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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.

Ben Wolf is the Founder and CEO of Wolf's Edge Integrators, a leading fractional COO firm specializing in helping businesses scale efficiently. He began his entrepreneurial journey by building operations at a healthcare startup, transforming it into the largest organization of its kind in New York State within three years. Recognized as a pioneer in fractional executive leadership, Ben authored the bestselling book Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach and hosts the Win Win Podcast. In this episode… Many business owners struggle to step away from daily operations, making it difficult to focus on long-term growth. Fractional leadership offers executive-level support without the high cost of full-time hires. But how does a fractional integrator actually help a business scale? According to operations expert Ben Wolf, a fractional integrator ensures smooth execution across all functions, allowing the owner to focus on strategy instead of daily operations. Instead of hiring a full-time executive for $250,000 or more, businesses can bring in an experienced leader part-time to drive execution, align teams, and remove operational bottlenecks. Ben explains that many companies remain stuck in trial-and-error mode for years, testing different strategies without real traction; whereas a fractional integrator brings proven systems that accelerate growth. This approach helps businesses scale efficiently without the financial burden of a full-time hire. In this episode of Financial Clarity, Hannah Smolinski and Ben Wolf, Founder and CEO of Wolf's Edge Integrators, explore the benefits of fractional leadership, the challenges of hiring experienced executives, and how business owners can create a self-sustaining company. Ben shares actionable advice on building a strong leadership team, reducing operational bottlenecks, and using a 12-month rolling budget to improve financial decision-making.

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 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.​

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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.

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.

In today's digital age, we're inundated with a constant stream of information, making it challenging to navigate and make sense of what's important. And now, in the midst of increasingly-capable AI, the very concept of importance is coming into question. Could open source be the solution to managing our impending sensemaking crisis? In this episode of the Win-Win Podcast, we're joined by Peter Wang, a physicist, computer scientist, and founder of Anaconda, one of the most widely used open source platforms for Python development. Peter leads Anaconda's AI Incubator, which focuses on advancing core Python technologies and developing new frontiers in open-source AI and machine learning, especially in the areas of edge computing, data privacy, and decentralized computing. We dig in with Peter to discuss the history and politics of the open source movement, and the security concerns around open sourcing AI models. And we attempt to understand how open source software can enhance transparency and collaboration between players, and how these technologies can be harnessed to better navigate the complexities of our information-rich environment. Chapters: 00:00:00 - What is Open Source Software 00:10:29 - Peter's History with The Open Source Movement 00:35:06 - Security and State Interests in Open Source 00:37:16 - Open Science and The Commons of Knowledge 00:39:40 - The Central Problem of Coordination 00:43:46 - The Solutions That Markets Solve and The Problems They Create 01:04:40 - Synchronous Attention As A Scarce Resource 01:09:23 - The Liminal Act of Modelling The World 01:19:58 - Virtuality and Colorful Dystopias 01:22:03 - Is Technology Values-Neutral? 01:32:30 - Moloch Invades The Tech Stack 01:35:57 - Psychosecurity and The Dangers of Attention-Renting Software 01:42:00 - Is The Global Community Actually Excelling in Science? 01:43:51 - Our Cosmic Scale and The Instruments To Probe It 01:53:18 - The Stagnation of Physics 01:56:06 - The Civilizational Perspective on AI Safety 02:05:23 - The Benefits of Open Source To Society 02:27:26 - Will AI Accelerate A Global Security Crisis? Credits: ♾️ Hosted and Produced by Liv Boeree ♾️ Edited and Mixed by Ryan Kessler Links: ♾️ Peter's Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/pwang?lang=en⁠ ♾️ Anaconda: ⁠https://www.anaconda.com/⁠ ♾️ Peter's Blog: ⁠https://medium.com/@pwang⁠ The Win-Win Podcast: Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins. #WinWinPodcast #Moloch #AI #Python

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.

Marcus chats with Liv Boeree, one of the most successful female poker players of all time. Liv is the only woman to have won both a European Poker Tour event and a World Series of Poker bracelet, and has amassed tournament winnings of over $3.5m dollars over her career. They talk about what makes a world-class poker player, whether poker skills are born of nature or nurture, and the experience of being a woman in a majority male-dominated game and how to exploit that fact. Liv was a cofounder of Raising for Effective Giving, which educated poker players about the ideas of giving effectively and managed to raise over $14m for top charities over its lifetime. This idea of creating win-win scenarios is a persistent theme in Liv's life, so much so that she is now hosting her own podcast called Win-Win with Liv Boeree, and has given two TED talks on the main stage, the latest of which is specifically focused on the win-win mindset and its potential to counteract Moloch traps and races to the bottom. Follow Liv on:Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/@LivBoereeTwitter/X at: https://twitter.com/Liv_BoereeInstagram at: https://www.instagram.com/liv_boeree/ 

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.

Is it possible to solve ocean pollution by turning the packaging industry into a closed-loop economy? Wes Carter thinks so. Wes is the Founder of a New Earth Project and President of Atlantic Packaging, on a personal mission to stop the significant pollution the packaging industry causes. In this episode we hear what it would take to close the loop on the economy via new types of biodegradable materials that could replace plastic and other common pollutants. We also discuss which types of recycling work, and which are rubbish. And of course, in true Win-Win Podcast style, we hear about what it would take to change the game so that companies (and their customers) are properly incentivized to account for the true environmental costs of the production and consumption. Chapters: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:35 - Wes's Story & the Packaging Industry 00:10:07 - Circular Economies 00:24:30 - Potential Solutions 00:31:11 - How to Align Incentives? 00:46:22 - Are Consumers Responsible? 00:51:41 - A New Earth Project 00:58:06 - Psychedelic Experiences 01:08:38 - Carbon Offsets 01:13:30 - Are Shareholders bad for the environment? 01:23:14 - Amazon's Progress 01:27:38 - Advice to Young Entrepreneurs Links: ♾️ A New Earth Project https://anewearthproject.com/ ♾️ Atlantic Packaging https://www.atlanticpkg.com/ ♾️ Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... ♾️ A Journey to a New Earth Series https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detai... The Win-Win Podcast: Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins. Watch the previous episode with Ocean Cleanup Founder Boyan Slat here: https://youtu.be/QEYbLN-LC5k?si=XaV2j... Credits: ♾️ Hosted by Liv Boeree ♾️ Produced & Edited by Raymond Wei ♾️ Audio Mix by Keir Schmidt

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.

