not only with regard to how we’re internally supplying the tools and training and coaching, but also externally. So our account management teams can better understand their customer needs and preferences, leading to more personalized or relevant interactions. That’s what we’re encouraging. For example, in our business. We’re often working with human resource benefit teams that are outsourcing their work that they used to do themselves to us, the insurance carrier, many of them for the first time. And these first-time outsourcers of really complicated processes, they need to feel confident in trusting us to take on that work and doing it well on behalf of their employees. So there’s a lot of research and our experience shows that the first time outsourcers They need more education and communication to feel comfortable handing that work off to us. So our enablement team, we’ve built tools and resources and training to teach our teams how to work best with first time outsourcers. We actually give them a little bit different path. And their experience that is really focused on education and gaining their confidence and providing them with the tools they need to feel empowered. So in this past year, we implemented the use of the digital room capability to really establish the go-to resource for the clients. And first time outsourcers so that they feel empowered. They know where to go to look for information and find articles literature and research and best practices that we’ve collected and made available to them. So we are demonstrating our listening and expertise because we’ve provided the support and strategies that ensure that. They continue to receive the assistance and resources that they need to maximize their use of our products and our services for their employees. So it’s kind of a win win both internally and externally. SS: I couldn’t agree more. And I know rep confidence plays a huge role in delivering great customer experiences. And this is an area that you are really passionate about. What are some of the challenges reps face today that can impact their confidence? PS: Yeah, sure. Well, this is a complicated business that we’re in. And the biggest challenge that we face really is keeping up with the pace of change with all the complexities. So not to get you schooled on insurance stuff, but Reliance Matrix, we’re the number one insurer with the most lives that are managed through our absence programs. So in your day-to-day life, you’ve probably hear about things like paid family, medical leaves, FML, et cetera. These are all like state level programs that provide employees with paid time off for family or medical reasons. And I’ll tell you, this is a huge source of focus and attention across the states. A lot of compliance issues around this. States are making their own policies and practices with regard to how they want. This to be administered inside in their states where the employees live. And so the pace of change in these state programs is incredible and it’s very complex and difficult to understand and difficult to keep up with, not just for our customers, but even internally for our folks to build and maintain the expertise that they have around these programs. So we honestly have relied on Highspot, our platform heavily as our go-to resource for knowledge, training, communication internally, as well as pitching that relevant information externally. It’s enabled us to move quicker. Enable people not to have to memorize current rules, regulations, et cetera. They can just go to the resource and find the most up-to-date information in order to answer questions and put that information in the hands of their customers. And then on top of it, then of course we can. Move quicker and measure our engagement, both internally and externally. So it really has helped us to solve this challenge of trying to keep people up to date. We’re encouraging our reps not to try to memorize everything. They just go consult the tool, go to the resource. We’re keeping it up to date. SS: We see those too. What are some of your best practices for helping reps overcome these challenges to really boost their confidence and improve the customer experience? PS: So you know, it’s really important that we straight stay true to our word in terms of consistently, regularly reviewing our content and developing best practices to share to our reps. I mean, if they come to ou platform, our content and find that it’s out of date or not accurate, I’m going to lose them. They’re not going to be happy that they’re not providing the right information to their clients and So we have really prioritized the keeping our content up to date, making it, you know, consumable, small pieces, small bits. And then we put out best practice videos that if I’m responding to an inquiry, I can go see how someone who’s really good at responding to that inquiry, how they say it, how they answer it. And I can use that to hone in on my own ability to answer to my customers. And then of course. You know, whenever we have content or we’re rolling out something new, it’s not a once and done, we’re planning for putting the content out. How do we bring people to it? How do we get them practicing it? How can we test on the knowledge? It is something they really need to know. And then You know, focusing in on the coaching elements that are available as well. In the past couple of years, since we implemented the platform, I would say that we’ve spent a lot of time putting content out there, keeping it fresh, learning how people learn and how best to organize it. But in 2025, one of the things that the team is going to focus on is more around adding a little more gamification. And competition to our approach, because after all, we are working with salespeople and they do like to compete. So we’re going to build some of that competition in to continue to enhance engagement and learning. SS: Those are some great tips and tricks. Now, I know coaching can be a key lever for improving rep performance, and your coaching programs have evolved a lot recently. Can you tell us what your coaching strategy looks like now and how you leverage Highspot to help support it? PS: Yeah, sure. Actually, I’ll tell you the good, bad and the ugly, but this was an area of challenging for us a couple of years ago. I’ll use the example in our sales model. Before we got more focused on this in our model, the sales managers are also. Sellers, they have their own individual sales goals in addition to the goals of their team. So didn’t really set us up for success in terms of motivating or encouraging the sales managers to spend the time with their teams developing because they were so busy, you know, trying to meet their own performance goals. And while we haven’t changed that model. Entirely, we have changed it a bit so that we have built in approach where we’re recognizing the importance of coaching and the importance of the manager and that role. So we have built an approach where we’re utilizing the capabilities and analytics and high spot to practice. So we call these our stand and delivers, meaning I need to learn, let’s say a product nuance or something about the way the service is done or administration. And I need to be able to repeat that or inform a customer or potential customer with confidence. You know, I need to know what I’m talking about so I can answer those questions on the spot. We have picked areas that are most important for our sales reps to be able to exude that confidence and we ask them to practice it. and they practice it. They will film a video and they will do their stand and deliver on the video and the rep will create and submit the video to their manager and the managers are accountable to review and coach and we can see their coaching notes. We can see who’s doing it and doing it with regularity. So the fun thing is the head of our sales organization, she has So committed to this. This is how she learned as she was growing up as a sales rep. They stand and delivers on demand. People would stop her in the hallway and say, tell me about, you know, X, Y, Z. This is how she got really good at it. So she really believes in this practice and this approach. And she really appreciates the capability and high spot because it makes it pretty easy to do. So we are constantly reviewing the engagement analytics. It’s to understand the performance of our reps, but also the performance of our managers as coaches. We’ve upped the game that way. SS: Very cool. How do you go about partnering with frontline managers to get them bought into coaching their teams? PS: Sure. Again, it was a journey. Uh, some managers were adept. They were already kind of managing their own production and balancing that with the development of their teams. But many were not. And so we went to work. And we focused on the ROI of Using real life examples and data where certain sales managers had best practices with their teams and they were really producing results. Cause not only was the manager producing results, but they were taking in new individuals, onboarding them and, you know, doing the ride alongs, providing the coaching and we could see in terms of goal attainment. Which managers were very successful and we actually built those into stories in case studies and we use the real data to bring back to the rest of the organization to prove the value of the role of the coach and the importance of the development of the team. I mean, there was a lot of other best practices that we learned and shared throughout the period too, but the story tells itself in terms of the numbers, honestly, and given how competitive. Most of the sales folks are, they accepted the invitation to do better, kind of turns into a competition. So it was an easy carrot to dangle because it proved that production increased with a greater focus on practice and coaching for development for the teams. SS: How are you now with the platform in place, leveraging analytics to understand how managers are coaching and optimizing their effectiveness? PS: Yep, sure. So there’s a number of things that we look at. We got grounded in the metrics that were most relevant to our goals. So in this area, it was things like employee engagement scores, turnover rates, productivity levels, goal achievement. And we look at adoption metrics and the use of high spot, et cetera. So it was really getting grounded in what were those key metrics that we should be looking at on a regular basis that helps tell the bigger story. And we’re collecting data from different sources, such as. You know, performance reviews or even employee feedback, the coaching sessions and records that are in the system and that data can provide insights into how managers are performing and how their coaching is impacting their teams or not. And, you know, it is a source of performance review for the manager themselves that when we’re evaluating our managers performance, it’s not just based on hitting your goals. A lot of those other key metrics are a large part of that. And then finally, I guess we are looking at or listening to the employees to understand their perceptions. It’s important to understand how they experience our onboarding, whether they’re brand new to selling. Or they’re a very experienced rep coming over. We have different learning paths and we are listening to that and understanding, you know, their feedback about their manager and the level of support that they’re feeling or the training that they’re experiencing in that onboarding program. And we’re using that feedback regularly for continuous improvement. It’s the constant job, it’s continuously reviewing our content, understanding what works well, what doesn’t, and using those best practices to make our programs better and better. SS: And you all are also leveraging the integration between Highspot and Salesforce to really help unlock meaningful data and tie your programs to revenue. Can you share more about how you leverage this integration and some of the impact that you’ve been able to uncover? PS: Yeah, sure. Well, again, this has been a journey in the very beginning. I remember interviewing, you know, some of the folks in the sales organization and the head of sales and they’re like, Oh my God, no, not another system to log into. I’m like, well, yeah, but there’s a lot that you’re going to learn from the system and how it’s going to add value to the organization. So in the very beginning, it was So important that we integrated with Salesforce. So we had an easy toggle, I should say, between Highspot and Salesforce. And then as we continued building, the centralized content access was a heavy hitter for us because of the integration. It allows our reps. To access relevant content and materials and sales plays within their workflows. So it’s much more seamless, uh, than having to toggle and go find and search and seek, et cetera. Now we have a long way to go. We still are working on how we make that information more predictive. And, but we’re proud of the work that we’ve done here. And then honestly, this integration has enhanced the customer. Engagement as well, because it ties our engagements, meetings, et cetera, to business outcomes. It helps surface our best practices and shared knowledge that can improve sales performance. So we’re still in the early stages of tying these analytics together and building out the push and the predictive nature of it. But we really see the opportunity. So we’re investing full force as enablement team and making that happen. SS: Paige, as your enablement strategy continues to evolve, how are you incorporating AI into your programs to continue to improve productivity? PS: Yeah, well, this is something I’m really excited about. We had introduced in 2024, the co-pilot tool AI as a productivity tool to parts of our teams, and now are really rolling out across, but our use in 2024 was. Probably more limited to just like meeting summaries, to-do lists, assignment of duties afterwards, creation of presentations, improving content, etc. Kind of like your own admin assistant as you’re prepping in your relationships and for your meetings. But in 2025, we are, I’m going to go a lot further with it. We’re exploring AI and machine learning between Highspot and Salesforce to make recommendations on content. Like I said, pushing and predicting and, you know, really driving at the sales plays and training that’s. Going to enhance our productivity. So I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of what AI is going to be capable of helping us to achieve, but it is a major strategy for the enablement team in 2025. So I’m totally stoked about learning what we’re going to. Be able to do their SS: Last question. If you could give one piece of advice to someone looking to enhance the business impact of enablement at their organization, what would it be? PS: Yeah, honestly, it’s don’t try to boil the ocean, start small. Know the business goals, align with the business goals and use the data analytics to measure the effectiveness of the programs and then kind of spread that grow for impact. Gather feedback from the teams to understand what’s working and how effective it is. Again, underscoring all the time, data-driven decisions, adjustments, improvements continuously. I’ll share an example, and this is so simplistic, but I tell this story all the time. My initial proof point or business case, a really simple one. I joined the organization a couple of years ago and I was out in one of our sales offices. I was literally walking down the hallway in the sales office. Two sales reps standing in the hallway and I overheard what they were talking about. One of them was trying to find a. presentation that another rep used for a finalist presentation. So they wanted the deck and they’d been going through files and searching for, I think she said like 30 minutes. Maybe even more. Then she picked up the phone, because she got frustrated, and she finally called that other rep, and lo and behold, incidentally, the rep had stored that deck on their laptop, meaning no one else really had access to it anyway. So, I was marveled by the fact that one of our top reps spent more than 30 minutes Looking for a piece of content and I asked for the deck reviewed it and I laughed because when I was looking at the deck I realized some of the data elements and even the brand that was on the deck was outdated. It wasn’t even up to date or in compliance. So, bing, lightbulb goes off. I’m like, oh, Paige could be a hero here because what I need to do is find a good way to manage content and partner with a marketing organization, et cetera, to tell this story. And lo and behold, again, such a simple example. It’s all proven by the metrics. So I sold it by showing the ROI of saving a hundred sales reps in our organizations, 30 minutes a month or more searching for content. And that’s a heck of a lot of savings that can be put towards production activities. And so again, the platform was easy to sell. Enablement is easy to continuously show the impact, but it’s using the data and telling the stories, but keep it small. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Keep telling measurable stories and everyone catches on and they feel it. And we are all the heroes when we are able to help reps and the organization to be more effective. efficient in growing a business SS: Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate all of your insights and advice. 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 Salesforce, 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stacks to boost productivity. So how can you build an efficient tech stack to support sellers and drive success for your team? 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 Harmony Johnston-Grant, the principal strategy and program lead at Medtronic. Thank you for joining us, Harmony. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Harmony Johnston-Grant: Thanks for having me today on the podcast. So yes, I’m Harmony. I’ve been at Medtronic within the diabetes organization for about six and a half years now. It’s gone very quickly. My main responsibilities are really how we drive strategy through to execution by using Enablement systems and frameworks, such as Highspot, Salesforce, and really driving that collaboration between all of our cross functions so we can quickly translate the needs of our field force and our marketing strategy into our wider programs. SS: We’re excited to have you here, Harmony. Given your experience in the life sciences industry, what are some of the unique challenges that reps in the industry face and how can enablement help overcome these? HJ: Definitely. So we need to demonstrate proven clinical outcomes of how technology can improve the standard of care. And the med-tech landscape is changing and advancing quite quickly, as well as being highly regulated. So there are a lot of differing factors by country, could be due to product availability, healthcare models, regulatory requirements. So all of these can kind of affect how we go to market. So it’s really crucial as a team that we’re agile and able to adapt to bring strategy through to execution quickly. And this is really where enablement comes in to support our teams throughout their whole journey. So looking at things like their onboarding, um, keeping up to speed with market trends, skills they need. How we enable and support them to go to market. So bringing kind of cross functional teams together to ensure the alignment and then also ensuring that our competencies and key results and metrics are really aligned to our wider strategic goals and objectives. SS: I think that is phenomenal. And you actually take a consultative approach to understanding and addressing what your reps need. I’d love to understand, how do you go about kind of gathering and incorporating rep feedback into your enablement programs? HJ: Definitely. So I’m a very big advocate for continuous improvement and I think feedback is really a crucial part of enablement. So we use a few different models and mechanisms to capture feedback. So one kind of being that we have a field advisory board. So this is where we’ve got representatives from each of our countries and regions that we consult with for any new strategies or programs. So it may be that we run pilots with them, for example, and this is a really great way to validate our insights and get that field feedback. Another couple of methods are kind of surveys to capture the wider organizational feedback. So they’re really great. For pre and post-program surveys to so you can kind of quantify how things are progressing and then also any new programs that we launch, we make sure that we’ve got that really key foundational support and feedback model in place. So we have like local champions, for example, who keep us in that close contact. So we know how things are going. And as we’ve got a lot of countries and markets, it’s really good to have that local knowledge and that well-structured cadence of feedback because what may work in one market may not work in another. I’ll actually share with you later a story about how we use kind of that consultative approach that led us to actually implement Highspot. SS: Amazing. I think that’s phenomenal advice. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of organizations are really thinking about how to drive efficiency and effectiveness by looking at kind of the consolidation of their tech stack. And I know one of your key focus areas is the creation and management of the sales tech stack. What are some of your best practices for building an efficient tech stack that still meets the needs of your sellers? . HJ: So there’s a lot of tech on the market. It can be quite hard to keep up, but I think it kind of comes down to a few things that you really need to kind of consider. So I think one is how you can keep things as simple as possible for your team. So I’m sure many other enablement professionals have heard this. We’ve got too many feeds, too many tools, too many systems. So how can you really drive that simplicity for your end users? I think that’s really as simple as listening to the barriers, their needs. How can you bring all those features and insights into one place and embed them into their workflow or an existing system so they don’t have to swivel chair between multiple platforms. Really drive those insights into action and bring value. I think another aspect is really what’s the strategic direction of your tech stack and what are your business goals and how can you align the two. So that’s where it’s really important that you have that internal alignment and vision with all of your customers. Functional teams and IT to understand really, okay, how can we embed our business goals into our tech stack and how our systems can integrate together. And then lastly, I would say, how are you going to actually operationally support the tech stack and what does success look like? So you can have a great system, but if it’s not implemented and supported correctly, you’re going to lose a buy-in. So thinking about things like how are you going to train your teams?What doess the support model look like? And tech is constantly evolving, so how are you going to ensure that any new developments with your tech are also cascaded to those teams and everyone’s kind of kept up to date? And then how you align your success metrics with your business goals to really drive that strategy through? SS: What would you say is the unique value of having an enablement platform to support your go-to-market initiatives? HJ: Yeah, definitely. So I’ll share the story I mentioned earlier. So previously we were using two separate tools. So one was our content tool and then our CRM. And what we noticed was the adoption wasn’t really kind of trending where we expected it to be. So we initiated a deep dive process into this. And so we really use that consultative approach to look into the key trends and understand why. So for example, we ran a survey, and we really had kind of one conversation with our field boss and local marketing to really get that contextualization as to what was happening. And what we found was that conceptually, the idea of the tools was there, but the value wasn’t being realized due to certain barriers. So for example, the content tool wasn’t embedded into their workflow and their CRM. Certain countries hadn’t seen certain pieces of content and local marketing couldn’t see the visibility of what content was being used and how it was landing. So we kind of took this We took all this feedback and we worked together cross-functionally to really evaluate the tools that we were using. And we identified that we really needed a unified and integrated platform. Use across all devices, really kind of structured the cadence of content and guidance, giving us those insights back as to how things are working. So this is where Highspot came into play. So we investigated a few different tools, and validated Highspot on the pilot, again, using that kind of feedback approach. And then. So this enabled a more streamlined cadence between all of our teams, making sure we’re speaking the same language, delivering the same message consistently, and that the field force really has everything in one place within their workflow. So I’d say definitely the unique value for us being such a large organization is really having that collaboration within one unified embedded platform. SS: I love that. What are, I know one of the key GTM initiatives your team has been focusing on is also supporting the rollout of new technology. Can you tell us more about this initiative and some of the ways that you’re helping reps better execute? HJ: So earlier this year, we launched a new product across multiple countries, which packs us in multiple different things. So timings, languages, we even have free languages in certain countries. So there’s a lot to consider and a lot of different teams involved. So product, clinical, education, marketing, sales, the list goes on. So as an enablement team, we really brought everyone together and worked with all of those internal stakeholders to bring in those assets. Build a sales play. So this covered everything from strategic objectives to messaging for our external stakeholders in line with our sales methodology, bringing in together the content that the teams needed to use and how they should go to market for their respective countries. So what they needed to really do to be successful with that launch? And then I think an additional benefit of having this consolidated into really one place is that local teams were able to quickly and efficiently then adjust into the local language and add in those local dynamics as well. SS: Amazing. I love that approach. What are some of the results that you’ve seen from these efforts and do you have any early wins you can share? HJ: Yeah, definitely. So I would say actually just having everything in one place for our field force has been really beneficial. And then I would say our speed as to how we cadence information in a much more streamlined way. So for example, with that product launch sales play, that would have been multiple pieces of guidance and content from multiple teams. And now we’ve got one aligned message to support our field force and enable them to go to market. And then lastly, it’s really having that visibility on how our content and guidance is landing. So utilizing those insights to make improvements and that feedback to have that continuous, I guess, virtual cycle of insights into actions. So it’s definitely a team effort and change management but it can bring a lot of insights and value. SS: I love that. I love that. Now, on that note, we talked about how rep feedback plays a huge role in the development of your programs. On the other side, how do you leverage data to evaluate and optimize the impact of your programs? HJ: Utilizing insights for informed decision making is really embedded into our company culture and I think this really goes hand in hand with feedback because you need that contextualization to make sense of it. So, for example, we use the OKR and A3 methodology across our diabetes organization. So this ensures that we’ve got key results and success metrics for each of our strategic objectives. So we’re able to see if something isn’t progressing exactly how we expect it to. We have those regular check-ins, but then we can also deep dive into the why. So like that example I shared with you earlier. We use that data, we use those insights to understand and deep dive into why as to things that aren’t working and then adapt our approach. And I think it’s really important to have and instill this mindset of data-driven insights across your organization as measures should be designed to pull people towards your overall vision. SS: Last question for you, Harmony. As you’re looking ahead, how do you envision leveraging innovations like AI to enhance your enablement program and continue to optimize your tech stack? HJ: The potential with AI and technology is very exciting, but I think it’s also easy to get lost in all the possibilities or jump straight into solution mode. There was a Gartner podcast and they said 72 percent of sellers are overwhelmed by the number of skills required for their job. And 50 percent are overwhelmed by the amount of technology that is needed. So I think this is where it’s really key that our role as enablement is to ensure that our teams are supported and upskilled to use technology and AI. So the way that we’ve been approaching AI within our team is Really looking into those kind of specific use cases, doing some proof of concepts within our programs and using that consultative approach with our field advisory board. So we can really validate those use cases and realize the value of them. So for example, lately we’ve been looking into kind of AI sales coaching and adaptive learning, and we’ve run that by our field advisory board to really understand with them, is this going to add value. Is this going to drive that simplification? And then using those insights to shape which direction we’ll go. I think the last aspect as well is being in such a regulated industry, what’s really crucial is that AI and technology are really underpinned by trust. So using that data in an ethical and compliant way. So it’s also really important to look into those nontechnical considerations with your AI strategy as well. SS: Phenomenal advice, Harmony. And I’m excited to see what you guys do on that front. Thank you again so much for joining us on this podcast. I really appreciate the time. HJ: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been lovely. 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 report from Harvard Business Review, 70% of all change initiatives fail. So how can you design and implement an effective change management strategy to help your reps adopt change within your organization? 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 Matthew Leiggi, the senior revenue enablement manager at Rectangle Health. Thank you for joining us, Matthew. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Matthew Leiggi: Absolutely. Great to be here. and like you said, I’m the senior revenue enablement manager here at Rectangle Health. I have almost a decade of experience in sales enablement, go-to-market strategy, spanning industries such as. Healthcare, SAS Data, and FinTech. I’ve had leadership roles in organizations like Rectangle Health, where I’ve been for about four and a half years now where my work really focuses on creating scalable enablement programs that empower the sales teams to articulate value effectively and deliver meaningful results. I also have my MBA, which has helped deepen my ability to align my business objectives With impactful enablement strategies, and at Rectangle Health specifically, I’m responsible for designing and implementing these programs that drive revenue growth. And enable our sales team to succeed in complex competitive markets. SS: Well, Matthew, I’m excited to have you join us today. One thing that caught my eye on your LinkedIn profile was that you state your mission is to empower sales teams to successfully land the value of your solutions across the buyer’s journey. Can you tell us more about this philosophy and how it drives your enablement strategy at Rectangle Health? ML: Absolutely. And this philosophy really kind of centers around ensuring that every sales interaction is value-driven and customer-focused. It’s really about, from my perspective, equipping my team and the sales teams with the sales knowledge tools, and confidence to address what the buyer’s needs are at every stage. At Rectangle Health, that’s translating this into actual strategies by creating sales playbooks, and dynamic training programs, ongoing, both in and onboarding. And then creating content that’s aligned with our specific buyer personas in the healthcare industry. Also, for example, I’ve implemented programs that have emphasized consultative selling, where we know that we’re going to have a conversation that’s going to be value-based, that’s going to articulate ROI and align those solutions with the customer’s pain points. Again, depending on who I’m talking to because everybody cares about something else. Or something different than maybe that next person that you’re going to be interacting with. So your approach has to be tailored to each of those individuals. SS: Absolutely. Now, Matthew, in the last few years, Rectangle Health has had a few acquisitions. In your experience, what are some of the challenges that sales teams can face when navigating an acquisition? And how can enablement help overcome these? ML: Acquisitions can bring changes in product portfolios, processes, organizational culture, and I know sales teams can struggle with alignment and a clear understanding of what the new value propositions are, having to adapt to new technologies they might not have used before. So enablement can help bridge those gaps by providing clear messaging frameworks, updating training on the integrated offerings, and fostering collaboration through workshops and cross-functional alignment sessions. When Rectangle Health underwent these acquisitions, I facilitated post-acquisition onboarding training to ensure our teams understood what the new value propositions were, focused on operational processes and really took a handheld approach to what the changes were. So how did it used to be done in your old system or your old process? And then how’s that going to translate into what we’re doing now in our new system? And that’s going to help confidently engage. Our teams to then feel more confident in the process to then more efficiently engage. Our prospects and our customers. SS: Absolutely. I think those are some fantastic tips and tricks for our audience. Now, I know silos can often also become a common challenge after an acquisition. What are some of your best practices for breaking down those organizational silos through enablement? ML: Absolutely. And breaking down silos really starts with creating a unified vision and fostering collaboration. So for me and kind of the enablement role of that, it really kind of starts with that collaboration. I always say enablement’s kind of the third leg in a stool between sales and marketing, product, you know, kind of the rest of the organization. So cross-collaboration is always paramount and that includes hosting alignment meetings, workshops, and what have you with sales, marketing, the product teams to make sure that everybody is on the same page. We’re all aligned and understand exactly what we’re supposed to be marching towards. The second piece is having a centralized place for resources, using a platform like Highspot so that everybody knows that the knowledge and information are all in the same place, creating that single source of truth. And then having regular communications, whether it’s participating or holding our own weekly stand-ups, or cross-department meetings, to align our priorities and initiatives. These practices ensure everybody is aligned on goals. And has access to those shared resources, so everybody is marching to the same beat, saying the same things and understanding what everybody across the organization is doing to the best of their ability. SS: And the desire to break down silos and unify your teams was part of the impetus behind deciding to invest in an enablement platform, I believe, at Rectangle Health. What are some of the ways that you leverage your enablement platform to help drive alignment across your teams? ML: Enablement platforms like Hotspot are really invaluable to help drive that alignment. And at Rectangle Health, content centralization, like I said before, is really kind of number one. We’re a small company. When I first started, we only had about 100 people. Everybody was really kind of using SharePoint. And now as we brought in those acquisitions, as you can imagine, everybody has their own places for content and resources. So bringing everything together under one umbrella was really a step number one to make sure how can we even understand what exists before we can say, is this even the right content? So that centralized content to create an easily accessible repository. For those playbooks, competitive Intel training material was step number one. The second one is to track engagement. So yeah, we might have several hundred resources that came in from a bunch of different libraries or different places, but what’s actually working when we’re able to analyze what’s used and what’s most effective, we’re able to refine our content, create better content, and being able to bubble that content up to the team. Where it’s most appropriately effective because we’re able to track that engagement. And the last part is feedback loop. That goes beyond just kind of working from a content perspective. Feedback loops are critical for enablement to be successful anywhere, but taking that seller feedback directly. And for me personally, working one on one with a lot of our sales reps daily, outside of just from a content perspective, but their feedback and understanding of what they do and the struggles that they encounter. Have each day and kind of what their processes are. Taking that and working that back into our platform and our content so that everything again is aligned and is going to work from the top down. And that’s going to help foster that consistent messaging and ensure all the teams are equipped with the right tools in the right time. SS: Absolutely. Now, with any change initiative, bringing your sales team along for the journey can oftentimes be easier said than done. What advice do you have for motivating sales reps and helping them to adapt to change? ML: Yeah, change is definitely easier to navigate when sales reps see the value that it brings. Just in my short time here, we have, again, gone through a lot of these acquisitions, processes have changed, leadership teams have changed. So the number one thing is really transparency and being able to clearly communicate the why behind what the changes are and involving the reps early and often in the process. So that we get those champions coming across in our trainings or updates, whatever it may be, because our reps are wonderful, love working with all of them, but it’s always a little bit different when it’s coming from one of their peers than when it’s coming from anybody else, right? We’re not just telling you to do something. We’ve worked with your peers to be involved in the process, and they’re helping us communicate that not only is this change just happening, but why is it going to make this process or this thing better? And then kind of piggybacking on top of that is the recognition piece. So celebrating the wins and highlighting those early adopters who embraced the processes and really kind of celebrating that and then bringing that to a tailored support approach. So role-specific trainings, one on one coaching to address any of these individual challenges so that no one person feels like they’re not supported. It’s going to help create an environment where change is seen as more of an opportunity than a disruption. SS: I love that advice. I think that’s phenomenal. Now you’ve already driven really strong engagement from the sales teams with your enablement programs. You’ve achieved an 81 percent recurring usage rate with Highspot. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption? ML: Absolutely. I mean, number one is stakeholder buy-in. Being able to work with our sales leaders and other stakeholders across the business that have a say in the content that’s being created, and how our sales teams are effective every single day. So engaging with those leaders early to champion those initiatives is always kind of step number one. Number two is to have a user-friendly tool or to use something that is going to be easy to understand. De simplifying access to the resources through something like Highspot where It’s extremely easy to understand where’s our content working with the Highspot team in particular to say, well, what’s the best way to organize that content and go into, hey, here’s not just a library. I should go into this with the intention of what am I looking for and how can I easily get to what I need to find more quickly. And then the real key to success is continual ongoing reinforcement. There’s a million things that happen. Every single day where the priority is always changing. We work in healthcare. So we work with these providers that have, you know, limited resources and limited time because they have patients coming in every single day. So they can’t always just kind of sit on the phone. And our goal is to capture their attention within the first 10 to 30 seconds and get their buy-in. The exact same approach is the same with our sales team. So continually being top of mind, whether it’s through email communications, hopping on team calls, really just kind of embedding enablement into the daily workflow through some microlearning. So manager-led coaching and reinforcement have contributed to that 81%. SS: I love that. That is amazing, Matthew. Now, I know that you guys are just getting started, but do you have any early wins that you’ve experienced so far that you can share with us? ML: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been able to help streamline our onboarding. With Highspot. So reducing the ramp time by helping to centralize the training and the resources, actually this morning, I was on with our latest group of new hires. And today was basically let’s start execution. So what that means is let’s make sure you have access to all the right tools, and systems. Process flows, everything was right in the high spot. So get them right in there so we can make sure that they have access to everything. All of our different job aides, it’s all right there. It’s all very systematic and programmatic. So we didn’t need to spend more than about half an hour making sure everything was all set up. That’s also helped improve and increase our engagement. Like you said, we have an 81 percent recurring usage, which indicates kind of strong adoption. And a lot of that has come from, again, the reinforcement constantly saying, well, have we looked in Highspot, sending links to Highspot, help themselves get to the right content instead of just maybe sending, let’s just say an example, the training video itself, helping somebody navigate their way through Highspot to get to that training content on their own. And then the other one that we found is improved message consistency. So our team has reported greater confidence in the content that they’re sending aligning. Their specific conversations with their follow-ups and pitches versus maybe just a static email template that they had before so they can actually see the engagement, be able to have more purposeful follow-ups, but also have tailoring the content and the conversation altogether to that prospect or that cross-sell customer that they’re working with. So these wins have really helped kind of validate. A platform’s impact and provide a foundation for helping us scale in the future. SS: Love it. Matthew, last question for you. The new year is right around the corner. As you look ahead, what are some of the key things you are planning to achieve next as you continue to evolve your enablement strategy? ML: It’s crazy to think that 2025 is right around the corner. So our main focus as an enablement team going into next year is to further refine our sales onboarding and providing greater support to our new hires to help decrease our ramp time. So that’s priority goal number one. Number two is to help enhance our organizational alignment. By integrating more teams and resources into Highspot. So we’ve really worked with our revenue team to anybody who’s customer-facing become aligned in terms of our content, our processes, and now our goal is to expand that out to the rest of the organization. And then for me, I would really love to expand into the use of. Kind of AI and automation and enablement, such as personalized learning pads, maybe some automated content recommendations to help really scale our reach and our impact because we have a pretty small but mighty team here at Rectangle Health and we’re continuing to expand and grow pretty significantly that we have to be able to use some different tools and be creative around how we can get to that reach because we don’t necessarily have the human resources to do that. SS: Absolutely. Matthew, thank you again so much for joining us. I really appreciate the time and the insights. ML: Thank you so much. So happy to be here and have a great 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.​