In a survey conducted by Zippia, 86% of leaders in the workplace cite lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failures. So how can you increase stakeholder buy-in to maximize adoption and collaboration?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 Gurneet Sagger. Thank you for joining us, Gurneet. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Gurneet Sagger: Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m a bit of an enablement veteran before the word enablement was invented. And in a past life, I actually led global sales teams. So about 13 years of leading sales teams, I made the jump into the enablement world. SS: Wonderful, we’re excited to have you here. Now, prior to partnering with Highspot, you leveraged a different enablement platform. What was the impetus for deciding to switch platforms?  GS: Yeah, Highspot for us is really about ease of use to the team. I think many enablement people will relate to a lot of tall tasks ahead of you with a small team. And that’s what led me to Highspot. Highspot was easy to use on the initial demos and the interface. SS: I love hearing that. And in bringing in Highspot, you built a really strong partnership with sales and marketing leaders including your CRO to gain buy-in. What are some of your best practices for securing stakeholder buy-in and proving the impact of an enablement platform to your CRO? GS: Yes, I think I’ve been very privileged to have leaders that I’ve reported to who are bought into the power that an enablement team can have. I ultimately was given the opportunity of, “Hey, Gurneet, what is it you need in order for us to scale? And what is it going to take?” And one of those key things was having a sales readiness LMS tool. And that’s why Highspot was selected. But throughout the process of getting through budgets, and headcount planning, I made sure that I had buy-in across sales, account management, marketing, and our product leaders. SS: That’s fantastic feedback. Now, since implementing Highspot, you’ve seen incredible momentum, including 94% recurring usage and really strong adoption in nearly every area of the platform in terms of adoption. What are your best practices for driving adoption across your go-to-market teams? GS: One of the things we did out of the gate is once we launched, there was no exception to be able to relay information out to go-to-market teams unless it was through Highspot. As a company, we use Confluence, which is a phenomenal tool for the broader team, but for all the other departments to move quickly, for example, product, if there’s a new product update, to make sure that they could roll out without any delays. Having each core product leader provide the enablement team with the information in a digestible way, which could be inputted into Highspot quickly was critical for us.And we just didn’t have any exception to the rule. Information needed to go out. It had to be leveraged through Highspot and ultimately you want to be able to, as a leader, show the ROI on the enablement tool and the costs that you’re incurring onto the company.SS: Thos are fantastic best practices, I know our audience can take a lot from that. One area that I know that you guys have really championed the success is in your onboarding program, I know that you guys have achieved a 77% active learner rate. How do you use Highspot to effectively onboard and certify reps?  GS: Highspot is the most critical tool for us. We grew headcount from 20 sellers to over 200 on the sales side and then we also grew our account management teams and we use Highspot on every single lesson. We’ve gone from a two-week onboarding program, due to high growth headcount scale, and now we’ve moved into a three-week program. And over the course of time, like many companies, you’re coming out of the pandemic, moving into a hybrid environment. But, we’ve had sellers all across the country in multiple sales hub locations. And so Highspot enabled my small team to be able to get the learnings out and to be able to track performance quickly. Every onboarding lesson sits in Highspot with all the accompanying resources to make it easy to find for our new hires. SS:  Now, in your opinion, what would you say is the value of having a unified platform that allows you to deliver everything from content to onboarding and training, what is the value of having that unified for your reps?  GS: It’s just ultimately speed. You know, my goal as an enablement leader is to prove and show that we can increase work rate, right? Not just for our sellers, but also our account management team. And so being able to search something in Highspot. We need to make sure that you can find them. And if a rep can’t find what they’re looking for, we’ve got good feedback loops so we can keep things updated. But, ultimately, it is getting our sellers and our go-to-market teams, the information they need, as quick as they can get it. SS: With all of this momentum for enablement and you’ve grown your team significantly and you’ve really done a fantastic job positioning enablement as a strategic business function. How have you leveraged Highspot to help you scale the impact of your team on the business? GS: We’ve used Highspot now, not only through onboarding, but increasing locations that our sellers move into, new verticals, and new product updates. And so it’s enabled us to execute a lot quicker than had we gone through the manual process or I know for many enablement folks that are still dealing with Google drives and sorting things through that. And so it’s enabled our leaders to be able to roll out as quick as possible. We want to make sure that we’re providing the very level best for our clients, what we call our partners here. And to do that, we’ve got to certify individuals. We have some critical verticals that we sell into that need a little bit more attention to detail. Every time we roll something out, we certify our sellers to make sure that we’re reinforcing those learnings and then enabling them to execute. SS: You guys are having amazing impact. What would you say some of the key business results that you’ve achieved so far with Highspot are, and how do you go about measuring enablement success? GS: Yeah, that’s really going to be critical for us going into this year. We’ve gone through two years of headcount growth, and now we’ve really got to start doubling down on obviously overall ramping success of our sellers. But I think, ultimately, we have a phenomenal platform and product and for us to get it into the hands of our partners and our professionals, those are the hourly workers on the platform, as quick as possible, it means education. Being able to ramp our new hires faster, being able to train a seller one day, and within 24 hours, they’re certified, and that then unlocks further revenue streams, like further account pursuits for those individuals is really critical. SS: Gurneet, last question for you. As you look to the future, you’ve mentioned that you plan to take advantage of a lot of the new enablement innovations, like artificial intelligence, to continue to scale enablement’s impact. How do you plan to leverage AI and other innovations to continue to drive business impact in the year ahead? GS: It’s everything from developing our call scoring and making sure that’s then aligned with our rubrics and our scorecards across all of our tool stack. I’m excited to see what Highspot will do with AI on their product roadmap and we’re already seeing kind of improvements with just descriptions and surfacing content in the right places. And for us as a business, AI is one of those key investment areas. And so as an enablement team, we do make sure that we’re following the same charge that our leaders have set. SS: It is an exciting future ahead that we have on that front. Gurneet, thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate it. GS: 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.

A study conducted by McKinsey found that 35% of value on average is lost when implementing change initiatives. So how can you ensure maximum value during organizational change?Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host, Shawna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Heather Green, the Director of Enablement at Jellyvision. Thanks for joining us, Heather. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Heather Green: Hi, thank you so much for having me, and absolutely. I started my career in an individual contributor role in sales and worked my way up through sales leadership, but quickly found my passion for enablement early on. I’ve worked for small startups to multi-billion dollar consulting firms and through it all, I consider myself to be a bridge for the sales organization. In my current role here at Jellyvision, my goal is to provide our revenue team with really everything that they need to be successful, from net new business to retention, and that’s through our direct channel and partnership business. So my team works to bridge the gap for our revenue teams. Marketing, product, and operations and support our sales team in any way we can. SS: You mentioned you have an extensive amount of enablement experience. What are some best practices you have when aligning your enablement strategy with the strategic initiatives of the business? HG: Yeah, it can be a challenging one sometimes. I would say hands down building internal relationships with our business stakeholders is incredibly key to bridging those two gaps. Everyone has the ultimate goal of providing revenue at the end of the day and making us profitable, but each team has their own goals that might not overlap with each other. I found that it’s really important to have consistent transparency and ongoing communication to make sure that I’m working with these teams in tandem which causes minimum confusion at the end of the day with our revenue teams. So a strategic initiative could be launching a new product or feature, but then that could be in peril with another initiative that RevOps is perhaps launching something new with this system, so it’s too much at once. It’s really important that we get that buy-in from our leadership teams across the organization to make sure that everything from a product launch to new rep tech, to a marketing campaign, that it’s all working cohesively together. SS: That is amazing. And you did mention though, that it’s not always easy. What are some of the major challenges that you’ve come across in your career when it comes to effectively really bringing your enablement strategy to life? HG: It can be tough sometimes. There are definitely challenges associated with it, but where would the fun be if it was so simple all of the time? So, especially when it comes to enablement initiatives, it’s so very important for me to make sure that our leaders understand the value of the why behind the initiative and the what’s in it for me for the individual contributors and ultimately what our goals are going to be at the end and what everyone’s going to get back. By getting that leadership buy-in, we can get everyone on the same page. It’s oftentimes an uphill battle but I’m a big fan of throwing on my hiking boots and climbing, right? So each step when we’re rolling out a strategic initiative it’s a long-term play. It’s not a short tactical thing. Each step is learning more about what’s important to each leader and then how we can pivot and adjust to best meet their needs to make sure that we push it forward.SS: I love that analogy, too. Now, when you first joined Jellyvision, you noticed some key challenges with the team’s previous enablement platform. What were some of those challenges and what was really the impetus behind deciding to make a change?HG: Other than me adoring Highspot, right? I’ve been such a fan for many years and I was lucky enough to use it at other organizations. But coming to Jellyvision for me a few years ago, I was thrilled to see how extensively our team had invested in the tech stack.A lot of times you don’t think many organizations. So as an enablement leader, it was just music to my ears, but with our previous content management system and engagement platform, the first thing I did when I came in was I looked at it and I did an audit. I’m looking at the backend analytics, but then really seeingWho’s using it, who’s not, what the top performers were doing, what our lower performers in that middle ground were doing. The spoiler was that not a lot of people were using the platform, which, also hurts because as an organization, you’re making that investment and you need to see that return to keep it.And so by digging in, I started doing many different conversations with our revenue team and individual contributors to determine. What was the reason behind not using it? And the key feedback that we received is that it was just difficult to use. It was hard to find content. It was even harder to edit content. And so it was like, why would I do that when I can just go into my Google Drive and find what I need and then edit and send it that way? It was just resounding results that it was difficult and no one wanted to engage with it. But knowing the value of a platform like that, I was able to then start putting the seeds down for making a change. I knew we were coming up on a renewal in the upcoming six months. And so I started asking additional questions on if it did this with this work and kind of planting the seeds. And then finally got to a pilot point of taking it with our key top sales reps and showing them what Highspot could do. And then from there, we were able to move the conversation forward in making the change once they saw some of the key things that Highspot was able to offer us. SS: I think that is fantastic. And, in addition, I know that you did a lot of work to ensure that you had buy-in from leadership to prove why the change was needed. What were some of the things that you did to ensure that you were able to secure that buy-in? HG: Buy-in is imperative, right? Especially when budgets are tight and they’re getting tighter and tighter every single day. So for me, it was gathering all of that data from our reps. So not only the analytics in the platform that we currently had and how rough it was from an adoption standpoint but then the verbatims from our reps of saying, “Yes, if we could have a Digital Sales Room, it would mean the world because then I would be able to track with our broker clients or if I were able to be able to easily find something and edit it in the platform, I would use it.”So I pulled together a lot of the verbatims and then I put together the ROI breakdown of what we could see in the platform. We were lucky enough in the business case I put together to start Highspot three months before our previous contract ended. That way we could load everything into Highspot, and do a full content audit, so we were starting clean. That’s so very important too, because what you put in ultimately will drive what comes out. But that allowed us time to do that audit, load, and tag everything appropriately in Highspot. And so that way we had a really, and do enablement ahead of that as well, to start again planting the seeds that change was coming. And these are the cool things that you’ll be able to see with it for us to have that smooth transition once we ended our previous agreement.  SS: And since you guys have implemented Highspot, how have you overcome some of the challenges that the teams were previously facing? HG: Adoption can be difficult across the board, but with Highspot, luckily, our adoption has been significantly higher than what we received with our old platform. For us, I think it was consistently highlighting what was working, what top performers were using, and what they were seeing off of it, being able to track it back to specific deal conversations, and how they were able to move those opportunities forward through the content they were sharing. We also hold bi-weekly office hours where we share our best practices. And in those best practices, peer learning is incredibly important for us. Making sure that we’re sharing what’s working with our tools and oftentimes when you have one person see what someone else is doing and how it’s helping them, that also helps to drive it forward. We also offered consistent training from video courses to one-to-few to one-to-one sessions. Luckily we’re in a smaller organization where we can offer that level of support, but to make sure we’re overcoming any obstacles, if someone wasn’t using the platform, myself or one of my team members would reach out and say, “What’s the problem, what’s going on?” Oftentimes, it was just that they were uncomfortable trying something new, but after we showed them or they spoke to a peer and we had that connection, we’ve been able to get a much higher adoption rate. SS: Fantastic. And you guys do have incredible adoption. I think you guys are at about 89% recurring usage. What are some tips that you have for building trust with reps and helping them understand the value of the enablement programs that you’re delivering? HG: It’s really due to my team. Shout out to Max Costello, she’s hands on our Highspot champion, and we call her our enablement queen. She has done an amazing job with building trust within our teams. She’s the one who does many of those one-to-one and one-to-few sessions. We did many virtual sessions before the launch, Zoom training where we would walk them through the tool, show them the benefits show them how we could customize things. And then we were very lucky with our professional services agreement. We launched this in January right ahead of our revenue kickoff last year, and so we were able to have one of our Highspot reps actually come on site, and I think that was instrumental for us to be in person as a revenue group, and then have a Highspot person from the team there along with us as a leadership team and an enablement team all together in the room to be able to together walk through it, not just over Zoom. I know that’s not something everyone can do and we were so lucky for it. But then post revenue kickoff, holding those consistent office hours and again, sharing best practices and just staying close with our team I think has been huge for us in getting people into the platform. SS: You’ve mentioned a few times now during this conversation the importance of using data. And we’ve seen in our customer base that having data is key to building trust and improving value. And I know that you are very much a data-driven enablement leader. How do you measure the impact of your enablement efforts and how do you leverage Highspot to help? HG: Great question. Gone are the days of using our gut to make decisions and to determine what’s working and what’s not working. Although I’ve worked with many people who still feel comfortable in that way. For me, data is imperative. It tells us what’s working, and what’s not working, and it helps us craft a story. And to quote, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, right? I need proof, timeline, and screenshots. That’s really where I come in when I’m speaking with my teams and I’m speaking with leadership on what’s working or where we should make adjustments. And that’s with every tool that we have, especially in the economy that we’re in today, every dollar invested needs to have a return. And if we’re not getting it, we need to figure out why. And a lot of that comes enablement team. So what are we doing to make sure that the teams are utilizing it properly? So for Highspot specifically, we report back monthly to marketing and to rev leadership. We have two separate meetings for marketing. We report back on what content resonates the most with our clients. So not only what our reps are sending, but what’s really being viewed. If we have a PowerPoint presentation that has. 30 slides. Gosh, I hope no one’s sending one that’s that large. But if a client’s only looking at, three to five of them, those are the slides that we want to focus our attention on moving forward. That’s what really resonates. And so for our marketing team, it’s been really helpful. Especially since we’ve just done this huge brand audit. And so we’ve really prioritized what pieces of collateral we’re going to adjust to the new brand outlines based on what’s been sent and what’s been engaged with. But then for our rev leadership, we’re able to then see, we’re able to tie the analytics back with how conversations are actually progressing from prospecting to opportunities, closed won or closed lost. And I think that shows a lot of value back into the platform. And again, we’re able to do a lot more one-to-one, one to few, given how small of an organization we are. We have about 60 sellers across our entire team. But telling that story with the data has been really helpful for us to show what’s working and then who we need to spend more time with to maximize their effectiveness as well. SS: What are maybe also some of the key results you’ve achieved since switching to Highspot? Do you have any wins you can share? HG: Our organization is a little different based on the technology that we sell. We offer a tool that helps individuals choose and use their benefits. And appreciate their benefits too. My marketing team would kill me if I didn’t throw that part in there. But we do, because of what we offer, we do 90% of all of our revenue right before the traditional open enrollment season. So truly 90% of all of the deals that our sales team is going to sign are signed between August through October each year, which then leaves many months where we’re not closing deals. We can create opportunities, but we don’t know how fully they’re progressing. So we were really excited this year to actually have that full end-to-end deal cycle from prospecting to opportunities closed won. We were able to pull some really awesome win stories in Q3 last year that we’re able to show what content was shared throughout the journey from prospecting before an opportunity was even created, and then from an opportunity being created to closed won, sometimes it’s a couple of weeks, a couple of months, but for a lot of time we’re doing prospecting, this time of year. So we’re looking for opportunities in February that are going to close and hopefully, August through October, and having that content to be able to show the journey has been able for us to streamline specifically with our master sales decks and our one-pagers and really when case studies are most relevant in being shared in the journey. And so I think that’s helped us a lot with bringing that to the masses and scaling what content is best to share when and we’ve tagged it appropriately in Salesforce now. So it makes it really easy when your opportunity is progressing the content that’s being shown to you. So it’s taking the thinking out of it at this point and made it really easy. So they know exactly what to share and when. SS: Heather, last question for you. What are some goals that you have for Jellyvision in the coming year and how do you plan to continue to evolve your enablement strategy to support key initiatives of the business? HG: Key initiatives are always changing. So we are going to continue to be nimble and pivot as needed. But this year we’re super excited to lean into the recent updates that Highspot has had. We’ve been very AI-forward at Jellyvision. Our CEO has really leaned in and encouraged us to lean in. So, I’m excited about the new updates to the platform. We’re actually doing a relaunch next month to our teams to roll out what that looks like. And then one of our major goals this year is to really maximize the usage of the digital sales rooms. Here we call them client microsites. That’s our internal language, but really maximizing what that looks like. That’s what it looks like for our reps to get more out of the platform as well.SS: Heather, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.  