Today is a special day—we're celebrating our 100th episode! For this milestone episode, we're diving into a theme at the heart of enablement: making the impossible, possible. In today's business landscape, only 28% of sellers expect to hit their quota. So how can you enable your teams to overcome the challenges of the current market to achieve consistent go-to-market 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. In this episode, we'll hear from nine leaders who transformed challenges into business outcomes, delivering impact against their go-to-market initiatives through enablement. From earning leadership buy-in to aligning go-to-market teams and boosting productivity, these leaders enable the impossible for their businesses. We hope their stories will inspire you to push boundaries and redefine what's possible in your organization. Driving consistent revenue growth can feel impossible when silos divide sales, marketing, enablement, and revenue operations. A unified enablement approach can break down these barriers and drive measurable impact. But how do you demonstrate the value of enablement to stakeholders and secure their long-term support? In this part, we'll hear Pam Dake, senior director of GTM enablement at Menlo Security, share her success story for gaining leadership buy-in. Pam Dake: My name is Pam Dake and I work for Menlo Security, a cybersecurity company that actually has just surpassed a hundred million ARR. One of the bigger challenges that I’ve had recently has been in aligning the executive teams in order to really, truly understand how to be impactful, leveraging the go to market motion in a way that not only lands the big deal, but also allows us to have a very productive and valuable customer relationship long term. And so for me, it’s been gaining the opportunity to have that meeting with all of these critical stakeholders, have them see value. Each and every time that you meet with them, so that they feel like they’re getting something out of that meeting where it’s actually really driving the business forward in ways that they may not have seen initially. And so for me, it’s been setting up a recurring meeting with those folks who are the most senior and executive in the company to be able to drive forward what sales needs, which actually is driven primarily from what sales needs. Really, our customers are looking for from us as a company. Be tenacious about how you’re able to make a difference with aligning their internal stakeholders and really driving forward the programs that will make a difference, not only in the short term and the long term. So as you consider the strategy that you’re building. Ensure that you have your other internal stakeholders aligned and do that in ways that create value for them so that they can see the impact. One of the things that we talked about earlier was data. Leverage the data that you have on hand. Leverage tools that provide you with that really impactful data that provide you with insight into the leading indicators that will actually drive the business longer term with the lagging ones. So the bottom line is really taking an outside in approach with what you’re doing from an enablement lens. How does this impact my customers? Therefore, how am I able to build the best programs that I can that will enable My internal stakeholders, my internal teams, in order to be successful and provide value to our customers, not only in the short term with what wins they’re able to achieve, but how they’re able to grow and develop the relationships over time. SS: You need stakeholder buy-in to break down silos and align your go-to-market teams – but why is that alignment so critical? Without it, you can't coordinate, plan, and execute the initiatives needed to drive the business outcomes that matter most. And when 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully, it clearly takes more than guesswork to achieve those outcomes. So how can you define, execute, and optimize your go-to-market initiatives to deliver unprecedented impact? In this part, we'll hear stories from enablement leaders who brought key go-to-market initiatives to life through enablement. First, let's start with a common initiative that impacts teams across the go-to-market organization: product launch. Effectively bringing a new product to market can make or break your revenue targets. We'll hear from Chris Wronski, senior program manager at Keysight, on how he helped deliver a product launch that contributed to the first revenue growth in seven years despite a tough market. Chris Wronski: My name is Chris Wronski. I’m a Senior Program Manager at Keysight Technologies, and I am the architect behind our Highspot implementation. The last couple years have been very difficult in the, across the entire industry, right? Every, many companies are talking about it, us included. If you go pull our quarterly info, you can see the last seven quarters have been very difficult for us. So what I talked about earlier, the focus on new product introductions. That’s an opportunity for us to make some hay. That’s an opportunity for a, we’ve got a brand new product, we’ve got a brand new reason to go talk to customers. Even if they have no opportunities, at least go explain to them what we’ve got, right? There might be something in there. We’ve done a lot of work around building sales plays in a way that the seller can consume it and trying to crush it down. Really, um, aggressive simplicity is what I would call it. But by building that in and giving them just a little bit of info to start the discussion in a way that we knew you could start that discussion with nearly any customer, that’s enough to get the ball rolling and let them go do their sales job. We’ve done a ton of pushing training to them. I can see that in the numbers. I can see when we do our training. I can see the following week there’s a huge spike in people going to those sales plays and looking at them and using them. And so, Last quarter we, we turned the curve, right? Turned the knee of the curve and brought back at least a little bit of growth. We were positive for the first time in seven quarters. SS: Next, let's dig into an initiative that is likely on the minds of many GTM leaders with the new year around the corner: sales kickoffs and events. Starting off a year on the right foot can provide a business with momentum that carries through the rest of the year. Brooke Cole, manager of global field readiness at Workato, shares with us how her team drove an impressive boost in NPS with their first in-person SKO events. Brooke Cole: My name is Brooke Cole, and I’ve been at Workato for almost three years. A business challenge that myself and my team have overcome that we’re really proud of is probably our first in-person SKO events that we executed earlier this year. Because of COVID and just the nature of the world, we had been unable to get together in person as a collective regional team. Really, ever. We hadn’t. We had one scheduled, and then we had to cancel it, of course. Uh, so, earlier this year, our team, we ended up doing it regionally. So, in North America, in APJ, and in EMEA, our team was tasked with putting on three different SKO events within three to four weeks. And we traveled to each one of them. And the way that we overcame that really was just a sense of teamwork and camaraderie. We built trust with one another. We had really open dialogue and communication. And we really used our skill sets and our collaboration. To put on an event that got an NPS score of 85 globally. We heard the phrase, this is the best SKO we’ve ever had. And truly, to be fair, it’s the only one we’ve ever had in person. But people left jazzed, and they left inspired, and we leveraged Highspot as a part of that. Going into this next year, this is the second year where Highspot will be our landing page for our global event that we’re having, and so it’s going to be the Know Before You Go, and we did that as a trial period last year, and it worked out really well. The traffic was great when people had questions, we were able to direct them to Highspot for that, and I think we were proud overall of just the vision that we put together. And how we executed the tools and the apps that we already had at hand in order to bring everybody together in a centralized place to give them the awareness and create excitement around the events. SS: Now, we're diving into an initiative that can have a profound impact on productivity: the sales process. Research shows that just 28% of a rep's time goes to selling, and an optimized sales process can help you streamline workflows and save time. Let's hear from Jay Livingston, head of enablement at Corporate Visions, on how his team is improving the sales process and delivering time savings as a result. Jay Livingston: I’m Jay Livingston. I lead Global Sales Enablement at Corporate Visions. I remember when I got involved in enablement, one of the things that I learned is that sellers spend an inordinate amount of time each month preparing their own content. They have a lot of goals. so we in a headquarters environment have time to sit around and think about how to improve some of these processes. Salespeople don’t, right? They’re running from call to call, always trying to be ready to meet that moment. And so one of the, one of the main challenges I’ve been focused on quite honestly for more than just the last couple of years at CVI is how do we make. Content and resources and tools and assets more purpose driven more readily available, more easily findable, and then more from a usability perspective, make it easier for, again, for those sales folks to be able to execute in those moments. And so I remember when we first rolled out Highspot here back a few months ago one of the things that, that a member of my team Eric is a VP on our team, would say, man, he’s I just, I don’t have time to do all the things that I need to do because I’m constantly getting emails or messages or slacks about, hey, where’s this and where’s this and where’s this, Highspot literally I no longer have to field any of those calls. As a matter of fact, when we were here in August, I had a chance, we were sitting around the table to share a story that just in the month, I think we had been maybe a month in at that point the amount of time that Eric has been able to get back in his day. To not have to field those annoying, it can be very annoying requests, right? Because how many times do we tell our sellers where things are, how to use them, right? And you almost wonder sometimes, are they listening, right? Are we not communicating it effectively? All of a sudden now we’re seeing literally no request for where is this? How do I use it, right? And so again, what I would say is it’s not bulletproof, right? There’s always going to be opportunities to improve. But one of the hallmarks of the way that I’ve tried to lead enablement organizations is to really have it boil down to two things. One, what is the seller’s, or what is your colleague’s ability to be able to execute in this moment? We can lean into the ability to help them get better. And two, what is their willingness? And willingness, oftentimes, is influenced by how easy something is to execute. And so if we can remove the willingness component, then we can just focus squarely on the ability. And so as we continue to move forward those are really the two things that, that we continue to evaluate ourselves by. Are we making it simple? And how are we helping folks coach or how are we coaching folks to get better and to be more effective and to utilize these amazing tools and opportunities that we all have SS: And now, let's talk about an initiative at the heart of enablement: training. When done right, sales training can drive the behavior change reps need to consistently hit their targets–but often, that can be easier said than done. Let's hear Anthony Doyle, director of sales enablement at Turnitin, explain how he revitalized training and ultimately improved seller engagement. Anthony Doyle: My name is Anthony Doyle, and I'm the director of sales and development at Turnitin. In terms of overcoming really difficult problems, the biggest problem is engagement—engagement from the sales teams, leaning into the enablement programs, spending time, and investing their time in their own development. I think that's what we've seen a real uptick on and success on in the past, maybe six to twelve months. We've seen a change in attitude. We're getting success now when launching new training programs. People are leaning into them, they're completing them, and they're giving us good feedback too, which is something that I probably never thought I would have said twelve months ago because we started investing a lot of time and building a lot of training, but then that wasn't really getting consumed. It was very difficult to get managers to even back us up and roll it out with our teams. Whereas now, when I've just presented to the go-to-market team on a go-to-market all-hands, strategy for the sales academy, there was just a lot of love in the room. A lot of people saying, ‘This is fantastic. We can't wait to see it in action and get our hands on it.’ So we had a lot of good feedback from that session. And that's really pleasing for me because it means that the strategy was the right strategy. I think the message for teams and enablement teams out there, if you are getting those challenges with engagement, is to keep at it, show value, and really drive those proof points. Get those wins regionally with teams who will engage, then present it in a very easy-to-consume way, and in a way that the teams can feel confident about engaging with. You will see the results, and the tide will turn. So that's something I'm proud of. SS: Next, let's explore an initiative that drives long-term impact—coaching. Effective coaching helps sellers apply newly acquired knowledge to maximize their performance. Let's hear from Andrea Holzwarth, VP of Sales Enablement and Customer Operations at Project Lead The Way, on how she supports ongoing coaching to help reps sharpen their skills. Andrea Holzwarth: We see a lot of value in coaching and training. We have our senior directors, our sales managers, really providing that one-to-one support for our reps out in the field. And we want them to be able to have those coaching conversations and the meeting intelligence helps with that. So we can see the calls. What is that? What’s going well? Maybe what are they struggling with? But I think a lot of times. I say this, that it’s easier to edit than it is to get started, and so having that AI feedback automatically in there it’s helpful, that’s a starting point. And then our senior directors, our sales managers can go in, provide more of that personalized coaching that they may see, but it gives them a starting point. One of the other benefits that I see with Meeting Intelligence is I just think about as a sales rep being in the field especially virtually now that we’re, all we do is meet virtually. It feels like we’re in the, we actually go to schools and districts too, but I would have loved it when I was a sales rep to just see, I think I know how I show up on camera or how I’m speaking to a customer, but, It is so helpful to go back and record and just see man, I said “um” a lot. So it helps with some of that coaching too. SS: And to close out, we asked our guests for advice on how they enable the impossible in their organizations. Here are a few tips from Suzanne Heller of Flight Centre Travel Group, Jennifer Shelley of QuidelOrtho Corporation, and Susan Kinser of Net Health Systems to help you take your enablement efforts to the next level. Suzanne Heller: Just go for it. Because we have the tools that make us successful. We have the tools to be able to measure what we’re trying to achieve. And it is okay at the end of the day to go back to the drawing board if it doesn’t work. But we won’t know that if we don’t try. And if we look at enablement 5, 10, 15 years ago, it wasn’t like what it is today. But because of the trial and errors that have, come up. Advice to anyone that is in an enablement role is just to go with your gut and deliver. And it is okay to go back and look at the data and pivot and optimize. You won’t know what’s successful unless you try it. I think my second piece of advice is buy-in. To your business, your brand, you tell a story, you bring immense value, and it’s really critical to create that brand awareness for yourself and for your team, to be able to let them know the purpose, and the deliverables, and the ROI that you bring to the business. So this would be my two. Jennifer Shelley: Not to get discouraged. Sometimes, we initially we will bring to the table things that sound outside of the box and Highspot tends to be on the cutting edge of technology. But technology can be frightening, and I think that you can get discouraged when people are, not as excited as you are about what you’re trying to accomplish with the technology that you have.  And just take your time, stay focused stay, consistent with your message and understand that it takes time for people to really understand the vision that you might have if they haven’t been exposed to all the great the great information that Highspot is providing them in terms of that cutting edge capabilities in the platform. Susan Kinser: Whether you have a seat at a table or not is to, try to get your voice heard so that you start having those conversations to understand the business outcomes that your team is looking to change, right? I think that the moment you’re able to ensure that you’re aligning any of your programs or any of your initiatives to those specific strategic initiatives that your company in a larger way is looking to achieve when you get that kind of information and you’re getting that feedback and you’re having more, and then they have that insight into the change that you’re making it just makes you more of that strategic partner and it gives you that space to continue to make that kind of success progress and success, I would say get a unified platform. Use Highspot and use the resources. And so I think what’s fun is in this ever growing enablement space, having your voice being heard only. makes the impossible more possible, right? As we start bringing things together and we start, having different ideas or having different needs, and we’re able to do things in these different ways, I would say my advice is to get connected to those business strategies, those business insights, and then get that unified platform and keep scaling. SS: As you heard from the enablement leaders we featured in this episode, nothing is impossible with the right team, tools, and processes in place. In looking to the year ahead, take stock of the challenges on the horizon and rather than looking at them as obstacles, channel them into opportunities to push the boundaries of what you once thought was impossible. Thank you for joining us for this special 100th episode of the Win Win Podcast. We'd love to hear how you are enabling the impossible—be sure to connect with us in the Highspot Spark Community to share your advice, and tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to research from Gartner, It can take up to 18 calls to connect with a prospective buyer. And when dealing with enterprise sales, that number can become even higher. So how do you help set your team up for success when navigating complex enterprise sales?  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 Eric Nitschke, the VP of Commercial Enablement at Corporate Visions. Thank you for joining us, Eric. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Eric Nitschke: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. My role or my background is a mix of marketing and sales enablement and leadership. So I have a lot of different things behind there and I think it’s shaped the way I’ve approached driving results for sellers and customers. Really. My background has always been in sales enablement content. So creating playbooks and websites or microsites, digital sales rooms, and different kinds of content that sellers would then use to educate themselves and be able to have better conversations. But the marketing background made me a little more aware of how content needs to be phased and directed at specific audiences. And that seems pretty, you know, common if you’re thinking about a customer marketing campaign to be role-based and set the direction toward what customer needs to do. But I think the same thing happens on the seller side, where we need to know what the seller is really trying to achieve at that stage of the sale process. So probably deeper than just my background, but I’ve been with Corporate Visions 12 years since my prior company was acquired. So I’ve actually kind of been with the two companies for actually 26 years. SS: Amazing. Well, we’re excited to have you here. And I know that one of your areas of focus is helping your teams elevate commercial conversations. I’d love to learn from you. What are some of your best practices for developing effective messaging and sales content? EN: Sure. That’s a great question. So I think a lot of companies, our clients, and lots of companies out there have a lot of great first conversations. And have trouble getting to the next one. And part of that is they haven’t gotten to the true business needs of the client. They may recognize an opportunity at the technical or at the service delivery level and it makes sense there. But when you start competing with additional budget or other initiatives that may not be competitive, but we’re all fighting for the same budget there, I think a lot of sellers don’t get to the next step because they haven’t really thought about the business value they drive. So when we talk about elevating the conversations, we always try to start and continue with where is the business value. It’s one thing to describe what your product is and what a client can do differently with it. But it really is about what it means to the company and how it’ll help them achieve business goals that really sets the hook and continues the conversation to the rest of the deciding journey. I think it’s really the biggest piece is just focusing on delivering those insights, and showing the connection to. The client needs and really just come out with being able to prove the value that you said you could up front. SS: Absolutely. Now, I know a key focus for Corporate Visions this year is enterprise selling. Can you share some of the challenges that reps can face during an enterprise sale and how you’re helping your teams kind of overcome those challenges? EN: So we’re pretty much focused exclusively on enterprise companies, but it’s gotten much harder, right? In the past few years, buyers have gotten so much smarter in the way they can research. And we’ve all seen the numbers about Buyers are 75, 80 percent of the way through the deciding journey before they even start talking to a seller. So we really need to make sure that our sellers have the ability to have conversations with multiple stakeholders. So don’t just focus on the technical, but focus on the business value that you’ll have across all those different decision-makers. Again, focusing on the economic buyers, make sure that we’re catching all the influencers and all the champions across the organization. And then the content that we develop is aligned again with where the seller is. So it’s not what we want to sell, it’s what the buyer needs to hear in order to make a decision. So all of our content, everything we have in Highspot, in our digital sales rooms, in our content management section, are all aligned with what to say, what to show, what to know to do. At different stages of the buying journey, you’re helping that customer along that deciding journey. SS: Absolutely. I love that. What would you say though, are maybe some of the key skills reps need to navigate, as you mentioned, sort of the complexities of an enterprise sale. And do you have best practices for helping to build and reinforce those amongst your reps? EN: So a lot of our research has led to the eight most important skills that are actually predictive of seller success. So having gone through more than 100, 000 buyer interviews and understanding why they bought, and why they didn’t buy. We can focus on those key eight competencies and eight skills that we know prove success. So being a creative negotiation planner, being able to articulate value, being able to align your solution with the value a customer really wants to see. These eight skills are the things that I focus most on when I create content, when I create learning courses, things we layer into the DSR to make sure that we’re at least displaying those things that a customer typically wants to see. And then when I create those things and bring them to market, again, it’s the learning, the digital sales room is so critical in being able to put the most important and most valuable content at the top. And then leave the more traditional or operational kinds of solution briefs and technical content at the bottom. SS: Got it. I think that’s fantastic. I’d love to understand from your perspective. Obviously, I’m a little biased when it comes to enablement platforms, but in your opinion, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform for helping to drive successful enterprise sales? EN: First is just basic integration, which sounds a little odd, but for me as the Highspot administrator, but also as the key enablement person, just being able to put things in a platform, Highspot, but having one platform for the learning, just the regular content access, and then take those messages to market through pitching or DSRs, Having it all in one place is incredibly helpful for me because I only have to upload it once and then use it many times. But also for the sellers because there’s never any doubt about where the right and new information lives. They always go to Highspot depending on the navigation or the spot overviews that we have. Very easy to find content and very simple to send it out. And then of course being able to monitor is just incredible for who looked at what and when all in one place so that I can gauge if is this the right content to be selling or are some things not working well enough and what I need to tweak. Again, it’s everything in one platform for all purposes. It’s just amazing for us. SS: I love hearing that. And prior to Highspot, I know you guys had another enablement tool. What has been the impact so far as you aim to improve enterprise selling moving to Highspot? EN: So again, I think the biggest change for us was that full integration as opposed to a great content management platform where you know where stuff is different from knowing where it is, knowing what to do with it, and being able to act on it immediately. There are plenty of content management drives and sites and platforms, but having it totally actionable and monitorable, I’m just going to make up a word, having it all in one place is the biggest thing that I’ve gotten out of our switch to Highspot. SS: Amazing. Now, you touched on digital rooms earlier as being kind of a key component to your enablement strategy, and your team has already achieved an impressive 59 percent adoption rate of sharing digital rooms with Highspot. Could you share more about how you’re using digital rooms to support enterprise selling? EN: We apply some of our other training and content that we have, and I would apply this to creating more memorable digital sales rooms. And there’s an entire process around being memorable. People will forget and just not even consider up to 90 percent of what you say or present to them. So finding the right 10 percent that you want them to remember is super key. And you do that through a couple different ways in digital sales rooms. One, you’ve got to remember that every buyer is in a different part of their journey. It needs to align with them to the point where even, are you trying to acquire a new logo. Or are you trying to expand an existing customer? Those are completely different motions that require totally different stories and skills, and they really need a different DSR to be able to just attach to those specific needs of the customer. Because if you use the wrong message, you actually push the existing client away. Another one is, again, when we talk about leaning into the biggest business value, we always put that above the scroll. They own a newspaper and put the biggest headline above the fold. We always want to make sure that when executives come to a DSR, they are instantly reminded of what value we are introducing and developing in their business and helping them achieve those large business goals. There’s also a whole set of design and imaging that I think makes things more memorable, and the Highspot DSRs are just amazing at doing that. Being able to quickly create templates that do that. So mostly when I create templates, they’re probably 80 some percent done, but they’re very purposely built so a seller can quickly come in and find the template that they want that best meets what they’re trying to do with it And it’s very quick for them to go ahead and customize that with their own client content and get it out the door In fact one DSRs we had sent out we found out that there were eight times more stakeholders involved in that deal than we realized. And it was a big RFP in this case, but we’ve used DSRs for RFPs for just one-off deals and our client success and our customers and ourselves, people are using the DSRs just to develop the business relationship over time. SS: Well, I love to hear that. So I know that partner enablement is also a huge focus for your team, especially, you know, as you’re navigating complex sales scenarios. Can you share more about your strategies for enabling and empowering your partners? EN: Sure, so we have several different partnership layers. So we have an affiliate program where independent contractors and consultants are out. Presenting CVI skills and CVI services. They basically get the same level of information our in-house sales team does because they need to have similar stories. They may not have to take the sale as deep into the designing journey as our in-house sellers might, but I still want them to have the context, the information, and know how to have those conversations so they can tee it up for one of us to come in and help them close it. We also have a number of alliance partners and marketing partners that We’re co-selling or cross selling and each looking into each other’s sets of business, whether prospects or existing customers. So we want to make sure that both sets of reps know the joint value conversation and we appear to be going to market together. Obviously we, you know, it’s our client and someone else’s prospect, so we’re helping with that. We want to show how seamlessly we work with their platforms, with their solutions, and then go to market together. And again, we make all that content available to our partners through Highspot. Maybe not to the level that our reseller partners would, but we want to be able to make sure that those partners are able to do business as if we were selling ourselves. SS: Absolutely. Last question, Eric. As you look ahead to 2025, how will your enablement strategy continue to evolve and how will Highspot help support you in that journey? EN: Wow. Great question. One of the big pieces of research we did a few years ago was what level of personalization is creepy. And it turns out, you know, we’ve all gotten the emails where. They just seem a little too familiar to me, and I’m sure they datamined my LinkedIn profile, but that’s creepy. So the right level of personalization is really at the industry level, where you have conversations about companies like yours that we work with, have these similar challenges in your industry, and here’s how we’ve been able to help solve them, let’s have a conversation. So, we pre-rate the content. Put them into pitch templates, put them into DSRs, and make it really easy for our sellers to then start pitch campaigns right within Highspot so that We know the messaging is right, and we know that the level of personalization isn’t creepy, because you really don’t want to come off creepy. And then, really going forward, we’re really looking deeper into, to more in learning development. So, building more custom courses internally. And also, those are broader, but also super, almost micro courses. Where everything I said about Digital Sales Room, I’m actually creating courses on how to do that. Industry plays. We usually go to market by industry, but let’s face it. Every industry has a different set of needs and business values. So we want to at least align with those things. So we’re creating all that custom content for our sellers. To then put into pitch campaigns. And then we’ll continue to monitor the scorecards and all the analytics functions that are in Highspot really helped me and help the rest of the product marketing team say, all right, that, that asset didn’t do what we thought it was going to do. It’s not being used. Do we need to promote it better? Do we need to rethink it? I’m getting insights that I never really had before. So we’ll continue to do that. The more data you get, right? The more insight you’ll get. We need to get our sellers continually to pitch. Fortunately, they’ve picked up on pitching and DSRs a whole lot. So we’re getting really good data that we can make the decisions on. SS: Love that, Eric. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you sharing your journey. EN: Absolutely. Happy to. We love Highspot here. 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 Epsilon research, 80% of buyers report feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information encountered in the buying journey. So how can you effectively engage buyers to guide them through the journey in an effective manner? 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 Larioni, the business development manager at Pie Insurance. Thank you for joining us, Jason. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jason Larioni: My name is Jason Larioni. I am based in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have been with Pie Insurance. For close to two years now started in the sales enablement role, got to build the vertical at Pie. It was really fun getting to dive in and really create what sales enablement was going to look like at Pie in the business development group. So part of that journey was leveraging Highspot and getting that up off the ground. That was really exciting and a really intense time building what all of that would look like. And then also being responsible for an entire new system and all of that change management. And just over the last few months, I’ve transitioned into a manager role, managing a team of digital account specialists here. And at Pie, I have an extensive background in training and enabling. I actually started my career as a high school English teacher. So that, you know, that drive to help people and educate and teach people and really kind of dive into what motivates people to learn and be better versions of themselves. I’ve always really loved tapping into that. I’ve taken a lot of that experience that I’ve had throughout my early career. I’ve taken that and implemented it into the role that I’m in now.  SS: Tell me more about that, Jason. As you mentioned, you’ve held a lot of different roles across the go-to-market organization. How does this experience, everything from client success to enablement to training, influence your current role as a development manager? JL: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up, because I actually just talked to my direct manager about this yesterday. I really feel that, even though I may have said otherwise, I really feel like I was not ready for this manager or leadership role until now. And I do attribute that to a lot of things. All of the experience that I’ve had throughout my career being in the different verticals, like you said, managing accounts as a client relationship manager, moving into the sales enablement role and wearing that hat, and I was doing sales enablement before it was even a thing or before that was a thing that people called it. So to move into that and then really. Understand what helps reps be successful and and what helps them with their go-to-market strategy and influence that. I’ve really taken that into this role and I try to come at them with that lens as I’m managing and coaching and effectively helping them understand KPIs and all of that. Where their struggles are. So it’s just, again, I’ve never really felt ready until I was able to bring all of those pieces together and have the experience that I’ve had. I’ve used that to influence the way I interact with my reps and move them forward. SS: Amazing. Now. I’d love to get your perspective now as a sales leader. What would you say is the strategic value of enablement for sales teams?  JL: The list is endless, really. It’s so critical to have resources and a path to success for your reps. When I was a client relationship manager. We didn’t have it. There was nothing. We didn’t have a content management system. We didn’t have a learning platform. We were a scrappy startup and it was all knowledge-based for the people that were there. It was all lived inside people’s brains. And when someone left, that walked out the door with them you could be losing years of experience or entire processes that no one else knew how to do. So, you know, when I got to come into Pie and help create that sales enablement strategy and what that would look like, I always kept that in the back of my mind of what I needed when I was in this role and it just, it gives the reps the ability to focus on what’s important and that is building relationships with their clients. They know then that they have the tools in their toolboxes. They don’t have to think about those things. They don’t have to. Worry about, Oh, is this piece of content that I am going to be sending out accurate or up to date, or am I saying the right thing? With the content governance and all of the pieces of the puzzle that Highspot has brought in for us specifically, it allows the reps to just focus on selling while giving them tools to help sell better and build relationships better. SS: I love that. Now, prior to Highspot, your team did leverage, I believe, another platform to try to equip your sales teams. What were some of the challenges your team faced at that time and what motivated you to change your tech stack? JL: Yeah, so Highspot is something I’ve been interested in for years. At my prior employer, I fell in love immediately the first time I was pitched on it. It’s just such a robust CMS and LMS involved or coupled with that. The driving factor was we were using Confluence, which I think a lot of organizations are using to help with their content management and it works really well for a product org, but there’s really no way to have content governance in there and I really was fitting a square peg into a round hole. For what I wanted it to do and how I wanted to segment different aspects of business development. We have different teams on here. Some information was relevant to some teams, some information was not relevant to other teams, and it didn’t allow me to get into the weeds the way that I needed to. I made it work for the beginning of the sales enablement journey, but I knew as we were scaling as an organization and as a business development group that we needed to have something more robust. We needed to have something that was going to help us with our content governance and was going to help us go to market in a different way in ways that we hadn’t before. And the biggest selling point for me was those digital sales rooms because we do have a lot of really high-priority relationships. We want that level of self-service. That we weren’t able to provide our agents before. And now with that Digital Salesroom, we can create that bespoke experience for our really great partners, our high-priority partners, the ones whose relationships are invaluable to us and we can help them be more successful with Pie. We can help build that relationship more. They know to go there to look for new things. And that was a really big selling point. And one of the things that really got us excited about bringing Highspot on board. SS: I love that. I want to dig actually into both of those points. On the governance side, your team has seen some drastic improvement. I think you guys have had a 35 percent boost in the last few months on the governance side. Can you tell us about some of the impact that an effective governance strategy has on your sales teams?  JL: Yeah, it’s been almost immediate we’ve seen the effects of it. I think with any organization that’s using Slack, there’s good and bad to using Slack and we’ve all seen it. When I first started, there were a lot of processes and documents that lived in Slack, you know, whether it was pinned to a channel. Or, you know, you’d have to go into a group channel and say, Hey, I need this done. You can never quite know if what you were doing was the right way to do it, or if that document that was pinned was the most recent document. You might have one downloaded on your desktop, or that one was pinned and you’re not sure which was the right one. And almost immediately, we saw that stop. Like, we unpinned everything from our channels, and we said, Hey, stop sending PDFs out to your partners that you’re working with. We’re going to leverage Highspot because you know that the link you’re sending is the most up-to-date version of that document. That version history was a huge piece of it too, where you could just go in and update a version of the same document and then that link doesn’t change. To answer your question more specifically, we saw Slack usage decline significantly because the reps knew and continued to know that. The documents and the information and the processes and the SOPs that they’re looking at are correct and accurate because of the governance that we’ve instilled and been able to really drive home with Highspot. SS: Amazing. And the other capability that you talked about that you felt was delivering value is Digital Rooms. I’d love to understand, how are you helping your teams better use the right content when they find it to engage clients through things like the Digital Room capabilities in Highspot?  JL: Yeah, so we started really simple. I created a template at first for them to use just a really high level. Hey, you can book a meeting here with me. Here are some successes that we’ve seen in your state. So that can help inform your decisions on what business you’re going to bring to us so that you are not wasting your time. Our general processes and procedures and how to interact with us. And from there, it became a collaborative discussion of it. Let’s try things. I would meet with one rep and they’d say, Hey, I want to download this Salesforce report and have it automatically import into an Excel sheet that’s external facing. So my agent can view it and understand, okay, you know, I submitted this business. Where’s it at in the funnel? I want to see how it spits out on the other side. And it’s giving them that real-time. And then we would come together as a group and all of those individual conversations that I had with different reps. And They would talk about this worked, this didn’t work. I want to try that. And we would then piecemeal it together and it grew into something much bigger and more robust. And it became this collaborative discussion of what was working, and what wasn’t working. And now they’ve gotten better at it than I was even able to in the beginning. And they’re doing things with their digital sales rooms that I didn’t even dream possible. So they were immediately excited about it. And I think that that was the big. The hurdle that I was worried about getting over was we had to have immediate buy-in. So that’s why I really wanted to start small with the digital rooms, and let them see the value. And then once we started sharing them with our partners, our partners started giving us feedback of, wow, this is incredible. You guys were easy to use before, but this made it even easier to use now. We just got so much positive feedback. And once they saw that and we started sharing it, it was just game on. And everybody was like, wow. I want to do this. My team then started using it in a different way for new partner onboarding and everybody just got really creative and really excited about it. And it was just, it exceeded my expectations of how we would adopt this product and it’s really exciting to see. SS: I love that. And in addition to engaging new clients with digital rooms, I think you guys are also working on expanding relationships with existing partners and agencies as you’ve touched on a few times during this conversation. What are some of the key ways you’re supporting this initiative? JL: Yeah, so that entire story I just told right there about the different ways, hey, I’m trying this, that was all current agencies. We weren’t even Using it for new agencies until a few weeks ago that came out of how we were using it with our current agency base so that was really again where I saw that gap of we’re not meeting the client’s needs the way we can be and I think I kind of shifted the direction of the The main purpose of a Digital Sales Room as like a new acquisition piece. But I saw that ability for us to use it the way that we needed to. And that’s how we started with the current agency base. But we are continuously looking at those engagement factors and seeing what’s being looked at, how often it’s being looked at, who’s using it the most and maybe why they’re using it the most. And we’re always sharing different reps of, Hey, this worked for me. This didn’t work for me. This is really what’s getting them engaged. So we’re making sure that, you know, we’re covering our bases there. SS: Love that. Now, as a sales leader, what are some of your best practices to provide coaching to your teams in order to improve performance against a lot of those key initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business? JL: Yeah, one of the most important things for me is I really just want to foster a culture of feedback and learning. I want my reps to be able to come to me with ideas. We’re a tech-driven company, you know, we’ve got Highspot, we’re leveraging other platforms that help us automate a lot of our tasks that come out of Salesforce. And a lot of what we do using Highspot, or using Groove, or using other technology platforms, a lot of that comes from ideas from my team. So yeah. They may come to me and say, Hey, I want to engage this group of people. And we’re, we’re trying to engage at scale. And we’re trying to talk to a lot of people at once. And without that, that culture of feedback and learning and testing things out, what we’re doing wouldn’t work. And because of that, we’ve been able to be successful. We have failed. We’ve tried things that didn’t work. I’ve said, Hey guys, that didn’t work. What did we learn from that? And we’ve learned from our mistakes. And when we do something similar. We try to do it better than before and hopefully get success out of it then. But specifically my team, we’re not afraid to fail. We’re not afraid to try new things. And we’re not afraid to, a lot of my reps say, Hey, I want to try this. Can you help me? And it’s been really rewarding coming into this role and having a group that is willing to try and is okay if they fail, but is also excited to learn from those failures. SS: I love that. I think that’s a great culture to cultivate within your organization. How, Jason, do you think about leveraging data, though, to help optimize the performance of your teams? And do you have any wins you can share? JL: Yeah, data is how we make most of our decisions. Honestly, we’re very state-specific with the type of business that we do. So, trends in a state is very critical to how we go to market. So, for example, if we start to see a decline in submissions from our agency base, we’re gonna look at, okay, was it in a specific state? Was it in a specific class code? If it is in a specific state, What is happening? Where are our competitors at? Did our competitors drop prices? Did we come in high? And we try to identify trends there. And that really informed a lot of, I just previously mentioned some of the things that we want to try and identify a group of agents, right? So we may say, Hey, things have been slipping in X state a little bit. Let’s engage the agency base there and understand what’s going on. And maybe it’s just a lack of engagement. We just fell off on our engagement a little bit, but maybe there’s more to it. So. When we are doing a quote follow-up and we’re looking to understand, are you going to place this business with us or are you not, we can then get feedback on maybe it is pricing, maybe it’s something else. So that data is really critical. And we’re constantly looking at trends in states, trends in class codes to help us inform how we want to go to market and engage at scale. SS: I love that. That’s amazing. All right. Last question, Jason, as you plan for the future, how do you plan to continue to strengthen buyer engagement and drive revenue growth for your team? JL: We just want to continue to leverage these incredible platforms like Highspot. And I think we’re only scratching the surface. We’ve backfilled my old position. We’re with someone fantastic. We have an incredible sales manager and the BD side of the house now. And she is just as excited, if not more excited about Highspot than I am. So we really want to lean into what is working and how can we just continue to build on that. And like I said, we’re only scratching the surface with Highspot. We really want to continue to leverage our digital sales rooms, and leverage those sales plays. Make sure that we are building our content library. We want to continue to grow that library and really have every single SOP and process and anything that the reps could need to be successful. We want to make sure that we are giving that to them when they need it and it’s easy to find. So really just leaning into the things we’re already doing well and just doing more of it. SS: Amazing, amazing job, Jason. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time, Jason. JL: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been great. 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 2024, those who leverage technology to power sales training are 50% more likely to improve quota attainment. So how can you enhance training efficiency and boost rep productivity with a unified platform? 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 Amanda Steiner, the director of sales enablement and training at McKesson. Thanks for joining us, Amanda. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Amanda Steiner: Thank you so much for having me. This is so exciting. So a little bit about me. I’ve been with McKesson for just under eight years now. Came into the organization initially as a part of the inside sales team. Loved it, had a great time, eventually moved out to the field and then became a people leader in the sales force. And as I was an individual contributor in this organization, I began to observe a lot of trends that were occurring even outside of my business unit that I think lent itself to opportunities for even an org of our size. To think more strategically about how we’re asking reps to spend their time in order for them to be more successful. And that was sort of the tip of the iceberg, but that drove my interest in enablement and training in general. I happen to have a background in education as far as my schooling. So I thought this was a nice cross-section of interests for me, but have since been leading our sales enablement and training organization for our pharmaceuticals division for McKesson for the last year and a half. SS: Amazing. Well, I know that you’ve also spent, I believe, the majority of your career in the healthcare industry, both in the sales and sales enablement space. Given that experience, what are some of the unique challenges that you would say reps in the healthcare industry face, and how can enablement help overcome those? AS: Healthcare is a very challenging industry. It’s ever-changing. It requires more than just a deep knowledge of the products that you’re selling in the market. It requires a well-rounded understanding of the entire healthcare ecosystem. So, From manufacturer to distributor, to provider, to patient, and all the financial and compliance considerations throughout. That means our sellers are really challenged to be, at any given time, well-informed, agile, and have excellent consultative techniques in their sales approach. So, their tools, resources, and support teams have to be able to rise to meet those challenges. So a strong enablement strategy is a must. If successfully pulled through, enablement’s going to provide the structure, governance, data insights, and innovation that you need in this kind of complex environment to keep sellers informed, marching to the beat of the same drum, and used to continuous learning Overburdening their mindshare. I know that’s a problem for a lot of us in healthcare because there is a change, not just quarterly, not just monthly, but almost daily. And we’re throwing so many things at reps that are in the position of informant to their customers and advocates to their customers as much as they are maintaining the sales relationship. So it’s very challenging, but I am super confident that enablement is the answer even for an organization of this size and complexity. SS: I could not agree more. And Mikesa, you’re responsible for helping with a lot of that continuous learning, including developing and managing the training programs. In your view, what are some of the key building blocks for an effective training program? AS: It’s such a good question. And it’s something that I hear enablers and trainers talk a lot about. But the one thing that I think we can all agree on is there is an old adage in the writing world that you should always begin with the ending in mind. And the same concept applies when you’re building a training program. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And if you’re not painfully specific about the problems you’re looking to solve, whether it is behavioral, whether it’s tactical, or data-driven, then you’re very seldom going to be able to truly address the problem, and it will just be a superficial solution. I also really recommend having a mixture of KPIs. I think one thing that enablement and training organizations struggle with is telling the story of our impact on the org. Because we’re a nonrevenue generating organization, we have to be able at any given time to tell that story. So the best way to do that is to make sure that you are not only measuring a moment in time where you deliver training and you can look at the sales target results from that date. But you should also be measuring and observing behavioral skills, selling skills, how these things over time have changed in correlation to moments in time when you made process changes, where you implemented training, and you can tell a story around multiple KPIs. I think the last note I’ll make is don’t just check the box on evaluation. Make sure that the way you’re measuring is as targeted as what you’re measuring. So in our organization, we’ve changed our approach on this to requiring teachbacks for tactical knowledge, things like sales process, things like, do you know how to log this thing over here, rather than always defaulting to assessment style evaluation. We also require role plays and stand and delivers for selling skills and this might come as a surprise to some of the listeners, but we hadn’t previously been very intentional about our evaluation mechanism. So, don’t check the box on that. Make sure that you’re thoughtful in how you’re choosing to evaluate the work that you’re putting out into the world. To really be confident that the sales reps are going to be ready to go as soon as you’re done with that effort. SS: I think that is phenomenal advice in terms of kind of the foundational building blocks. I’m curious, what did training look like at your organization before you started leveraging Highspot and how has it evolved since then? AS: I would say that we needed a lot of help with organization of efforts and particularly With making sure that our reps were not overburdened with information in dozens of places, which is where we started. And I think what we’re still working from, as you can imagine, is that takes a lot of time in internal collaboration and intention to get to a point where your points of origin for a sales rep are greatly reduced. I would say that for McKesson, where we started was with multiple business units that operate in very siloed ways. And I think that’s still a struggle for us and a struggle that I think many of your listeners particularly large organizations can relate to. But we didn’t have a common environment for content management that integrated with the CRM that also enabled us to get real-time data on how reps were interacting with this content, consuming it, and sharing it with customers. So we just did not have any kind of closed-loop system. to justify our efforts and also form a more strategic collaborative strategy with marketing, with strategy, with operations. So I would say before Highspot, there was a lot of throwing things at the wall and hoping something stuck. Now, we’re still in the phase of building our critical infrastructure for the business around it, but I am super optimistic based on what we’ve seen already. This is going to provide a launch pad for us. That’s not only promoting our digital literacy in the sales world, especially now that we’re in a much more virtual selling environment but is also going to create the foundation for our support teams, as well as our sellers to sell more intelligently, which I know is what we’re all striving for. If you don’t have a good infrastructure, you don’t have good data. You don’t make informed decisions. SS: I love that philosophy and approach. I think that is some very sound advice on the topic of challenges. What would you say are some of the common pitfalls that organizations might encounter when they’re developing training programs and do you have any advice on how they can avoid them? AS: Yes, too quickly jumping to solutioning. I think that’s something that we all do when we’re super excited to fix a problem. The thing that gets in the way, of course, is ego. We all want to solve the problem and think based on our experience, we have the answer. So we get excited about it, but. What you’ll see, of course, is, uh, you end up in a position where you haven’t really gotten to the bottom of what are driving the surface concerns that you’ve been made aware of. And a lot of the time, You’re going to hear things like, it’s a selling skills issue. They need objection-handling workshops. They need help with our value propositioning. And sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s true that it’s a mixture of things. But my question to the listeners would be, do you have a sales methodology problem or do you have a sales process problem? And if you’re not confident in what you’re hearing and its root cause, don’t begin to solution until you get to the bottom of it. SS: I think that is phenomenal advice. And I have to admit, sometimes I feel like I’m guilty of that from time to time. So I think that’s. Amazing advice for our audience. To shift gears just a little bit. I’m curious, how do you foster a culture of continuous learning amongst your sales team and motivate them to want to enhance their skills and knowledge? If you have best practices for driving engagement in your training programs, I think our audience would also learn a lot from you on that front. AS: Yeah, you know, this is still something that we have to work on also. I like to think of it as an art, especially because the way we sell is going to and must continuously evolve. What I’ll say is That you need to meet people where they’re at. So, the best training is one that is quickly consumed and quickly applied. So, why not replicate how people are taking in information today? Um, that’s led us to radically shorten our virtual learnings, opting for mixed modalities like more video content, more job guides, and a focus on the application right away. Rather than just strictly using assessments or throwing a ton of information at people. What ends up happening is, between your information dump, between the assigned corporate HR training everybody has to do in a year, you create training fatigue and a very bad brand. You have to get people excited about training by making it bite-sized and very clear what’s in it for them. Again. So layer knowledge, don’t throw it all out there all at once. Give folks just enough to be excited and go practice right away. So they have a positive impression of learning continuously and they want to keep coming back because it’s working. I heard from a peer, and I thought this was very provocative, that training should be one part teaching. Two-part application. Especially when virtual. You need to drive that engagement. People need to feel like they’re playing an active role in the education. They’re going to remember that far more than anything you assign that may be content robust that you’re super proud of that is just going to cause fatigue and dismissiveness for them. SS: I can see, I can see that. And I like that formulaic approach for sure. When you go to evaluate the success of your training initiatives and kind of the overall sales readiness efforts within McKesson, how are you leveraging data to optimize these programs? AS: I feel like this is the golden egg question for so many sales enablement and training organizations. Data is power. But you can’t get good, reliable data without the infrastructure to collect it in the first place. We had to start doing a lot of foundational work with stakeholders to define sales processes, how we were going to use our CRM, and whether or not we needed to do a data hygiene cleanup in our CRM. But once you’ve established these foundations, you still need multiple KPIs to show trends and a narrative impact. I would use a combination of, you know, your sales target data, your CRM data from the point of training, as well as things like benchmarking surveys on skills from their leaders before and after a training is administered, and how they perform in role plays with a set rubric. Combine these things after the fact to find common trends that eliminate any doubt or suspicion that It wasn’t your work as an enablement and training org that is driving a change because there’s a healthy amount of skepticism because there’s a lot that goes into sales reps achieving their targets and their goals. So you need to be very intentional about what you’re going to measure before you even start your effort and then combine it with this multi-pronged KPI approach to be able to say. There’s undeniably a trend happening here. There was undeniably a shift in what we wanted to see from this point in time and from this effort. And that’s why you can be confident what we’re doing is making a difference. While we’re still building the critical infrastructure around the sales process and our tech stacks for our sales teams, the data we are starting to look at is not only how it’s making a difference in their day-to-day sales targets, but I think new hires, in particular, are a great data set for enablement. You can look at how quickly they’re achieving their first sales, their first closes. You can look at how quickly they’re achieving their first renewals if they’re in a retention-based role. We’re also looking at How they are consuming content in the high spot system, interacting with their customers per the CRM data, and whether or not our stronger sellers are taking this more holistic approach to engagement with their customers. And what can be learned from their approaches to make strategic changes in how we coach and form our training programs. We obviously grade or ask that they grade our training efforts once they go through the program, not just with things like CSAT, but how quickly do you feel you can apply this training right away? So, there are some soft measures as well as hard metrics that we’re working on pulling more regularly, but this is going to be an area where we’re going to have to continue to expand the KPIs we’re dipping into to make the more data-informed changes to our programs over time. SS: I love that. And I love those really concrete examples of things that folks can take advantage of from a data perspective to start to optimize their programs. I’m curious, what are some of the results that you’ve seen in your training and sales readiness efforts? And are there any key wins or notable business outcomes that you’re able to share with us? AS: So since we’ve focused on an enablement infrastructure through getting clear on our processes and our technology stacks, we’ve not only seen substantial adoption of Highspot for more than just our content management, but much more informed conversations are beginning to take place as a result of Shaping the Highspot environment around the sales strategy, the marketing collateral, the go to market approach, their sales playbooks. So we’re still doing a lot of this foundational work, but one example I can give you is a team that got very intentional about this approach last quarter in 90 days alone, increased their time in Highspot by a thousand percent over the previous quarter. And the deals lost decreased by 34%. And their CRM adoption, our CRM is Salesforce, jumped from just under 50 percent to 80 percent in one quarter. So there’s a story to be told there where you can tell it was evident for this team that they understood the core function of their role to the extent that they understood their sales process. They understood how they were going to be using their technology, and how it was going to serve them. Also, critically, that high spot became The core location for their enablement resources and strategic direction. SS: Well, it sounds like you guys have seen some early amazing results as you look ahead, what are some of your goals as you continue to develop your training and enablement strategies at McKesson? AS: Sure. Now that we’ve just about established the critical infrastructure I mentioned before, we’re really continuing to advance towards building our Digital selling literacy, I’ll call it. We are challenging ourselves to get more innovative in how we interact with customers, and how we leverage the information and resources at our disposals to create more compelling. And engaging conversations with our customers that hit more on the mark of the things that they care about. So as part of that effort, we’re developing playbooks through Highspot that will really realize all of the effort we’ve been putting into establishing it as the place for content. Our learning management system is the place where you go to use digital sales rooms and have these other ways of interacting with customers. In a more formulaic approach to saying here is What we advise for optimal results in your sales role. I think playbooks may be the pinnacle use case or a pinnacle use case of Highspot when you get to bring all of those elements together. And we’re confident that if we get it right, we’re not only going to make a huge difference in reducing reps’ administrative burden substantially because today they’re going to a million different places to get all these pieces of collateral information. Advice from our SMEs, et cetera, down to just their CRM and Highspot as their points of origin for their day-to-day. But we’re also confident that now we’re going to get apples-to-apples data amongst our sales teams to begin selling much more intelligently. We’ve never brought our different business units into a system like this to speak the same platform language in this manner. And so I’m really excited about the opportunities to bring this together. Level of information up to our very senior stakeholders to begin to show them a picture of their talent in sales in a completely new way. SS: I love that. Amanda, last question for you. What advice would you give to other healthcare organizations hoping to enhance their training efficiency and try to really boost rep productivity? AS: Be intentional about your enablement strategy within your organization. Our industries are very complex. As a result, we have a tendency to staff in silos, where gaps are initially observed, instead of taking a step back for a more strategic approach functionally. Yes, your customers and product lines may vary across the industry. Your large organization or very complex businesses, but enablement is an infrastructural and strategic approach meant to keep you agile and informed by data and empowered to make bold, innovative changes where needed. So don’t throw something at it. Ask yourself, is this a function of what enablement could carry through? If I had an infrastructure to support a need, even before a need is known. I think that’s really where I’ve seen organizations of this size and within the healthcare landscape struggle. There are so many different avenues of this business that we are trying to solve at the same time. That we end up creating these enormous silos and collaboration challenges. I know collaboration for us is something that continuously comes up in our employee opinion surveys because it is very challenging to reach across the aisle when we’ve been stood up to support very niche needs. That is still critical, but what kind of glue do we need in between these businesses to make sure that we’re agile across the business to make sure that we’re solving for this functional need and not just the niche SME expertise that yes, you must also have. SS: Amanda, phenomenal advice. Thank you so much for joining our podcast today. I really learned a lot from you. AS: Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. It’s been an honor to be 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 a Harvard Business Review report, about 70% of change initiatives fail. So how can enablement help sales teams navigate large-scale transformations and come out stronger on the other side of change? 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 Jenna Siegel, the director of revenue enablement at InMoment. Thank you for joining us, Jenna. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jenna Siegel: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I made a large shift to land myself into enablement. So I came actually from an academia background, teaching at the University of Illinois Chicago, while I was working through some postgraduate work, and I quickly realized that academia wasn’t a place that I wanted to land for the long term. Which left me with this really kind of humbling experience of what do I want to do with my life. And I think like many people in enablement, I landed myself in sales. I was in various go-to-market roles, whether that be service, sales, or customer success, and I really quickly got frustrated with like, the lack of resources and education in the corporate space. And of course, as someone who came from an education and academia background, I was a constant advocate for we need resources to get everyone to speak the same language, to get everyone to understand the same processes. So after having worked in go-to-market roles for several years, I landed a role within enablement and I’ve been there ever since for about six years now. SS: Jenna, we’re really excited to have you here on the podcast. So thank you so much for joining us. I know your team recently went through an acquisition, which can often bring significant change for sales teams. What best practices did you implement to help your teams effectively navigate through this transition? JS: Absolutely. So acquisitions are so tricky to navigate and I really feel like they’re fear-inducing for everyone involved. So with my team, I was leading revenue enablement at a company called ReviewTrackers that was acquired by my current company called InMoment. So ReviewTrackers was a really small organization with a very small enablement org. InMoment was actually a much larger organization without any true dedicated revenue enablement. So for us, it was so easy to step into this expanded role of leading enablement across the entire organization with truly preconceived notions of what we thought would drive success, mainly because we knew what drove success at our small little scrappy company called ReviewTrackers. So the biggest challenge for me and for my team post the acquisition was really just to be curious. Right. We constantly are preaching this to our sales reps throughout the discovery phase. Be curious, ask a lot of questions, and really learn about them and their business. And I think we often forget to do that in enablement. We come in and we’re like, I know what drove success. I know that doing this sales methodology is going to work because look at the success it drove for my prior business. So we really had to adopt the same methodology in our transition. And this didn’t just involve meeting with the stakeholders and with senior leadership and presenting our expertise and our plans and getting their feedback, but I think the most important thing that we did was really step into meeting with the frontline folks, those that are executing on the role day to day and really learn about what are their challenges, what are their enablement desires, what do they wish they had, but Had never had because they didn’t have a revenue enablement dedicated role. So it was a new function to in the moment and we stepped in and I think it was split. Some people thought, Oh gosh, these people are going to come in and they’re going to make our lives miserable and they’re going to implement all these trainings and we’re, it’s going to pull us off the field. You know, our biggest strategy in the acquisition was driving trust and confidence across our teams before we ever were able to present a plan. SS: Well, it sounds like you guys did a phenomenal job really driving that trust and confidence across your teams. I know unifying the go-to-market teams is essential during these types of transitions. What challenges have you encountered in aligning your go-to-market teams and how did you overcome some of these challenges? JS: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the biggest thing is we weren’t just unifying teams, we were unifying regions. So we had three separate regions that were functioning pretty independently from each other, as well as teams, whether that be sales, success, ADRs, or our account management team that were also functioning independently from one another. And one of the first things that we identified was that there was a vast amount of technology and go-to-market processes that differed across the org, especially because of the number of mergers and acquisitions that they had gone through even prior to acquiring review trackers. And I strongly believe that these fragmented technologies and processes Also aid in creating a fragmented go-to-market organization. So I’m so grateful that I sit under a really brilliant revenue operations team that I could partner with and they could partner with enablement. So we could really understand how the technologies and processes were being used and where there was room for optimization. This was really our first step in trying to figure out how we were going to unify the teams and how we were going to get everyone working. Together and in the same direction. Don’t get me wrong. All these teams were doing really brilliant work, but it was very fragmented in nature. So in doing that, we explored how can we string together the processes and the technologies to drive adoption. So for example, we’re a MEDIC shop. Post acquisition, we implemented MEDIC methodology. And I think it’s really common to introduce selling methodologies and send everyone on their merry way and just hope that it works. You know, we can implement it for sales, we can implement it for success, we can even implement it for our account management team, and I just really hope that they put it into practice. But we had the really unique opportunity to rework the systems and the processes alongside introducing some of these new methodologies. So we were able to layer in, here’s the new methodology, let’s practice it. Let’s get it, you know, we know it’s not new to the go-to market organization. Here’s how also your technology is going to hold you accountable. So this kind of set the groundwork for how we implemented our CRM system. How we set up sales stages with exit criteria, how we deploy information through the LMS system, and it can be role-specific, but the same line of thinking to all these different go-to-market organizations. How we set up Highspot, and how Highspot is organized for all of our sales reps to use, and our go-to-market orgs to use. That was our biggest thing to tackle when we thought about how we were going to unify the teams. SS: Mm. Particularly in a merger acquisition, I know sometimes employees can feel uneasy as team structures and roles and dynamics evolve. What’s your best advice on motivating teams and reps in particular to really ease them into the process of change? JS: Yeah, I think it all goes back to communication, right? We know it’s essential to get leadership alignment first. That’s number one. If leaders are aligned and bought into the changes and brought into the processes to help define the processes, we know it’s going to trickle down to their teams. But also, we wanted our frontline people to have a voice in these changes. Silos, like especially for InMoment, we’ve seen this happen, can only bring about further anxiety and defiance and actually adopting the process and burnout employees. So we created these group of tiger teams, where we brought together leaders and individual contributors, and into these teams to help us define the processes, and poke holes through our processes. And that trickled down to the greater team because they were bought in. They could be, you know, the leaders of their team. They can advocate for these processes and these systems. And that’s where we see the most amount of success and hoping that people aren’t anxious or hoping that people can process these changes. SS: Yeah, I think buy-in is absolutely critical. From your perspective, what is maybe the strategic advantage of an enablement platform when navigating change like this? JS: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I love enablement platforms. I’m a huge believer that even the smallest go-to-market org and the smallest enablement team, it’s very hard to be effective without having a platform in place. I like to split this out into two pillars why we think enablement platforms are important or how we really use it to our advantage. One is how we deploy enablement. So how we even go about deploying enablement? The second is how we track the efficacy of the changes. And the efficacy of the enablement that we’re putting out into the field. So, regarding how we deploy enablement. Our enablement org, here at InMoment, although it has grown since the acquisition, is very small and very scrappy. And we as a small team, need to be able to scale. And when I hear people say scale, my first thought is always, Oh gosh, everything’s just going to be LMS courses. Nothing’s going to be live. We’re not going to have hands-on training. And I don’t believe that to be the case. I don’t think that scaling for our team means abandoning live training or completely avoiding the face-to-face aspect of enablement. I think it’s actually quite important in this kind of blended learning environment post-COVID and post-remote teams. Deploying enablement for us means What is going to happen after we have run the initial enablement? I quote this study to like nausea with my team that 30 days post enablement, 70 percent of the content is forgotten if we don’t do any sort of follow-up. So we really like to use our systems to give those reminders, to make the content continuously reappear post enablement. So maybe it’s using Highspot to actually send content newsletters. We deployed enablement. We know these are the pieces of content that really coincide with the enablement. We send monthly enablement newsletters actually using Highspot digital rooms, which people love so that it’s, the content stays front and center. Or maybe it’s deploying an activity in our LMS system. Hey, we ran this enablement session. Here’s this quick activity or challenge that we want you to engage in. Or also maybe it’s gamifying it through our systems to make learning a little bit more fun. We recently did Highspot scavenger hunts post-enablement. We launched a new product line. We had what we call expertise exchanges where we really shared best practices amongst the team. And part of that was a Highspot scavenger hunt of like, who can find the most relevant stats related to this product and related to the value of the product and share it with the larger team. People loved it, right? It’s different. It’s not your typical sit in hour-long live sessions where we know that. 15 minutes in we’re losing people to their email and their slack or it’s not, you know, all of a sudden we’re opening up a breakout room on Zoom and we see the attendance drop 50 percent because people just don’t maybe have anxiety around that which is also understandable, but we also need to combat. So this way of gamifying it through our systems and through our enablement platforms is really important. So that’s our first pillar. Our second pillar is how can we use our enablement systems. To measure the efficacy of our efforts. We deploy surveys. I didn’t mention this yet, but Amoment is a customer experience technology platform. We’re really big on how can we understand our customer’s experience. And here in enablement, we think our customers are all the internal folks that are on the receiving end. Surveys give us really great feedback. But they only tell a portion of the story. We can get survey feedback that’s like, everything was amazing. We love this enablement session. It was fun. I learned a lot. And then a month down the road, the data is telling us a very different story. And we really try to take a holistic approach to how we understand data. So if we run an enablement session on a product launch, anytime we run a larger initiative, my enablement team, we measure various data points to really understand where it is that we need to go next. We can look at the lagging indicators, that’s like financials and deal velocity and all of that. But I think a lot of the really good information and the juicy information lives within our enablement platforms. You know, we include attendance and completion data point. There’s quite a bit that goes into the data that we’re looking at. Conversational intelligence data, how they’re actually speaking about it in our field, but enablement metrics like Highspot metrics are really important to us. Perhaps it’s that we’ve deployed this enablement. We’re seeing a huge uptick in how they’re using the content. And then the next month, it’s not unique to InMoment. We see a huge dip down and all of a sudden no one’s using it. Well, that tells us we need to resurface this in some way, shape, or form. We need to figure out how we’re going to get people talking about this again. So it really is our signal for where do we need to re-engage and where do we need to re-evaluate our strategy. SS: I love hearing that. Shifting gears a little bit, content governance has always been a big focus for you this year with 58 percent of InMoment’s content now well governed. Congratulations. How have you been able to optimize governance and what impact has this had on your team as they navigate change? JS: Yeah, I strongly feel that we had a Bigger mountain than usual to tackle when it comes to Highspot, um, particularly because my team, again, there was an absence of a revenue enablement team at InMoment for a long time, and my team acquired Highspot, and it was a tool that was launched out to the masses without any real strategy around how it was going to be maintained. So when we acquired Highspot as a team, we had a lot to tackle. One is that there was a lot of outdated content on there. I think I found content back from 2009. Which is problematic and also just unnecessary because Highspot provides the governance tools that you would need to make sure that content is refreshed. So when we had initial conversations with our go-to market team, when the acquisition happened, I said, how are you all using Highspot? The number one answer is, Oh, we don’t look in there. There’s too much outdated information. So my team started by doing a content audit. We pulled a list of all of the content that lived within Highspot, with how many views it had. We really used the data in Highspot, how many views it had, when it was last viewed, when it was last updated, when it was originally uploaded. Unfortunately, nothing had feedback owners listed on it. So we really didn’t even know who owned the content outside of original authors or whoever uploaded it originally. So we, as an enablement org, had our product marketing teams and our marketing teams go through an exercise of marking content as. It’s outdated, remove it. It’s still relevant content, but needs updating or it’s good to go and keep it as it is. In doing that, we got our content down to, I want to say about 400 to 500 pieces of content from thousands and thousands of pieces of content, which was really big. Our next step was actually working with our go-to-market teams and creating a tiger team to figure out how do we want this organized in the system. People did not know the searching functionality well enough to be able to find the information they needed. And there were no logical spots set up in the system where they could just click in and say, Oh yeah, I’m looking for a pitch doc, so I’m going to click here, or I’m looking for a blog or a gated asset, I’m going to click here. So we worked with the various different go-to-market teams, customer success, sales, ADRs, to figure out a unified way of organizing the content within a system with the relevant filters. We know our ADRs want to filter by buyer persona. That’s how they’re going to market. And that’s how they’re prospecting. But we know that our customer success folks might not want to be only filtering by buyer persona. So we created what we think are very logical spots with the appropriate filters for the appropriate teams. And then I think the most important piece of this is that every single piece of content is required to have a content owner, a feedback owner so that people know if there is an issue with the content, it’s not a giant hole in the system where you’re just stuck with this outdated pieces of content. You have someone that you can go directly to and say, hey, this isn’t up to speed. This isn’t landing in the form. Or this has a customer who’s no longer a customer and therefore we need to take it out. That was a big piece of the puzzle as well as putting expiration dates on everything. So everything has a six-month expiration date at the six-month period. The feedback owners can review the content, mark it as still applicable, or say this needs to be removed off the system to make sure that we never get into the state that we had before. And also just a big shout-out to Highspot on that one. That was a massive undertaking and a huge project which the Highspot team helped us out on a weekend when we took the system down. They were just Malcolm, our customer success rep. He was really there to help provide us with industry best practices. I don’t think we could have done it alone and in a silo. SS: Well, I love hearing about project wins like that. In a recent webinar, you actually mentioned that your team holds monthly expertise exchanges to promote peer learning. Could you share more about this practice and how you foster a culture of ongoing learning? JS: Yeah, our expertise exchanges were created because when we stepped into the role, there was a lot of silo work going on, and we knew that enablement was never going to be effective if we did a one-and-done approach. So we created a series of expertise exchanges. We’re on a monthly cadence. We get together the various teams and we really take a look at, well, what enablement did we run this month? What was our focus? And it leaks over month to month. For example, if we’re running product training, And then we’re also running a methodology. We try and blend the two together to really make it a holistic training that the enablement efforts aren’t even siloed within itself. Every month we look at what enablement we run? What data were we trying to influence? And we figure out a theme for our expertise exchanges. So, for example, one month that theme might be a product line, right, reputation management in the field. We assign them through our LMS some pre work to do prior to these expertise exchanges so everyone comes prepared. That usually is, for example, uploading a prospecting email that you sent and then post the enablement session or providing a pitch deck or a recording of a call. We try to make it things that they’re already doing. So it’s not seen as, Oh gosh, I have to go do a mock demo or I have to create a fake pitch deck. We want it to be things that they’re actually doing within the field and it shouldn’t be a lift for them. And it’s also not a lift for enablement. It’s an easy one for enablement. Enablement reviews. Those we come together as a go-to market org. And we just call upon people. Hey, I know you all have been putting this into practice, would love to hear where you’re seeing wins, where you’re not seeing wins, and really just share amongst each other. People are very eager to share their wins, which is great. So very rarely do we have to call upon people, but we also have the submissions in advance so we can take a look at them. And if we have that moment of like no one wanting to share, call out their wins for them, right? Like, hey, I saw Caroline, that you worked on this email that actually. Our outreach data shows got 40 percent reply rate to, can you talk about your email? It’s a really great way to get people to see how they’re actually putting the enablement strategy into practice in the actual field. And also we just create a library for them in Highspot as well of like, here’s the examples of when so you can easily find them and go off and do the same. If someone else is seeing success, you should absolutely adopt that and you should absolutely put it into practice yourself. SS: I think that’s fantastic advice that our entire audience can maybe even take and apply in their organizations. As you’ve expanded and evolved your enablement strategy, what key metrics would you recommend tracking to effectively drive change? JS: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure everyone preaches this, but I really do sit under the most brilliant revenue operations team and most brilliant revenue operations organization, which is great because I have access to all the data that I could ever possibly need. And I think like many enablement leaders, I bucket our metrics into leading and lagging indicators of success. And leading and lagging indicators of influence, which I don’t think is a unique model to be using, but it’s a very effective model. So the leading is the data that myself and my enablement team, we can directly tie back to our enablement efforts. Things like attendance and completion rates and challenge scores, and even conversational intelligence trackers within our CI system. Those are really easy metrics for us to. Be able to track to start to tell part of the story. I think the lagging indicators are so important to prove our value to the larger business and to continuously show how we are aligned with whatever it is that the business is trying to focus on. And those lagging indicators are ones that we would also love to be like, yes, enablement. Had a direct influence on, but there’s other, you know, influences that come into play there. I often find that those lagging indicators are the hardest. Bits of data to get access to in the business. But as I mentioned, I have like the greatest revenue operations team. And specifically, I have a colleague on my team, a coworker, Trevor, who builds out the most brilliant lagging indicator dashboards. He even does a good job of like bringing in the leading indicators to that dashboard. And this is what we really use month over month enablement strategy. So these are things like deal velocity. These are things like the financials of like, if we’re doing enablement on a specific product line, are we seeing an uptick in the revenue that’s coming in from those product lines? Our pipeline data, even outreach data and data specific to our tools. We really deep dive into this data month over month. And we actually have like a monthly data review session where we look at our leading indicators, lagging indicators, try and drive correlation, but also. It’s not just for proving out the efficacy of our efforts. It’s really figuring out, okay, based on this data, where is it that we are going to go next? And I think when we’re looking at data, we do it in two ways. One, we have quarterly priority sessions amongst my enablement team, where we all sit down and we figure out, okay, what are the biggest like lagging indicator data drivers that we need to have influence on this quarter? What’s data telling us? Is it retention? Is it pipeline? Whatever that is. And then month over month we look a little bit more granular at the data to figure out are we actually having the impact that we need to have. From a business perspective. SS: I think those are definitely some of the key metrics as change efforts. Typically, though, they kind of progress through various stages and often require time to fully implement. How do you maintain momentum as new processes become solidified in the long term? JS: Yeah, we love to take an ever-boarding approach. So we onboarding new people. We also do it when we’re launching large-scale enablement efforts. I actually think the key to making enablement sticky is providing leaders with the resources to coach on this on an ongoing basis. We are a small team. We can’t scale to have on one conversations with everyone and figure out where it’s falling short, and where we need to make adjustments. Perhaps Mike is better than Anthony. We don’t have those resources to be able to get really granular into the people aspect of this. But the managers do and that’s their job and they want to be doing this. So we like to think about when we launch an enablement series, Look at the data first. We figure out why are we doing this enablement. Is it necessary? Are we doing this because we have our own agenda or does the data align with us? We then meet with the managers first and we actually run almost the same version of the enablement session with them with some caveats why are we running this? What’s the purpose of this? What are we going to be presenting? And then the last part of that is managers, what do we need from you post enablement? Maybe it’s that we need you to listen to one call per rep per month and provide them feedback in the system so that we can gather that data and see how this is sticking. Maybe it’s that we have created a coaching template so that you can have these conversations in your one-to-one. And by the way, upload those into one of our systems, obviously on a private basis, so that we can review those as well. We want to be able to provide the leaders with the resources that they need to help us make enablement sticky. And then we run the enablement session for their people. And then when we’re doing the expertise exchange, we also have a one-month retro with the leaders where we talk about what are you seeing in the field. What’s working? What’s not working? A very similar exchange session that we do for our. People but with managers. We want the managers to have a voice in where we go next as well. SS: I love that. Last question, Jenna. Looking ahead, how do you envision evolving your enablement strategy to keep pace with your business’s growth? JS: Yeah, absolutely. We actually just had our enablement strategy meeting for 2025 and really starting to look at the data. And actually, as of recently, my team acquired product training as well. So we now have an even better opportunity to kind of align all training across the business and make sure that we’re all working in a singular direction. Although for a lot of new teams as well too, right, we’re not just focused on revenue enablement now. We’re also focused on the technical teams from a product training perspective. So, alignment across the org and how we approach enablement. I’m also selfishly very excited about this because I get a lot of new unique perspectives from my team considering I have new folks on my team now as well who have had a different view vantage point of enablement across the org. But also I want my team to continuously get to a proactive state. And I think we can only get there by being brutally honest about our current progress and using data to drive decisions. I love what my team has done thus far in using data, but The data is one piece. We need to storytell with the data. We really need to make it make sense for everyone else within the business. And we need to make it make sense for us so that we can be proactive. We have like one rule on my team and it’s, you’re not allowed to bring an ego to work and think that your way is the best way. And during our enablement strategy meeting, I started off with everyone needing to challenge us, and challenge me as a leader. I don’t know the best way forward all the time. You all have great ideas that I have never even thought of. We all need to continue to challenge each other, use data to make data-driven decisions, and really continue to retro and think about, did this work? Was this effective? Was this not effective? All while being proactive and really, you know, scaling our team. It’s like an impossible task that we have as enablement, but I think it’s possible with the right people and with the right strategy. SS: I’m excited to see where you all go. Thank you, Jenna, so much for this. JS: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was great. SS: And thank you to our audience for listening to this episode of the Win-Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