HG: Yeah. Thank you. 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 research conducted by Sales Enablement PRO, organizations with dedicated enablement efforts report a nine percentage-point increase in average win rates compared to organizations that do not have dedicated enablement efforts. So how can you make sure that your enablement strategy is setting your organization up for repeatable 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 Gail Behun, the director of revenue enablement at LivePerson. Thank you for joining us, Gail. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Gail Behun: Thanks for having me. So I have been here at LivePerson only a couple of months, but I’ve been in revenue enablement for about ten years. I started off as a seller and became a sales leader, and then really found the impact of sales enablement to be so powerful on the entire org. And I’m incredibly passionate about empowering salespeople and associated teams to be as efficient, and as effective as possible. SS: I love that. On that note, I think one of the things that stood out on LinkedIn, you also mentioned your passion is around building really scalable and repeatable sales success. In your opinion, what role does enablement play in driving that for the business? GB: I think we have to be the cheerleaders for scalable and repeatable. I think our sales leaders are very good at solving individual problems, individual quota issues, and individual deals, but enablement is well suited to look big picture at the processes and tools that we have in place that make that process repeatable. Revenue enablement has the opportunity to really streamline the effectiveness of our sellers through our tools, our talk tracks, and our training. And we’re uniquely positioned to do that because we’re not involved in a deal. We’re involved in every deal on some level. SS: Absolutely. Now, I know you all just implemented Highspot, but prior to that, your team had multiple separate tools to deliver enablement programs. What were some of the challenges that your organization faced with that approach? GB: I think every organization is faced with the dreaded G-drive scope creep, where there are ten versions of this, and nine versions of this, and one lives on this drive, and this rep has downloaded the deck, and now they’re making changes on their own, and there just wasn’t tight governance. And as organizations grew, especially radically during COVID, it just got out of control. Having a unified tool became a must-have as we and a lot of other companies have taken a slowdown in hiring and an opportunity to reset our systems moving forward. SS: Absolutely. From your perspective, how does having a unified enablement platform help you to overcome some of the challenges to your earlier point around being able to drive scalable and repeatable sales success? GB:  My goodness, the amount of time sellers spend not selling is upwards of 70%. It’s just crazy the amount of time that they spend getting deals through the process and looking for materials and where we can cut that time down and make them more efficient. Gives them that time back to be more customized in their engagements with their customers and be able to expand their business offerings and value rather than working through cumbersome systems. And so a single source of truth is critical to that. And that’s what a unified tech stack provides. It was one of the biggest reasons for us moving to Highspot, but the bigger reason is the buyer’s experience and the Digital Sales Rooms, and having those both under one company umbrella made it a win for us. SS: I love that. Now, another key reason your team decided to implement Highspot was to reinforce the value of enablement as really a strategic tenant for the business. What are some of the strategic initiatives that enablement supports at LivePerson and how will you leverage Highspot to help? GB: Our team is relatively new. LivePerson went through an enablement reset. Because so much of our sales motion is grounded in the expansion phase, so much of our initiatives this year are around account expansion. And, as I said, Digital Sales Rooms are a game changer when it comes to interacting with existing customers and showing ongoing value. And so the ongoing value metric is incredibly important for us as we double down on that facet of our business. It also helps us dramatically when you’re talking about multi-threading and getting into additional stakeholders because with existing accounts it’s very easy to have one great champion but not go deeper than that, and Digital Sales Rooms and the engagements we have through Highspot will allow us to have more powerful multi-threading and more opportunities to open more doors within our client account. SS: I love that. I think that’s a great initiative and a way for Highspot to help support that. Now, I know one of your goals in implementing Highspot was also to ensure a really strong alignment with marketing. What are some of your best practices for collaborating with marketing and how are you driving strong alignment through Highspot? GB: Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything more important than making sure our sellers are up on those marketing messages because those marketing messages, that’s what marketing is talking to our accounts and our customers out in the space about, it’s what we’re known for being thought leaders: having great analytics and information. So, having a single point for that information within Highspot is incredibly important. Our marketing team and our field marketing team each have their own sections: field marketing, especially because we do a ton of customer-facing events, and so for them to organize that for all of the sellers to see where they’re going to be out live and in person, “What type of events? What are the talking points?” Become critical as well. Sellers, even before pre-COVID when we were all at home, but especially now, we have to be able to tell each other’s stories. And so marketing is great at collecting those stories. They’re telling customer stories through case studies. Enablement, we’re telling customer stories through what we call win stories, which are more behind the scenes. So we’re creating win stories that let us interview a seller, tell the good, bad, the ugly, and then we can tie those to those case studies. And so it gives the sellers the information they need to go out to market, but also to have the conversations behind the scenes. SS: Fantastic. Now, as we mentioned early on, you have started the work of establishing a great foundation in your implementation, and I know that you’ve just launched Highspot to your teams. What were some of your best practices to ensure a successful launch? And how are you measuring success? GB: We had an amazing CSM implementation manager on the Highspot side who gave us some great advice, and we did a lot of ramp-up activities. We had a cheerleading squad with internal leaders who were making videos that were hosted on the Highspot page, talking to our potential users, saying, “Here’s what you’re going to love about it, here are some ways you’re going to use it.” We wrangled in our frontline managers and our leaders to speak to why we made this move, making sure that they didn’t feel like it was just another piece of software we purchased, and that this was critical to the way that they did their jobs. Our senior project manager on the project gamified a great deal of the onboarding. And so you could get points for different activities and she would post out the winners. And we’re not done. We’re going to continue to share those videos over the next couple of weeks. We launched Highspot at the same time, right before our sales kickoff. And so our sales kickoff pre-work was actually to create a video and host it on Highspot.I got everybody in and using the tool. And now we have these great videos people have made that we’re scoring and we’re going to give prizes out over the next couple of weeks. So we are going to continue to hype this. We’re going to do some, sharing and awards for a great Digital Sales Room or a great engagement that somebody’s utilized the site for, to show those best practices.And then continuing education. We just have to continue to have office hours, see what kind of questions people are asking, and make sure the site is answering those so that we can make sure we continue to build it out. We’ve launched it, but honestly, I think we’re probably 30 to 40 percent done, meaning we have a lot more to do, and that next phase is going to be driven by more interactive content, more video content, and more user-driven content as they push us to add and make more valuable for the site. SS: And one area in particular, because you’ve mentioned it early on in the conversation where I know you aim to achieve strong adoption is in the use of digital rooms. As you’ve mentioned, it’s a great way to get deeper into the accounts that your team’s going after. How do you plan on driving adoption of Digital Rooms with your revenue-facing teams? GB: That’s a great question. Partially by cheerleading it through their front-line managers, making sure their front-line managers are asking, Hey, here’s this deal you have in play. Let’s look at your Digital Sales Room. Let’s look at it together. Let’s see where you’re getting engagement. As I said, the post-sale motion is a big part of what we do.So working with our CSMs. Have you launched a room? What’s the engagement you’re getting? Not just right before your QBR, but on an annual basis. And so really working with our frontline managers to be our champions in those areas, I think is going to be the biggest push. And then again, showcasing good successes, being able to show, “Hey, this account has a very high level of usage of their room.”We’ve got a great number of downloads. We’re seeing a lot of multiple people logging in and show that as a best case so that we can continue to say, “Hey, don’t you want to have that engagement for your accounts?” SS: I love that. Now, again, I know that LivePerson is just at the start of its enablement journey with Highspot, but what are some of your key goals for enablement in the year ahead? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you get there? GB: One of our key goals I’ll speak to is just what I would call a brand unification. LivePerson went through a lot of twists and turns over the last couple of years. And so having a strong unified message is going to be incredibly important.So working with our marketing team to have a great unified message for our brand to be able to gamify that through some sales contests where we can have people upload elevator pitches and point of view decks and things like that, where they’re talking to the brand, they’re saying the words that we need them to say in the way that we need them to say it is going to be one of our key goals. Engagement within our accounts going deeper and wider, and we’ll be able to measure that through the Digital Sales Rooms and the adoption in those spaces. And then account retention is one of our biggest goals – retention and expansion. And so again, we’re pushing home on the backside of usage, whether it’s for QBRs and beyond, to make sure that we have as much engagement as possible year-round. So how do we make sure that a Digital Sales Room isn’t opened and then we have a client login, they do their QBR and then they don’t look at it for six, seven months? So, consistent engagement is going to be important because that’s the motion of selling 365 days a year is what makes a difference. When you come up to renewal with an account, have you added value all year? And using these rooms is going to let us see that we’re giving that value out to our customers in a tangible way. SS: I love that. Gail, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.GB: Thank you.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.