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.

According to research conducted by Gartner, B2B sales reps forget 87% of what they learn within 30 days of training. So how can you build effective learning programs that foster continuous development? 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 Tom Brandon, the Director of Sales Enablement at OneSpan. Thank you for joining us, Tom. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Tom Brandon: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. So I’m Tom Brandon. I’m the director of sales enablement at OneSpan, which is a workforce authentication, banking authentication, and digital agreements company. I’ve been in the training and enablement field for way too long. I don’t want to say how many years it’s been, but started out as a technical trainer, doing all of the. Microsoft training, MCSC, MCP, MCT, Cisco training, delivering all of those, and eventually became a global trainer for a cybersecurity company, Trend Micro, took on their training teams, took on their development teams, and ran their global education department, was there for about 10 years. Then moved on to another cyber security company, WebSense, which became Forcepoint, and took on their global education department, and eventually we branched off the sales and technical, and I continued on with their technical education and building out their programs. For almost 10 years as well. Then moved on again to another cyber security company, ReliaQuest, and was their VP of learning at ReliaQuest University. And then finally here at OneSpan. I’ve been at OneSpan now for about a year and a half, really enjoying working with this company and the sellers and building out a true enablement. SS: I love that. Well, Tom, thank you again for joining us. You have extensive experience in designing and delivering learning programs. So what are some of your considerations when developing programs for these different teams across go-to-market like revenue and customer success teams?  TB: That’s a great question because each team always has a unique focus and spin that you have to be aware of, but for me it really comes down to five main things. What do they need to know? Why do they need to know it? When do they need to know it? How do they do it? And then who do they go to for any questions? And so everything that we’re doing focuses on those five main areas. And whether it be a simple microlearning, whether it be a full-fledged training, or it’s a communication that we’re sending out, those are things that I always focus on because. If a sales rep or a customer success manager doesn’t know why a change was implemented or why pricing has gone up or when things go into effect or how to actually do something for our PS and our SE organizations, then they’re at a disadvantage and they’re not going to look good in front of their customers. So those are the things that I usually focus on. Anytime we’re building out any type of communication enablement or training program. SS: I think that’s great advice. Now, one thing that did catch my eye on LinkedIn was that you mentioned you actually rebuilt the onboarding program at one span to a flipped classroom model. For those that are maybe a little less familiar, can you explain what a flipped classroom model is? And can you tell us more about this effort and how your team brought it to life?  TB: Absolutely. In traditional education, think about when you’re going to a university course, you go into the lecture and you have the professor that’s up there and they’re delivering their lecture content. They probably delivered that hundreds of times for different classes. And it’s the exact same thing every time. And the students, then they take that information and then they go and they have to read some more. They have to do some worksheets and everything. And it’s It’s a one way data transfer, and it’s really not a great way for the students to learn and apply that information. Whereas with the flipped classroom, the idea is that you give the students content ahead of time. You give them all of that, that learning, that book study that they need to be doing, and they prepare for the in-class session with all of that content. Now, when they’ve done that, the time with that expert, with that SME, now can be used for deeper engagement, for communication, for role plays, for a practical application of that content that they have just read about and they’ve gone through all that self-paced learning. And then after class, this is where they can do some additional application of what they have practiced. in class, whether they have discussion forums or assessments or additional learning opportunities. And so it’s a way to not only get the information across, but have a two way communication with the students, which is going to help them to remember the content. It also allows them an opportunity to practice in a safe environment and then gives them further opportunities outside of class to apply that knowledge. SS: Amazing. Well, I think it’s really cool what you guys are doing on that front. And you actually leverage the certifications in your onboarding program, as well as other ongoing learning programs. How have you used certifications to motivate learners and validate skills? TB: Well, the validation, that’s the easy part, right? That’s what certifications are all about, is validating that somebody knows a fact or is aware of a process or whatever it may be. The motivation, that’s the hard part, is trying to figure out how you can not only validate or assess but also get people excited about what they are learning about. And this is really where things like setting up achievements for people, having specific goals that they can achieve, and then having some sort of reward for them, whether it’s digital or physical, whatever it might be. And this is also where you can start talking about. The idea of gamification or serious gaming as well. For me, I’ve never been a big one on gamification. Let’s just put something into a game just so that people will go through the content and the game has nothing to do with the content that they’re going through. But serious gaming, something that is a practical application, something that is an experiential-based learning opportunity for them that then gives them an achievement once they have actually shown that they can perform some action, whether it’s delivering a pitch or whatever it might be. But It shows them that they can be confident in what they are learning, that they are actually making progress and achieving. And so, you know, for me, it’s finding ways that you can do this serious gaming and provide achievements along the way. SS: I absolutely love that. Definitely, progress is a motivator, I think, for a lot of people. As you think about reps or go-to-market teams, oftentimes they are on the move and extremely busy. So how do you incorporate microlearning and agile curriculum methodologies into your learning programs? TB: We have all seen a decrease in our attention spans over the last several years. We’re so used to the quick hits and ever-changing content that’s put in front of us by social media that the traditional approach To lengthy training programs is not appropriate for our current audiences. And so, looking at, one, an agile development framework is absolutely important, because if you look at the traditional approach for planning out curriculum development, it could take 3, 6, 9 months for a full-fledged course to be developed. In today’s fast-paced world, in 3, 6, 9 months, that product may not even be around anymore. Nonetheless, people are interested in purchasing that product. And so the Agile development process, taking those Agile principles from software development and applying it to what we’re doing in curriculum development is absolutely critical. Setting up sprints and working very closely with development teams or with marketing teams and making sure that we are in lockstep together and releasing things at very short intervals. And those things that you’re releasing in those short intervals, whether it be one or a two-week sprint, now become those micro-learning pieces. And this is something that again, You know, with people’s attention spans, we need to be able to get quick hits out to people with the most important information and be able to share that with them on a continued basis so that they know that more information is coming. And that leads to kind of that idea of the just-in-time training as well. Get that information in front of people as they need it so that they can be prepared for whatever situation they’re facing. SS: Absolutely. What role would you say your enablement platform Highspot plays in helping you land these strategies? TB: Highspot has been fantastic for this. One, it’s been our consolidation point for all of the content that we’ve had. I’m sure everybody that’s listening to this, they are facing this problem where you have content that is spread across so many different places, and sellers are saying, I don’t know where to go to find information. And so having one definitive location where people can go and find the content has been a lifesaver for us. Second, is that it helps us with creating smaller micro-learning content and making that available to our sellers in an easy-to-consume format. And the third thing then is that it provides us with rich analytics so that we can see what is working and what isn’t. We can see who is accessing it, who is not accessing it, and how well they’re performing. And it’s not just about the people taking it. But it’s helping us to determine if our content really hitting the mark. Is there something that we need to go back and revisit? There’s something missing or something that was mistaken in there. And so from an enablement standpoint, not only is it a vehicle for us to get that content in front of our users, but it’s also a mechanism for us to ensure that we’re providing the best quality that we can to those people who are taking our enablement content. SS: Absolutely. I want to shift gears a little bit because I know that in order for enablement to be successful, you really have to have effective partnerships with key stakeholders across the organization. I know for you as well, that one of the things that was important was transitioning enablement from being an order taker to really a consultative partner for the key stakeholders across the organization. How have you built effective partnerships with your stakeholders as you’ve implemented these learning programs? TB: That’s a great question. One, as an enablement leader, I struggled with for a long time, is trying to get away from that order-taker mentality where people just come and say, we need training on this, go and create this training for us, to being that true consultative partner, where we are working hand in hand, with different departments to understand their needs and then to provide our recommendations for how we can help them to achieve those goals and needs that they have. And when I came into OneSpan, we were really order takers. It was just people telling the enablement team, to go and make these trainings. And what we’ve had to do is we’ve had to transition in three main areas. One is that we have to prove our value. We have to show that we are true professionals in our craft and that we know what we’re doing. Second, we have to build trust, and that means that we have to be working arm-in-arm with those leaders in other departments. We have to be there providing input, and we have to be listening to them as they’re telling us about their needs. And third, and perhaps the most important one, and this is one that I’ve really been focusing on the last several years, is that we have to become the communication hub. There’s a lot of siloed information in every company, and that information is critical for the success of the company. We have to get it in front of the go-to-market teams. And so I see my role as a sales enablement expert here to find that information in the silos and then to share it out. And what that does is it allows us to get better visibility into what’s happening in the organization. It allows us to ferret out where those problem areas are and to get the different departments working closer together. as well. And it all comes from that communication hub mentality. SS: Absolutely. I love that approach for gaining stakeholder buy-in and trust. You know, I know you talked a lot about how important kind of having that data and analytics set is along the way. In what ways do data and analytics also help you to enhance your continuous learning and reinforcements with your team? TB: So I’d say there are two main parts here. One is leveraging a model that gives us more information than just the smiley sheets at the end of training. We’re implementing the Kirkpatrick model of evaluations. It’s a four-level model. And, you know, really quick, you know, the idea here is that at level one, you have your basic reactions, those smiley sheets, and people like the training. And usually, it’s, did they like the trainer rather than the training? The second level Is did they actually learn something? And this is where you can have quizzes that can determine this, or you can start looking at confidence and you can start doing things like before and after surveys. And so you can see if there was an increase in confidence. in attendees’ confidence in a particular subject. This is a subjective measure, but at least you can start getting into the minds of those people who have been taking your training to see, did it made an impact. The third level then is behavioral change. Did they take that information that they learned about in the training and have they taken it back on the job? Are they actually doing the things that they learned about? And then finally, the last one is driving business results. So the people who went through the training, who’ve seen this confidence change, who are implementing it on the job, are they now performing better than those who have not gone through this training? And is it making a material impact on the business? Is it bringing more money in? Are they making more sales? And so, Leveraging a model like this that gets away from that, did you like your trainer smiley sheet and starts getting into the minds and actions of the sellers is absolutely critical. The second is the system Highspot is allows us to dig in-depth and get an analysis on what is working, and who is succeeding, and allows us then to create a model for others to emulate so that they can then have the same success as those who have gone through and are now providing that material business impact. SS: Now you said the word impact a few times. I would love to learn from you. What impact have your learning programs had on your team so far? And do you have any wins you can share? TB: Yeah, we’ve probably had maybe three key impacts. When I first came into OneSpan, we were rolling out a new first call deck that our sellers use when they get with customers for the first time. And we did a First call deck certification program where we built out not only self-study around the first call deck but then had sessions to actually do role plays with our sellers and work with them on key scenarios and key customer profiles so that they could then actually do a certification role play with their managers. And go through that. And the sellers by far were more prepared and engaged than they have ever been in any deck certification training. And we got every seller through. They all passed with an 80 percent certification or higher in that program. A second one that we’ve had, we call it our one spark, a sales kickoff. At the start of 2023, we had a change in CEO and we were supposed to have A in-person sales kickoff, but with that change in CEO and a lot of changes that were happening around the company, they decided to cancel the in-person sales kickoff, but our team in conjunction with our business unit leaders decided it’s still critical for us to create a program to start getting people the information they need to On the goals and trajectory of the company for this year, 2024. So we, the enablement team, created a week long virtual sales kickoff program, and we did this within one month period of time, and we were able to leverage the technology. Not only the content that we had, but then our systems like Highspot to help us get this information out to our sellers, held multiple webinars, and it was by far one of the most successful kickoffs that we’ve had, even though it was virtual. The final one, I know I could ramble about this for days and days, but was our revamped onboarding and really taking this old school onboarding program that was really an ad hoc for every single individual as they came in onboarding to a consistent program that’s the flipped classroom program that allows more interaction time with SMEs, with the instructor, gives the new hires an opportunity to role-play in that safe environment and gives them opportunities then to apply their knowledge outside of the classroom as well. SS: Those are some amazing wins, Tom. Continue to move forward and optimize everything that you are doing. What will be your primary focus areas for continuing to enhance One Span’s learning programs? TB: I have to say, I’m going to stick with the number three. I’ll give you three of them that we have. One is microlearning. Have to continue with the microlearning approach. I don’t see us going back to week-long, two-week-long, month-long training courses. There are situations where that may be beneficial, but working in a global company with a global go-to-market sales force, we have to leverage the technology that we have. And microlearning is a key aspect for us. The second thing that I really want to start focusing on is user-generated content. We’re a small enablement team, and we don’t have time to handle every single thing that we’d like to do. And we’re not the experts because we’re not in front of the customer every single day on some things. And so, getting Users to actually generate some content that then can be leveraged within our programs. Not only help us to create broader programs and, ones that are, are more effective, but it also gives a little bit more credence to it because it’s sellers sharing with sellers. And it helps other sellers to see that this is something that’s important. And so user-generated content is something that I’m looking to really start working on in 2025. And finally, communications. I know I’ve talked a lot about communications already, but that is one key area that really has to be focused on. I, early in my career, used to tell people, I was not a marketeer. I don’t do marketing, but you have to be able to effectively tell people what’s happening, what is available, why it’s important, and get that in front of them on a continuous basis. SS: Tom, last question for you. For organizations aiming to create effective learning programs for teams across the revenue engine, what’s maybe one piece of advice you would give them to set them up for success? TB: I’m going back to communicate. You have to use all channels that are available. I refer to it as guerrilla marketing. You have to be able to tell people not only what you are doing, but the effect it has and the benefits of it. And find new and unique ways of getting information in front of people. Start creating a microlearning series. We just started one called Behind the Curtain that takes a look at specific customer profiles and how they’re leveraging our products. We’re also doing one on cyber security awareness this month, and we’re getting things out every other day to our sellers, key aspects that they could be talking to their customers about. But the communication aspect, people may not know all the great work that enablement teams are doing. Unless they’re told about it, you have to let people know. So communicate. SS: I love that advice. Thank you again, Tom, so much for joining us and sharing your advice through this podcast. I really appreciate it. TB: 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.

A survey conducted by Gartner found that 84% of marketing leaders and cross-functional partners experience ‘collaboration drag' – and those that do are 37% less likely to achieve revenue goals. So, how can you ensure your cross-collaboration efforts enable your initiatives to take flight? 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 Keith Swafford, the Senior Manager of Enablement, and Allison Gillespie, the Vice President of Marketing at O’Reilly Media. Thanks for joining us, Keith and Allison. I’d love for each of you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Keith, let’s start with you. Keith Swafford: Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. As you mentioned, Senior Sales Enablement Manager here at O’Reilly. I’ve been in sales supporting roles probably for the last 10, maybe almost 15 years. Within the last 5 or 6 years, been a part of a formal sales enablement group that we have here at O’Reilly. I originally was always more on the conference sponsorship side. That’s where I started my experience within the sales world and supporting sales. And then it’s evolved over through content marketing with what we were doing here at O’Reilly and then eventually into sales enablement.So it’s been a great journey, balancing between the marketing and sales side, and I love it. SS: Wonderful. And Alison, how about you? Allison Gillespie: Sure. So, and again, thanks for having us. Allison Gillespie. So I am the vice president of marketing in charge of kind of everything B2B related as it comes to sales support, everything from leads, trade shows, you know, demand gen thought leadership and then sales enablement. And I’ve been in B2B marketing my whole career, but sales enablement was actually a function that we started probably about five years ago at O’Reilly when we started growing. And so we built it from the ground up and we’ll probably talk about that later, but O’Reilly is an online learning platform that enterprises in any vertical subscribe to upskill and reskill their teams. And so our big focus is on tech teams, but we actually cover all areas of the organization with our product. SS: Amazing. Well, we are excited to have both of you here today. So again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and have this conversation. Now, Allison, as a marketing leader, what are some of the key initiatives you’re focused on driving for the business? And how does your sales enablement strategy help you to do so? AG: Sure. I think like all marketing and sales functions, growth is the main goal, right? So whether that’s revenue growth, customer growth. Personal growth, that sort of thing. So our goals, what we’re measured on is very similar to what sales is measured on and that’s driving pipeline. So that’s true for the marketing team. It’s true for sales enablement team. And we have a couple of key initiatives this year that we focused on. So optimizing our tools is a big one. We have a really, what feels like a really large sales and marketing stack and a lot of different tools that do different things, some crossover between tools, but sometimes not.And so we’ve really focused this year on getting the most out of each tool. We’ve taken someone from sales enablement to be the lead on the tool, make sure, you know, we’re meeting with the vendor regularly. We’re kind of maximizing our usage. We’re using all the features and functionality that we need. And if we aren’t, you know, find out why and kind of dig into that more, develop communications and training, and make sure our sales team is actually using it in the way they should, and that it’s actually helping them in their day-to-day. So that was one. Another big one for actually our whole sales and marketing team was earlier this year, we moved to challenger methodology, which is a pretty well-known sales methodology.And that put our entire sales team through the training at the beginning of the year. And then sales enablement has really taken the lead in making sure that we’re continuing to reinforce that training, that we’re providing the content that they need, the courses, the exercises. And I think the big shift there is that. It’s shifting from feature-based selling to more teaching, right? Teaching them about what our product or our service solves. So that’s been a huge initiative and a huge undertaking. And then I’d say just the third one from a marketing perspective is optimizing our marketing channels. Figuring out, always looking at what works, what doesn’t, what creates the most pipeline, how many touches does it take, you know, all of those sorts of things that go into a B2B marketing strategy and then optimizing the ones that do and stopping the channels that don’t. And so part of that is just making sure the sales team understands like, what are these marketing channels? Where are these leads coming from? What do they need to do for outreach? And Sales enablement definitely helps in that aspect of it because they helped create the cadences and the invites and the training around it and things like that. So that’s been kind of our three big initiatives this year. SS: Amazing. And I love how enablement is really at the crux of making sure that all three of those get landed successfully with your sales team. Keith, how do you bring the sales enablement strategy to life in execution with your programs? KS: Yeah, I think there’s, I mean, three or four ways of execution, making these things come to life and kind of wanting to deliver on some of those same items that Allison just mentioned. And I always want to keep it, this is what’s worked for us. And so, the first thing that comes to my mind is, We talk about this concept of where we’re actually we are a marketing-run team Like the enablement group sits within the marketing side of the business, but we’re actually a really seller-filled Enablement team so a lot of us actually have a selling background. So either we were supporting sales We have people that come from like SDR roles that decided hey Selling directly wasn’t the best for us But like I want to do this over here and still support sales with people who come from trade show Experiences and doing the sales there. So we have found that’s been a huge win for us of being able to have, yes, marketing priorities, marketing goals. And we fit under that side of the business. But when you have individuals that are on this enablement team that has sold or have supported sales for a long time, it creates, I think, a really effective team to be able to deliver on the things that we need to kind of day in, day out the month, I might want to come to projects.The second thing that kind of comes to mind is we’re always trying to have, kind of create what are the clear priorities and visions. Specifically from sales leadership in the organization. And I need more clarity and, you know, envisioning goals beyond. These are the revenue goals that we’re trying to accomplish. These are the quotas we more of like what’s going on in the next one to two years in the sales organization that we want to see different. Right? So is that something that’s happening with the product in the branding and positioning, right? That falls to, that can fall down to us. Is there something with the skill set of our team in the next year or two that we want to see shift? If there’s something happening in the company, you know, so whatever level you wanted to look at it, what are those priorities? A 12-month, 16-month vision is really helpful beyond we’re trying to meet revenue, right? We’re trying to grow revenue. I think that’s been helpful for us. The third thing that comes to mind is making sure our sales teams and our reps actually understand the process and kind of the workflow of working with us. And enablement, you know, does a sales or a sales rep who has a specific request or a project that they would like to see delivered for themselves or for their team. Are they confident with like the process of working with us that they can step in, know when to contribute, and know when they don’t need to contribute any more to keep things streamlined? So I think having consistency or just clarity of this is how we get stuff done as sales enablement and sales or marketing and sales together, I think has been really huge. And then finally, just, we need a home base for sellers, and this is really where Highspot comes in. Do we have a spot where sellers can say, I have what I need, and I know where to find it? I think those four things have been really helpful for us in being able to execute on the things that we want to meet our goals. SS: Amazing. Now to dig into what you touched on in a few of those components, Keith and Allison, I’d love your perspective on this as well, but what would you say are some of your best practices for effectively collaborating to deliver on your marketing and enablement priorities, Keith? KS: Yeah, I think the first thing that comes to mind is actually. Knowing and partnering with specific aspirational and talented sellers within our organization, sales, and even teams need to be able to recognize that there are certain people within the sales organization that are really good at what they do. They’re great sellers. And oftentimes other sellers want to copy their work ethic. They’re going to copy their output, right? They’re going to want to take the best things from them. And so I think a big part for us is being able to recognize those individuals. Recognize that, okay, is the output that they’re putting, is it quality? Does it align with what we want to do in enablement and within marketing? And let’s not create from scratch. Actually partner with them in the things that they’re doing. I think of a recent process where we went through and redid our trial process, or we call them content evaluations. And we looked at the data and we had.I think there was two or three reps and they were all kind of doing the same process because they learned it from one rep that it ended up being like 60 percent of deals were closed if they went through this certain type of content evaluation. And so we all looked at that. We’re like, why isn’t everyone doing this process? The data is so rich. So that’s a great example of like, we’re in enabling marketing. I’m not going to go away and feel like we’re going to magically come up with a great experience. It’s like, no, we’re going to partner with what’s working well and then scale it. And the scaling part sometimes is the tricky part, but being able to scale it in that way, I think has made it really helpful and effective for us. SS: Amazing. I love that example too, by the way. Allison, how about from your perspective? AG: I would say hands down, the key to our success is having a partnership with sales. And partnering really closely with them. So we regularly, have a rhythm of communication, right? It’s basically an open door. If you have a question, just ask, there’s a level of trust there. If leadership is behind the sales enablement team, then the wholesale organization will follow. I think each party. Sales enablement marketing and sales, all know their limits. Right. And so we lean on each other. We may say like, Hey, we want to do this thing, but we don’t exactly know how to do it. And so we’ll go to one of our sales leaders and ask them their opinion. And, and it’s very collaborative. And that to me is. What makes it all possible? Because if we were going to siloed and, and I’ve heard, and I’ve talked to colleagues who have very siloed sales and marketing teams, one hand is not talking to the other, and you just don’t have that communication and that collaboration. And to give you an example, I was on a call with a vendor one time that we were considering. Purchasing with our CRO. He was on the call and the vendor was talking about how, you know, one of the reasons we might not have good usage is because sales and marketing aren’t working in tandem and he just stopped the vendor and he said, no, no, actually we are attached at the hip with our marketing team. So that’s definitely not the issue. And it was like the biggest compliment to me and to the team because it was like, yeah, we are attached to the HIP. In many ways, we are one team working towards a common goal. So definitely that is the key to success for us, for sure. SS: Absolutely. I’m glad to hear that things are Good in terms of collaboration between sales and marketing over at O’Reilly.But what are maybe some of the challenges that marketing and enablement teams can face when trying to bring the two worlds together to support key business initiatives? And how have you guys overcome some of these challenges? Allison, I’d love to send this one back to you. AG: Sure. This is probably not unique to O’Reilly, but it’s focusing on the projects and determining what is a high priority and what’s not. And so oftentimes, you know, a sales leader will come to us and say, we need to do this thing, whatever it is. And so we immediately get working on it. It’s a high priority. We do all this work. And then it’s like something happens and the priority has shifted and the sales leader has gone quiet or, you know, we don’t hear anything about it anymore, but yet we’ve spent all this time on it. And so it’s really knowing your colleagues, right? And kind of understanding what’s happening in the business and why the attention may have moved off that project and then finding those ways to get it approved and finalized. So, you know, for example, maybe they just got busy and we know they’re busy because they’re working on a big deal or something like that. So instead of pestering them constantly, like what’s going on, what’s going on, giving them some space, coming back to them in a week or go to their counterpart and say like, you know, we’re working on this project. Is this still a priority or not? Here are the things we need. And again, like just giving them the space because we know everybody gets busy and we know for our business that priorities shift and that’s okay. And so just finding those little ways to collaborate and kind of keep the project moving as much as we can. And then if it’s not a priority anymore. And everybody agrees on that, then let’s just stop working on it and we’ll move on to the next thing. SS: Absolutely. Keith, what about from your perspective? KS: Yeah, I mean, it’s closely related, right? This idea of you want to get departments that we’re working with, and I think most enablement organizations, they’re involved with so many different teams and so many different departments within their organizations. Everyone has their own priorities, right? So, let’s Take it outside of even just sales, right? We work closely with the editorial group because the publishing background that we have, uh, we have a product group, we have a product marketing group, you have legal and finance, all that stuff like ties back to a lot of the work that we’re doing. And so the prioritization of like all those projects, and I think specifically Clear communication. Sometimes it’s been hard of being like, Hey, when you make this change over here in finance, it actually affects us over here in sales and what we’re doing in sales enablement or, Hey, in product, when you actually adjust this small item, Here within our learning platform that actually just shifted maybe about 50 conversations in the next two weeks with our sales organization. So I think that’s always been a challenge for us is like, how do we make sure there’s clear enough communication across all the teams that our sales people are the people who are actually, and it’s not even us in the enablement, our sales people are the ones who are actually having these conversations with customers and with prospects. And so when we make changes internally, How do we make sure that that gets communicated all the way down to the sales rep who is really the face of the company and being able to, you know, give reason to give explanation and really to still provide insight to our customers and prospect. Navigating that communication has always been a challenge. And it will be as the organization just grows. SS: Love that. Alright, so one thing that I really love about O’Reilly Media’s mission is that you guys really have it centered around solving challenging problems and being able to inspire what’s possible. Allison, I’d love to hear from you. What is a challenging problem that you’ve been able to solve for the business through your enablement strategy? AG: Sure. Yeah. It’s been about five years that we’ve had a sales enablement team. The one that comes to mind is onboarding. So about three to four years ago, the company started rapidly growing, which meant the sales team was rapidly hiring. At the time we just had one person on our team that was doing ad hoc onboarding, the manager would ping them and say, Oh, I have this new SDR starting. Can you do some sessions with them? Talk about this and this, but there was no, nothing was consistent. There was no formal. Plan, anything like that. And so we came together as a team as we started growing, cause we realized this was not going to scale. And we really streamlined the onboarding process. We templated it, and worked with sales leadership to say like, okay, what does sales enablement cover? What do you want to cover as their individual manager? And we took this huge chunk of work off the sales manager’s plate because, you know, at the time they were responsible for onboarding. Now it’s more of a joint effort, like sales enablement starts it. And then once we’re done, you know, we hand it back to the manager and it’s very much a collaborative process. So with that, we were able to reduce the ramp time for new reps. So what used to be, you know, six months ramp time to get them actually out there selling is now down to 60 days or less, depending on the role within 30 days, they’re already hitting the ground running and sometimes actually closing deals within that time. So we’ve seen a really good response from that. And we’ve continued to have growth. We continue to have turnover. We continue to refine the onboarding process as the business evolves. And kind of one of the biggest things that’s come out of that besides the ramp time is actually our HR team has emulated some of what we’ve done. So they’ve seen sort of like, oh, we have a process and a timeline that everybody goes through and they’ve emulated that for just the hiring process in general at O’Reilly. So that was a high compliment, I feel like for the sales enablement team in our work. SS: I love that. And being able to shave it from six months to 60 days or less to get reps to build revenue for the business. That’s amazing, Liv. So kudos and congratulations on that accomplishment. Keith, how have you leveraged your enablement platform to help solve a challenging problem for the business and inspire what’s possible for your reps?KS: I think of two ways that our enablement platform, Highspot, has been a huge help since we’ve implemented it. Highspot and its ability to really fine-tune, I think, our sales messaging and positioning have been really strategic. You know, we used to have branding messaging that I think would resonate really well with our prospects and our customers. But previously the messaging was really, you know, It was written and shared for everyone, so it could be for customer success, it could be for customer support, it could be for our frontline sales reps, right? So, we have the ability now with Highspot to really fine-tune that. So if we want to create sales plays, if we want specific courses, specific languages, if we have certain materials that need to be around, we can organize it and like distribute it in a very specific way across our groups. With way more precision and way more accuracy than we ever have.And sometimes we still needed to hit all of those groups within the same messaging and branding. But for us to have that flexibility in the ease, since there’s such a, the tooling and the, the organization of things is there, it just allows us to kind of do what we need to do from branding and positioning and messaging, and then just deliver those things. So that’s been, it’s been huge to be able to get that specific and be that organized with it. I think it’s been a huge help. And then secondly, using Highspot specifically for the analytics to see which items are critical and which are just like nice to have. That, hey, this hasn’t been touched in three months. Do we need to update this? Do we need to make a revision of this and have those conversations of is this a good resource? If it is, yes. Why isn’t it being used? Just begin to ask a lot of those really good questions. Without the report, you can’t ask good questions on specific documentation that we’ve created. So we’re always trying to ask like, what’s going to stay? What needs to grow? And like, what needs to go? Those are the areas that we want to, Always be thinking about when we’re thinking about asset creation. And I think it’s even, even coursing and training, but that was been really critical with the analysts. SS: I love hearing that. And you guys have actually seen some incredible progress recently with training and coaching. Our stats are saying that you guys are at a hundred percent of active learners. I’d love to understand what are some of your best practices for creating an engaging learning environment for reps? KS: I think the first thing that sounds maybe simple is like, you gotta make it required. That is a simple thing and I think that’s a cultural thing. We want to assume you want to show up, and do well in your role. You want to grow in your role, right? So there is this idea of like culture and of wanting to develop yourself and train yourself. So you want to make it required. There are certain things that our sales teams cannot do. In front of a customer until they work through certain training material. And they want to be doing these things. We’re not asking them to do things that are not helpful for their role. So simple thing, the first customer might make it required, make it part of your culture, that this is what we do is we learn and we get better at these certain things.Secondly, make it short. We fully believe that people shouldn’t have to, not even just sales, but all of us, most people don’t like sitting through a six-hour course on something, right? How do we make bite-size? Learning moments. And really we try to do that even with our own learning platform. And that’s really kind of come into how we develop learning and training at O’Reilly, excuse me, within our enablement team, right? I wanna make this as short as possible, so that way you feel it’s efficient, it’s helpful, but it’s also not taking you away from your work and what you need to do as a seller. So make it short. And then third, make it human anytime. That we in enablement with our training and our courses, if we can interject actually the people of enablement into the material, that’s always better.It’s always better to have a real human talking over, let’s say, a PowerPoint versus them just reading a PowerPoint that has the text, right? So anytime we can have a more human connection in the learning modules that we’re creating, it’s always better. Because we have that relationship with, with the sellers and, and what they’re doing. So if they’re also then hearing it, seeing it from us, knowing that we support them, it’s always better. So make it required, make it short, you know, make it human. SS: I love that you guys apply that filter to the way that you create enablement for your field teams. It just makes it resonate and land a lot better with your reps. AG: And I would add to the make it human is use human language. So a lot of times when we’re putting scripts together and stuff, it’s really easy to kind of fall into that marketing speak. And it’s good because we can check each other and be like, Keith will be like, Alison, people don’t talk like that. We need to humanize this. And like, what would you actually say? And so we kind of use that filter as well. Like if I was talking to my friend, What would I say? Like, how would I say this and put that human element into some of the work that we do?SS: Absolutely. So, you’ve talked a few times about how important it is to have the data to understand what’s happening and how to use that data to make optimizations to your strategy. I’d love to understand, how you go about measuring the impact of your enablement strategy. Allison, do you have any wins you might be able to share with us? AG: Sure. So we look at a variety of metrics. Of course, we look across the whole sales funnel and how are we doing? And we look at things like conversion and pipeline being created and meetings being booked. And then how are the deals moving through? Where are they slowing down? If they’re not closing, why not? If we’re losing those deals, why not? Because all of that kind of touch points typically lead back to something we can do, right, to help the sales team, especially if it’s kind of in aggregate. Like if there’s a thing that’s happening in aggregate, then that’s signed to us that like, let’s jump in there and see what we can do. So that’s the big one. That’s sort of the data-driven one. The other one, which is really hard to measure, but equally important is feedback from sales leadership. How is this actually working in the field? What is actually happening? You know, we’re seeing this, but like, what are people’s boots on the ground saying? And this sort of goes back to what, you know, Keith was mentioning earlier about even going to individual sales reps and saying like, rolled out this new thing, is it working? Like, what are customers saying? What’s your experience with it? And so getting feedback loop, I think, It’s also important to sort of measure the impact of our strategy. Of course, we use the metrics from Highspot. Like what are people looking at? What are they using? What are they not using? That actually can even be more telling than what they’re using. SS: Absolutely. Well, Keith, and Allison, this has been fantastic. I have one last question. Um, Obviously, the enablement space continues to evolve.I’d love to get a sense from each of you on sort of how you plan to leverage some of the latest innovations like AI to continue to drive impact for the business. Keith, maybe I’ll send this one to you first. KS: It is a really exciting area and at the same time. We often say at O’Reilly, when it comes to technology, that there’s a difference between what’s hype and what’s actually helpful. So I think that’s very true for Gen AI, large language models and how they can apply even for sales, sales enablement, marketing, what is actually helpful for us as an organization and us as an enablement team, what we’ve begun to explore right now, just custom GPT, right? So how do we take the great things that are happening with the different GPT models and services that we already know most of our team is, is Using, and we’re encouraging them to use, but how do we bring the data set that’s powering those GPTs behind our walls, so to speak, and actually drive change? Really unique situations and scenarios and for our sales reps. So whether that’s kind of role-play simulations that we can use in training where they can role play with like one of our potential buyers of what the, or our potential customer, what that could be like, whether that’s doing really deep account analysis, you know, Compared to the other customers that we have, let’s say a hundred within like healthcare, and we want to know what are their top five priorities in this area, in this time, we can figure that out. So exploring custom GPTs, I think is really interesting for us. Cause if we can. Streamline kind of the administrative work, our sales people. So that way they’re in meetings, right? If they’re in meetings, that is where they shine and we’re doing our best. So if we can actually output that nonmeeting time and get like a 70 to 80 percent quality, and then the reps can do the rest, that’s really huge for creating an effective organization. So that’s one area that we’re starting to explore right now.SS: I love that. And that would be extremely helpful to your point. Allison, how about you? I’d love for you to close this out on this one.KS: Sure. So I think, you know, from my point of view and I think sales and marketing both know this, but the way that people buy is changing, some of that’s being driven by technology. Some of it’s just being driven by some of the younger workforce coming in and things like that. And so things like prospects expect more personalized experiences. So trying to figure out how we use Gen AI to create Those personalizations and scale that, right? You know, we’ve got the sales team out there and so we want to have them work smarter, not harder. And so how do they leverage Gen AI for like some of that personalization work, right, or some of the research on an account so they’re not spending, you know, hours researching an account? Now they can spend minutes. And how to do we kind of package that up nicely instead of just saying like, yeah, I use chat GPT, you know, how do we package that nicely for them and show them how to use it to their advantage and really just, To get their productivity to go up and like I said, work smarter, not harder. And so I think over time, especially as more tools come out and AI is being incorporated to all of the tools that we use, so how do we use that and leverage that in our work as well? So I think over time, we’re going to see such a huge shift in not only the way people buy, but also how we as a marketing and a sales team operate. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s exciting times. Well, Allison, Keith, thank you both so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time. AG: Thank you for having us. KS: Glad to be here. 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 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 Gartner shows that 84% of sales leaders see effectively cultivating their organization’s tech stack as a key to meeting revenue targets. So how can you ensure you’re optimizing your tech stack to meet key business goals? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jonathan, or JB Belair, the vice president of recruiting technology solutions at Osaic Wealth. Thank you for joining us, Jonathan. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jonathan “JB” Belair: Thank you for that and thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. My name is Jonathan, or JB Belair as everyone calls me. I’m the VP of our recruiting technology here at Osaic, and Osaic is a large broker-dealer. In my specific role, I look to help our sales team better recruit financial advisors who are looking to join our firm. And just to lay that down, so everyone knows exactly what we do here. In terms of my experience and background, oh my goodness, I have been in technology longer than I like to publicly admit. Sometimes in the front end, also in the back end, and in development. But, part of my background is also being a financial advisor. I’m unique to this role because I get to talk about technology. How financial advisors can come to our firm here at Osaic, have a really great experience, but also I can rely on my experience as a financial advisor and still am a financial advisor. That’s a little bit about what I do. It’s been about 15 years now since I’ve been in this industry, fully registered as well as a broker. Also as an investment advisor myself. In addition to that, my responsibility really extends beyond that as well to help manage some of the technology that’s used in our enablement team.To ensure that our recruiting efforts are both effective and innovative for our, what we would call our clients, which are recruits looking to join the firm here. Also, I help articulate our Osaic technology story to prospective financial advisors or financial professionals. It’s the industry term we use just so they can understand what we have to offer and also so that they’re with us, which is a firm that really prioritizes having that advisor-centric technology, and tools available for them to help them service their clients grow their big book of business, and, of course, thrive. SS: JB, one of the things that caught my attention was on your LinkedIn. You mentioned that your expertise per your introduction is in harnessing technology to drive innovation. I’d love to understand from you, what are some best practices for curating an effective enablement tech stack? JB: Absolutely, that’s a great question. When it comes to enabling a tech stack—and I am full of anecdotes left and right—I tell everyone it takes a village, and it really does. But, one of the key things is making sure that it aligns with your business objectives. You want to make sure you have your goal defined, right? Ensuring that the technology that you’re looking at—in this case, Highspot—really lines up with one, our firm’s objectives. What we’re looking for in growth, and also efficiency. We have to also make sure that we have stakeholder buy-in as well as another important thing. You want to make sure that you involve those key stakeholders from across different parts of the firm to ensure that one, we have this for our use in recruiting. But, is there a cross-departmental need as well, right? Do we have other parts of our firm that could also benefit from this? So that was a note, sneaking that into later down in our podcast where we talk about why we chose Highspot, but that’s one of the pieces. I think it’s also, from a best practice, good to prioritize integration and compatibility—that’s a big one. We all know as larger firms, typically, we use our CRM tools and we have different automation tools. We want to make sure that Highspot, as I say, plays nice in the sandbox. That’s important, because if we lose your tool, then we don’t have any integrations. It’s not going to do us any good, honestly, at the end of the day. But also, some other best practices in there are making sure that you can focus on the user experience as well. It’s important to us to have tools that are intuitive and user-friendly so that we know then that adoption among employees—whether it’s our group or around the firm—will easily get on board with that. But, also, there’s training and support as well. I certainly would say that I’m a Highspot pro. Debbie DeLuca on my team is also the Highspot pro of the team, hands down. And she definitely does training with some of our other groups, that’s another piece of it. But outside of that, some of the other pieces where I make suggestions are the cost-effectiveness. What is the ROI on the tool that you’re looking for? There’s some scalability and flexibility, as well. It’s just as important that your tool is able to scale up and scale down with us, right? Because that helps when we think of things like, let’s say, future-proofing some of our tools. As we grow, we want to make sure that tools can expand. That’s an important part of the puzzle. Another couple of things that I would say, too, everyone does it: go to Yelp, go to Google, take a peek at the reviews, and see what people have to say. You can usually tell pretty quickly if people are having a good experience with the tool or if they’re not having a good experience because if there’s one thing we all do in our Reddit culture is there’s a subreddit on everything. SS: No, there definitely is, and correct me if I’m wrong, I believe you guys were using a different solution prior to Highspot. What were some of the major challenges that your team was faced with during that time? JB: There was a lack of a hub for information. We know that one of the reasons why our sales enablement team is so effective is we can have a hub for us, right? And the other platform didn’t allow us to create customized pages that could serve as centralized hubs if you will. That really makes it difficult to organize and access collateral and other information in ways that is really intuitive for the people who need to get their hands on it. In addition to that, we had limited analytics with that tool. It wasn’t built to be a sales enablement tool per se—air quote that one for those of you who can’t see me. I think it served a lot of purposes. It did some things well, but it didn’t do anything really well, and that can be an issue for us in particular. We didn’t have a great Salesforce integration with that tool—full disclosure, we use Salesforce. So that was very important for how we look at our recruits, and keep information, and how we track contacts—that was a really important part of the puzzle as well. Also, Pitch analytics. If we sent something out from the other tool, we weren’t getting anything back. It just wasn’t detailed enough, so that can also certainly hinder our effectiveness at measuring how we’re trying to engage, but also that helps us understand what’s landing and not landing well. So, that’s challenging. If you can’t understand if the Pitches are making sense to whoever you’re sending that to, that could be a problem. So those are some of the pieces, but also it just seemed a little disjointed, because we didn’t have that integration to Salesforce. Again, we use that as our CRM here, and that just made it difficult because we lost out on the integrations and that flow we want to have. Also, I would say, just the transparency across the firm. Cause we certainly work with other teams in this role and not having that ability to see, “Oh, Hey, it looks like JB sent out a Pitch on X, Y, Z.” That can be really helpful to another person having a conversation. And we didn’t have that in our system. SS: Absolutely. And so it sounds like there was a really good impetus for change. And, obviously, you all decided to partner with Highspot—thank you. Since implementing Highspot, how have you been able to overcome some of these previous challenges and really drive innovation? JB: It’s industry-leading technology, right? So you all at Highspot offered cutting-edge tech that really positioned us at the forefront of our industry. In the enablement world, if you will,  we certainly have firms that we compete against. I don’t know technically who uses Highspot, but we certainly know who does not use Highspot, I’ll tell you that. Having some advanced features and capabilities was critical to ensure that we could be in that leading technology spot, right? That’s part of our brand identity as well as our firm. We’re not trying to be the stodgy old, broker-dealer that sounds like a law firm, we want to be industry-leading with technology. We know that’s where people are going, and we’re looking to attract those types of professionals to our firm. So that kind of helps in it, but also those enhanced analytical insights that we get, that’s important, right? That was a major driver and the need for us to have more robust tools, deeper insights into our recruits, what they’re looking at, what’s landing well, what doesn’t land well, and really the analytics. Highspot helps us with that, but also it helps us stay organized, which is a great thing. So for those of you who don’t have Highspot right now, we love the search field because it actually uses AI. So when people are in there looking for collateral, they can type in a word that they’re searching for. They say, “Oh, I know that this piece had this phrase, right?” It helps connect those things together, but also those enhanced analytics, when I hit on that topic. It allowed us to open up other pieces that people didn’t know were available. So, maybe there’s someone in a different part of the business who said, “Hey, I didn’t know that we had this specific collateral piece, right?” Because maybe it doesn’t touch that group per se on a regular basis. So that helps, it creates more engagement. But also, at the end of the day, the biggest thing, of course, was the seamless integration into our ecosystem. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. If it can’t integrate with what we’re doing, we can’t get that into our CRM—which is Salesforce on our end—it just is not going to do us any good. SS: I could not agree more. JB has not been compensated for the things that he’s saying, he just really loves the platform and is using it in a phenomenal way. So, thank you for sharing that. Now, Osaic has experienced a lot of change this year, including a rebrand following a few acquisitions. What are your best practices for driving, as you call them, recruits to have a consistent experience with you all amidst all of this change? And how are you leveraging Highspot to help? JB: Absolutely, that’s a great question and an interesting one. We went through a big rebrand, so we used to be multiple firms. We brought everyone together into one Osaic, right? And Highspot has played a really important role, especially on the recruiting side of the puzzle. Because just like anything, when you hear a new brand, you need to have great collateral. You have to have the Sales Plays and other things that you can go in and Pitches that we can get out so we can talk about who we are. As much as we’d like to think that everyone knows who we are—maybe they recognize one of our old firms like Woodbury, or Royal Alliance, and those firms, maybe that was in the back of their mind. We need to make sure that we can talk about our new firm, right? Osaic, who are we? But also that helps us bridge the timeline for those people who may not be aware that we’ve been around more than two years. We’re not the nucleus of the block, we just brought the thing. Basically, we took all the pieces together to make a really nice firm from all of our other broker-dealers. We had certain strengths from different firms and we brought that all together to create and curate a great experience for financial advisors. One of the ways is really a unified voice. When we send out collateral, it's consistent and it has the right brand voice on it, which is important, especially during a rebrand. It's essential we have that in all of our communications because we want to be really consistent with that. Highspot helps us because one thing, I’ll tell you—and this is for anyone listening, whether it’s our industry or, pharmaceuticals, whoever it may be—what we didn’t want to have was people using old collateral they saved on their desktop. I’ll send them out this piece, and maybe it had our old branding. Because what does that do? It creates confusion because they’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re Osaic, but why are you sending me something from Advisor Group? I thought your name was Osaic.” So, it helps that just from a procedural way, because if they’re sending it from Highspot, they’re sending it from Osaic. We know it’s the most up-to-date version. Another benefit, again, I’m not paid—I do accept free coffee, and I will drink coffee all day long—is that as we update pieces on our end, it updates in Highspot itself, which is great. So we have the most current brand that’s out there. We certainly have a marketing team, we have a design team, and when they make those changes it’s uploaded to a tool that we have. And then from there, it’s updated in real-time in Highspot. So that’s important, but I think also Highspot can be used not only just as an enablement platform, but you can use it to help train as well. Remember, the cool thing is, you’ve got those Spots that you can make. And I’ll tell you a story: interestingly enough—and this is a best practice for anyone out there who wants to tune into this part of the podcast—when we originally created our Spot, we thought about it from the standpoint of ‘what we want to see in enablement', right? What is important to us? What do we want to see? It was interesting, we went to your conference out in Seattle, which was really fun—big plug for anyone who has not gone, Spark was super fun, go if you get a chance—and we had some time to sit down with Katie and Elise. Look at our spot, and speak with someone, one of your professionals there who could give us feedback and advice on our Spot. What we learned was, and I will take full responsibility for this one, the light bulb went off in 60 seconds. I’m like, oh my gosh, we created this for us to use. We didn’t create it for the end user. So, we went back to the drawing board, we refined what we did, and we learned very quickly that when it was speaking to the end user, that’s where we had the liftoff. That’s where everything started coming together because then our recruiters could go in and say, “Oh, hey, this is the spot we fit in. Here’s the information we need.” So that was one of the pieces to how I think that surprisingly through this rebrand, you can actually use Highspot for a little bit of training because we can create those pages and put those pieces there with a narrative as well to help out with that. Also, Playbooks. It’s another thing you can do in there as well to guide you through different scenarios. There are a lot of ways that you can manage a rebrand, it was so exciting. But it's, again, one of the kind of bringing these comments to a close. It’s so important that it’s consistent with what we do to drive home our brand message: who we are, what we stand for, and what the thematics of our firm are. I’ll tell you, that was the whole point of our rebrand, is making sure that people knew who we were. Without that consistency, that training, and all the other support, it wouldn’t be as successful as it’s been. SS: I love it, and thank you for the plug. I do hope you’re coming out to Spark '24 in October this year again. But, I want to talk about Plays, because you touched on it just now and you have achieved an impressive 67% adoption of Sales Plays. I’d love to understand what are your best practices for building effective Sales Plays and then how are you driving adoption of those with your teams? JB: Absolutely. So one thing that I will tell anyone—and this is whether it’s a Play or anything else you’re doing—if you can gamify the process and make it fun, people will get on board. If you can make it a challenge maybe there’s a—, and full disclosure, we have certainly run little competitions with different groups about this. Whenever it’s a game people get excited and they really get into it, so I found that has worked well. But as it comes to building effective Sales Plays, I’ve got, again, Debbie DeLuca, who’s on our team, who’s amazing. She is the absolute pro at making these Sales Plays. But, first and foremost, you have to start with a clear objective. What is your goal? Defining that goal for each of the Sales Plays, whether it’s to introduce our brand story or adoption of messaging to support a specific product or initiative we have; that’s important. You’ve got to have a clear objective as the first point. But then also along that, you need to make sure it aligns with the business strategy itself. Where does that fit into those puzzle pieces? Super important. Number one, that clear objective. Number two, I would say is understanding who your audience is, right? So we can tailor Plays to different roles and teams, because maybe the recruiting team may have a very different Play than our engagement team, or maybe one of our product, professional groups, or our retirement plan sales consulting group, right? So, it’s going to look different. It’s always important again, to remember who your audience is as you think about that. We like that Highspot allows us to really create rule-specific Plays as well. So, that means that everyone has that relevant and actionable content, right? But also have their persona focus in there as well, right? So, customize the messaging: who is it to, who is the end user? An example of that would be if I’m talking about our technology to an existing person at our firm. That message may sound different to a recruit. What voice are they looking to hear? But also, we do work with third-party recruiters as well. When we consider that, the voice is a little bit different because they’re hearing their clients. They’re our client, per se, because they contract through us. Their client is actually that end advisor. So that voice is a little bit different. So that’s certainly nice, but also leveraging the guidance, make sure it’s structured in there, what are the step-by-step pieces, right? Clear step-by-step instructions are important. Also, if you can put scenarios and use cases in there, that’s always helpful as well. And of course, it wouldn’t be Highspot if you didn’t have the ability to integrate some cool stuff—media, photos, presentations, PDFs, those kinds of things, those go a long way, right? If I give you a play and it’s just a Word doc, let’s be real—you’re losing interest in five seconds, you’re done. But, if we’ve got pictures and other things in there, that also helps to engage users, but again on top of that, it’s a support piece. I like to call it support collateral, I would say that goes in there. So we can link in pieces from our collateral library, templates, scripts, and things like that we have that make it nice. But also, in addition to that, we can go back and look at the performance, too. Are those Plays, are they hitting well with the audience, or are they not? Because if they’re not, we might have to go back and figure out, okay, if we have a 2% open rate, what are we doing wrong? What messaging isn’t getting there? And I would tell anyone, “Hey, the best thing to do is reach out to one of those people that you’re literally creating the Play for.” You may be surprised—what you think they want to hear and what they actually want to hear are two different things, but analytics help. If you have to swallow your pride from it and be like, “Okay, I thought I was right, clearly I was wrong, let me make the phone call to escrow, what do you want to hear?” Along with that, some best practices in the Plays is facilitating the collaboration. We can collaborate across teams on there, too, which is great. I know that was a short question, but a lot of details on that one. Again, I've got a great team of people that I work with and we love Highspot, obviously, so one of the best ways to use this tool, is it needs to have a feedback loop on these things, right? That’s how you can really refine it and make it great because that’s the whole purpose of us using this: to engage, educate, and do everything we do. SS: Absolutely. Now, I want to talk about the impact that this has had, and you guys have seen some really impressive increases in quota attainment and win rate. Can you tell us about some of the business impact that you’ve been able to achieve since implementing Highspot? JB: We have had—this last quarter, into this year—some of the best recruiting that we’ve had on record, which is great. Now, there are a lot of people who can take credit for that, right? There are a lot of people who contribute to that goal, but I can tell you that what we’ve noticed is you can achieve higher efficiency in what you’re doing by using Highspot. Because, now if we have recruiters or other groups throughout our firm who want to leverage the tool, they don’t have to shoot in the dark to find 50 places and find the collateral or the tools they need in their role. That helps, because there are a lot of hands in the cookie jar when it comes to bringing financial advisors over, and in my role specifically. On a regular basis, we have to work with a lot of different groups. That’s one thing that’s important. It also increases the kind of quota attainment itself, we know when people are engaging with us, and we know when they’re not because we have analytics to that. If we see someone that’s engaged, that’s a way better way for us to spend our time. Let’s talk to that recruit, let’s continue the conversation. Or, maybe we’ve had someone who opens up emails or they just look at it and glance. Maybe it’s time for a phone call, right? So a couple ways [it can help] is one, it can help us gauge is the lead cooler than we think, or is the lead warmer than we think? How do we want to take those actions? It also helps us drive higher win rates because we have those data driven insights, that’s important. I know we’ve talked about it a lot, but those advanced analytics to help our team understand what’s important to that person they’re speaking with and that’s across the firm. As an example of the recruiting side, are they interested in hearing about our wealth management offering, maybe it’s our succession and acquisition planning we have, are there services that we have that they’re really interested in? We can plug into that, have a great conversation and go from there. It does help us achieve those higher win rates, but also just from a success standpoint. We’ve seen, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. There’s a lot of people in our industry, in our market, in our model, in our — even who compete with us, but we’re seeing really great recruiting success. I think part of that is our ability to help drive consistent messaging, have those collateral, but also share why people would want to see themselves with let’s say Osaic as a firm. That takes a story, it takes collateral, it takes teams, it takes consistency. I think when you add those all up, those contribute to that. But again, the other important part as we think about that too, is that helps drive revenue. There’s that scalability factor, all those things play into that success. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to count on Highspot to be part of that. As we say, it’s not about the amount of touchdowns you get. It’s all about moving the players down the field and Highspot helps more efficiently move the players down the field, because that’s what you can control. And we know that leads to better win rates. SS: JB, last question for you. As you look to the future, how are you continuing to drive innovation through technology at Osaic and how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help? JB: Absolutely. I love tech, I could talk about it all day. But for us, as I think about ways that we’re continuing to drive that innovation, Highspot allows us to be user-centric with what we’re doing. And that’s important, whether it’s the internal user who’s using it on the inside, but also the user-centric piece on the receiving end. When we’re talking to those recruits that could be our existing clients, who would be financial advisors, and professionals who are already with us as a whole, right? Having that technology allows us to continually refine what we’re doing, and scaling up and scaling down is a big piece of that. We are lucky enough that what I would tell people, the analogy that I use when I’m talking about our story here is, there’s a lot of firms who— whether they’re larger than us or smaller than us—we all have similar capabilities, more often than not. Let’s be real, right? We all know that. You’ve got 20 different coffee shops, they all serve coffee. But, what makes us stand out? One of the things we’ve done with our technology is make sure that instead of putting things together with band-aids—I like to say fishing line, and hope it works—one of the things we did over these past few years is we ripped out the wiring, we ripped out the plumbing on the house, we did the hard work first. Part of that was also us bringing on tools like Highspot, because when we have a better technology infrastructure as a whole, these things are cool because we can scale up, we can also scale them down. The other piece to that too, as I look to drive that innovation, are those tailored experiences as well? That’s important. I’ve seen emails from some firms and it’s the exact same thing. I think to myself, how interesting would you be as the end user to get three of the same emails from three different firms? How crazy is that? We can create that tailored experience, and It also helps us show that we’re listening as well, because if you’re leaving the firm, you’re not leaving because you don’t have anything better to do with your time. There’s a reason, so let us help tailor that to your experience. But also, innovation-wise, we can really drive dynamic content as well, which is important that adapts to our users journey. Again, that could be internal or external when we use that as well. But, I think a lot of it can be summed up with one big thing: I'm looking to foster that culture of innovation, to help carry that torch across our teams and throughout the firm. I’m lucky enough that, quite literally from our CEO and our president down, they are so supportive about empowering us to create that innovation. We want to be the technology leaders in our industry, right in that broker-dealer space. So there’s a lot of things I'm really looking forward to when it comes to innovation. Those are just a couple of them on driving that innovation. But, for anyone out there, even if you don’t have Highspot now and you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Hey, we got a different tool.” Just know that tailored experience, the analytics, the ability to, scale up and scale down and all the integrations for us at Osaic, we found that is where the magic happens and that translates directly to our win rates and success in other areas. We can create a really clear dotted line from A to B, and understanding what that ROI is as important as well. As much as I can talk about——, if you ask me, I’m going to say everything is fantastic. We’re making great progress and having great wins. We’ve still got to back it up with some metrics, too, and that’s where it comes in, on the analytic side. I would just I would do all emojis hey, here’s our whole scorecard. Everything’s an emoji. But usually people want some more tangible numbers to be alongside that as well. SS: J. B., thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time. Thank you again. JB: Thanks so much for your time, 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.