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

According to research from Gartner, only 34% of change initiatives are a clear success. So how can enablement leaders help sales teams effectively navigate change and overcome challenges?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 Kris Richardson, the senior director of sales and partner enablement at Apptio. Thanks for joining us, Kris. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.  Kris Richardson: Sure, thank you, glad to be here. I’ve been at Apptio for about eight years. My role is I’m responsible for all of the sales training, not only for our interns or sellers but also for our partners. My background is actually in sales, I started years ago. Instead of going to med school, I started with a company called Nextel selling phones to businesses. I found myself interested in training my customers and from that, started into sales training, and I’ve been in this side of the business for about 25 years now. SS: Well, we’re excited to talk to you, Kris. Apptio has been a long-time customer of Highspot, but before Highspot, your team leveraged a different enablement platform. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and maybe some of the challenges that your team faced at that time? KR: Yeah, it was quite the experience. It was not a good experience for our sellers. It was a very, what I call, bland interface. So, it was a poor user experience. They couldn’t navigate very well. The search didn’t work very good. For anybody that was trying to create content, which was mostly our team and the marketing team, it was very, very clumsy. It would take sometimes hours just to stand up one little section with, some text in it, in a link. So, that was very difficult. And then, we didn’t have a lot of analytics. We couldn’t see, what are the things that our sellers were looking at? What was driving them to certain pages or certain content? Without that information, we didn’t know what was working. So, we were just putting up everything we could every day and hoping that our sellers were clicking into it. SS: How have you been able to solve some of those challenges that your team is facing since implementing Highspot? KR: I think the biggest was the ease of use. Our sellers love the internet-style paging, they’re used to that. They’re always searching on their phones and on the internet themselves. Seeing the buttons, and being able to click on an image or a button and get to what they need. Being able to just navigate, and search super easily. The search engine with Highspot is so powerful that we can tag certain items and it will populate exactly what a seller is looking for whether they put in the right information or not. And then going back to what I said in the previous question is that for our folks that are building “spots”, what Highspot calls their pages, it's really easy to stand up a new spot. You can literally copy something else that happened a few months ago, change a few things and you have a new version of that that looks refreshed and updated. And then finally the biggest is that we have the analytics to see what our settlers are looking at and what they’re not looking at. So we can take that information, it allows us to promote the items that seem to be really popular, and then archive the items that aren’t being used. SS: Amazing. Now, as a little bit of background, I think Apptio recently went through an acquisition, and I think we all know MNAs can often present a lot of change for sales teams. What were some of your best practices for helping your reps really navigate that change? And, and how did you leverage Highspot to help? KR: The first thing we did was stand up a page directly related to the acquisition, a lot of questions, a lot of moving parts, so we made on our home page, the landing page when folks come into Highspot. Our sellers see a big banner that basically says, “Hey, here’s where you need to go”. Once they click into that, we had all of the relevant guides, any calls that were held. So the recordings of those calls, any PowerPoint decks or slides that were used in those calls, any relevant guides related to the acquisition. So it was super easy for them to find that just by going to the homepage, they could click in there, and get what they need to, to stay up to date on the changes. SS: Absolutely. And even throughout all of that change, Apptio had a fantastic recurring usage rate with Highspot. I think you guys were at consistently 80%. What are your best practices for driving adoption?  KR: Well, we put almost everything that a seller needs on Highspot. With my background in sales, we always think of where would a seller go to find this? What would they search for? And we promote and serve up the things that they’re going to use most often that that’s going to be most useful for them in their day-to-day job. So anything critical gets put onto the homepage. That could be any call that we have any content that we want to promote. And then we have a series of enablement calls. We have at least one a week. Sometimes we have three to four, they could be role-based calls. They could be regional calls. They could be sales skills or process calls. But every time we do a call, we promote. On those calls. Hey, what’s new in Highspot? We have slides and we talk about what’s new and what they can find. And then as soon as that call is over, we post those links to those calls and those decks right there in Slack, and through email. So everybody knows if they need to find something, they go to Highspot. So, I think that’s what drives the usage for our sellers. SS: That’s amazing. Shifting gears just a little bit. One area where you guys have also seen really high adoption is sales plays, and you’ve touched on them a little bit. You guys have 69% adoption. Tell us about your sales play strategy. How are you leveraging plays to effectively guide your reps on how to land a lot of your key strategic initiatives in the field? KR: It really starts with onboarding. Sales plays are a key part of what we call our Ignite and Spark seller onboarding. And so every time somebody goes through onboarding, one of the key elements is we point them to the sales place. We want to get them used to it right away, going to find content on Highspot. Some of the activities might be, go look at a certain piece of content on the sales play and then go apply it, whether they do a role play with a mentor or their manager, maybe they are filling out some seller prep content and they’re sharing that with us through onboarding. So they immediately know to go to Highspot because of that. Anytime we also have a product change or maybe there’s a new persona that’s buying the products that we’ve never really dealt with before, perhaps a new competitor that has emerged those sales plays get updated. So anytime there’s new information out there, we try to get to the sellers through the sales place. And again, continuing to promote anytime there’s updates through Slack calls, et cetera. And then finally, I’d say we use the sales plays a lot of times for prerequisites for training. For example, we have our sales kickoff coming up in two weeks. And part of that is, “Hey, we’ve updated the sales play for this product, or that product.” Go review that before you get to the sales kickoff. So again, driving that, that a constant need to go there to get the information they need has been, I think—one of the factors for success with the adoption of reviewing sales plays. SS: Absolutely. And you touched on this a little bit, but as your business has experienced a lot of change, how do you keep the plays updated and optimized over time? KR: Well, I think we’re lucky in that we have a product marketing team and they have very specific folks that own each of those sales plays. So they tend to be the people that are in the know. So they know when there is a new competitor. Maybe there’s new objections that are coming out. They know when, you know, new personas, they know there’s new updates to our products. So they’re the ones that can make those changes as soon as possible. We also filter feedback from our sellers. So if the sellers are seeing stuff, those get filtered right to the product marketing team. And again, they have that ownership. The other thing is we’d like to pull the data to see. What are the sellers doing on those sales plays? What are they looking at in those plays? Are they remixing any of the content? Are they pitching any of that content? And if they’re not using some of that content, can we just get rid of it? Can we move it off there? So the sales plays nice and clean and constantly looks refreshed. So I think that makes it, makes it easier when sellers can get in there. There’s not, they’re not overwhelmed. They see the information they need and know they’re going to use, and they can also say, Hey, that’s, that’s new content that’s updated. And so they constantly go there to find that new information. SS: I love that. On the topic of optimization, I noticed on LinkedIn that you mentioned you focus on moving the needle against key business outcomes, such as win rate and quota attainment. How do you measure the impact of your efforts on these types of metrics? KR: I mean, I think in general, it starts with onboarding. We make sure that our sellers complete their full onboarding program, that Spark or Ignite program that I mentioned. We also make sure that we review their activity. What are they doing and how does that correlate to the pipeline that they have? And then ultimately, how does that correlate to win rates and their success? We want to make sure they’re not just getting lucky, that they’re doing the work. They are learning, they’re honing their craft, honing their skills, and they’re applying that by having calls, conversations, meetings, et cetera, pitching things from Highspot so that the pipeline, the activity, the knowledge results in those win rates and, and quota attainment. SS: How has your usage of Highspot helped you influence some of those metrics, and do you have any wins you can share?  KR: Yeah, I mean, I would say as it relates to Highspot, one of the big things that we look at is the scorecards. Are reps active in Highspot? What are they doing in there? Are they reviewing new content? Are they honing their skills? Are they building their knowledge? If they are, we know that they’re more likely to succeed. They’re more likely to close deals because they have the knowledge and skills to be able to do that. We want to make sure, are they remixing content. Are they downloading content? Going back to the pitching, that’s super important. Are they pitching content? What’s working? What’s not working? Then we can share that information with other sellers so that we can say, “Hey, look, Bob over here has been pitching this particular set of materials. And he seems to be getting a lot of meetings.” It’s, it’s great for us to share that. So I think looking at those metrics helps other sellers in addition to just the ones that are really active in Highspot. SS: Amazing. Chris, since we have just turned over to a new year, as a closing question for you, looking at the year ahead, what are some of your team’s top priorities, and how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you achieve these? KR: Yeah, I would say Highspot is critical. As we mentioned, we were acquired by a company in September. Some of the organizations, not all, have gone through what we call transfer of employment. So some of us are actually employees of that company. That gets to be difficult when not all of your employees are. So we’ve got to make sure that everybody’s on the same page. Again, that’s why we put everything on Highspot that’s why we’ve stood up this page in particular about what’s happening, what’s coming, what’s new. But we’re about to go do a transfer of business. That means everybody in the company will be employees. Everybody in the company has to operate under this new company’s guidelines. And so I think the good thing for us is all of our sellers know that our processes have been consistent. Our sharing of information has been consistent and that’s been through Highspot. By putting the information in Highspot, sharing it in Highspot, they know they can always go there to make that change management a little smoother. I say us personally as a sales enablement team,  and a partner enablement team, our goal is to really improve our search results and that goes back to tagging, and sharing like content. We do a pretty good job of it, but we have a lot of authors, and we need to get them better at it. We have a whole, what we call governance committee that gets together, an author committee making sure that they are doing the things that our team does to make sure the search is great, that sellers can find what they want quickly. And then finally, it’s really about getting rid of stuff that’s not being used, archiving content, because if you don’t stay on top of it, you could have a huge library and people are finding stuff that’s not relevant. So making sure that everybody that is authoring stuff is archiving old stuff, and just keeping the new stuff front and center. SS: Wonderful. Well, Kris, again, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.  KR: Yeah, thank you so much. This has 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.

Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that companies with a consolidated tech stack see a 19 percentage point higher average quota attainment than teams with multiple disconnected tools. 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. How can you boost rep productivity with a unified sales enablement platform? Here to discuss this topic is Andrea Holzworth, the vice president of sales enablement and customer operations at Project Lead The Way. Thank you for joining us, Andrea. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Andrea Holzwarth: Thank you for having me today. I’m Andrea Holzwarth, as you mentioned serving as the vice president of sales enablement and customer operations for Project Lead The Way. I’ve been with Project Lead The Way for eight years now served in a variety of roles. Mostly on our sales team, so I served on our school success team, our new district engagement team, and our strategic accounts team. I recently transitioned over to our customer operations team in July, and really in this role I serve as the leader of our sales enablement, so providing our sales team with all the resources that they need, all the professional development coaching training they need, while also solving some of those operational challenges that we may have. Whether those are internal or external, just making it easier for our customer to implement Project Lead The Way. SS: I love that. Now, prior to Highspot, you were leveraging a different platform for enablement, including a separate learning management system. Can you tell us about that experience and ultimately what led you to decide to really consolidate your enablement tech stack? AH: As you mentioned, we were using a variety of resources, and as you can imagine with a variety of resources, there’s really no source of truth of where the right resource is, or where that learning is. And so, Highspot really was selected by Project Lead The Way as our sales enablement tool because of its ability to be the source of truth but also its ability to integrate into Salesforce. It’s an easy-to-build learning management system for us. A couple of the other things that we really appreciated about Highspot was the ability to provide sales plays to our team. So, the “know, say, show, and do” to really equip our team with the right resource at the right time to the right audience. And then we also really appreciated the development of talk tracks and how we can provide team members the opportunity to listen to their peers and some of those role-play conversations around targeted topics or specific PLTW programs. SS: I love that. What have you seen as the impact of having a unified solution rather than separate siloed tools? AH: We’ve seen quite a bit of impact so far, but I’ll say that Highspot really provided our team a unified vocabulary and again, that single source of truth. And it also allowed our sales team to be really more efficient and effective in the field. Instead of digging around trying to find that one resource, they were able to find everything in one spot. And it was also tagged correctly. And I say “spot” a little bit of pun intended there, but it allowed them to find everything they needed. I mentioned this earlier, but we do like to say the right resource, right time for that right audience. SS: I love that. And you guys are actually driving fantastic adoption across the board, so kudos to you and the team. I believe you guys have a 95% pitch adoption rate and 68% play adoption. What were your best practices for ensuring a successful launch when you first rolled out Highspot? AH: Yeah, we’re very excited and encouraged about our initial implementation, definitely some early wins for us, which has been just phenomenal for our sales enablement team, but also for our sales team as well. We took two approaches and I will say that we started developing our implementation plan far before our launch date. We wanted to really take a two specific approaches. The first approach is the “do with, not do to” mentality. And the second was to go slow to go fast later. Obviously, those sound very corny, but that’s what we kept going back to every time we were developing our implementation plan. We wanted our team to feel those small victories along the way. So we started off with really small monthly learning. I’ll give an example: our launch date was actually October 5th, and we shared only one expectation for the month of October for our full team. Send five pitches. That seems kind of small and some people got it done within hours and the others took a couple of days or weeks. And that’s okay because that’s all they need to do is send five pitches. We wanted to bring everyone alongside us and have an impact on that early timeline. We wanted them to get comfortable. The other piece that we did too develop a feedback group before our launch date and this has helped us to pre-identify some team members that we thought would be early adopters. And most of them are, and so that has helped us gain feedback from our, from those using it. So again, do with, not do to. SS: I love that motto. Along those lines, as you mentioned, one of those things that you did to help build that momentum was get feedback and create a super user group. Tell us more about that. How did that help you drive adoption? AH: Yeah, so we developed that super user group or we call it our engagement team feedback group – and just for reference our sales team at Project Lead The Way is referenced as our engagement team – we wanted them to be those that were driving the adoption So we didn’t want it to be something that was happening. From the operations team, you must do this. It is really like I’m doing with them and we wanted them to be leaders within their groups, so we asked for a couple of commitments right away from those team members and those commitments were one: commit for a whole group, a whole year to be in that group, and not to prioritize meetings. We know that there’s lots of meetings, lots of conflicts, but to prioritize attendance. And the second one was really laid out pretty clearly was we want to provide Brene Brown’s “clear is kind” feedback, meaning we didn’t want it to just say, “Hey, this is great.” “No, it’s all going well.” What wasn’t going well, how could we learn that? Before we took that learning to our full sales team, we can work out some of those kinks. And then the other thing that we’ve really seen success with is this group has continued to provide that feedback along the way, but they’ve also taken their learnings and experience and shared it with their home teams. And that wasn’t a requirement and something we even said it’s just they were identified by their leaders as being super users And so it was a nice way for them to have some of that peer-to-peer learning As opposed to you know, the customer operations team coming in and sharing so we host those monthly learnings as a full team And then our super user group goes and shares in their individual teams, which they also kind of share some of their tips or tricks how to do something a little faster or a workaround which is just fun to see as well. SS: I really love that approach. I hope some of our other customers can take advantage of that and implement that within their own organizations. Now, rolling out a new tool and driving adoption can also require some behavior change. What are some of your best practices for motivating that behavior change? AH: We all know change is hard. No matter what change you’re going through, your personal, professional, change is going to be hard. Everyone has a certain threshold of change that they can take before it becomes uncomfortable. We really wanted to sit there and identify and bring everyone alongside us in that change, so we wanted them maybe to feel pushed a bit outside comfort zone, but never to go past that threshold. We wanted them to feel successful. I think that’s one best practice. Not going again too fast, maintaining some of that slow momentum. So you’re bringing everyone with you. The thing that we’ve loved to see over the last couple of months, their implementation is we have some that aren’t necessarily the super users, but yet they still want more. They want to keep learning more. They want some more nuggets where we have another group who’s just kind of staying along right alongside our learning. So it’s been a really nice thing there. Another best practice I mentioned earlier, but again, it’s. Do with, not do to – so how can we bring everyone with us in this learning? How do we make everyone feel a part of our implementation? It’s not something that they have to do, it’s something they’re getting to do. The other thing that we really did in the beginning was share the end result. Highspot was a change and our team is very mission-driven at Project Lead The Way, so we wanted to showcase to them how utilizing Highspot was going to feel better to our customers. One of PLTW’s core values is customer centricity. Our customers are at the center of all that we do. And we truly believe that Highspot as a resource makes a more customer, seamless customer experience. And so we shared that with our team and showcased that to the team so they knew that, “hey, I’m not only doing this because we’re changing over to this, but it’s also better for my customers that I’m serving.” Lastly, I’d say data helps. So we’re now able to showcase to our teams how effective their outreach is. In some ways before, we could say if someone was opening an email, but now we can show if they’ve opened it, how long they viewed it, did they share it. And we were just somewhat in the dark before. Empowering our team with data, just helping them to want to own some of their own learning and Highspot, too. SS: I think that’s fantastic. And you guys actually have a very unique and specialized sales team at Project Lead The Way. A lot of them actually come from a teaching background rather than a traditional sales background, which is amazing. What are some of the unique considerations you have for driving behavior change amongst a slightly less than traditional sales team, and how does Highspot help? AH: At Project Lead The Way, we see a strong value of team members who have that experience from our customer base within our PLTW network. Many of our team members do come from our network prior to joining us. I’m going to go back to what I mentioned earlier, but Highspot provided us with that common vocabulary. It also gave us consistency across the board, and we could share that there was something that if a school was contacting us in California or even in Florida, they were having that same customer experience because of Highspot, we were able to showcase that consistency. It’s also provided an easy button for our account owners and they don’t have to search for things. They don’t have to maybe assume that someone needs something or, you know, try and put themselves in those, the shoes of that customer. We really have done that legwork for them by putting things in particular spots and showcasing or tying them to the correct opportunity stage. We’ve made the easy button, so there’s not a lot of other additional thinking. They can just build the relationship, which is what our accountants are so good at; building relationships with our school districts. SS: I love that. Training programs play a really big role in being able to drive behavior change. One of your key initiatives for the year ahead is to build out robust onboarding and training programs. How are you designing these programs and leveraging Highspot to help deliver them? AH: We believe that onboarding for a new team member is one of the most crucial times when you’re bringing on a new team member during their tenure. We want every team member to get that best fundamental start. We want them to be foundationally sound but also see the buy-in and understand where we’re going as an organization, and we believe we had a pretty strong onboarding experience before. But, a lot of our onboarding was built in-house, and it was a lot of meetings with other individuals, and we are trying to take down the amount of meetings that we may have, and we’re trying to define, but also decide what is the best way for some of that learning. Highspot's learning management has helped us do that because we can build courses. We can also check for understanding along the way. It’s not going to replace every meeting. We believe, again, those first four weeks are really crucial. We want that new team member to feel interaction, to feel a relationship building with Project Lead The Way. But some of those things are very operational or very administrative. How can we take some of those and put them into Highspot that they can do on their own time? Instead of having to schedule some meetings, we’re still dipping our toe into what that looks like. We’re excited to transition some of that learning into Highspot SS: I love that. What are some of the early wins that you’ve started to see since you launched Highspot and how are you measuring success? AH: That’s a great question. There’s lots of ways. I think I was talking to someone the other day – Highspot gives you a lot of data and there’s so much of it to look at, you don’t have to identify which data that you’re looking at. One of our early wins: I mentioned our October learning, so our November learning was that all of our lead outreach would move over to Highspot and would use pitch templates. Again, create consistency for us. We had never had a consistent lead outreach experience before. We moved all of that to Highspot, and the biggest win that we received from our sales team was that we could show to them by the end of the month that we had a 71% open rate for all of our sales-qualified lead outreach. We could never share that data with them before because we didn’t have it and it wasn’t consistent again a school in California may have been getting a different email than a school in Connecticut. We wanted them to have that and seeing that data helped them get again additional adoption and buy-in. That was one of the big things. Then, I’ll just say, we keep hearing anecdotal feedback too, from different team members along the way. My favorite is when team members will reach out to me via teams and just share their experiences. The other day, one of our top performers messaged me and said, “Oh my gosh, Highspot, such a game changer for my lead work. I was able to get through 30 leads in 20 minutes.” And it was like, “Wow, that’s awesome.” That’s more time for them to be out in the field, for them to be supporting customers instead of, you know, just sending an email kind of thing. So lots of different ways to see success, but that’s really where we’re starting with. SS: I love those. Those are some great early wins, Andrea. It’s the new year. So, my last question for you: how do you plan to continue to optimize your enablement strategy with Highspot in the year ahead? AH: Yeah, we did develop a year-long implementation plan. I kind of mentioned this earlier, but we wanted our team to feel confident, to feel comfortable with Highspot this year. Our full first year of implementation was just what we thought success would be if we were adopting, comfortable, and confident. So what we’ve done is starting in October of this year, we identified one monthly learning each month, and then we build upon that each month as well. And so that’s our plan, to continue building on. We put some of those bigger nuggets, the exciting things, a little bit later in the year because we wanted the team to be operationally sound with Highspot. But for example, our digital rooms are going to be coming up soon. That’s where we’ll be sharing with the team. Also, more sales plays will be involved with the team. And so we’ve shared that calendar with the full team. We want to be transparent in this. We do have an asterisk, “subject to change”. Things may change along the way, but we have shared with them what that learning is going to be, and also what that expectation of what to do with that learning. So, we’re all in with it, we’re going to keep rolling, and we’re excited to see how far our team goes. We already have some team members who we haven’t shared a digital room with just yet, but they’ve done it on their own because they’ve done some self-learning and we’re excited about that. They’ve been in there. They’re the ones early adopting. So we see some early success and we’re excited to see the rest of the year with it. SS: I love that, I am too. I’m excited to see how you guys succeed in the year ahead. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. AH: 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 research by Marketo, sales and marketing alignment can help businesses become 67% better at closing deals. So, how can you drive alignment through enablement to improve business outcomes? 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 Heather Hoover, director of global marketing & academy at Össur. Thanks for joining, Heather! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Heather Hoover: I’ve been with Össur for about 15 years. Currently, I’m in the education team leading the global academy for bracing and support, and also for the marketing aspects of things. That’s where we’ve been utilizing Highspot for about a year and a half now. I am just really excited to tell you a little about our customer experience today.  SS: Fantastic. We’re excited to have you here. One of the key reasons you initially got involved in enablement is because of the overlapping needs between enablement and marketing. What were some of those shared needs that caused you to invest in enablement, to begin with? HH: That’s what initially happened from the education side of things. We shifted because of COVID with a lot of in-person education and training to the digital side of things and really shifting towards video as well. It was just coming up with that strategy of shifting our customer education from a video perspective and then how to share it with customers so that they would have a good customer experience. Originally, we were struggling with Outlook trying to send multiple videos out. Would you send it just like SharePoint? How would they find it afterward? Is it easy to download? That was one of the main reasons why, at least from the education side of things as we were kind of building out our strategy and shifting from in-person to digital, how would we have a better customer experience for our B2B side of things from the video side of things? SS: I love that. You touched on a few of them before you implemented Highspot. It sounds like you were maybe leveraging an internal marketing hub, which sounds like it led to a few challenges. Can you talk to us about that experience and how maybe you’ve been able to solve some of those challenges with Highspot? HH: For about nine years or so, we had our own internal system that we’re utilizing in order to share marketing tools. Just a place where the marketers were able to upload the marketing tools, documents, brochures, sell sheets, etc., but that was IT-based internally. With a lot of competing priorities, so within the organization, the IT team had to move on to other projects. So when there were some glitches or some things that needed to be updated within that system, it was just really hard to get those updates needed. Of course, that just became very glitchy, and then needed to find a solution for our marketing tool hub. It was like one portion of it was looking into Highspot, but of course, the other aspect is how do we find a solution for kind of the video aspect side of things too. SS: Yeah, absolutely. Since implementing Highspot, I mean, you guys have seen some really great adoption from your teams, including an 83 percent recurring usage rate. What were your best practices