According to a study by Gartner, 83% of heads of sales report sellers struggle to adapt to changing customer needs. So how can you build an enablement strategy that ensures you’re meeting every seller where they are?Shawnna Sumaoang: 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 Shelby Luchini, the strategic content go-to-market enablement manager for Grammarly. Thank you for joining us, Shelby. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Shelbi Luchini: Awesome, thanks for having me. A little bit about me, I’ve been at Grammarly for a little over a year in our enablement org, and prior to that, I was at Outreach for about seven years. I had an awesome journey there where I started as a customer-facing rep and moved into enablement and I really love onboarding, coaching, and training reps. At Grammarly, I’ve been doing that same thing.We have an awesome enablement team here and my role is working on strategic programs that scale across our market org. So from BDRs, all the way to RCS and SC function. Anytime we’re building out programs that might have to do with discovery or new feature releases, new content for our teams, and working really closely with our product marketing partners, that’s where you’ll find me.SS: Wonderful, we are excited to have you here. As an experienced enablement leader, I’d love to start with understanding some of your key considerations for crafting an enablement strategy that really drives impact. SL: First and foremost is really making sure that we have a buy-in and a good understanding, from the leaders as to what they’re looking for as far as accomplishing goals. Standing up some strong KPIs around what we’re looking to accomplish with the program and working really closely with reps.So we have some segment enablement managers on the enablement org that I work really closely with. We partner closely with the AEs, CSMs, any roles that we’re rolling out to, to make sure that we’re getting not only the leadership and the manager perspective but rep perspective on what they’re struggling with and what the problems that we’re looking to solve with any of the enablement programs. That’s first and foremost, and then having a really strong reinforcement strategy. So one thing I’ve learned with enablement that’s super important is, trying to avoid flash-in-the-pan enablement where you might have a bunch of ad hoc requests coming through from leaders or reps and making sure that you have a strong reinforcement strategy to bolster on top of the enablement programs that you roll out. SS: You talk a lot about your experience building enablement programs from scratch, particularly on LinkedIn, which I love. What are some of your best practices for building enablement programs from the ground up to support your go-to-market initiatives? SL: It comes back to having that manager buy-in and having managers support enablement programs when you don’t have some of that reinforcement from the leaders. It’s really difficult to make sure that reps are taking trainings, or even invested in their learning and development. It comes with the culture and laying the culture and the foundation is probably where, if you don’t have that, it’s going to be really hard to stand up an enablement program from the get-go. So there’s that. I also think that building strong foundational partnerships with go-to-market teams, like product marketing, those different departments are super fundamental to the success of any enablement program. So I think manager reinforcement and the partnerships that enablement builds are really crucial to any success of building something from the ground up. And then lastly, I’ll say having a strong vision for what enablement looks like is awesome, but also having some quick wins. Putting together a strong roadmap is great in partnership with leaders and everything when you get in, and maybe a sales team isn’t super used to getting help from any sort of enablement or having resources. Having quick wins to show, hey, this team is really valuable to our organization and they’re just trying to help us learn and grow both professionally and personally. I think that’s super key to having a strong enablement program and starting from the ground up. SS: Yes, I could not agree more. It’s fantastic that you’re striking that balance between the long-term strategy and also supporting those quick wins. How does your enablement platform help you to deliver on both of those components, both your strategy and the quick wins to support your go-to-market initiatives? SL: We use Highspot as one of our enablement platforms, and it really allows us to direct the teams to a one-stop shop. So they always know that Highspot is the platform to go to after we have any sort of all-hands meeting or an enablement meeting or training, and it supports us in getting out new content. Our marketing and product marketing team does an awesome job of developing really great thought leadership and content. And we’re always. It’s, putting that in front of our teams, to support some of those ad hoc requests that might come through as well as, big strategy enablement programs like Discovery Playbooks or Persona Playbooks. And we’re always driving reps to Highspot and they never have to guess where content or enablement programs or trainings live. It’s always in that one place. SS: I love that. And I know one of Grammarly’s key initiatives this year is ensuring that you’re constantly upleveling both your new and experienced reps for discovery, especially with the c-suite persona. How are you driving this effort through your enablement programs? SL: We’re trying to weave discovery and that starts from the most basic foundational discovery playbooks. Giving reps insight into how to use insight openers and data to have compelling questions and dig in and uncover payoff and impact with their customers. But we’ve rolled out a ton of different Plays, and that includes Plays from discovery, buyer personas, as well as any new feature releases that we’re rolling out. We’re always trying to incorporate Discovery questions into that, and how can they make sure that this is just a natural part of everything? Any sort of enablement program that we roll out to just have it be muscle memory, right? We want it to be second nature as far as when they’re having those conversations with prospects and customers really leaning in and they should be sprinkling discovery into every conversation that they have. Discovery isn’t just a one moment in time or one call. It’s all always happening throughout the entire sales cycle. We want to make sure that muscle memory is really baked in and really an inherent skill for reps. SS: And you have a particular interest in utilizing Digital Rooms. How are your teams leveraging Digital Rooms to really personalize the buyer experience for some of your key personas? SL: Digital Rooms has been a really exciting thing for our teams. Just to give a little context, prior to using Highspot and Digital Rooms, our reps were sending out emails with big file attachments, it was probably getting lost in a lot of prospects inboxes, and very difficult to find information and send it out to prospects with the latest and greatest.So Digital Rooms, what I love about it is it’s allowed our reps to be themselves, it shows their personality. They’ve added pictures of themselves showing their hobbies and putting a face to the name, almost similar to like a LinkedIn, but next level, which I love. And then we also have content that’s definitely personalized to our different buyer personas. And so giving guidance on hey, here’s some information that you might send to a marketing persona or a CX buyer. So we’re really clear with our descriptions and our content of what what content might be applicable to different personas that they’re reaching out to. So it should be really easy for the reps to drag and drop content into our different Digital Room templates that we’ve created. So we have a handful of different Digital Room templates that reps can just go ahead and create, and then they’re also just making copies. They’re sharing out Digital Rooms with one another. So it’s been a really great experience and I think reps are using it across the deal cycle. Not even just to help them close deals, but after the fact, passing some of the Digital Rooms over to some of our onboarding folks, so they can continue the journey with our customers. SS: I love that. And I’d love to dig into that maybe in another podcast, cause I’m always curious about how companies are using it across the entire journey, not just pre-sales, but post-sales as well, so that’s exciting to hear. Now, you’ve also seen some really great results utilizing Sales Plays with your teams and you guys have. 92% adoption, which is amazing. What are some of your best practices for building effective sales plays that really help your teams land these go to market initiatives in the field? SL: I think one of the biggest things for our teams is just consistency; consistency and how Plays look, how they feel and the rate at which we roll out different Sales Plays, right? I think it comes back to the flash-in-the-pan enablement and trying to avoid doing some of that. But anytime we’re doing, you know a tier two or a tier three feature launch for example, there’s always an associated Play and it always includes insight into those discovery questions—what are some discovery questions you can incorporate to dig deeper, uncover pain, et cetera. But, we’ve really relied on Highspot for some of their best practices. And so we follow the know, say, show, and do method, which has been really helpful—and not even just for me, in terms of building the Plays—but I think just for reps in following, here’s what you can expect every time you see a Play. I think that’s been really helpful for them from a consistency standpoint. SS: When you’re thinking about your go-to-market initiatives, what are some of the outcomes that you have seen that might have seemed impossible to achieve, but that you’ve been able to do with your enablement efforts? SL: Prior to using Highspot, we really had no insight into, how many emails reps were sending, how the content was getting engaged with—it was really a black box. Looking at some of our results from Highspot, reps have sent over about 3,500 Digital Rooms and we’ve had Highspot since December of 2023. There’s been a lot of engagement with customers, over half of those folks that our reps sent those Digital Rooms have actually engaged with the content, which is really exciting to see. They’re sending tons of content, They’re sending Digital Rooms, and we’ve had over 1,200 opportunities contacted, and I don’t know if that would have been possible—or we wouldn’t have at least known that it would have been possible—without Highspot. We’ve influenced a significant amount of revenue with the platform. I think just the visibility into seeing what we’ve done with Highspot has been incredible. I’m really proud of the team for leaning in and really taking a Highspot under their wing, because hen I first deployed it, I was a little skeptical of getting some of those really exciting metrics and it’s been a really cool experience to see the teams really embrace it. SS: It seems like you’re seeing amazing trajectory with it, so you’re doing a fantastic job and kudos to you and the team. Last question for you, Shelbi, as you are looking ahead, how are you continuing to push the envelope on what’s possible with enablement at Grammarly? SL: One of the most exciting things that we’ve done over the last year is one, built out the enablement team. So prior to my manager Flav starting, there wasn’t any enablement and now we’re at seven folks on the enablement team, which is really exciting. I think we’ve done an amazing job of laying this out—the foundational programs, discovery, enterprise ICPs, persona, playbooks. Now, we’re really starting to get into some of the more advanced topics like building business proposals and really laying some of those next-level programs for the teams to go bigger and go sell into more of those enterprise companies.There are some really exciting things on the docket for enablement and Grammarly, and continuing to lean into some of that reinforcement. I think we’re going to be able to build on a lot of the enablement programs that we’ve already set into motion. That’s one thing that’s super exciting about enablement is, you always come back to some of those foundational things that you’ve rolled out in the past. They always continue to iterate, we always continue to partner with our product marketing teams on how do we bolster those and continue to incorporate new features into that existing messaging, et cetera. I think there’s a lot of really awesome opportunity to continue building on some of the foundational programs and starting to incorporate ROI into the conversation and uplevel the skills from that perspective. SS: I’m excited to see what you and the team do at Grammarly. Shelbi, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.  SL: Right on. Thank you so much, really appreciate 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.

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 data from Gartner, organizations that prioritize revenue enablement are 75% more likely to exceed their revenue growth targets. So how can you drive impact with an effective enablement strategy?  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 Lou Keane, the senior vice president of revenue operations at GWI. Thanks for joining us, Lou. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Lucrezia Keane: It’s great to be here. I joined GWI about 11 years ago, previous to that, I was working for another research company called Kantar. I started off as an individual contributor on the account management side and worked my way up there for the first six years. When I joined GWI 11 years ago, it was very much a startup. There were 13 people in the whole business and I joined to set up the account management team. And then grew that team from myself as a player-coach and one other rep, to having 15 account managers. We launched a customer success team as well so then high antenna customer success reps. And drove the growth of the account management, renewal, and expansion of existing accounts.By then, my role pivoted and changed a little bit. So I started looking after what we define as sales excellence, which covers everything around enablement and operations. This is at the point when we brought Highspot on board, and my role now is a little bit more focused on revenue growth. So, looking after SDRs, channel, and partnership solution partners, which are essentially our sales engineers but spanning still some enablement operations. SS: We’re so excited to have you here, Lou. You had an opportunity to work across multiple disciplines, as you mentioned in your introduction, from account management to sales excellence and revenue growth, based on this experience, what do you see as the strategic value of enablement for revenue teams? LK: Absolutely. From my perspective, the main thing about enablement is helping to improve efficiency and drive productivity. Whether it’s updating processes, creating new processes bringing on tools that enable you to automate certain tasks, driving efficiencies, or having the analytics and the background to really understand the impact of those tools and the impact on the business. Then the last bit for me is content. Having the right content for the reps, whether it’s training type of content or more of the sales collateral and sales assets. For me, enablement looks at processes, tools, and content, and to drive efficiency and productivity. SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, thinking back before you had Highspot, what were some of the challenges your teams were facing? LK: We had a few. So, as a startup and then a scale-up, there were lots of pieces of content saved in lots of different places. We moved to Google Drive, and it was very difficult for reps to find the latest piece of content and the most appropriate for certain conversations with different types of clients. It was difficult to measure client engagement with that content. Providing a marketing team or strategic insights team with feedback on how clients were engaging and what really worked in the sales process—those are the main challenges. Then, streamline training and onboarding. It was very manager-led, done slightly differently, depending on the manager, depending on the team. So streamlining all of that was a key aspect that we needed to improve. SS: I think we all can definitely relate. And at that time, I believe you were leveraging a different enablement platform. What was the impetus for deciding to make a change and find another solution? LK: At the time we had an LMS. But I don’t think it was being used as widely, or as effectively as it needed to be. It was also because it wasn’t owned within the revenue team—adoption wasn’t great—and then we used Google Drive for managing a lot of our content, which isn’t the best place to manage content. Yeah, really fun finding a solution that helped with content management and tracking, but also coaching and training. As part of the evaluation process, we spoke to a number of different companies, including Highspot. But what really made Highspot shine compared to some of the other companies that we were evaluating was really the ability to do both of those things and do them well. We spoke to companies that were really strong in the content management part but didn’t have the coaching and training element and vice versa. So, having the combination of the two was really key for us. SS: I love that and I’m glad you did. Part of your team’s focus when bringing on Highspot was building out training programs. Why was this a key focus for your business and how did Highspot help you to build effective training? LK: It was a key focus because we were growing really rapidly. We were hiring lots of new people and realized that maybe our ramp time was a little bit slower than we wanted it to be. As I mentioned earlier training was very manager-led during isolation by different teams and different managers.Some were better at it, some weren’t as great. So really having a consolidated unified way of training the different teams, bringing them into Highspot, building out Sales Plays, building out all of the different learning paths, customizing those learning paths based on different roles or teams that they were working on.It enabled us to be a lot more effective and efficient with the training that we were building, and how that was being delivered to our reps with different types of content, in different types of formats. We brought in LinkedIn Learning videos and had our own, we mixed it up with some face-to-face sessions and some self-learning and had different quizzes. So it made it much more engaging and interactive than we had before. It also enabled reps to go back to it. So it wasn’t a kind of one-and-done type scenario, but it enabled them to, if they weren’t quite clear on something, to refer back to it. But, I think one of the key things that we’re still leveraging now—and it’s a really easy way for reps to understand new processes or products—is Sales Plays. It really helps give the rep a streamlined, really concise view of, for example, what the product is, how to speak to customers about it, what use cases it answers, how will customers be leveraging it, and really helps them in their sales journey. SS: You’ve done an amazing job. Your team has seen incredible adoption since implementing Highspot, including 88% recurring usage. What were some of your best practices for driving adoption when you first implemented the new platform? LK: We did a lot of training, and a lot of roadshows team by team to really address the needs of every individual team. There was a lot of drop-in sessions following the first launch, and we spent a lot of time showing the value of Pitches and Sales Plays and why it was a much quicker and better way of finding out more about a product. But also, with the Pitches, is sharing content with clients and prospects, understanding how those clients and prospects were engaging with those.It was so easy to show the value of things like Pitches to the sales reps because for an account manager where the contract’s coming up for renewal, they could share that through a pitch and they could see: A, has a key decision maker engaged with it? Have they shared it with anyone else? Who are they sharing it with?It gives the reps the right time to reach out to that person. Once they know they’ve had the time to consume that content, then they reach out to them, rather than it being completely blank and chasing people endlessly. So that was really helpful.We set up Spot owners to keep things up to date, that was critical. And obviously, one of the issues we had previously was that a lot of content wasn’t up to date. So having Highspot and having Spot owners who were responsible for uploading new things, and removing when things were out of date built that trust with the team as well. They know that when they go in there, they have access to the latest information, and I think we constantly share updates on new content available. Everyone across the organization has really adopted it; our CRO will constantly share links to assets that are in Highspot. So again, it’s driving that usage and that engagement with the tool as well.SS: I love that. In addition to adoption, what are some of the business outcomes you saw after implementing Highspot? LK: The first one was really about ramping faster. New joiners that were joining GWI were able to, through the different kinds of learning paths, onboard themselves a lot quicker, and had better results.We see that kind of on an ongoing basis with our SDR team, as well. They’re running faster than they ever did, hitting their targets quicker. They have better knowledge of how to engage with the customers and better knowledge about new products. So it’s not just for new reps, but also existing reps who want to upskill themselves. Being able to do that as and when they need, and not be too constrained to a training session that’s being booked in four to six weeks’ time.If there’s something new that’s already been released, they can access that content straight away. Those were the main things that we saw. The other thing was better success rates in terms of closing deals faster because of the Pitches and engaging at the right moment, I say those are the main things. SS: Fantastic. And ultimately, how have your teams overcome the challenges they previously faced and how did Highspot help? LK: One of the things is, it made it a lot easier to find the right content. We did a lot of work on filtering, but some of the developments that Highspot made by making the search functionality a lot easier and a lot more intuitive, really helped our reps and our teams find the right content a lot quicker.Being able to track engagements in general, just having a better-informed sales team through the content that’s in there. And then again, having less out-of-date content really streamlines the process, and makes sure that the right content is in the hands of the right people and the right clients.And they’re not sharing stats or information that’s 12 months out of date, because that can really impact the trust you have with a client or a prospect. SS: I love to hear that. Lou, last question for you, looking toward the future of GWI, what do you hope to achieve in the year ahead and how can Highspot help?LK: I think that so many features that Highspot has, we could actually embed a lot more and do a lot more of. One of the things that we really want to look at is how we embed Highspot content training and learning in Salesforce more. So that when reps are in Salesforce, they have that content surfacing.We’ve done a little bit of it, but it’s probably not as well organized as we’d like. We’re launching a new LMS platform and I think integrating the LMS with Highspot will be key. We’d like to do a lot more with some of the new AI features that you’ve launched and also leverage the scorecards more.So there are definitely a few features that we need to do more of. But again, it’s great to have a platform like Highspot that really helps us move forward with some of these things. SS: Thank you so much for joining us, Lou. I really appreciate it. LK: No, it’s great to be here and it’s lovely talking to 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.

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 research by Gartner, 50% of sellers are overwhelmed by the amount of technology required to effectively complete tasks. So how can you enable your teams with the right tools to maximize efficiency? 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 Kathleen Kohl, the sales enablement manager at ManpowerGroup. Thank you for joining us, Kathleen. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Kathleen Kohl: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been working at ManpowerGroup, which is a global workforce-based solutions company for nearly 12 years. My expertise lies within sales excellence as most of my career has been spent in sales operations and enablement. Currently, I lead sales enablement at ManpowerGroup supporting all six of our lines of business, particularly our sales tech stack. What I love most about my job is collaborating with sales and marketing leadership teams, and showing them what all of our sales tools have to offer. SS: Amazing. Kathleen, we’re excited to have you on the podcast today. One of the things that I noticed, particularly on LinkedIn, is you mentioned how you work to generate opportunities for sales to win through data, tools, technology, and training. I’d love to learn more about this approach. How would you say each of these components plays a role in your enablement strategy at ManpowerGroup? KK: Everyone is talking about data, whether through AI or internal data strategies to train AI models. We teach our sellers how to use our tech stack effectively so that they can create more leads and opportunities To drive revenue for the organization.Our sales tech stack helps sellers understand their target audience and deliver their pitches uniquely and professionally making us stand out. You need to differentiate yourself from the competition these days and with the right tech stack and knowledge, you can do that, and Highspot Digital Sales Rooms have been instrumental in that approach.SS: I love to hear that. And I’d love to understand some of the key priority business initiatives that you’re focusing on supporting through your enablement strategy this year. KK: Yeah, so we are really focused on automation. That has been top of mind alongside measuring the effectiveness and usage of our sales tech stack. One of my team’s goals has been to find content in Highspot in less than five seconds. And we are doing that through tool governance, audits, and Spot policy. Additionally, we aim to increase our digital sales room usage by training our sellers and showcasing the power that DSRs or Digital Sales Rooms can punch.We’re also exploring the learning coaching platform with our rate management brand, which will help to streamline that approach. SS: That’s amazing. At ManpowerGroup, your team is responsible for enablement across, I believe, multiple unique brands. What are some of your best practices for managing all of the various stakeholders with diverse enablement needs? KK: So we have a unique opportunity, as you mentioned, and that we have visibility across all six of our brands and all of our lines of business on their sales priorities. The best practice that we know is important is to ensure we have strong relationships with our sales team. Sales leadership teams who manage our sellers across their brands. We’ve learned that building relationships with sales leadership is extremely important as they hold the power within their sales teams to implement enablement strategies that my team facilitates. SS: I want to dig back into the tools and technology aspect of your strategy. How do you leverage your enablement platform to help you execute your strategic business initiatives? KK: We utilize our tech stack throughout every aspect of the sales life cycle. A main driver is always leading our sales team back to a centralized place where they can find information and how-to’s for all of the tools. Highspot has been extremely helpful to us with this as we host all our sales kits and sales plays here which gives our sellers a prescriptive approach to what to know, say, show, and do, to create a standardized process for how we sell at ManpowerGroup. Highspot is where we communicate and drive our sellers to as a one-stop shop for information. It helps us to facilitate new marketing campaigns and enablement strategies for the field. SS: You mentioned in your intro you have a lot of experience in sales operations and enablement technology roles at ManpowerGroup, and you have a lot of expertise in curating an effective enablement tech stack. In your opinion, what is the value of having a unified platform like Highspot? KK: I would say one of the most essential aspects of Highspot is that it integrates with our CRM system and multiple other sales texts that we use. This really helps our sellers track their pitches and their effectiveness and seamlessly track that ROI.Additionally, our adoption rate at Highspot is, I would say, exceptionally high. And really, that is our central place for sales to go to, to find what they need and understand how to sell and utilize our sales kits. SS: You touched on training a little bit earlier, and I know you recently began to use the training and coaching capabilities with one of your brands, Right Management. What are your best practices for designing effective training programs and how are you planning to leverage Highspot to help? KK: Yeah. So again, relationships are essential with all of our stakeholders. For Right Management specifically, we have a strong relationship with the product owner and the sales leadership team to build the training content and implement and create adoption.It’s crucial really that we work closely with our product management team and understand what’s essential for the sales team to know. Then we can create training that can be used daily and implemented in real time. We can also measure that progress based on how sellers did in that training and then coach accordingly.SS: I love that you’re thinking about that layered approach. Another area where I think you’ve proven you are seeing a lot of success. In helping sales is with digital rooms, and you shared an example where they helped move stalled deals forward. Can you tell us more about your best practices for leveraging digital rooms and their impact on that initiative?KK: We’ve used Digital Sales Rooms throughout our business. The sales life cycle as mentioned earlier, gives our clients a unique feel for how we deliver and tailor our solutions to their needs. What’s really great about these is that we can put all of our documents related to that client and throughout the deal stages into that digital sales room for them to go back to and have an ongoing relationship built where it’s a centralized place.SS: I think that’s a fantastic way to up-level your buyer engagement and it gives you a lot of data. When it comes to data, what are some of your best practices for measuring the impact of your programs and how are you leveraging Highspot to help right now? KK: Our sellers love seeing data on Highspot, seeing if their content is being viewed, and knowing what might be most important to their clients through this engagement. So this helps our sellers to better cater to their client’s needs and offer them the best solution possible through engagement metrics. SS: Since implementing Highspot, I know that you have seen an increase in deal size, faster sales cycles, and even an increase in quota attainment. Can you tell us more about the impact you’ve achieved? KK: We’ve tracked significant enterprise wins based on a customized approach using Digital Sales Rooms. Additionally, finding content quickly is critical. Having Highspot help us navigate this and automatically archive outdated content makes it easier for sellers to find what they need. This ability to see what a client is most interested in helps us create unique solutions based on their workforce needs. SS: I have to say you are doing an amazing job there, Kathleen. Last question, looking ahead, how do you plan to continue to grow the impact of enablement on your strategic initiatives at ManpowerGroup?KK: So we have a big push on my team to increase that Digital Sales Room usage. We do a great job right now utilizing it, but it can always be better. We’ve seen a real impact through Digital Sales Rooms and a goal is to increase Q4 for our sales teams. We are also looking at the pilot for Right Management, of learning and coaching. And we want to understand how effective it will be and scale, potentially, once you see those results come through. SS: Amazing. Like I said, fantastic work at ManpowerGroup, Kathleen, and thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today.KK: 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.

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.

According to research from Sales Enablement PRO, organizations leveraging enablement tools are four times more likely to effectively drive rep consistency. So how can you improve sales rep effectiveness 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 Paul Wright, the vice president of sales enablement at Acosta Inc. Thank you for joining us, Paul. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Paul Wright: Absolutely. Thank you again for having me. As you mentioned, I’m the vice president of sales enablement for Acosta Group. And I’ve been in this role for a little over two years at this point. I came into this role from a subsidiary company in Acosta Group called ActionLink, where I was an account manager and had business development responsibilities, some field management responsibilities, et cetera.I had been there for about seven or eight years prior to the move over [from ActionLink]. Before that, I’d been a visual merchandising manager for a large national retail chain. I’ve been a buyer for another large retail chain. And spent the first I’ve spent several years of my career as a district manager for a large company that has an office in Arkansas.I’ll just say that, but so I’ve got a load of retail experience, and bringing that all into the corporate side of things has been a fun challenge for me to go from managing people to managing processes, content, training materials, and different things like that. SS: Paul, thank you so much for joining us today. As you mentioned in your introduction, you have a lot of experience as a retail and sales leader. How does that experience influence your approach to your enablement strategy? PW: One of the biggest helps is I know what it’s like to sell, cause I’ve done selling before. I know the challenges. I would not consider myself even to be a seller, but I had some success in selling and learning, basically bringing all of my experience in, even from down to employee relations, and becoming a creative problem solver. Learning to hear the root cause or the root problem helps me to teach sellers how to listen for the unsaid when they’re talking to a client or a prospect. I tell people all the time, that if you ask a prospect or a client, what’s your biggest pain point you’re looking to solve? The client, especially if they’re brand new to you and you don’t have a relationship established, is not going to tell you anything because everything’s roses in their world. But if you listen and ask the right questions at the right time, you’ll find their pain points and then you present them a solution in a way that they almost think it’s their idea. When it’s their idea they’re the hero of the story, and it becomes an easy transition into closing a deal. SS: Absolutely, I love that. What are some of your best practices then? I would love to share some tips and tricks with our audience for partnering with other leaders across the business like sales and marketing as you develop your enablement programs.PW: Interestingly enough, at Acosta Group, I sit on the enterprise marketing team and that’s a little different I think in a lot of organizations, there’s a separate sales operations team that generally is like a deal desk, a contract desk, and an onboarding desk, things like that. But because I sit with the marketing team on the enterprise commercial team, I’ve got direct access and consistent access to the folks who are providing the content that we’re storing on Highspot, for example.We have regular content meetings where I will bring up a point that a seller brought up to me, or they’ll bring up a point that they noticed from a piece that was more successful in a recent RFP or something like that. It becomes a collaborative process to get the right content and the best content in front of our sellers to enable them to go in confidently, knowing they’ve got what they need at their fingertips.SS: Wonderful, I think that’s a fantastic way to establish a partnership. Now, collaboration across the business plays a key role in how you designed and launched your current Highspot environment. Can you tell us about that process? PW: So I want to go back to the very beginning of Highspot at Acosta. The agreement was already in place to start a pilot when I came into the role. And we were in the final four or five weeks pre-launch where we were loading in content and things like that. And at that point in time, we were loading in what we thought sellers wanted. We were loading in huge capabilities decks and things like that.And some of our marketing leaders were at our annual leadership meeting and they actually polled some of the sellers and said, what do you really want out of Highspot? We want to know why they should outsource because we are a third-party provider of services for our companies, for professional services.And a lot of folks will say we can do it cheaper ourselves. So why should they outsource? Why should they use Acosta as their outsourcing partner? What advantage is it to do the Acosta? So our team got together and decided that we were going to create a service catalog and each service that we provide would have its own play page.And on that play page, we would answer those questions. What is this service? Why should you outsource this service? And why should you outsource with a constant for this service? And instead of a 35-slide capabilities deck, we had a three to five-slide overview of that particular solution. We also had a cell sheet added as part of the play page.So send this one-pager out to measure interest. We had a spec sheet that was internal facing that answered the views and plots behind the scenes of the service and what exactly it entails. Most solutions have a brief overview video, like a 30 to 60-second jazz reel kind of thing just to get people excited about it.Something that can be shared on social, or whatever. And then we started an on-demand training series for every solution where we get our subject matter experts on camera talking about the solution like they’re talking to a client. They will bring up in the course of this, some key listening cues, some key questions to ask, and probing questions to ask about what the solution entails, [like] what some advantages are for using Acosta for that solution, et cetera. We’ve got a user base of around 225 individuals. And with the last time I checked, which was in April, we had almost 6,000 views year-to-date of content inside of Highspot. And it was something like 17 days of view time. The challenge we’re seeing now is our users are not leveraging some of the real capabilities of Highspot.We could have stored this content in SharePoint. We could have stored this content on a team site or anywhere else we wanted to. We picked Highspot so that we could get the advantages of the engagement metrics. And so that’s our next challenge up is how do we do that? How do we get people more engaged with using Highspot to its full capacity?SS: It is always a journey of evolution and enablement I have to say, and this is a rapidly evolving space and you guys are doing quite well, given where you are at your stage in the journey. Now, as you were rolling out the platform to your sales team, do you have some best practices for driving some of that increased adoption that you were seeing amongst your sellers? PW: So I really think that the initial push of doing the Highspot Heroes was a big point of that because everybody likes to be at the top of the leaderboard, especially sellers. They’re a very competitive bunch of people. And so I think that helped drive a lot of that initial early engagement. I think another thing that we did really was we had some office hours where I would just be on a team’s call for an hour once a week.Just to answer questions and help people guide things through. I still, to this day, do a 30-minute orientation for every new user that gets added to Highspot where I walk them through the capabilities and get them acquainted with the idea of pitching at the very least. And then one of the other things, and I’ve done this for all the other parts of my job as well, is I pride myself on being accessible. So every email that I send out has a link where they can book 30 minutes with me. It’s linked to my Outlook calendar that shows them when I’m available. So they’re not overbooking or anything like that. I’m well known across the company as one of the most accessible people in support and get Teams messages all day long. “Hey, how can I find this? How can I do that?” And I really think as enablement is a support role, I think that’s critical to be accessible and approachable to your users. SS: Now, that’s fantastic. Paul, one area that I know you’re starting to see some traction with your sales team is engaging their buyers with Digital Rooms. What are some of your best practices for leveraging Digital Rooms today? PW: It goes back to when I was first brought into this position, I was informed that my role was to be the easy button for sellers. So when it comes to Digital Rooms and some more advanced features of Highspot or Salesforce or anything like that, let’s make it easy.Another term is frictionless. So we’re in the process of creating templates. We're creating this; we’ve already created a spot where we uploaded all of our client logos so that we know they’re sending ones that are right-sized, right format, and everything like that, so it looks good. I think the worst thing you could do to a client is send them their logo and it’s pixelated or stretched or something like that.So we’re creating that to make it easy so they can find that as they’re putting their Digital Room together to send creating some verbiage templates for a cold call or a landing page for a trade show. Or, we use Digital Rooms for a lot of different things. I’ve even used them.For event registration pages in the past. And so the more our people see them, the more they want to use them. And the more they want to use them, the more ideas we come up with for making them easier to use. SS: I love it and hose are some creative ideas, even some that I may apply with my own team right after this. Now, another way you’re evolving your buyer engagement efforts is through a relatively new capability in Highspot, Autodocs. What are some of the ways your teams have just started to leverage these? PW: We are truly in the early days of Autodocs. In fact, the senior director for brand and I sat in on the webinar last week and we were messaging each other back and forth on Teams during the whole thing and she was like, “This is speaking to my soul. I feel like I’ve been seen.” So we are, right now, putting together a pilot program for Autodocs for our users. It’s still taking shape, we’re identifying a small group of people to roll it out to first. And these would be the folks that are our most active pitchers right now.So we see them as early adopters. And so we will put together one or two Autodocs that are our highest profile services that are most frequently accessed and pitched and get this pilot group up and running. And if you ask me this question in say 60 days, I think I’ll have a lot more information to provide to you, but we are truly building that runway while the plane’s going down. SS: Oh, absolutely. You gotta start small, but once you get those pilot users leveraging it and loving it, I hope that it does take off. So we’ll circle back in a few weeks and check in on you on that front. Now, I know buyer engagement isn’t the only part of your strategy that’s been evolving, and you’ve been driving innovation through your use of AI or artificial intelligence. How are you utilizing AI in your enablement programs? PW: So we have all the AI features available in Highspot right now turned on for our users. I’m a firm believer of letting AI do the things it can do so that I can do the things it can’t. And the thing that it can do is it can craft an email message that introduces a document. What it can’t do is make sure it’s using my voice. So I can go in and edit that message then to sound like me and not sound like a machine. I’m a big believer in the co-pilot program from Microsoft. As a company, we’re piloting that this year in a small group of users, and I’m part of that.And some of the other hats that I wear at my job, I’ve used that to write flows for Salesforce. And take what would have taken me four, five, or six hours to figure out, [it takes] 15 minutes to enter the prompt, get step-by-step instructions, and have a working flow. Once again, let it do the things it can do, and let me focus on what it can’t.That’s going to be my approach for AI for as long as I can see it because it's such a powerful tool that we’re, truly, as a society, just scratching the surface [of] what it can do. SS: Well said, well said. Now, Paul, I have to give you credit. You have driven some fantastic results at Acosta. And I know that you guys have even seen through a lot of your amazing enablement programs and initiatives a correlation to an increase in quota attainment and win rates. How, from your perspective, has your enablement approach impacted these results, and how have you leveraged Highspot to help?PW: I don’t want to take all the credit for it, but sales enablement was a new position at Acosta when I came in two years ago. So prior to that, the sellers had been on their own. One of the areas we saw was they were keeping track of their pipeline, as an example, on Notepads, in OneNote, or somewhere that was not consolidated. No visibility whatsoever. Every little micro team had their own SharePoint site. There was no version control on content or anything. When we started loading in those big capabilities, we noticed logos that were two generations old and just cringe stuff. Nobody was doing it intentionally or with malintent, there was just nobody herding the cats.  The biggest thing that I can take credit for is when I take a step into a role, I own the role. And my role was to get CRM usage up. So we went from having a virtually non-existent Salesforce pipeline to today, we have a robust pipeline that if we only got realistic win rate numbers on, we would be winning, and we have improved our attainment in our quota attainment and win rate.And Highspot has really been a part of that. Our EVP of business development is one of our loudest champions. He wants all content that goes to a prospect or a client to come out of Highspo. He said, “No more of this. If you want to download it because you’re worried about presenting it in a place with spotty internet, that’s fine. But when you download it, it gets used one time. And then you consider that version is old from then on. You get your content out of Highspot for every new pitch, [and] every new presentation.” That has been critical. Our marketing team is small but mighty and they have some of the most intense brand guidelines, and I say that in a good way. They are fantastic stewards of our brand and they do a great job of spotting when something becomes outdated. We do regular audits of our content to make sure that we don’t have information that’s three years old in there still. And one of the ways we’re doing that is we’re taking that on-demand training that I mentioned earlier to the next level.I’ve got a project manager helping me and we’re putting together a three-tier accreditation for each of our sales solutions. And tier one is that on-demand video with some questions for understanding. Tier two takes all of our sales content, pulls out nuggets and key points, and puts it into an interactive module using Rise Articulate.And then there’s a quiz for understanding level three is a scenario based on where they are. We did one for our Amazon services where they’re giving pictures from Amazon listings and they are to call out what’s wrong with them and they’re to call out what’s right with them and things like that. And at the end of this, they get a social shareable image that says “I’m accredited in full-service Amazon”, for example.And so we’re leveraging Highspot for all of that, as both our repository for where to go to get the training and the source of our content, so that we’re teaching on the same content that they’re pitching. SS: Paul, last question for you. As you look ahead, how do you plan to continue to evolve your enablement strategy at Acosta?PW: Daily evolution. I have a personal mantra: get 1% better every single day. In the finance world, there’s the rule of 72 that says whatever your interest rate divides into 72 by is how quickly you’ll see a double return. A 1% improvement means that you will be 100% better in 72 days.It doesn’t mean you’d be perfect, it doesn’t mean you’d be an expert, you’ll be a hundred percent better than your starting point. So I am constantly on the lookout for webinars that increase my knowledge and understanding of enablement and what is out there to help people. And we’re looking at doing more of a drip-type campaign with Highspot like we did in the early days and some retraining and reintroducing of these features because honestly, the the methodology and the features have changed pretty significantly in the last two years in Highspot themselves.And if our sellers are intimidated because it’s called something different, then I need to take that intimidation away. And help them make it easy for them to see that a Digital Room is as easy as anything they’ve done in the past. I continue to look out as well for ways that AI can be brought into the whole deal.In my Salesforce platform, I’m looking to add in opportunity measurement, or grading, and different things like that to help our sellers see from the beginning when they’ve got something good. To continue to go after what’s good and maybe let the other stuff go by the wayside. Focus on what’s winnable, what’s achievable, and what’s impactful to the business.SS: I love that approach, and a very interesting statistical approach to improvement. Thank you so much for joining us today, Paul. I appreciate the time.PW: Thank you for having me.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.

According to Gartner, 60% of sales reps lack relevant learning opportunities. So how can you provide consistent training and coaching with a unified platform?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 Felix McCabe, the head of global enablement execution at Dropbox. Thank you for joining us, Felix. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Felix McCabe: Shawnna, thank you for having us today. I started my career in sales, so I have a lot of empathy for the sales force. My career trajectory has taken me through different avenues from marketing to commercial to where I sit now in enablement. I have a unique perspective on the whole sales process and the different components and parts supporting our sales team. So as I transitioned into enablement at Dropbox, what I do today is lead the execution arm of our enablement team, helping to upskill the level of our sellers at Dropbox. SS: I love that, it sounds like you are the perfect guest to talk about skilling up your sales teams. And I know on LinkedIn you mentioned that you like to push the boundaries of seller development from onboarding to productivity to mastery. And that is a key focus for you. As an enablement leader, what does streamlining the path to mastery look like? FM: From where I sit I think about the seller life cycle, like you said, from onboarding, to ramp, to starting to become productive, to ultimately becoming a master in that role. That starts with onboarding and equipping the sales professionals with the right sales skills they need to really be able to sell in today’s market. You layer on top of that product knowledge and any specific sales process nuances we have. Then you’ve got to check that learning, test the delivery, and ultimately sign off and certify and say this salesperson is field-ready. But development can’t really stop there. It takes continuous practice and that comes in the form of coaching, and that’s what’s required as we move closer to mastery. I’m not saying we’re fully there yet at Dropbox, but it’s certainly the ambition we have to put those right pieces in place to accelerate that journey through the seller life cycle. SS: So tell us a little bit about the value of training and coaching in this. How do you build effective training and coaching programs to help sellers achieve mastery? FM: The training is only as good as the reinforcement that happens afterward. Because how many times have we seen a seller go through, tick the box, “I’m certified”, but then they struggle to articulate your value prop in the market or something like that? The challenge for frontline managers is often that there’s not enough time to coach each rep effectively, especially if I’m managing a team of six or eight reps.But the functionality that we now have with Highspot – thank you – has given us the ability to scale that learning with the ability for managers to really jump in on the platform and be able to coach in a more async and time-effective way. From an admin perspective in my world, I’m able to ensure that coaching is happening and we’ve seen that ramp up since we’ve started to implement this process. The next step for us is to see how AI can accelerate that. SS: Absolutely. Now, from your perspective, what is the strategic value of a unified enablement platform when it comes to ensuring sellers are ready and building that path to mastery? FM: We’ve heard a lot about Zoom fatigue over the last few years, especially since the pandemic, but for a seller, it’s tool fatigue. There are so many places to go to do different parts of the process, and that’s just annoying. It’s in my way, and at the end of the day, I’ve got a clock above my head and a target on my back. I’m trying to get that job done anyway, so it’s confusing, and it slows down the sales process.But what we now have with you and Highspot, there’s a way of bringing some of those elements together so that our sellers are moving closer to a single source of growth. For me, I love the idea that I can go to one place. I can learn about my products as a new seller through courses and learning paths.But then, as an experienced seller, I’ve got a place to go and refer back to. If I’m on a customer call or preparing for a big meeting, I have an evergreen or always-on space where I can get that information that’s key and critical. SS: And Felix, you’ve actually leveraged Highspot at a previous enterprise organization as well as Dropbox, and based on that experience, what are some of your best practices for effectively implementing and really driving adoption among your sellers, particularly as you mentioned, while there is all this tool fatigue? FM: My various experiences at GlobalTelco, Vodafone – shout out to the guys there – and actually a lady at Highspot, Laura, who implemented that at Vodafone, and who introduced us to the platform, and I used it as a rep. That’s why when the opportunity came up, I put my hand up and said, “I know this can be a lot better than what we were doing with the platform at Dropbox.” In terms of best practices, I’ve borrowed from some of that experience, but I’ve also learned from other enablement practitioners, like Manny, who I met in Seattle last year at your Spark conference.I’ll shout out here to Donnie Miller over at American Woodmark. I know he was on this podcast too, but he gave me a tour of their instance of Highspot, and that gave me a lot of food for thought as I came back and started to relaunch the platform. So in terms of adoption and helping us get there, number one: it’s making things easy to find. It’s as much about curation as it is creation because you can have a lot of stuff in there. I like to use the analogy that we’re the gallery, and we work with the publishers as the artist and we help them curate the best assets and showcase what our reps need to know. Then it’s about building good governance around the platform to make sure it’s always good content and stuff that’s outdated is getting out of there.Quality is something we struggled with and now we’re getting a lot better at. And investing time in bite-sized learning, to show how you can get the best out of the platform. That’s a value add and a key tidbit that we got from our Highspot CSM, Kelly, so shout out to her as well.SS: You talked about how important it is to really make sure that Highspot is seen as a platform, that trusted source, and you guys have seen a lot of success by implementing a lot of these processes that you just talked us through, including great governance, you guys have actually achieved a 29% increase in adoption of Highspot over the last few months. How do you gain trust with your sellers when launching new programs or initiatives? FM: It starts with trust, and that's key for adoption and ensuring that what we’re doing is value-add for our stakeholders. Not only the sales reps themselves, but also sales leadership and not making sure we’re adding to a priority list, but we’re part of the priority list, supporting that and partnering with content publishers. In our case, that’s a lot of our product marketing team to ensure the quality of what’s being produced as well as ourselves in terms of the learning that we’re creating is supported by those assets and then bringing it to sales in a consistent.We’ve done that a lot using the Sales Play object in Highspot, that’s been helpful, both from a curation point of view, but also from an admin point of view, because we’ve got dashboards now be able to show how those plays are being engaged with, from a content consumption point of view, as well as a learning certification point of view.And, another recommendation we’ve taken from Highspot is leveraging your messaging framework of what to know, what to say, what to show, and what to do. And just simplifying that messaging for reps has been, a game changer. SS: Now, in terms of strategic initiatives, because you mentioned the product marketing team is one of your key partners. I know one of your key focuses this year is driving a new product launch. Can you tell us more about this initiative and what you’re aiming to achieve? FM: We launched a new product last year, which we call Dropbox Replay. It’s a video image collaboration tool, enabling things like frame anchoring and commenting, and works with a lot of the main video editing tools out there like Adobe and DaVinci.It’s got many use cases, not just the media space, but construction space. We’ve even seen some interesting use cases from sports teams that we partner with. From an enabler perspective, it’s about us ensuring that our sellers are knowledgeable about this product, its functionality, and then how it’s supporting our customers to be more productive. So that’s where it starts with Replay. SS: Absolutely. What are some of the key ways that you’re leveraging Highspot to help support the product launches for your teams? FM: I’ll talk a bit about the Replay launch again because what we’ve done is we started by creating a three-module learning path. Our sellers can learn about the product and test their knowledge using the knowledge checks and the video submission capability that’s in there. I think that’s really cool because we’ve tried to be creative with that type of knowledge check and the video submission. What we’ve done is create scenarios where we will have reps pitching against objections that they might get from a customer, as well as creating a scenario where they need to demo the product.So that’s both two different use cases for that same piece of functionality within our learning paths and that’s been great. Alongside that, we’ve created an evergreen space around Dropbox, we Play products, so we’ve got our pitch decks in there, discovery questions, case studies, competitive information, we’ve even got video content from some of the reps, some of their colleagues who’ve been successful selling the product and what value they were able to bring to their customers.  So that’s where we’ve got to so far, but we’re still looking forward and we’re looking at now how we can leverage Highspot’s API, create a new flow of data so we can start tracking more of this line correlation from content, consumption training certification into pipeline generation and ultimately revenue, right? So we’re starting to build that out now with the help of the Highspot technical account team. SS: How do you measure the impact of your efforts on your strategic initiatives and do you have any wins you can share? FM: We’ve been on a journey from a data perspective here. As I just mentioned, we’re looking at automating some of the processes we’ve had through your API and data lake extension, but until now it’s been very manual. Last year, for example, we took our global AE team, roughly about 50, 60 sellers, and we looked at their performance across five or six criteria: performance versus target closed business, those kinds of things, and we created an aggregated score.We did the same in terms of engagement and things that would highlight engagement, like content consumed had they completed training, et cetera. What we were able to find by creating this aggregated score was that the reps who were doing more of the right things – they were highly engaged, consuming the content in Highspot, and taking the courses that we’d built – were outperforming others significantly. I think the stat we have is between 48 to 57 percentage points higher attainment versus target than those who weren’t engaged, so that’s huge for us to be able to quantify that influence over revenue. Going forward, the plan is to automate a lot of this and we’ll be looking to leverage the API, but also the Scorecards you’ve built into the platform.SS: And that is an amazing win, congratulations to you and the team at Dropbox. Last question for you, Felix, you have a strong vision for your enablement strategy. How do you plan to evolve your strategy in the next year? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you innovate? FM: I always like to joke that we’re never in a fair fight in enablement. We’re typically outnumbered 50 reps to one of us. In that world, it’s all about being scalable, repeatable, and measurable. A couple of things that we’re looking to do is continue to invest in building more of our spaces within Highspot in those Spots. We’re bringing on other partners within the business, like our rev ops team, and deal desk, they’re all looking for their own spaces. So we’re bringing more of the sales process and organization into Highspot to continue that ambition of being a single source of truth. We’re on to your front-line lead coaching program, so bring all our front-line managers through a coaching program and Highspot will play a big part of that with specific manager-based plays and using the Scorecards again here.And then we’re hopefully going to accelerate a lot of what we’re doing with the AI functionality that you guys have brought to market recently. For me specifically looking at AI feedback within those learning modules, I think that’s going to be a big piece for us.SS: Exciting. Felix, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time. FM: Thanks for having us.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 study conducted by Gartner found 62% of sellers who lost a virtual deal believed it would have been won if conducted in person. So how can you ensure rep confidence in today’s digital sales landscape?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 Cara Holt, the director of sales enablement at Learning A-Z. Thank you for joining us, Cara, I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Cara Holt: I have been in education for 20-plus years, which is scary to say in some form. So I started as a kindergarten teacher and then quickly started leading teams around my third year. I was a curriculum leader, then an instructional coach, and then I was eventually assistant principal before I stepped out. I came into the world of ed tech not really knowing what it was, but I knew that professional learning and training was definitely a passion of mine. And so I went into training teachers first. And then because of where I was and the product that I was selling or representing, I realized that our sales team didn’t know how to position something. And so that’s how I say I accidentally fell into sales enablement. It really wasn’t like a thing or a term that I’d heard before.And so that was about five years ago now. And so started working with sales teams, started building Materials for them, job aids, training materials, and then really started building certification courses. And what does that mean? And what does training look like? And so training just exploded from there.Built my way up into the enablement space – I lead an amazing team here at Learning A to Z. We all collaborate cross-functionally. Sales enablement is a big cross-functional collaborator. And so we all have those different functions and we lead an amazing sales team here that helps educators. That’s really what our goal is, just to provide them with the materials and resources that really make their life easier. SS: As someone with two elementary school children, I have to say, I think you’re a saint for all that you have done in your earlier career. And I love that path that you followed from your career standpoint to lead you to enablement, that is amazing. And it aligns with something that I had seen on your LinkedIn profile because you shared that your passion is sales empowerment. How does this influence your approach to your enablement strategy? CH: Yeah, so it’s so funny because the term sales empowerer really came from when I got here to Learning A-Z. They had sales enablement before, but really it was sales ops. I had to work to really redefine who we were. One of the things that I did when I was introducing myself to my reps was I would say, “I’m really here to help empower you to do your job, whether that means tools, whether that means training, or certifications, all of those things, that’s what I’m here to do.”One of my reps spoke up and she was like, “So really what you’re saying is you’re a sales empowerer.” Yes, that’s exactly what I am. And so we just took that and read with it, I was like, that’s amazing. That’s who I want to be. I don’t want to be sales enablement, now I want to be a sales empowerer and I really want to empower them to feel confident. Like our solution – we know that our solution is there to help students and teachers and I want them to be able to position that and be able to speak to that and feel really comfortable when they’re in front of our customers, that really buyer-centric lens.That’s really what I say, that goes back to that cross-functionality. We work with all the different teams. We’re really here to help empower our reps. And what does that mean? And it’s tools like Highspot that help do that. SS: On the note around enablement platforms, before implementing Highspot, you noted that 80% of your reps really struggled to locate content when they needed it. What impact did that have on your sales team’s confidence? CH: When I came to Learning A-Z it was really important to me to not come in like a wrecking ball. They had an enablement function but we knew we were doing things differently. And so I started performing a gap analysis, really what were the areas that were missing and how could I come in and help to solve problems for them and really empower them in all those places. And one of the places that really stuck out to me at the beginning was that 80% of my reps didn’t have confidence in finding the material. We had a platform that was really like digital asset management – there was no real structure, there were no analytics behind it, there were no Digital Sales Rooms. So they were really, pulling materials. One of our head of sales had pulled an iteration of a playbook that was seven iterations old, and that is not a good look. And what are they printing? What are they sharing? And I know as an administrator, or past administrator, when you hand me papers in this digital world, they’re going to get lost on my desk. I’m not going to be able to go back and look at them or find them. And then you have no idea if I really reviewed it, like what that meant for me. And so I had come from a company that had Highspot and I had some knowledge, but the thing is, I didn’t want to come in saying Highspot is the solution, right? You don’t know. You’re at a new place, you want to give them the time. I did my due diligence and I spent time, speaking to their many different platforms that have that similar function. One of our sister companies uses Highspot as well and so at the end of the day that’s who’s showing through as the right solution for us as well. SS: I love that. So I know that that analysis you did was definitely part of the impetus for deciding to invest in an enablement platform, and I know that you helped lead the evaluation for the right platform. As you said, you wanted to make sure it was the right fit for the organization that you’re at currently. So what made you ultimately decide to partner with Highspot again? CH: I spoke to lots of different platforms and people – great people – and met great solutions along the way, just not maybe the right solution for us. The thing that really stood out is Highspot has amazing people, they really do. Going back to, these are people that are going to partner with you and stick with you through your implementation journey. And I had seen that support before. And so I knew I had that to count on. Also, Highspot’s a leader in their field, really it’s the top. And when I was thinking of what platform are we going to get, that was really important to me that we had an innovative platform that was going to take our feedback and really make those changes to the best benefit of their customers.I knew it was user-friendly. That was something that was really important to me because our team was going to be building Highspot from scratch, and doing the content mitigation from our other platforms. So all of those pieces, taking all of those pieces into consideration, Highspot just kept coming up to the top for me, and that was something that I was working with our head of sales at the time, our senior vice president, now the president of our company. He was in it with me, and we were going to all these different demos and he had one in his mind that he really wanted. And so it was through that I was even able to help him change his mind and see the benefits that Highspot could bring to our table. SS: Since you launched last November, you have already seen some amazing results – you guys are driving 93% recurring usage. Can you tell us about some of the impact that this has had on sales confidence now?  CH: So we haven’t relaunched our survey yet, we wanted to give time for implementation. However, the one thing that we noticed right off the bat is when we came to our all sales meetings and people were sharing content, or product marketing was sharing. My team had a back channel joke where it was like Highspot, Highspot, Highspot – every time they said it, we’d put like a cheer in our chat. We just knew that they were loving it, all teams were loving it and they were creating different things. And it’s been fun to even see how marketing has created some plays for different campaigns and different pieces that we’ve been able to take and have big wins for. So being able to see our sales reps are now taking the ownership of leading some of our trainings of things that they’ve learned and sharing best practices, and really seeing that grow has been a huge win for us. And just hearing, like I said, every meeting with “Highspot, Highspot, Highspot”, “Make sure you go here, you’ve done this”, we have a place where they can share their wins – and that’s been a lot of their wins is being able to share a Pitch or being able to share a Digital Sales Room. And so hearing that and knowing okay, we’ve made an impact in this space, has been really rewarding for our team. SS: Now, as important as it is to have a single source of truth for your reps, it’s also important that you pair that with a really robust governance strategy. How are you focusing on improving content governance and how is that also helping to drive sales confidence? CH: It’s still something that I’m really trying to work on, it’s still one of our grow areas because when we initially mitigated from our first platform, we just took everything over. And so now we’re sitting here and that’s the one number I would like to see come up is that content governance because now we’re able to use the analytics that we’re getting from sales to feel like, what are they actually using, what things are just sitting here and not being utilized? We have made a beautiful platform where everything is really nicely organized and they can go to specific Spots for each one of our products because we have a really robust product portfolio. Everything is organized and there for them, and I think that has impacted their confidence in a positive way. But now we can use those analytics, we launched in November, we have those months behind us. So now we can actually start looking at what’s being utilized, how it’s being utilized, what’s winning. And I report that out to senior leadership on a monthly basis. What is our top content? What are they using? And how does that affect our win rates? And being able to see that has an impact on both marketing and sales. SS: Absolutely. Now, you’ve touched on it a little bit already. But I know a key way that you focus on empowering your teams is the use of Digital Rooms. What are some of the key ways that you’re leveraging Digital Rooms with your teams today? CH: Digital Rooms was one of our favorite features that we were going to get because, like I said, as an assistant, principal when you hand me papers it’s going to get lost on my desk. But now in this digital world, I can open that up, I can go back to it, I can share it. It provides all those opportunities because I know that there’s a statistic out there that says now most sales are being done online, and so it empowers our reps in that way to have the analytics and see the Digital Rooms. We actually had a rep just recently share how she’s customizing it per month and putting the top five things you should see this month, and honing in on the things that are happening in the product, the campaigns, the webinars that we may be releasing and really customizing her Digital Room in that way to share it with customers. To not just be a Pitch, but a tool that’s really partnering with them long-term, and sharing with them new things that were coming out and really being that lifelong partner, and not just trying to get that sale.That’s really who we are as an education company. And seeing that, and seeing how they’ve been utilizing those Digital Rooms has been probably one of the most exciting things. And building more templates for them so that they have those pieces, and then sharing templates that are landing really well in the market, and then being able to share that and have those pieces has been really beneficial to them. SS: Amazing. And how are you also then leveraging Digital Rooms to gather insights on what’s working and what’s not both for your sales team as well as your buyers? CH: Being able to have those analytics, really we were driving blind before, we didn’t know. And so now being able to pull those analytics that’s on the coordinator on my team works with me and we really review that. So that we know what to report out to sales, we know what to report out to marketing on what’s landing with customers. What's resonating with them? What can we make sure that we provide more of? So having all of those pieces and really being able to use that data and be data-driven in that way, it’s something that we never had before. So it’s really opened up a whole new avenue for us as far as the strategy goes and being able to share those analytics. SS: I love that. And you guys are seeing just absolutely. Amazing impact. You guys have seen some fantastic success with over 400k in closed won revenue in the first few months, and 10 million in open opportunities associated with Highspot. How did you drive these results? CH: I think that having that connection to our CRM and being able to see analytics like that has been huge. I think to be able to drive those results really started with a strong implementation. We actually started with a different coordinator leading the implementation efforts. He actually went on to a new adventure, super happy for him, but that meant that there was going to be a transition in that position, but we never lost traction. That implementation of Highspot was super important to us and making sure that they had the training that they need as the enablement team, they had the pieces that they need to really feel confident in the platform. So that when they were sharing, when they were pitching, that it was having an impact. And so that’s where I think, and we also paired it with some certifications and different trainings that were happening. And so with that came sharing new decks, sharing new scripts, and being able to see how they’re utilized and like what they’re sharing in those Digital Rooms based on the certifications of their trainings that we’ve just had has really made an impact for my team, but for sales to see what is impacting our market. SS: Fantastic. Cara, last question for you, I really appreciate all of the insights that you’ve shared. How are you continuing to build on the momentum that you’ve achieved so far to continue to help drive a lot of this business impact? And how are you planning on leveraging Highspot to help? CH: Highspot has amazing webinars. They have this new thing called Learning Circles where we can learn from other enablers. I’ve reached out to other enablers that are in the ed-tech space to hear, “What are you doing? What’s working?” I think instead of seeing them as competitors, but seeing them as collaborators is an important part of that strategy when you’re implementing a new tool to see hey, how are you doing this and how can I learn from you? Utilizing the chat features and the different things I can reach out to other people that are Highspot users, I think is really important. We want to make sure that this is something that continues to be sticky, that it continues to have a high recurring usage.We’ve seen such an impact already. We just want to make sure that now we’re leveraging best rep strategies. We’re allowing them to share big wins, that we’re highlighting those in our all-sales meetings. That we’re bringing that to the surface, that we’re really looking at that content, driving that engagement, utilizing those plays to be that one-stop shop to help them learn different strategies or different campaigns that we’re sharing.Really utilizing all of those pieces and driving usage and growth in the future I think is really going down to now that we’ve implemented it, now that we’re starting to see, now let’s go back and analyze the data and where can we take it to the next level. Because that’s really what I want to see. I want to see us be able to take it to that next level and really share best practices. Not just within in-house, but with other enablers as well. SS: I love that. And you participating in this is absolutely a fantastic first step in sharing it with other enablers. So thank you again, Cara, so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. CH: Yeah, of course. It was great being here today. 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 by McKinsey, organizations outperform their peers by 85 percent when prioritizing customer insights. So how can you leverage data and insights to drive strategic 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 Graham Killian, the senior director of global revenue operations at Talogy. Thank you for joining us, Graham. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Graham Kilian: Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here and looking forward to our chat today. I’ve been working in the go-to-market strategy and enablement space for about 12 years, starting out mostly in an integrated marketing capacity, doing a little bit of everything to drive business for a few different startups. And then that’s where I began with Talogy almost eight years ago where I’ve been incredibly fortunate and I’m very thankful for the opportunities I’ve had to learn, grow, and innovate as the company has grown rapidly and expanded across the globe. And, really reflecting on my experience for our conversation today, I actually found it really interesting how closely Highspot is tied to my career journey, going from a marketing generalist supporting a very small sales team in Indiana to now leading a global revenue operations team that supports hundreds of people within our go-to-market teams in over 20 countries worldwide.And, I say it’s interesting because Highspot came into my view through your team actually doing a very good job of practicing what they preach from the first touchpoint with one of your sales development reps sending me some thought leadership content about the rise of RevOps and the importance of sales enablement. And that was right around the time that my current boss – who’s now the VP of global revenue operations – was the vice president of sales, and I was in product marketing and we both started talking about how this was really a need for our organization.And, through the thought leadership content that your team was sending me, and as I began to engage with your sales reps, that content really started to become the foundation for essentially my thesis for what RevOps could be for Talogy and really what helped me make my business case to become a department of one to start RevOps. And so that was three years ago. In that time, we’ve now built out the team, we’ve restructured, I think the global RevOps team now is about 14 people. And it’s crazy, here we are today. SS: We’re glad that you’re here with us, Graham. Now, as mentioned in the introduction, gaining better insight into what works for your sales team was one of the key reasons why you initially implemented an enablement platform. How does Highspot help you take a data-driven approach to your enablement strategy? GK: Really it helps us in multiple ways. We look to ultimately use data to help us make more informed business decisions, right? There’s a lot of data across the business. There’s a lot of content, especially for a business like us. We’re the product of 16 acquisitions 16 different companies being brought together, a lot of different departments that have a different piece, whether it’s part of creating the actual sales-enabled content or creating guidance that goes into it and then ultimately actually having some firm data when it comes to what works and what doesn’t, so that we can better prioritize where we put our resources, where we allocate those resources. We’ve really used the data that we can gain from Highspot to be more strategic and more pragmatic in how we approach sales enablement, we’ve used it to really improve the experience that we can deliver to our clients. So some of the data that we really look at when we’re considering the effectiveness of tools like Highspot is feedback from our clients. So we run a win-loss interview program. Something that our product marketing team heads up and, before Highspot, we were seeing data coming in through those interviews telling us, really pointing to some of the typical symptoms of silo syndrome – the things that you can expect when you take 16 different companies that all have multiple departments and you put them together. And it was causing friction in the sales process and the customer experience, causing that pain that at times would cause buyers to not choose to buy from us, even if they liked the solution. And we’ve been able to leverage that feedback into what we do, and now we’re leveraging that feedback to validate that what we have done is actually working. SS: I love to hear that. And how has this data-driven approach helped you scale your enablement strategy across your global teams? GK: From the time that we really started looking at Highspot – and we’ve tried to seek feedback from our teams – so leveraging data on the very front end to understand what teams' needs were. So through surveys, through focus groups and interviews, really trying to put some hard data behind what our challenges are as a company globally, as well as then also understanding kind of the nuances that come with running a global business operating in ten different regions where there are cultural differences that may impact the way you sell and what’s really effective in your local market. We’ve done a lot of work on the front end to make sure that we’re understanding that from our teams, and we’re also collecting feedback now that we have rolled this out to our global teams after we’ve implemented and we’ve had some time with them actually using it getting that feedback from them to see what’s working. How is it improving efficiency and effectiveness across the business, and ultimately, how are we solving for the classic problems that all of the businesses like us have? Which is content is difficult to find across the business. It’s siloed in a ton of different areas, it lacks visibility. So there’s a lot of great content out there that people could be using but they don’t know where to find it when they need it – that just in time surfacing of the content that you really need. And then also, very importantly, is that content lacks guidance. How do you actually use that content to be effective in the sales process, position yourself as an expert as you’re selling, and really build the trust that it takes? When you’re not in commodity goods, we are solution providers. And so solution selling takes another level of that really good guidance where you can put the context and the content together and really create an effective influential experience. SS: Now, Graham, I know global expansion has been a key strategic initiative for your business. What are some of the challenges businesses might face though, when trying to expand globally? GK: Yeah, there really are a wide variety of challenges that you run into. So we are a global business, as I mentioned, we acquired 16 companies across the globe, so we’re in over 20 different countries. So with that comes a wide variety of different stakeholders, so scalability becomes incredibly important when you’re a lean mean enablement team, and you need to be able to support a very broad range of stakeholders with varying needs. For instance, every week we have sales enablement content in ten different languages to be able to support our teams in their local markets. So being able to make sense of that, being able to make sure that, your local teams have access to the content they need, but that you don’t create noise for your other sales teams that really don’t need to see content in Dutch, for instance. Very rarely does our America’s team need to see that content. And so being able to create a curated sales enablement experience becomes very important when you’re dealing with the challenges of there’s a lot of content to begin with and then you multiply that by language needs, it becomes exponentially greater to harness all of that content and really centralize it into one place. For instance, we also have a lot of different siloed repositories where this content exists. Coming from different companies, from different departments, we have over 20 different content repositories aggregated into Highspot. So when you think about organizational change and trying to create efficiency it can be really a challenge to try to get folks who have maybe been doing things a certain way for a long time to change what they’re doing. It can be a big lift to try to consolidate 20 different SharePoints into one. But with a tool like Highspot, we don’t have to disrupt what people are used to manage content behind the scenes and allows us to aggregate everything into one central place for our consumers – our salespeople, our go-to-market teams – to really drive the efficiency for them without having to create a huge project to consolidate everything on the back end. So that’s been really beneficial.Dealing with, you know, the cultural differences and being able to account for those things is certainly something you deal with at a global scale. And so being able to create resources at the global level for scalability purposes, but then also being able to support those teams with localization, which is really where we moved the needle in sales and in our local markets is really important. At times we might use Sales Plays to launch something globally, but then work with our teams to figure out where we might need to localize those things – where we need to make sure that we’re providing content pricing in their local denominations and their local currencies – and that becomes really important.And then the last thing I think I’ll mention, which is probably one of the biggest challenges, is driving consistency and standardization, right? And that goes hand in hand with scalability. It’s very hard to scale what you’re doing from a sales enablement and sales training standpoint when you have eight to 10 different sales teams and they’re all used to doing things in different ways. And there really isn’t a whole lot of consistency in how sales enablement and training have been delivered historically. Really using Highspot as our conduit for this we’ve been able to start that process of standardizing the way that we frame our actual sales enablement and our training, the way that we deliver it to our teams and then the way that we actually analyze it by now having data. It’s very difficult to understand the effectiveness of a program when you don’t really have data in the first place. And so going back to the first question about how we’re leveraging data, really understanding. How our global teams are accessing and using content has become incredibly valuable, and that’s one of the things that we’re most excited about as we build more data about what our internal teams are viewing and ultimately what they’re sending to our clients and how they’re using content to influence the sales process. Very exciting stuff and only something that’s possible with a tool like this when you’re dealing with global scale like we are. SS: I’m sure a lot of companies can relate with that. Graham, you have seen some fantastic results since implementing Highspot, including a 95 percent increase in rep confidence and a significant increase in efficiency. What are the key components of your strategy that led to these results? GK: I think the answer to your question really lies in the close collaboration that really needs to happen in order to be successful with implementing something like Highspot. The whole goal of Highspot is to solve the challenges that your team is facing and also be able to bring together cross-functional teams, demolish those silos, [and] break down the sales barriers that there often are. And a lot of times that means being able to collaborate more closely with cross-functional teams than you typically do. And a lot of what we were able to do, as I mentioned earlier, was collaborate with our sales teams on the front end to really understand what their needs were, collaborate with the content owners and the guidance owners to understand what their needs and their challenges were when trying to deliver that content to our sales teams, and then really be able to use Highspot to bring that together and to be the solution to many of those challenges. And really nailing those things down with the sales team on the front end allowed us to be very focused in what we prioritize when we created Highspot and in the design of Highspot and ultimately, I think that’s what has led to reps being more confident that they have the latest and greatest at their fingertips at all times. And a lot of it also goes back to that visibility as they at least now feel like they have visibility into everything. And they also know that they have the team –  this cross-functional collaborative team of content owners across the business – that are focused on maintaining that repository for them and ensuring that it is truly, accessible. A single source of truth for the organization. SS: Now, you’ve touched on it, but a major driver behind your success are Sales Plays. What are some of your best practices for utilizing plays, and how has this helped drive impact? GK: Yeah, sales plays are great, they really are. They are something that really brings more simplicity and cohesion to things that can often feel nebulous and complex and even disjointed when you’re bringing together all of the different puzzle pieces across the business from different departments that it takes to actually create a complete comprehensive sales enablement package for your team. So Sales Plays are great with that, they really helped foster that collaboration with cross-functional teams involved in both the content and the guidance creation and help bring it all together in one place. I really love the simplicity of Highspot’s best practice framework of what to know, say, show, and do. And that is really something that we have adopted now as a framework for enablement as a business. So when I work with our consulting team or our product team, we talk about, which assets fit into which of those know, say, show, and do categories. And then we bring that all together into a Sales Play that’s organized in that way. And it’s just so simple that it makes sense to our teams. And so we actually just used that framework for collaboration on a very large global initiative. We just launched a new solution, our in-view leadership solution suite earlier this year, which was a huge cross-functional effort across the globe. A ton of work from a ton of teams went into it. And to make sense of all of that, to deliver it to our go-to-market teams in a way that isn’t overwhelming, is a challenge. And we used a global Sales Play to be able to bring together all of that content and context into one place. And that is how we launched it internally. We launched it through a Sales Play that was in our internal webinars as we were explaining what the solution was. We were also helping our teams understand where they can find the resources that they need. So much of this, like if you sit people down in a 1-hour webinar and give them a bunch of information, they’re going to retain a very small portion of that. So the main thing we try to train our teams on is where they can find those resources when they need that just-in-time ability to surface the content you need to be the expert in real-time when you’re having a conversation with your client and avoid the ever dreaded, “I’ll get back to you with that.” Even when it’s something that’s a seemingly simple answer, it can kill a sales process. And so Sales Plays are really good about making sure a salesperson has clear, curated guidance from end-to-end of everything that they need in a given selling situation. And it also helps because they know that there’s one place they need to go to find everything. And if they can’t find it, there’s usually guidance there to tell them either it’s coming, or who they can go to for help with that. So it’s a really comprehensive way of enabling a team, but also giving them a narrow segmented focus of where they’re selling and not allowing them to get lost in the noise of other solutions in the process. So we’ve actually expanded the use of Highspot globally right before that launch so that we could get that Sales Play out to everybody. And it’s really been, we’ve had great feedback, fantastic feedback from our in-market teams. And the early results and the feedback we’ve seen leads me to say that it’s really been one of the most successful product launches in my time at Talogy.SS: I love that. And I’d love that one of the areas that you’re expanding into, or you’re in the process of expanding into, is around Pitching and Digital Rooms. How are you planning to leverage Pitch capabilities in the year ahead to continue building momentum with your teams? GK: So Pitching is an awesome feature, it really is, and something that our salespeople have often dreamed of and didn’t think was possible. And so, there’s been a lot of early excitement from the sales teams that have gotten it. We’ve had great results with early adoption of pitching just because our sales teams love the abundantly professional deliverables that you can send to your client. And making that sales process easier, of course, avoiding a ton of emails and attachments and trying to send a client, whether it’s a recording of a call, or if it’s a pitch deck, that’s maybe too large and you can’t even send it via email. It solves a lot of just the basic problems that our teams have. And so that’s where driving the adoption of it hasn’t really been too much of a challenge. It is something that is change management, it’s different behavior than a lot of salespeople were used to. But once you can train them on it and get them more comfortable with it, they really love the capabilities of what they can do. And we’ve seen a lot of this adoption of Pitching when it comes to how we present proposals and RFPs. If there isn’t a restriction on how the RFP can be delivered to the client, we build out a nice branded Digital Room, we host the actual proposal document with all of the requirements as well as any of the supplemental materials they might need, sometimes we add a personalized video. And it really personalizes the buying experience and we do believe that’s going to lead to more wins, right? At this point, our teams are really excited about what they’ve been able to deliver and then the insights that they get when they send it. One of the things that will drive salespeople and sales leaders crazy is once you’ve sent that email, what happens? I spent all this time putting together the perfect pitch, did they even look at it? That’s one of the questions that’s always burning in your mind.Our SDR team uses it for prospecting, a great way to use Pitching capability. So when you’ve sent several emails to targeted prospects and you’re trying to prioritize, who do you follow up with when no one’s actually responded to you? Leveraging those Pitch analytics that just pop up to the top to say that so and so just viewed this piece of content, it just signals that’s a timely time to reach out. And so we really leverage it in that way as well, just to help prioritize where our salespeople spend their time every day, making sure that they are reaching out to people that might be warm, or maybe you did send a proposal several months ago and that client has gone silent. And then you see something pop up in your email, a notification that they’ve re-engaged. That’s a good time to maybe reach out and see if they need anything. And so we’ve had some really good experience now and some good success stories from salespeople who have had that exact thing happen and made that reach out and the buyers like, “Oh, that’s actually great time that you’ve reached out, we’re actually ready to move forward in the decision-making process.” So it’s a great tool. SS: Last question for you, Graham. How do you plan to leverage innovation and enablement like AI to continue to expand globally and engage your clients at scale in the year ahead?GK: The rise of AI is certainly something that everyone has their eyes on. Highspot is really proving to be a leader in this space, and so I’ve been reading a lot of the thought leadership content, attending a lot of the webinars to stay up on what the options are, and trying to understand really what’s going be the best fit for our business. Where do we start with implementing some of these AI-enabled features, and then what can we maybe grow into over time, ’cause I think that’s always important. Implementing newer technologies, especially with things that are really on the cutting edge like AI. Some of the features in Highspot that I see immediate utility for are things like Instant Answers. So, being able to go to the search bar – intuitively type in a question that would normally go in an email to one of our consultants or someone in our R&D team – being able to just plug that into the search bar with a question mark, and then actually returning an answer that’s based upon.Our content that’s in our system, I think is really important, right? When there are tools like ChatGPT out there, where you could have salespeople going and trying to ask a question and getting an answer back and not knowing if it’s factually accurate, I love the fact that our team can go into Highspot, ask a question at least about our content, about what we do as service providers, and be able to get an answer that’s just based upon the content that we have at Highspot is incredible. It’ll lead to a lot of time savings. I think it’ll lead to some just natural upskilling of our team. When they have a quick question, they can get a quick answer. So it almost becomes like a knowledge check in that way. And then there are some additional exciting features that I know Highspot has, like AI knowledge checks, like AI coaching that are all things we hope to take advantage of in the long run. I think other features where AI and where these innovations can help us go back to what, you know, I talked about earlier being so critical, which is really helping our sales team when the sales process is so nuanced, [and] when there is such a vast pool of content that our sales team can use to position themselves as experts in the sales process. Using tools that can help them surface the right content at the right time is so critical. And so tools like Highspot and being able to actually recommend the content to salespeople, depending upon where they’re at in the sales process, depending upon certain attributes that they’re tracking related to an opportunity in Salesforce is really powerful stuff when it comes to helping your sales team efficiently get to what they need. And then being able to effectively use it with their client to influence the buying decision. SS: Graham, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and your insights. GK: Thank you very much. It was my 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.

A study conducted by Sales Enablement Pro found that 37% of leaders consider increasing revenue while minimizing costs for their employees to be one of their greatest challenges. So how can you maximize the impact of your investments while building your sales tech stack?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 Tiffany Jones, the vice president of sales strategy and field operations at HackerOne. Thank you for joining us, Tiffany. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.Tiffany Jones: Thank you for having me. I’m Tiffany Jones, I am at HackerOne. I lead strategy operations and the enablement team at HackerOne. But I’ve been in the space for almost 15 years now. Before HackerOne, I was at DocuSign leading operations there from a hundred million through IPO to well over a billion in revenue. SS: I am excited to have you here today and you obviously have extensive experience as a leader in go-to-market strategy and operations. Based on that experience, can you tell us about some of the challenges facing go-to-market teams today? TJ: Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges that we face from a go-to-market team perspective is how we think about growth in this new economy. Pre-COVID it was a pretty standard path that we were growing quarter over quarter, year over year. COVID had a ton of disruptions to that process. There were some big ups for some companies and some big downs for others. Really in the tech SaaS space, there was a lot of ups. And so right now, from a go-to-market perspective, we’re all just struggling to figure out, like, how do you repeat that year-over-year growth and get back to that same equilibrium. SS: Absolutely. And tell us about the role of revenue operations in this current landscape. How can RevOps teams help organizations really overcome some of these new challenges that we’re seeing, particularly in the growth sector? TJ: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think a lot of times the revenue operations part of the organization gets swept under the rug when it comes to thinking about the solutions for this, but, in my experience, we're front and center, and we play a role in how we think about the teams being organized and how they’re incentivized and building out those structures so that we can get back to that growth level, as well as with the tech stack that’s necessary, and the sales process that goes along with that to amp up the productivity of the sales team so we can get well-oiled machines with the right people in seat in the right roles to achieve those results. SS: I love that. And I think, as you stated, a key focus for a lot of operations leaders is really driving sales productivity. What are some of the key ways that RevOps can help businesses really optimize sales productivity? TJ: Yeah, the one that always comes to mind is systems. But there are a number of things for me that really help optimize productivity. There’s the territory design that you end up deploying in your organization. There’s the sales process that you ask each of your individual sellers within your organization to go through. And then there’s the tech staff that they actually operate in for that sales process. Aligning all three of those things that you have, when you say productivity, you’re not just talking about squeezing as many dollars out of an individual person as humanly possible and treating people more like machines every day, but really like how do you optimize their experience as sellers so that you’re asking them to do what’s most beneficial for not only themselves, but the company with the right tools at the right time, like really optimizing their experience? I find it to be really, really important. SS: Absolutely. And, obviously one of our core audiences is enablement and sales productivity is absolutely top of mind for many enablement leaders as well. In your opinion, how can revenue operations and enablement partner together to improve sales productivity?TJ: I think it all really starts with the sales process, thinking through what you actually want your sales team to do on a day-to-day basis, like the way that you want them to interact with customers, with other people internally, and with your tools in Sprint Center, and that’s something that the operations and enablement teams need to partner on in order for that to be something that you roll out and the sales team adopts, because you need it to not only work from a theoretical perspective, but you need the backend architecture of those systems to work together to deliver that experience for them to operate in.I have the benefit in my current role of Managing both an enablement team and operations team. And it’s been amazing this quarter as we put together our key projects for the year to see how those are intertwined from a process go-to-market systems perspective and the sales process that we want to layer on top of that and how those project plans really are on top of each other. It’s not, A waterfall effect where someone’s working on this and the next team takes it over. They very much are partnered hand in hand to deliver an optimized solution for the sales team. SS: And you talked a lot about the process component but there’s also a lot of kind of joint shared ownership around the tech stack. I think that’s a really critical area of partnership between enablement and revenue operations. They, I, At least in my experience, are often trying to make sure that they’re building and optimizing that for their go-to-market teams. What are some of the key components from your perspective of an effective tech stack in today’s sales landscape?TJ: Oh, it’s a difficult question. I feel like the landscape is ever-changing right now. There’s so much consolidation going on that there’s a constant evaluation, at least in my team, from my perspective of: are we using the right tools for the right purposes? I think when we talk about evaluating the tech stack, it’s not all a consolidation game.I don’t think the end goal is to get to one or two systems that limit the number of clicks or logins they have, but essentially using the best of every product in a way that makes sense from a systems architecture perspective. And I keep saying architecture because I think it’s such an important part of when you have a successful sales system running. So, how are you clicking through to some of your tools? Are you doing it out of a home base or are you asking people to go back into a single sign-on tool and navigate between different tabs at different points in the day? I think you get the enablement aspect, which is here are the best of these tools.Here’s how I want you to send emails, or to record calls, or to follow up on, and send out material to your end customers. But without the operations team, those can become very siloed events. And you need that operations team in the background, thinking about how they tie all of that information and data together so that the sales team is experiencing a much more optimized way that they’re working with the tools SS: Absolutely. And this might lead to. Lead into the next question a little bit, but I’d love to understand, what are some of your best practices for evaluating solutions to identify the right ones that also support your overarching go-to-market strategy? TJ: Yeah, in a perfect world, I would love to do an RFP on everything that we want to do and take a broad swath look at what’s really out there in the market.It’s rarely what happens. Sometimes we try to pull back and do a little bit of that, but from a best practice perspective, whenever we’re presented with a need for something, I ask two questions. The first one is, do I have an existing tool that solves this and at what level does it solve it? And does that solution meet my sellers where they’re at and what they’re trying to do? And the second question is so important. It’s very easy to answer the first one. Again, there’s a lot of consolidation going on in the tech stack world for sales, and so you probably have a tool that does whatever your team is asking to go look at right now. But is it meeting the sellers where they’re at?Is it in the space that they want to do that activity at? Does it fit into that sales process flow appropriately? And I think that key part of the evaluation really helps to build an optimal text stack for everyone to use. And so it might be that they need to do that while they’re sitting inside of their CRM.And so because that’s where they’re always doing it, it makes sense to have something that either is embedded there or is a tool that the CRM already offers, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. They’re doing it on their phone or one-off or in Slack or Teams. And meeting them where they’re at, I think, is the, is a really important aspect of making sure that you have a toolset that your team is actually using.SS: Oh, absolutely. And how does an enablement platform like Highspot strategically fit into your sales tech stack? TJ: For us, it’s a central point of information, right? We’re using it to collect information, distribute information, both internally as well as externally, as well as using the learning module to test that information.So it’s very much an information hub for us. We use it to again, leak out to other tools that we have or bring things from those tools in as that central point. But we need that, repository is the wrong word because it’s so much more than that, but we need that centralized point.For a long time, CRM was supposed to be that centralized point. And that was where the industry was really going from a tech perspective. But it’s just not where our salespeople are. The CRM is an afterthought of filling in information. So more and more we’re finding. That pane of glass that’s more like Highspot where the information itself is where our salespeople want to be. And that’s where we see it as part of our tech stack today. SS: I love that. How do you measure the impact of your technology investments on your strategic business initiatives?  TJ: The measurement one is always so tricky for me. I don’t have a great answer for that because it’s not as simple when I buy tech stack pieces, there’s always an ROI calculator everyone has and they look at, and they show me all the metrics of the time saved by my sales team and or like I’ll remove this tool and so on overall cheaper costs and all of those are true and they’re a good way to measure.That’s the ROI that we’re getting and it’s great for talking with my procurement team on. But the reality of the measurement is how much is my team in it. How much are they actually using it? How many logins are they doing? How many edits are they making in the tool? Are they doing it because I’m forcing them into it?Because I put a mandatory course in? Or are they doing it because it’s where they want to be? And again, a great example is more and more for our culture at HackerOne, Slack is where everyone wants to be. And so I know that if I put things in that medium, that I’ll have a higher use of it. And that’s what I mean when evaluating, like, where people are at.I’m only going to get the ROI on that tool that I’m buying if someone’s using it. And I know that they’re using it if it’s integrated in Slack because that’s where they’re at every day. And so that usage is really what’s the most important metric for me when thinking about, am I buying, or are you? Do I have usable tools on the system?SS: Absolutely. And that’s definitely a common thread that we’ve heard when we talk to other operations leaders, for sure. Last question for you, Tiffany, how do you think technology innovations like AI will continue to impact the sales landscape? And do you have any advice for other leaders on how to keep pace with these innovations?TJ: AI might be the death of me and my role sooner rather than later. It’s interesting. Everyone has a copilot, everyone is using AI, there are some that are quick in front of it, and some are better than others, but it’s just the reality of every tool that we’re using, and 90 percent of the emails that I get on tech stack related things are around how this AI is going to make my team so much smarter, they’re going to spend less time doing research, they’re going to have these really personable emails that are sent out. The reality is if everyone’s using the same AI tools for the same things, they’re not like envelope emails are going to start to look the same. And it might work for a little bit, but it’s not going to be, it’s not gonna be the long-term benefit we see of AI. And so when I think about AI and how it’s popping up in all of our tool sets, what I’m really focused on is what each tool's AI does for my sales team and through, again, similar to Tech Stack, like how do I want them using it? At what point in the sales process is that the. The well-thought-through AI has the best advice or information to help support them. And being really intentional about which AIs they’re using at what point in time. And still pushing them to have that personable impact on what they’re doing. If it’s sending an email let it write some of that for you. But then don’t absolve them of doing the work of the research and double checking. Because I think that’s where it’s going to start to fail a lot of companies and a lot of leaders where they rely too heavily on it. Insult. I think in the next two years, people are going to have an operations team, like a full-time Co-pilot management role, or analyst role, just to make sure you’re curating those Co-pilots to not conflict with each other and to have the right answers. I think advice for other leaders outside of maybe getting in front of a role like that open is to be thoughtful about why is your team using that AI component. What value is it giving them at that point in time? And do you have another AI somewhere else that you have to think about? Is it going to give conflicting information or could someone use them differently? Or two different roles use them and end up in a spot where you’re now, at odds with each other within your own organization. So I do think you have to start to look at those AIs as almost their own tech stack within the tech stack and be really thoughtful about your approach. SS: Very interesting and amazing advice for our audience. Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciated it.TJ: Yeah, this was great. Thank you so much. 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 Forrester, 77% of marketing leaders report that buyers expect more personalized interactions. So how can you align your marketing strategy with the ever-changing buyer’s journey?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 Eric Andrews, the vice president of growth marketing at TriNet. Thank you for joining Eric, I’d love for you to tell us all about yourself, your background, and your role. Eric Andrews: Thanks for having me, it's nice to be here. I’ve been working in marketing for about 30 years, mostly on the client side. I’ve been at Trinet now for about two and a half years and I lead growth marketing, which, for us, includes digital marketing, demand generation, marketing enablement, and customer marketing. I’m a firm believer in the strong connection between demand and growth enablement because, we spend a lot of money trying to generate demand, and I think we’re sub-optimizing those investments if we’re not providing the content and tools to sales to help them progress and close the leads that we’re generating for them. SS: Fantastic. We are excited to have you here with us, Eric. Again, thank you so much for joining, and you have a unique role because you oversee both customer marketing and enablement. So from your perspective, what is the value of uniting these into one department and one strategy? EA: It’s also a really interesting fit, and they go together well for a couple of reasons. First, we work with customers to support new sales through the creation of case studies, customer videos, referrals, as well as references. Being able to work with the customers to sign them up to be referrals or to make referrals or be references is really important. And then second, I think enablement can support the upsell work that we do with CRMs to ensure that they have the right messaging and tools to support that motion. SS: Amazing, and as you mentioned, as a marketing and enablement leader, one of your key focuses is aligning with the buyer journey to improve engagement. Why is this a key focus for your team in the current landscape? EA: We all know that buyers are increasingly delaying engaging with sellers until they’re deeper into the buying process. That means more of the buying process, or the journey is covered by marketing. Our goal is to try to meet prospects where they are and then provide the content and tools and experiences they need to keep them moving down the buying path. And that doesn’t stop, once they meet with sales, right? We want to continue to provide relevant information to prospects either directly or through the salesperson right through that entire process. SS: It is absolutely critical. And this desire to drive better engagement is one of the key factors that led you to implement Highspot. How can an enablement platform help you streamline the buyer’s journey? EA: It happens in a couple of ways. First, Highspot has helped us organize and curate our enablement so that sales reps can find the content they need. And they can share it quickly, right? It’s all about trying to take time out of the buying process and make it as simple as possible for our prospects.So for us, we built a very consistent portfolio of content across our verticals and our personas, and that means that reps increasingly know exactly where to go to get the information they need and can respond to buyer questions and buyer requests really quickly. And then second Digital Sales Rooms, using Digital Sales Rooms to share all that content means that the buying team has just one place to go for everything they need.And if you’ve ever been involved in procuring some sort of a solution, it’s really helpful when all of that content is in one place as opposed to having to open up, dozens of emails and click through links to see, to find that one asset that you were looking for. So we think the digital sales room is another way that we’re just streamlining the process and making it easier for our prospects to, come to a decision. SS: Now, to better align with the buyer’s journey, you actually reimagined your content strategy. It recently drove an improvement in content governance. Can you tell us more about your content strategy and its impact on the buyer’s journey? EA: Our content strategy is built on a couple of premises. First is quality over quantity, right? Marketers, we tend to measure success by the pound, right? I must be doing a good job. Look at all the assets I created. We developed a bill of materials that includes only about a dozen assets. And that would be for each of our go-to-market motions, right?But it’s a dozen assets. They’re mapped to the buyer’s and seller’s journey. Our goal is not It’s not to grow those assets, but rather to make sure that bond is of the highest possible quality, that it’s up to date, and that it’s 100 percent complete for every product, every vertical, and every persona.The second premise is around consistency. Within our bills and materials, we ensure consistency of messaging, value propositions, and voice. That sounds obvious, but when you have different people and different teams creating content, it’s not a given that the messaging is going to be consistent across All of the assets that you’re providing to sales.And we also strive for consistency across those bills of materials. So for example, every bill of material has a battle card. All our battle cards are structured in the exact same way. So if you want to know how to handle objections, it’s always on page two of the battle card. In fact, it’s always the lower right-hand corner.I think that consistency plays an important part in both helping sellers on board faster, but also giving them the confidence that they can find the answer to a question that a prospect is asking. They can find it quickly. It’s not, “I think I can find that.” They know exactly where to go to get the answer because it’s so consistent.And then the last thing is we try to be more data-driven than anecdotally driven. I think if you work in enablement, everybody’s, gotten the call from the seller in Columbus who says all the sellers need this one asset. I’m telling you, everybody needs it.And you’re like, okay, great. You build it. And then you find out the only person who used it is the guy in Columbus. So, if an asset in our bomb isn’t working, we will swap it out. Our goal is to make sure with a limited set of assets, each one is successful, but we really do try to measure success based on utilization, not based on any sort of anecdotal information. SS: You’ve mentioned that digital rooms have been a game changer for your reps, and you’ve been able to drive an increase in buyer engagement using digital rooms. What are some of your best practices for leveraging these digital rooms? EA: I think probably two, three, three things, we want every opportunity that is engaged with sales to have a Digital Sales Room. It should be at the deal level and everyone involved in that deal should be invited to that room. Second, all assets that are shared should be available in that room. And by the way, that can include conversations, if you’re using Gong or other conversation recording tools for the prospect, we want that digital sales room to be the place to go for all of the content associated with that deal.And then finally, once the deal is won ownership of that deal room should be moved to the onboarding team, and that way, they can minimize the amount of repeat discovery they have to do with the client. It’s really making sure that the deal room stays right through the life of the client. SS: We’ve talked a lot about buyer engagement, and I know some of the other key business metrics you focus on are improving win rate and time to close. What are some of the key ways you measure your impact on those metrics, and how do you leverage Highspot to help? EA: We absolutely, Look at revenue or, ACV we go annual contract value is an important measure from a marketing standpoint, but with respect to enablement in the high spot we’re looking at win rate.We’re also looking at time to close and trying to speed up we strongly believe that having really high-quality, consistent content tools that are easily accessible by reps and easily shared with prospects is going to have an impact on both win rates and time to close. Measuring that is challenging, right?We look at a number of things. We look at the Make sure the number of reps that are on Highspot and how frequently they’re visiting. The content utilization, both internally and externally. The number of deals Digital Sales Rooms connected. And we look at all of that against win rates and time to close.And I think going forward, there’s a real opportunity here to start to correlate specific assets at specific points in the buyer journey and how they impact outcomes, and that’s a big data, AI, machine learning kind of exercise that I think, successful companies are increasingly investing in and are going to, it’s going to make a big difference. SS: Amazing traction on that front. What are some of the key results you’ve been able to achieve since implementing Highspot? And do you have any recent wins you can share? EA: Sure. I can’t get into numbers, but the one thing I will share is that I think Highspot is really helping to speed up the onboarding process for our sellers and getting them to full productivity more quickly.And again, I think it goes back to what we’ve already talked about. A single place to go for high-quality curated content that’s organized in a way that’s easy to find, that’s consistent, so that you know where to go to get answers. And I think we’re seeing that’s really helping our reps get up to speed quickly.  SS: Very cool, Eric. Thank you. Last question for you, as you continue to evolve your strategy, how are you planning to leverage innovation in AI to grow the impact of your efforts? EA: Yeah I’m super excited about some of the AI that Highspot is building into the platform. Two areas that I’m really excited about are The real-time coaching I think that’s going to be absolutely incredibly helpful in helping our sellers just in the moment, be able to. Course correct, if you will, or optimize the time that they’re spending with a prospect. The second is, I talked about it a little bit earlier, which is this notion of understanding the next best action based on, looking across all the opportunities and all the content, being able to surface, in real-time for a rep, share this asset now, I think also, and again, it, it’s all about trying to serve the prospect better to help them along their buying journey. And anything we can do to serve them better, I think is going to help in the end. SS: Eric, thank you so much. I really greatly appreciate your time.  EA: Good. 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.

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.

Learning in the flow of work leads to a more engaged and more confident workspace. According to research from LinkedIn, those who spend time learning at work are 39% more likely to feel productive and successful. So how can you equip, train, and coach your teams without interrupting productivity? 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 Chris Herter, the director of sales enablement at Paycor. Thank you for joining us, Chris. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Chris Herter: I’m happy to be here, thanks for inviting me. My background is pretty diverse, I didn’t grow up in sales enablement. The majority of my career has been in sales as a seller and a leader of small market up to enterprise, [selling] hardware, software, and managed services. After I was done with a quota-carrying role, I transitioned more into organizational support where I spent some time in leadership development and even in marketing. But for the last six and a half years I’ve been leading the sales enablement and training team here at Paycor. SS: We’re excited that you’re here. And now that you are in enablement, why do you think that enablement From your perspective, is a strategic imperative for businesses today, and how does having a unified enablement platform really help you to maximize the impact of your strategy? CH: I feel – and I think this is probably a popular opinion – but without enablement, there’s no dot connection between the company’s overall strategy and sales execution. You can build a best-in-class training program, which we do, and you can have a robust tech stack, which we do, but even if you provide all of those resources, you need enablement to really provide the application to the execution. It’s not just setting those things out there on a shelf and expecting the execution to happen. We’ve got to make sure that there is that application piece of the training that ties back to the strategy. And I think one of the things that often gets overlooked that it’s worth talking about here is we have to create a better seller experience. So we’re competing for talent, just like we’re competing against our competitors for market share. So enable and enablement, if we can help streamline processes. Refine messaging, find ways to reduce drag, and really help sellers see those more wins in revenue, we’re going to see less seller attrition. So improving that seller experience and making their lives easier and more efficient, is very important to us. And so if we tie that back to the unified platform, we can enable in real-time. And for us, that means more pushing and less pulling. It gives us the opportunity to have more speed to action and we can do it at scale. And one of the things I think about too, is we just want to reduce that seller drag. So we’re becoming too large of an organization now to have personalized training and do a lot of in-person events or one-to-one coaching. Our platform really makes it easier to communicate and deliver our key sales plays that align to our top initiatives. And it gives us a place to, in a space to house all of those things where the sellers can spend less time looking and finding for the sales plays and the tools and collaterals and spend more time hunting and winning. And I think some companies just have an intranet where these things are a repository and sellers have to find and look and try to utilize [it]. But with a unified platform, we can go to one place and one source of truth for all of the things that we need to be effective. SS: I love that. And I’ve tried the intranet things. They don’t work quite as well, especially for sellers. In the past, what challenges have you faced when trying to build an enablement strategy that engaged your reps? And how did you overcome those challenges? CH: There were plenty, how long is the interview? We could spend a lot of time here, but if I had to boil it down to a few, I would say we were relying on a lot of inefficient ways to communicate the strategy. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? And what are we going to achieve? From there, we didn’t have the best way to build a playbook to make those things happen. We were using emails, PowerPoint decks, “the intranet”, if you will, that company repository that I mentioned, and those things were not efficient and not effective. So our sellers just didn’t use it. And what you got was a lot of disparity, a lot of rogues, a lot of sellers, trying through trial and error and so to get engagement, we had to do a lot of workshops and human interaction, a lot of face-to-face, and so it just becomes harder to do that when our Salesforce growth. Is far outpacing our sales enablement growth. We couldn’t do that one to one. And so we had to take that a step further and then through the platform, we weren’t able to measure efficacy or tie our efforts to our results. We had no line of sight to what was working. What content was working, what contents were even being used, and I wouldn’t say we fully overcame those challenges, but we’ve made a ton of progress, and it’s just happening through consistency and staying the course with our strategy and not deviating it. If we see a dip in usage, or we see a dip in content consumption, we don’t panic. We just know that our strategy is working. We might have to put our foot on the gas in different ways. But I think for us, we really tried to think about simplification, and with Highspot as our jumping-off point, we’ve really embraced that simplification of what to know, what to do, what to say, and what to show. We started with that and we’re sticking with it. And so our sales reps get used to that and we don’t throw them any zingers. They know that this is the play. This is the initiative. This is the stack of mail that we’re going after. And when they get used to that enablement sort of output, it becomes easier for them to engage in it. And then, more importantly, It becomes easier for them to execute on it and drive results through it. So I would say just the consistency of having one way to deliver and one source of truth for our reps to go to has been helpful for us. SS: You guys are really driving that consistent execution across your entire sales team. It’s amazing. CH: Thank you. SS: Now, prior to Highspot, I believe you all leveraged a different platform and even had some siloed solutions for both equipping and training your teams. What was the impetus that drove you all to make a change to unify your approach? CH: I would say, me taking on the role and having more line of sight to this. I can’t take all the credit, but everything was messy and we didn’t know what we didn’t know. Our sales enablement platform, as I mentioned earlier, was more of a content repository and it eventually just became a dumping ground for everything that we created internally and externally. And while we had the best intentions, it just wasn’t being used, it wasn’t being used properly, and it wasn’t being used effectively. And from an instructional sales training and company learning standpoint, we had even more platforms. So we sell an LMS platform. So we have our homegrown system that we sell. Through the solution that we were trying to use. And we had another bolted-on solution for new hire training. And then we had a sales enablement platform over to the side. So whenever I was taking on this role, I’m looking around wow, we’ve got three to four places that we’re sending our sellers, sending our reps. And none of those places are talking to each other, nothing is updated simultaneously. At the end of the day, we weren’t accomplishing what our ultimate goal was, which was making our sellers better and making them more efficient. In fact, I feel like whenever we looked at this, we started to study it and take a closer look. I feel like what we noticed that we were creating unnecessary barriers for them to have to overcome just to do their job, just by sending them to multiple places. And I think that ties in really closely with our value prop at Paycor, it’s a unified solution, one single pane of glass. And with Highspot it’s, a similar approach, a similar value prop for how we use it too. SS: Now, I get this question a lot, especially when I’m talking to enablement practitioners in the industry, and they really want advice on gaining buy in from leadership. How did you go about getting buy-in from leadership for making this change? CH: I wanted to look for other internal champions. I knew that I would have a tough hill to climb if I was going to go about this on my own and try to find a budget – and budget isn’t the biggest issue, most of the time it’s change management. So I partnered with Rachel Neely, who is our manager of communications, and she was struggling from a content governance perspective. As I mentioned earlier, It was a repository. It was a dumping ground. Once I started partnering with her she was saying, I really need a tool that’s going to help me with communication, it’s going to help me with content governance. And so it’s funny, I’m looking for something that’s going to help enable our sellers and, have a learning platform. We combined our efforts and we both knew about Highspot, but we had our own initiatives, and then, as we started to work closer together and combined our efforts, we were able to tie those efficiency gains together. We’re able to look at different business results that we could achieve by partnering together, improving seller experience, and removing multiple platforms. That was when it was all starting to come together. But, even after that, there was still some hesitancy from a prioritization standpoint. I think everybody said, Hey, this is great, it’s nice to have, but I think what really sealed the deal for us and where I saw some eyebrows raised and I started to see some internal buy-in was whenever I saw how Highspot, your sales team, was using digital rooms to sell to us. And that was a game changer because we were able to say, “Wow, this is how Highspot is using their own platform. This is how they’re drinking their own champagne.” And we were very impressed by that. And it was really talking to your sales team and your sales leaders and connecting them with our sales leaders to find out how they were using it. That was really how we were starting to get more people to buy in and more people to see, “Wow, this is not just a learning management system, this is not just a content repository, there’s so much that we can do from a communication perspective, enablement perspective, learning perspective, sales perspective.” And as we got that internal buy-in. We could bring those use cases, to my boss and my boss’s boss. And when we put it in front of them, it became a no-brainer. Then it became, all right, how do we make this happen? Instead of this isn’t something that is nice to have, it became something that is really a priority for us now. We need to get this up and running. Let’s get this ready for our kickoff. SS: That is amazing advice for our audience. This is how you make enablement must-have, fantastic. CH: I think what really did it for me to take that a step further is our sales rep was really good at her job. And I was always being asked to provide more things, case studies, different pricing just all, technical information. And she was able to say, Hey, we’re supposed to sign tomorrow. I know that your procurement team isn’t even looking at the contract yet. Or, this person that was supposed to be a champion hasn’t opened up the proposal. Holy cow, that insight, we don’t have that today. We need those types of things. And that was really, whenever I started to position This is how they’re using it. Look at what they’re gaining. Look at what this could do from a forecasting standpoint and an engagement of your buyer standpoint and really see how you all utilized it and see what we could potentially replicate. That was a big deal. SS: I appreciate it and I will have to pass those kudos along to the team. Now, we started to connect last Fall. You actually led a session at Highspot’s user conference Spark ‘23, I hope you’re coming to Spark ‘24 in October. CH: Oh, for sure.SS: Yay, fantastic, that is the right answer. Now you talked about the importance of taking a more programmatic approach to your sales processes versus a suggestive one. What did that shift look like and how are you leveraging Highspot to help? CH: Yeah, when I say suggestive, a lot of times from enablement, we were putting things out and just leaving and expecting it to be consumed and executed on. And we had pockets of success, but it wasn’t working and I mentioned earlier that because of our growth, we had to build an enablement program that was scalable, which meant that we had to make it easy. We had to make it self-service. And in some aspects where we really had to lean in was building programs that can be leader-led. So it really became, let’s enable the leaders to enable. We would not be able to do that if we didn’t have a platform to deliver those things. So part of that was to enable those leaders to enable. The second part was metric-driven. And when we’re able to showcase best practices. That leads to an increase in measurable results. Now things are starting to cook, right? We’re making it easier for you to get to the content. We can prove that these plays and the content consumption is leading to measurable results. Now we’re getting more buy-in. Not only that, but whenever we go from less suggestive and more programmatic, it’s great to find the wins and showcase the wins, but I think sales wants more proof that it isn’t just theoretical. So we really didn’t stop there. It wasn’t enough in some cases, and I’m sure every organization goes through this, where sellers want to go rogue. They don’t want to follow the playbook, they don’t want to use the resources or run the play. While we had success showing the positivity of the gains, we started to take a different approach and really look at this, from the inverse and what’s happening with our low performers and strange coincidence, right? When we look at our low performers, we’re seeing a lot of common themes. There’s a lack of engagement in Highspot, whether we’re looking at the Play Scorecards or we’re looking at the consumption of the training programs. Pitches, Digital Room engagement, you name it, it became glaringly obvious that the low performers were just opting out. So I would say what Highspot helped us do was give us on the enablement team and the RevOps team line of sight to what was working. And then also line-of-sight to who’s not involved. And so it went from more or less of that opting out to saying, Hey, you’re someone who’s a low performer. And you are not utilizing the plays and the tools that we’re giving you. You’re showing a lack of will. So now we put that in the leader’s hands and that empowers them. Now it’s empowering them to use the data. It has become a partnership now and running things more programmatically. It isn’t, “Hey, training and enablement is making us do this.” It’s training enablement is empowering our leaders to build winning teams. Training enablement is giving our leaders the tools that they can become self-sufficient. In building and running programs, they’ve got line-of-sight to the metrics on the wins. But more importantly, if we’ve got low performers, it gives us a diagnostic avenue to find out why they’re low performing. We can’t, I said this at Spark, we can’t just say go win the game. We’ve got to find out, why we’re not getting on base, why we’re not getting runners across the plate. And if a leader can look in and Obviously, we’ve got the KPIs that we measure from a performance standpoint, but it’s those other things that aren’t so obvious. It’s looking at, okay, are they even going into the tool? Are they even coming into work and turning on the thing that gives them the tools and resources and the plays that they should be doing every day? I feel like all of those things combined, there’s no silver bullet, there’s no magic bullet, it’s a little bit of empowering the leaders and then giving them wide a sight to what’s winning and what’s not winning. SS: That’s a fantastic approach. And since you guys have made this shift to a more programmatic, unified approach to your enablement strategy, what are some of the key business outcomes that you’ve achieved and do you have any wins you can share with us? CH: For sure. I think I’m probably the president of the digital room fan club. I told you how it worked on me as a buyer and I take that same energy and that same passion whenever we’re pushing this with our sellers. And I think our biggest achievements are around the digital rooms. We’ve pushed this so hard and we’ve, we continue to train on it. We know in enablement and training, this isn’t a one-and-done. We’ve built it into our processes, and one of the things that we’ve done is we are just trying to make that so easy for the reps that there’s no excuse to not use it. And so we’re doing the work on the front end to create the templates, a light, medium, and heavy version. And what we’re seeing, is not only is the usage going up, but again, we’re partnering with the leaders. We’re training them to give them line of sight to not just the quantity of pitches and digital rooms, but we’re also helping coach them on how they can coach on the quality. So they’re seeing what’s leaving the station if you will. And now light bulbs are going off. They’re like, Holy cow. I can see what my reps are sending. I can see that they’re missing steps. Wow. I can see that we won this deal and I can tie it back to which digital room was used. Now I can replicate that across my sales team. And so because of that, we are able to look at who are our highest digital room adopters. We’re able to aggregate that information and say, what are the correlations to the data? And what we’re seeing, and it’s no surprise is those highest adopters of the digital rooms. We see a huge uptick in first-time appointments. Leading to discoveries and analysis and for, our audience that knows anything about digital rooms, it’s probably no surprise to them. What an amazing buying experience you’re creating, on the front end, and the back end, post-first-time appointment, you’ve got a robust follow-up where everything is right there. And you can track the engagement. If you’ve got a diverse buying committee and you don’t have open communications with them I can see who’s engaging in what, which, what are they engaging in, and why. Now I can go have specific follow-ups with them, and it allows for more specificity and less vagueness with the follow-up. And we’re seeing, really positive momentum in that post-first-time appointment digital room that we said, “Hey, why not do this pre-first-time appointment? What, there’s no rule that says we can’t push out a light version of a digital room before we even have that sit down face to face with them. And what I mean by that is once we get that meeting scheduled, we’re training our reps now to push over that light version that is, Hey, here’s a little bit about paycore, maybe here’s a client testimonial and product overview demonstration. That’s in front of them before we ever meet. Now, think about that, pause there for a second and think. I scheduled the meeting, but there was a challenge there. I’m acting on that challenge. And this prospect has agreed to meet with me. I’ve put something in front of them. That’s tangible. That allows me to see what they’re engaging in. I take all of that. And I show up at that first time meeting. I don’t have to guess anymore about where this conversation is going to go. I just really look at what the data is telling me. I look to see what they’re looking at, what they’re clicking into, and where their interests are. And that’s where I’m going to take the conversation. So instead of sitting back and guessing. I’m going in with insights that I didn’t have before. So maybe more than what you were looking for there, but that’s again, the president of the Digital Room fan club. And that’s where we’re, we’re doubling down there. SS: We are happy to award you that title, Chris. That is amazing how you’ve gotten the entire team rallied around Digital Rooms. Fantastic work. CH: Thank you. SS: You alluded to this a little bit, but you mentioned coaching. So in addition to effectively equipping and training your teams, I’d love to understand from your perspective, what is the value of coaching for reps in the current sales landscape and how are you planning to evolve your coaching strategy? CH: Yeah. It’s an absolute imperative for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, especially, enabling at scale and enabling our leaders. And again, I’m biased, but I feel like we’ve got a best-in-class training and enablement program. We do, but we need to equip our frontline leaders to coach in the moment, but we can’t be there. And, while we’ve got conversational intelligence and things like that, we’ve got to make sure that we’re equipping our leaders to coach. There are some things that I call low-touch, and high-impact. Some low-touch, high-impact things that we’re doing are, leveraging video submissions. That’s easy. If I want to, role-play the value prop, I don’t have to be in front of my leader. I can submit the video submission, and let the AI give me some tips on how to do it. It points the leaders to the right place. So those are some of the easy things, but what we’re starting to dip our toes into and, credit to Highspot for giving us this idea, we built the playbooks, and we’ve got the sales kits, but what we’re trying to do now is build that coaching playbook for the plays. So we’re running one Play for the sellers while we’re running a Play for the leaders simultaneously. So it’s building a coaching playbook to say, these are the coaching moments. These are the things to look for. This is what your seller is going after. So Ask these questions. And so if I’m logging in as a leader and a rep is logging in as a rep, they might see different things or we’re going to push something different to the leader that, that gives them line-of-sight to what their reps should be doing. And then it gives them line-of-sight to their coaching moments, and that’s been effective. We’ve again just really dipped our toes in that, but we’re already seeing the efficacy there and we’re starting, I mentioned this a second ago, but we’re starting to do more with conversational intelligence, and I see a ton of opportunity here. We’re getting that off the ground now, but for a frontline leader to really equate it to like NFL and able to go back and look at the play tape, look at the game tape, and see, “Hey, what did we do wrong here?” “Team, what can we learn from this?” “Hey, what are our best sellers doing to convert a first-time appointment into an analysis?” We’re able to show what we’re doing right and coach to what we’re doing wrong. And then for me, from a training perspective, I get to index all of those things and I don’t have to role-play scenarios anymore. We can watch the game tape and learn from that. A lot is going on right now. We’re really, I think we’re. We’re coming into the end of our fiscal year where we’re starting to experiment and learn things, but as we ramp up into FY ‘25 in July, I think we’re going to have a lot of these experiments already carved out to where we’re going to be running, hit the ground running where we’ve experimented. We know what works from conversational intelligence. We know what works from the leader playbook and be able to execute on that as soon as we start the fiscal year. SS: Amazing. Another area I know a lot of companies are experimenting in right now is around artificial intelligence or AI. And I know that you’ve been driving an evolution in your enablement program, and that is by leveraging AI. I think Paycor was one of the early adopters of some of Highspot’s AI features. Can you tell us about the ways you’re leveraging AI and its impact so far? CH: Yeah, I’ll not necessarily enablement, but back to how we got started with Highspot, that former content repository, if you will. One of the things that we’re trying to do is empower our content owners and have them be, the stewards of their content. They’re the SMEs, they’re the stakeholders. And so we want to empower them. And so that content description writer that’s been a huge efficiency gain and there’s a wow factor to it as well. I think our content owners that maybe aren’t as versed in enablement technology. That excited them and that got them to really, say, Oh, this isn’t so hard to upload content. And now the descriptor is happening for me. That makes that part of it easier. But a couple of other things that have been huge efficiency gains, is the email creation and the Digital Rooms reps are just so enamored with that.We obviously want them to add the personalization and check for accuracy, but if I can build a digital room and I have multiple pieces of content in there, and then the AI is helping me make sense of that and put it in a readable way and make it great for my buyer. Sellers are eating that up and it makes them less apprehensive to use that solution. So that’s been a big one, but I think for me it’s probably, maybe one of the less sexier ones, but for me, my favorite has been the Copilot for finding the content or for finding the answers that the reps meet, just in the search bar, instead of typing what I might be looking for, I’m typing a question and I’m getting an answer back. And not only am I getting an answer back, I’m getting an answer that’s also pointing me to the content that I might need. And I am just I’m a huge, believer in looking for easier. And so I’m a big proponent of that, and one of the ways that we’re fostering AI adoption throughout the company is we have an internal AI corner where we’re looking for wins and we’re looking for, “Hey, what are you doing? Share it with everyone else. Let’s replicate it.”And it’s been neat to see that Highspot has been one of our huge champions for those AI gains, not just in the Digital Rooms and the email creation, but also in adopting Meeting Intelligence. And that’s one that I want to get off the ground a little bit more. Candidly, there’s a lot of that out there, with Zoom and, there’s Teams, I don’t want to force anything, but I am strongly encouraging our reps to utilize the Meeting Intelligence because there’s so much potential here. I didn’t get a chance to catch the the spring webcast live today, but I got a feeling that there’s probably talk of Meeting Intelligence, being able to build that into your Digital Rooms. And so from a seller standpoint, if I’m having a meeting with you, taking those insights and allowing that to flow in the Digital Room, that’s going to be a game changer for our reps and not only our reps, and a game changer for our buyers as well. So we’re embracing AI. Highspot has been making it easy for us with just some of the wow factors and how easy it is. And I was mentioning this on an internal AI tiger team call yesterday, where I feel like a lot of our sellers are utilizing AI in Highspot, and they don’t even know it. And it’s not necessary for us to broadcast that this is AI. I think what we’re trying to do is beat the drum. What efficiency are you gaining? How easy has this made for you? And so while there may be fear and apprehension of AI, we’re really focusing on: let’s make your life easier, let’s make your job easier, let’s make everything more efficient for you. SS: Chris, you guys must be doing something right. I think you guys are doing a whole lot of things as you’ve been evolving your enablement strategy, and the numbers speak for themselves. You guys are driving an impressive 95% recurring usage rate amongst your reps, which is amazing.I think our audience would love to understand, do you have any best practices for engaging reps in your enablement programs, maybe even, as things are shifting or changing within an organization? CH: First, thank you. That’s nice to hear. Honestly, I’d have to give a lot of credit to our sales communication team. They’ve helped us on the enablement side remain consistent with Highspot. They’ve done such an amazing job with spot management and content governance that we’ve got a, we’ve got a nice clean house. And, having that clean house, people want to go back to the clean house. They want to go to the rooms where things are easy to find and use inside of those rooms. And so it starts with the help that we’re getting from our sales comms team. I certainly want to give them credit. But additionally, we make it a habit to, in terms of the best practice we’re consistent. And what I mean by that is pushing our sales communications out, we use Highspot for that. And so even if we push something out from an email standpoint or a weekly newsletter, we may just give the headline and it’s, “Hey, for more details, click here.” So we drive everybody back to Highspot. We don’t put the juicy meaty stuff out in an email, or push out any other platform. We’ll push out the headline, but people have to come back to Highspot to get the details. So we’re creating that environment of that’s our jumping off point for everything. And I think, if I was to say one thing about it, it’s just remain consistent and if you remain consistent, you’re going to find that you’re creating a behavior without forcing the behavior people are going to say, Oh, I had to click here from the weekly newsletter. Maybe I’ll just start there. Maybe instead of going back to the newsletter and looking for what I needed, I know it’s going to drive me to Highspot anyway, I’ll just start at Highspot. And additionally, we’ve made the homepage so user-friendly, and we keep it refreshed, and we keep it updated with the top initiatives and the top news. You’re not going to find something from January that’s old and outdated, and you’re not going to find anything from last fiscal year. When you open up the homepage, it’s the things that we’re talking about from the company strategy level, and it’s our top initiatives. It’s right there when you log in. So that’s made it very easy, the consistency. And again, I use the phrase clean house, but I think your audience will know what I mean by that. If I’m coming into that clean house, I’m just going to keep coming back to it because it’s easy for me to get around and find the things that I need. SS: I can definitely relate to that. Last question for you, Chris. What goals do you have for PayCorps in the year ahead? And how do you plan to continue to partner with Highspot to help achieve these? CH: Yeah. So we’re continuing to grow our sales force. We’re fortunate at Paycor that we’re seeing some great growth from market share and revenue and all of the things that you want to measure. So we’re growing our sales force as well. My north star for me and my team is ensuring first-year seller success. When I wake up in the morning that’s the first thing I think about. When I go to bed at night I think about it as well. So what that means is efficient and effective onboarding and training. We built a really great foundation that’s got measurable results, it’s been proven out. And so what that allows us to do is keep running those programs that we built with Highspot. We run it with our new hires, we run it with our first-year sellers, and what I think is really neat about first-year sellers and Highspot is there’s a unique advantage that we’re going to take advantage of, which is we don’t have to worry about change management. They’re coming in and on day one, they’re Highspot natives, if you will. They’re using Highspot and we’re building that into the training DNA. And so if we think about ensuring first-year seller success, and we know that we’ve got proven results using Highspot’s Plays in sales kits and Digital Rooms, we’re training on that from day one. And so our reps are coming in. We don’t have to, get out of bad habits. We don’t have to really change. “Hey, this is the way I used to always do things.” We can train them on those proven methods and the proven platform that’s been delivering results from our tenured sales folks. So we’re really trying to build the sales kits, build the Digital Rooms, build Meeting Intelligence into their DNA from their first day. SS: Chris, thank you so much for spending your day with us. I really appreciate the time. CH: You’re welcome. Thank you. It’s 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.

Research from Gartner found that 91% of sales leaders reported that finding relevant content and tools for reps is a struggle without a dedicated enablement platform. So how can you simplify the rep experience with a unified 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 Carolyn Hoang, the senior director of sales enablement and effectiveness at Alight Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Carolyn. I would love for you to tell us more about yourself, your background, and your role.Carolyn Hoang: I’ve been at Alight for a little over a year and I was brought on to help develop and grow our sales enablement function at the org. My role today has evolved a little bit and right now I’m focused on supporting and developing product education and enablement and ensuring we have a robust and effective product training and enablement process as we anticipate upcoming product launches and releases. As for my background, I’ve been in healthcare, health insurance, and the PBM space for 20 years. I initially wanted to become a pharmacist like my sister but found my niche and enjoyment on the corporate side of the business around operations and product strategies. So I’ve always said my life purpose has been helping others. So any way that I can make that impact in any role I’m always fulfilling my purpose and that’s where it landed me here in sales enablement at Alight. SS: We’re really excited to have you with us today, Carolyn. Now, you did mention that one of your specialties is improving efficiency in business operations and processes. How do you help drive efficiency for the business as an enablement leader? CH: There are so many ways that we can help drive efficiency in any business, but you have to start by understanding how the business operates. So the way that I look at any organization as I come into it is understanding how are they at maturity level in a current state. For example, process analysis and optimization, always conducting a thorough analysis of existing business processes. How do we identify bottlenecks and any inefficiencies, and what are those areas for improvement? Another area would be working closely with all of the cross-functional teams, ensuring that we can streamline or redesign business processes and eliminate any unnecessary steps. Or automate any repetitive tasks that we can. That means establishing those standardized procedures or best practices across the organization.SS: Now curating the right tech stack can have a huge impact on efficiency. And prior to Highspot, you had several tools, including a different readiness platform. What were some of the challenges that this led to? CH: Yeah, assessing the right tools and technology integration or tech stack is so important for any business. And I can’t stress that enough. Some of the challenges I’ve seen most frequently is just those fragmented workflows, utilizing just multiple tools that a rep or a seller needs to switch between different platforms or accessing information or content that needs to at the right needs at the right place. A place that’s been challenging data silos. So every tool has its own data repository, but when they’re not speaking to one another or the systems are not integrated, that poses also a huge challenge. And then, yeah, that lack of integration between platforms that is used by multiple different client facing teams. Having that all centralized in one place eliminates that. And that’s something that I found at our organization, was that the level of integration and content management needed to be consolidated and ensure that our reps – all of our customer-facing reps – have the right content and consistent content, at the right time.SS: What was the impetus though, for making the switch to a unified enablement platform and ultimately to implement Highspot? CH: Yeah, in my early assessment here, I immediately saw a need just for greater integrated workflows and business processes that would ultimately centralize and create that seamless integration data across all of our customer-facing teams and all of the various enablement tools and tech stacks.So many factors went into ultimately making the switch to Highspot as our go-to platform. But it’s more about the technology that can support our organization and our organization’s, ever-evolving needs and help us enable our sellers most effectively and efficiently.SS: Fantastic. And in your opinion, what is the strategic value of consolidating your enablement tech stack into a unified platform rather than separate disconnected tools? CH: I would say improving efficiency and productivity across multiple business teams. So that’s, again, data integration insights are just so important, as it helps us inform and better enable our reps through those data-driven insights and decisions that we can help continuously improve our content, our training, our platform, and also the enhanced user experience. So, having that unified platform really provides a seamless and intuitive experience on the front end, and the back end as the user, as the administrator, and really improve our user adoption and satisfaction. So having a consistent interface and navigation across all of our enablement functions and teams, our reps can easily find the right tools, resources, and things that can lead to increased engagement and effectiveness. SS: I love that, how you guys are thinking about both an integrated data and experience perspective, that’s fantastic. How did you go about building the business case with your stakeholders for making this change? And I think a lot of our audience would love to hear some best practices for gaining stakeholder buy-in.  CH: Engaging your various stakeholders as early as possible in the scoping process when building your business case is key. So keeping them continuously informed and engaged throughout the process. I always say partnership and collaboration; that’s key when you take time to understand the various stakeholders. How do you identify those businesses and teams that you will work with on a day-in and day-out process? How each of those teams operate, what are their pain points, and how can we help solve those business challenges together? Aligning different use cases and identifying what those use cases are. That resonates with each of our stakeholders and ensuring that they’re aligned on what our enablement vision goals and business outcomes that we can achieve really help solidify the buy-in and understand the “what’s in it for them” and “what’s in it for us together”.SS: That’s a fantastic approach, always put it in the perspective of your audience, even internal ones like stakeholders. Now, you recently launched Highspot actually at your company’s sales kickoff. Can you tell us about that launch and how you leverage that key moment to help build up momentum for this change?CH: Launching Highspot at sales kickoff was just such a perfect opportunity for us to generate buzz, and excitement really leverage different gamification opportunities to drive that early adoption and early engagement with the platform. So before we developed or kicked off at our event we built what we call the sales kickoff spot in Highspot, so that’s where reps can access all the information they need to go to before they attend the event, like the agenda, travel details, any pre-work or training that we want them to prepare or review before the sessions. We also included this fun Easter egg in our SKO page where we use gamification like that launch experience to incentivize our sellers to complete any pre-recorded raining and get folks driving excitement and buzz around, what is Highspot? What can it do? And to go to our Highspot booth that we had in our partner expo so what we did is we had the first three folks who finished training, found the Easter egg phrase, and went to the Highspot booth and mentioned it, then they all won a prize. After SKO, we communicated with the winners and recognized their efforts to encourage others to participate in it, but also really sprinkle that pride. Fun and strategic learning right throughout the platform. And that helps folks from a user experience perspective to learn the platform, play around with it understand the processes, and again, help drive continuous engagement and options post-launch. SS: I love that, that sounds like it landed well with your teams. Now I know you guys are also using Highspot to help optimize your onboarding program. I know that’s a key initiative for you all this year. How do you plan to optimize your onboarding program and how will leveraging Highspot help you to do CH: New hire onboarding is so crucial to get right at any organization. So ensuring our reps are fully enabled with the right product knowledge and know how to position and recognize the value of messaging that resonates with the various buyers and prospects they’re talking to is key. At Alight, we made a huge effort to prioritize and build a strong and effective onboarding program this year. And that’s something that we continue to focus on building out and continuously iterating throughout the year as well. SS: Amazing. Now, I know that you guys are just getting started with Highspot, but what are some of the key ways that you’re measuring the impact of your enablement programs on business results?CH: On the example of, the onboarding program and where we’ve been focusing on improving our onboarding program is really taking that in it and seeing how we can improve our time to productivity in our first sale for our reps. Understanding how do we increase the time it takes for a new hire to onboard, learn about all of our various products and solutions we offer and really be comfortable and confident in saying, Speaking, having that first effective conversation with their prospect or buyer and ultimately be able to execute the first deal.  So that’s something that we’ve been focusing on, in addition, to pipeline generation ensuring that we’re able to help our sellers generate more pipeline, lead conversions, and increase in win rate. SS: Amazing. And all the top-line things the business cares about. Now, looking into the future of Alight, what are some of the key goals you have for enablement in the next year and beyond? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help achieve these? CH: Some key goals this year are centered around driving sales effectiveness. I would say, enhancing our customer engagement and accelerating our business growth. So we plan on leveraging Highspot A1 by optimizing just our sales content, and our content strategy. To continue consolidating where our customer-facing teams are accessing the right content at the right time, making sure it’s relevant and effective at any stage of the buyer’s journey, right? Enabling them to engage their customers and really drive better outcomes. Also enhancing our sales-readiness. As we continue to invest in our sales readiness initiatives, we want to make sure that our sales teams are well-equipped with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed. So Highspot and the platform play a crucial role in delivering personalized training, coaching, and some of those on-demand resources we’re building out to support ongoing learning and development. I would say another area is just really driving that alignment across teams, again, breaking down those silos, ensuring that our teams that support enablement, like sales, marketing, product, and other key functions, really provide a seamless customer experience. So, we’re planning to deploy some key integrations coming up between Highspot and our CRM system and some of our marketing automation tools. That will help us streamline that experience and those workflows to enable our reps to be more effective in driving revenue growth. I would say lastly, it’s like scaling our enablement initiative. So as our organization grows, we continue to scale our enablement programs and how we enable to support the needs of our expanding Salesforce and sales teams. Highspot’s scalability and flexibility allow us and help us enable and deploy the programs that we need at scale and ensure consistent delivery of the resources that we support across our organization as well. SS: Wonderful. Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.CH: Thanks so much for having me. 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.

According to a study conducted by Zippia, organizations with a comprehensive training program see 24% higher profit margins. So how can you improve rep readiness with a unified platform?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 Marc Losito, the chief of staff at FoodChain ID. Thank you for joining us, Marc. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Marc Losito: It’s a pleasure to be here and, currently, I serve as the Chief of Staff at FoodChain ID and the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives. I just finished a 23-year career in the military where I finished up in strategy and operations. And so transitioning into a strategic initiatives role or an operations-based role is exciting, and fluid for me. I’ve been at FoodChain ID for over a year now, and we’ve been employing Highspot as our primary sales enablement tool for about eight months. SS: We’re excited to have you here with us today. Now I know when you first started at FoodChain ID, one of your first tasks was to implement an enablement platform. Tell us about that journey. Why was it a strategic priority for the business to invest in an enablement solution? ML: Yeah, that’s a great way to phrase it, it was a journey. So, about this time last year, our executive leadership team gathered together and began to evaluate our strategic growth options, and sales enablement kept rising to the top. Brandon Taylor, our Chief Revenue Officer our champion of Highspot really put it on the front of our growth initiatives and really championed our adoption of Highspot. It wasn’t too much longer after that, and it was about, May of last year that we began to adopt Highspot and we rolled it out in August. We have been rolling ever since. One of the key differences that we’ve seen, and it’s really just the realization of this, this growth narrative that Highspot brings to sales enablement is we were able to cut down our seller ramp time from nine months to six months immediately with the training and coaching features on Highspot and, professionalizing our onboarding, putting it all into one spot and having sellers singing off the same choir sheet, as it were. SS: That is amazing to go from nine months to six months, and I definitely want to circle back to that. I do want to get a better sense because you were the executive sponsor for the evaluation and I know that you partnered closely with other key stakeholders in the process. How did you partner with your CRO and RevOps to find the right solution for the business and ultimately gain buy-in? ML: That’s a great question. Our CRO, Brandon Taylor, was the champion of this growth initiative, and Ryan Wing, our Director of Revenue Operations, was crucial to making sure that we were all aligned on a collective vision, making sure that our strategic goals were synchronized, and to make sure that everything from, sales enablement content to the way we wanted to orchestrate our plays and the KPIs that we had set out, the first being to decrease that ramp time. We thought that was the closest crocodile to the canoe if you will. We’re continuing to chase, some other goals, and our CRO has really put a high bar on what we want to achieve with this. With Highspot in, shortening our sales cycle times, increasing our win rates, increasing our ACVs, and increasing our opportunity creation, but ultimately getting their buy-in was the first step and making sure that we were all aligned on what the opportunity was and what the return on investment could be if we unanimously supported the adoption. SS: Absolutely. And I know that having one unified solution for enablement at FoodChain ID was really important rather than separate tools to equip, train, and coach your teams. In your opinion, what has been the impact of that unified experience on your sellers and their productivity? ML: The essence here is, bringing fragmented tools from across our enterprise and bringing them into one centralized location. It’s like switching from a vehicle that has manual steering, where you’re trying to struggle to shift and pivot with market trends, market changes, and competitor dynamics. But bringing Highspot into FoodChain ID is like switching to autopilot. You’re able to cue seller behaviors so quickly. You’re able to pivot and adapt to key changes that you’re seeing in the marketplace and it allows for a seamless inflow of information. As a result, our sellers become more agile, more informed, they execute it. Seller behaviors and plays are better, and they’re significantly more effective. And we’re starting to see the impacts of that. SS: Now, we alluded to one of the big wins earlier, but I know since implementation, you guys have shortened your onboarding time from nine months to six months, and you’ve also reduced ramp time by 30%. Can you walk us through how you optimized sales onboarding and ultimately drove these very impressive results? ML: I tell you, reducing onboarding time was a challenge but it’s one that Highspot is tailor-made to go after. And so we focused on three primary areas with Highspot when it comes to onboarding, which is customized learning paths. Integrating real-world scenarios into the training process and then leveraging the enormous amount of data and feedback that you get to continuously refine your onboarding approach. And so that triad not only expedited our onboarding process, but it ensured that new team members were sales-ready in a shorter amount of time. SS: Fantastic. I love to hear that. In addition to onboarding, your team also focused on improving sales coaching. In your opinion, what is the value of real-world coaching for sales reps? ML: There’s nothing that can replace real-world coaching. You’re not going to be able to automate or AI your way out of real-world, human touch. And the crucible where theory meets practice. When we’re onboarding reps, it’s not only important for them to learn in a classroom, but it’s also important to have a setting to apply, iterate, and refine their approaches in real scenarios with a feedback loop. That accelerates their learning and adaptability. And ultimately, the adage is true that practice makes perfect. And in today’s dynamic market, that’s especially critical. SS: You did mention AI, so I’m curious. How do you plan to utilize innovation in the enablement space like AI to help your team deliver effective coaching? ML: I actually have a bit of a background in AI, from graduate school and from my time in the military. I just believe that AI opens up a whole new frontier that revolutionizes sales coaching, by using AI features like meeting intelligence, we can personalize learning you can personalize it at scale you can provide real-time feedback, and more importantly is that you can identify patterns that would be impossible for humans to detect. And it’s not about replacing the human element. Like I said, nothing is going to replace the human touch in training and coaching, but augmenting it, and learning how to use AI with that human touch is going to make coaching more impactful and insights-driven. SS: Absolutely. And I did not know that about your background, that you have a background in AI. So I’d love to get your opinion: how can AI help the business scale sales productivity more broadly? ML: I’ve seen firsthand from my time in the military, how AI can have a transformative power globally and on the battlefield. And if you think of sales as a battlefield it scales productivity by automating routine tasks that otherwise take sellers away from engaging the customers, it delivers insights that would take us ages to analyze, with torrents of data, stacks upon stacks, and personalize the customer experience as well at scale. It’s a game changer, and it turns data into a strategic asset for every organization.  SS: How do you think AI will continue to drive business innovation in the near future, especially when it comes to enablement? ML: AI is bound to expand, especially in enablement and business innovation. I think we’re going to see AI become more integrated into daily operations. Highspot is already at the forefront here with meeting intelligence, being part of every sales engagement, and providing analytics.I think those analytics will become more accurate over time as we, train new models and reach new heights. But at the end of the day, the potential is it’s pretty vast: from automating administrative tasks to delivering those strategic insights and shaping seller behavior and future directions to make our customer experience more delightful. SS: Mark, last question for you. As you look ahead, how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you achieve some of the innovation that you’re aiming to drive this year? ML: That’s a great question. So where do we go after our tremendous start? And I think what our CRO would tell you, and our director of revenue ops would tell you is that Highspot is poised to be a cornerstone of our strategy to drive innovation.Internally to FoodChain ID, we refer to Highspot as the sales accelerator. It is what propels our sales cycles forward. So we plan to leverage its capabilities to personalize learning scale development. We’re currently going through an environment optimization where we are using the motto of all the sales enablement you need when you need it, and none of it when you don’t.So the key there. Is that a sales rep doesn’t have to wade through this swamp of sales enablement that they don’t particularly need at that time, and Highspot is tailor-made – with its filtering, its lists, and its search features – to provide the right sales enablement at the right time and none that you don’t SS: I love that. I might have to steal some of those taglines for our marketing efforts. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. ML: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. 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 Forrester study, 53% of sellers said that sales technology positively impacts their results. So how can you optimize your enablement tech stack to drive productivity?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 Sarah Gross. Thanks for joining us, Sarah. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself and your background. Sarah Gross: Shawnna, thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to be here today. I have spent a decade in sales and a decade in enablement, and absolutely love both spaces. I started my career as a BDR, moved into sales management and got the typical dashboard and quota, and very quickly realized there was a lot more to sales and to managing salespeople.I ended up actually researching enablement and then got into being a practitioner myself. So, as I’ve built out teams over the years what’s been interesting is to watch how enablement went from L&D to how we think about making our team more productive, but we weren’t calling it productivity quite yet. We were like, “Oh, let’s get people from 100% to 110% of attainment” to now being the real drivers within the organization of how technology helps our team be more effective and therefore productive in what they’re doing day-to-day. SS: I love that and thank you again so much for joining us today. Now you and I have known each other for a while and I know that you focus deeply on a couple of core components when it comes to driving a business. That’s the people, processes, and technology. How does that approach guide the way that you build your enablement strategy? SG: Yeah, first things first, you have to have the right people in the right roles. So I’m a big fan of, especially in a sales organization, right? Having that BDR, SDR structure, the account executive, the SE. And what’s important from an enablement lens is being able to make sure that everybody knows their role and function. It leads to the process side of things. So if everyone knows what role they’re playing in the sales process, then it is defining what that process is, right? Less of the upside of what are our sales stages and how we forecast, but more of what are the gates through which I need to uncover information from the customer and our internal selling team to advance, and to know that I’m in the right place of moving this opportunity forward and spending more time and resources on it.How do we make sure that process then maps to the methodology that we’re using from a customer buying lens, as well as a selling buying lens? And then how do I make sure that we have the right technology, that I’m not asking my reps to copy and paste a Salesforce field into 15,000 different places, but rather Sales Navigator that’s layered with a Zoom info of the world and allows them to push information into that centralized repository in an easy way to build on account plans, to build on opportunity plans, and to have that structure of what good selling looks like. That’s the baseline, in my opinion, for what enablement has to have as the building blocks at the bottom of the house if you will. To then just start to do things like AI and getting into call recording and understanding what words are being used, when, where, and how.And devising an enablement plan that is by cohorts of people that need a specific topical area.  SS: I love that you established that baseline. What are some challenges that you’ve encountered as a leader when it comes to creating an effective enablement strategy, though? And how did you overcome those? SG: The strategies have changed over the years. I’d say at the beginning of enablement, early 2010's, right? It was a lot about what is it. Why is it different than L&D? Why would we invest in this different team and structure? Then we evolved into, okay, they, they run the LMS, right? They’re the people that give the training. And they may have an action item coming out of it. And then we’ve gone into this world of, Okay, we have technologies that are supporting enablement now, which is fantastic. They’re designed for enablement, and they’re giving us the right level of analytics. But how do we, as practitioners, continue to stay that we’re elevating the value of our practice? I still see where people are just trainers or they’re just go-to-market folks who get it out to the sales team. I hear that a lot. You’re the person who helps us communicate with the revenue team and speaks their language, which is a big win in and of itself, right? We’re not being called L and D anymore, but on the flip side of things, we’re not the seat at the table, driving the go-to-market strategy. I do see that starting to change where more companies than ever are hiring VPs of enablement. They want to attach to the operational strategy and the go-to-market strategy and have a plan Where all three of those functions are working together there was this weird trend during COVID where everyone was down-leveling their enablement to save costs, and now I’m starting to see that flip again Where we’re hiring lots of folks that are at a senior level. They want 10 plus, 15 plus years of enablement experience to guide them on “how do I drive that productivity lever?” “How do I be smarter in how we sell in the market?” Because we do have fewer salespeople and we have a bigger market that we have to attack. SS: Now, as we talked about in that first question, people, process, and technology, on the people side, what are some of the key things you prioritize when you’re building a high-performing enablement team? SG: I think the people side really matters in how you build out your enablement team so that you’re embedded enough to understand the business, right? For example, if you have a role that covers everything up to ISRs, right? Inside sales reps, where they’re both covering leads and running the sales process, you need a very different enabler to support that type of practice. And someone that’s maybe in an office with them, as an example, that’s where I think it makes sense when they’re all in the office. Or someone who has experience both in running a lead gen team, also a selling team, so that they can pull those together. As you think of the sales structure, that’s where I think enablement has to mirror. This is why enablement teams change from time to time because it’s normal that sales structures change, and you have to make sure that we’re constantly evolving with them. When those two structures start to look different, like when I see enablement teams aligned by product, right? They’re seen as generalists and they’re less impactful to the overall business. SS: That makes sense. On the process side, how have you partnered with your key stakeholders to identify process gaps and solve those inefficiencies? SG: That’s the question always. Having really strong ops partners and being part of the conversation that you have with your chief revenue officer is important. I think that the way that works best is that ops gives you visibility to everything that they’re showing to the sales leader. If you have a different lens, the sales leader is looking at like, “Where do I have pockets of inefficiency that I could either reduce my head count or change that headcount around?” You’re looking at it as, “How do I have cohorts people that maybe are at that 90% mark, that they would make a lot more money and we would make a lot more money if they were at 100% or 105%.” The way I look at the data that’s being provided to me is always, “How can I think of running cohorts of people?” So for example, I’ve had in the past where I’ve got a discovery coach, someone that I can deploy if there are people in SDR land, AE land, and SC land that need that particular topic area. And by deploying them I’m keeping my business partners. So you’ve got that strategic person that they trust introducing the session with somebody that’s focused on that particular topical area to move the needle as it comes to productivity. I’d expect that a lot of enablement teams are probably going to have someone who’s that AI specialist over time, where their entire job is to match that internal data set with what we are hearing from our enablement tools. And how can we deploy every call we’re looking at across the system? Deploy, if we hear X word, one sheeter, a cheat sheet to the rep in the moment. It’s a talk track that gets deployed to our SDR organization, right? Maybe it’s even a technical validation asset that’s going to our enterprise reps as they run into X integration that they don’t run into all of the time. So I’m starting to see where I almost think SEs are always a secret sauce to a lot of organizations. To me, it’s how we capture what’s in our SE’s minds and deploy it on every call that’s happening, not just the ones that an SE is attached to. SS: Absolutely. And then the last piece of the puzzle: technology. How does an enablement platform help you effectively bring your strategy to life? And in your opinion, what is the strategic value of a unified platform? SG: First and foremost that’s definitely evolved in the past, like five-ish years. Originally, I would say we were looking at just do you have SCORM packaging. It was very traditional instructional design technology that you needed. Now, because we’re further away from what is traditional L&D, I’m seeing a lot of enablers really need their platform to drive, “What are we missing?” We’re running a discovery program, we’re running a negotiation program, and we’re running our new product launch. But what are people looking for in the system, whether that’s on the content side or the learning side that we’re not providing to them today? Or, what are we providing that nobody gives a shit about? And we’re wasting our time and resources? So, it’s an efficiency lever for enablers, which is what I see the platform as. The reason I think that content and learning have to be in the same place, is it’s part of the learner’s journey, right? Humans either want to consume information in written format or video format for the most part, right? And as you take those two things, you have to meet the learner where they are. That’s something we all knew years ago. But now it’s not just meeting them where they are, it’s meeting them where they are at the right time. And so it’s making it a self-service model that you can then look at analytics and drive what you’re putting out there to them in the most efficient way. So if you don’t have what content is someone consuming, what learning is someone consuming, and what are they sharing externally with their customers, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle. Because they might be – another thing I’ve always been able to point out to my heads of revenue – is that we’re consuming and teaching this internally, but our customers are actually looking at this when we send it over to them. So there’s a disconnect between the two things that we really need to solve for. SS: Now, obviously, if you make the investment in technology, you want to ensure that your reps are taking full advantage of it. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption of your enablement solution with your reps? SG: Ariel Lashaza, who’s someone who’s worked for me at a couple of organizations, did this extremely effectively. We brought it to the level of reps. Think of TikTok, we called it “What You Want to Know Wednesdays”. And it was a piece of information that they could try every single week. I think the way that these things work is it’s the curve, right? That we always know. You got your earlier adopters, you got everybody in the middle, and then you have your late adopters. There are certain folks on every team, you know they’re not going to do it until we tell them they have to. Then there are people that you know are going to chomp at the bit to get anything. And then there are people in the middle that their manager has to tell them to do it. So I think it’s identifying who your early adopters are, especially as you do those fun, “What You Want to Know Wednesdays”. And let them drive the topics, because then they’re excited about it, they tell that middle crew, get them more excited about it, and ask them to go to shared and team meetings, and that’s how we’ve rolled things. Having a little bit more structure around it, I think that it’s important that, one: it’s leadership-led. So you have a preview from the frontline manager level, up. What to be expected, how are we going to support you, what do we need from you? Very simply. Then as you actually roll things out to the team, it’s embedding that into your monthly learning. However, you’re already communicating to the team and then it’s taking those early adopters, and showing them the impact on revenue, which is why I think that Highspot’s report of tracking opportunities related to Pitches is like money. Because you can go back and you can say, “Hey, you sent out 18 Pitches. Those were viewed 300 times, and you actually closed every single one of those deals. So, your rate of closure when you use the pitching functionality is 100%. What was your close rate before you did that? Maybe it’s 40%.” And so immediately to them, they see the ROI. I just think we have to, as enablers, always be selling. And the way that we sell is by using that data and analytics for our revenue team. SS: So on the topic of data I think that you have always been someone who has helped those around you succeed by really being inquisitive and leveraging that data, as you mentioned, to make business decisions. What are some of your best practices for, to the point you just made, measuring the business impact of enablement? SG: Best practice, one is, what’s your CRO measuring? if they’re being measured by ARR attainment and NRR, right? You have to know what those numbers are first and foremost. Secondly, it’s starting to break down, “Hey, CRO, if I did X, do you think that would move the needle on what you’re being measured against?” If that’s the case, let’s put this in place, and let’s put a stop in the sand where we are today and measure it again in 6 months. So I think that alignment up front is really important and making sure you’re not just tracking to time-to-ramp if they don’t care about it, right? Super important you’re aligned. Thing two is buddying up with the ops team and saying, “I know you’re measuring this. I want to measure how we can impact this as a team. You’re probably making some operational changes. Maybe it’s quota, maybe it’s territory alignment, et cetera. Let me build off of that. I’ll actually help you communicate that to the reps that it’s happening to. And, once we communicate that, instead of it being a 10-minute call, let’s make it a 30-minute call. Where on the last twenty minutes, let’s talk about how they can attain that number in a better and more succinct way. And maybe what Sales Plays are we running to support them in hitting those new targets that we’ve provided?” So it shows us the unity between ops and enablement, which is such an important part. And then it’s coming back. I’ve always said, at a minimum, quarterly reviews. What was the enablement impact? And that’s where I do think we should push our vendors to support us in that, right? They should be providing us with Scorecards. They should be providing us insight into what’s going on in our system from their CSMs. And I encourage all of my enablement peers to be requesting that. It is well within our rights to push that we need that level of data to run our businesses. Think of a CMO or CRO. They’ve been holding vendors accountable for providing them that since the beginning of time. And it’s now our time to do that so that we can have those executive-level conversations. And we’re not just being like, “Oh, we launched the learning path.” Or, “We launched the huddle.” That’s fantastic, but we’ve all moved past that. It’s not about you putting it out there. It’s about, did it hit the mark actively, proactively sharing what did or did not, and what you’re going to do next. SS: To that executive leader point, given kind of your wealth of experience and enablement, how have you gained buy-in and support for your enablement strategy with your executive leaders? SG: It’s always the fun thing that when you get a new CRO or a new C-level, right? How do you set their expectations of enablement, right? Honestly, there’s still a lot of different definitions out there of what a good enablement team looks like. I think it’s really important that up front you understand: what are their priorities and how are they being measured? I didn’t say, what are they measuring? How are they being measured? Every CRO has something that the board is asking them for. That’s just part of the game, and part of being in sales. And it’s usually different than what quota is being assigned out to their team, et cetera. I think the second piece of that is then saying, “How can I communicate this with you? What frequency would you like to see updates from me and in what format?” If they don’t have a proposed format, something I learned from an early CRO of mine is CAB: Conviction, Action, Benefit. Having three columns on the screen: what are we convicted to do together this quarter? Again, that’s a together statement. What actions am I taking, right? Or do I need you to take to support that? And I always suggest there’s a two-way street there. And then what’s the benefit? What is the thing that we are measuring? And if we come back and it happens, we know that we are successful in this. Super simple, but I would go on whatever format your particular leader is looking for. They might have a different version of that. Or propose, hey, if I did this, would that work for you? I don’t think it should ever be more than one page. It shouldn’t be a ton of charts and a ton of things. Solely because that’s your job as enablement. Our job to them is that we’re measuring those big projects together. SS: I love that advice and that acronym. Last question for you, Sarah, where do you see the future of enablement going over the next few years? And what are you most excited about? SG: That's a good one. We’ve come a long way in a very short amount of time as a profession. I definitely think that AI is a big part of our future. It’s a big part of everybody’s. It’s a big part of humans. I think as enablers the thing we do that is so critical to every business is we understand how humans work, think, and do. So it’s using AI to be more human and to help our team with those productivity levers.So think of right now we run a pitch contest and you use your top three reps, you have them pre-recorded as an example and then you launch it to everybody and you have a grading criteria in the system. Maybe you have something like a Copilot of one of these SORMs that’s running and giving a little bit of insight. But, in the future, think about if that could simulate a customer in their territory, in their patch that they’re trying to sell to today. It could be somebody that looks and feels like their particular segment. That becomes even more impactful as we continue to grow. And I do see that’s where we’re going.I want to level set to all CROs out there, that’s not where our technology is today. But, it is absolutely something that’s within reach in the next couple of months. I also see a lot more happening around the traditional Salesforce where we used to serve up, “Hey, have you thought about sending this white paper type of thing?” Integrated more into the call intelligence world where you’re in a call, and it says, “Hey, you just hit a roadblock right in that conversation. Consider this objection handling technique,” or, “Consider saying you want to bring your SE in to do this technical validation based on the integration they just asked for.” There’s a lot more of that to come as we continue down the path. What am I most excited about? It is AI. I say that with a little hesitancy in my voice. I think that it’s a way for enablement to scale without having to have humans and to be able to spend time doing the things that we love doing, which is talking to reps gathering feedback, and being part of the collaboration. That is revenue. I think we spend a lot of time right now in some cases behind the scenes in our LMS and CMS because they’re not totally optimized. So if we are in this AI lens where our CMS is sending us an email every morning of what’s good, bad, and not happening in the system, and we’re not going through hundreds of thousands of pieces of data, that gives you so much more time to be in front of the team and with the team. Right now, I see enablers having to choose one or the other that they’re really good at. And the people who are behind the scenes sometimes aren’t part of the executive meetings because they don’t have enough face time, but they’re really good at the right programs, et cetera, to get out. And then some people who have too much face time, and not enough behind the scenes are dinged that they’re not analytical enough, or they’re not using AI to drive their business. So it’s a push-pull today. I think that our vendors are really catching up with supporting enablement. Just like Salesforce has always supported a revenue organization in design that will get us to where we need to go in the future. So, I am excited about AI and because I think it will give us more time to be the human elements in front of our revenue organization. SS: I love that. And I know we are very excited about Highspot Copilot as well here and all the AI innovation we have coming. And we’re going to actually be announcing some of that at our Spring Launch Discover Webcast shortly. So thank you, Sarah, so much for taking the time to chat with us. I really appreciate it. SG: Absolutely. It was my 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.