for really ensuring that you had an effective launch and rollout of the platform to your teams? HH: I think with the adoption rate, it really just shows there was something that we had a big problem that needed to be solved internally. I would say it wasn’t much of a heavy lift from the sales team doing that training and education because it was such a big gap for us. Highspot did fulfill that gap. It was very intuitive as well. Once we roll this out to the sales team from the app side of things and be able to utilize this when they’re out in the field or just very easily on their office days as well if they did want to use their desktop aspect of it. Qe did get a very quick adoption when we launched this. I would say the education side of things too was just easy because we just had a lot of big problems that needed to be solved and then the Highspot platform from both just the marketing tool side of things, or just being able to help create the libraries of information for our customers as well within Highspot. with the microsites that were just very well received by the sales force. As we did the adoption to and, and all the trainings, there were quite a few sales members as well that went the step further and wanted to create their own pitch styles and kind of learn that too. We initially had the main reasons as to why we were instituting Highspot, but it kind of went above and beyond as well with the sales team and getting very creative on how else to use Highspot and how to create better customer experiences for our customers. SS: To the point of the microsites or the digital rooms for your buyers, one area where your team is seeing a lot of success is leveraging the pitch capabilities in Highspot. Again, you guys have fantastic adoption there with 76 percent. Can you tell us more about how your reps use Highspot to engage buyers? HH: Yes. The reps like to call it the library of information. I think everyone has email overload these days. If you’re one of our customers and you have to deal with multiple suppliers, one of the things that’s like, where did you find that information? Did they text you? Is it in Outlook? Do I have to comb through all my emails? And what was that rep’s name? Or, trying to find that information. The way that the reps often sell it is the library of information and that can be continuously added to as well. It makes the customer more efficient that way that they can, remember that oh you know, Össur has this hub, they utilize Highspot. I can just kind of use this link and make it part of my favorites, and then the Össur rep, when I see them, could just add in anything that I’ve asked them right, right to that link continuously as well as to have a search through Outlook or, all my emails to find that information. That’s one of the main reasons why the sales team utilizes it a lot is from the pitch aspect too, it is kind of the library of information and a one-stop shop for customers to find the information. SS: Yeah, I love that. Could you share with us, what are some other wins or maybe business outcomes that you’ve been able to achieve since implementing Highspot? HH: I think one of the bigger things is from the academy perspective, just being very easily able to share videos and then also have that library for the videos as well, whether it be like our often the clinician and patient fitting information. You can continuously add to that as well as the customer purchases more products. That’s really nice just to be able to have those microsites and be able to continuously build off of those. Also from the pitches, just being able to see those analytics. I think that always creates warmer leads that way as well to see who’s engaging within the customer when you do send those pitches out and how often they’re engaging. That was just something that we never had previously as well as an organization with our previous platform being able to see, was it actually opened and how long did the person engage with it as well? It’s been really helpful from that aspect. Also, just being able to view those analytics from our strategic initiatives to see from the engagement rate and open rate with what the reps are sending. SS: Yeah, absolutely. Those are some fantastic wins. After the success you’ve had with your US and Canadian teams with their experience with Highspot, I understand that you’ve actually decided to expand the platform globally. What is your advice for gaining buy-in to expand enablement globally in that way? HH: We launched from the US and Canada about 18 months ago. At that point with the launch within the US and Canada teams, it was a bit more of like a manual upload process. The rest of the global teams decided to wait until we had an API connection flowing for a lot of our marketing tools. It does take a lot, I would say from an internal standpoint of getting the right stakeholders on board, but I think the key thing that the Highspot team did was just help us identify what our problems and challenges are and then how a Highspot and a platform can help solve that as well. Just to be able to help get some of the key stakeholders globally on board with that. SS: Yeah, that’s fantastic. What are some of the key considerations that you need to keep in mind when you’re launching Highspot in new regions and how are you preparing for an effective rollout in those regions? HH: I think the key thing was this API connection that we have with all our approved marketing materials. That really just helps out with consistency from a brand globally along with making sure that everything’s been correctly validated from a claim standpoint too. I think that’s kind of one of the key things and not something that I personally thought of at the launch of Highspot as well was just making sure that we kind of have that flow of all the approved content and material from our internal standpoint, ready to go so that it’s consistent from a brand and messaging standpoint globally too. I think that was kind of, one of the key learnings that I kind of wish we planned for and thought of ahead of time before the initial implementation. SS: How have you been able to actually maybe drive stronger alignment across teams and regions since investing in enablement? HH: I think it’s always keeping things top of mind. When it really comes to the sale with any sales team members, everyone always has a lot of competing priorities across any organization. It’s just keeping a top of mind for the sales team as well, since they just have so many things that they’re working on, so many customers that they’re working with. It’s kind of just keeping it top of mind with best practices, lessons learned and continuous training as well. Early on the beginning of the implementation within Highspot, we just had initial training sessions, but then also monthly check-ins with the team as to the best practices lessons learned, and key successes as well so that they can learn from each other. I think that’s always the thing is making sure that we have the training needed or at their fingertips but then also some reiteration and repetition with the team to make sure that everyone understands that the things that they can get accomplished within the platform. SS: Yeah, absolutely. Last question for you, Heather. What are some of the key initiatives that you’re looking forward to achieving in 2024 with your partnership with Highspot? HH: I think it would be the global rollout. I think we just had so much that we learned between the US and the Canada teams when we rolled it out over the past year and a half. We have those best practices, we have those Lessons learned. Now, with the global rollout, it’s just really helping out some of the other regions and being there for them as well, and how we can help support that side of things and just making sure everyone has as great of a successful rollout as the US and the Canada teams did. SS: Fantastic, Heather. Thank you again so much for joining us today. HH: Of course. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it, and thank you so much for the Highspot team and for making our launch so successful. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Read the full transcript here. Who's Moloch? And what do we mean when we call something "Molochian"? What does healthy competition look like? How can we avoid or extricate ourselves from Molochian scenarios? Are our instincts about fairness and unfairness usually accurate? Is it possible for today's social media giants to create products that people want to use and that are actually good for people to use? What kinds of problems could conceivably be solved by "trustless" solutions? or "high-trust" solutions? Where do you fall on the "rationality-to-woo" spectrum? When do we not want to find rational explanations for mysterious phenomena? What kinds of new rational explanations might we find if we opened our minds to more "woo"?Liv Boeree is one of the UK's most successful poker players, winning multiple titles during her professional career, including a European Poker Tour Championship and World Series of Poker bracelet. Originally trained in astrophysics, she now works as an educator and researcher specializing in the intersection of game theory, technology, and catastrophic risk reduction. Her main focus areas at present are the risks posed by artificial intelligence and other exponential technologies. She is also a co-founder of Raising for Effective Giving (REG), an advisory organization that uses scientific methods to identify and fundraise for the most globally impactful charitable causes. Her latest project is the newly launched Win-Win Podcast, which explores the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Follow her on Twitter at @liv_boeree.Further reading:Icarus, a documentary about doping in sports"Meditations on Moloch" by Scott AlexanderFinite and Infinite Games by James CarseWin-Win with Liv Boeree (podcast) [Read more]

Ben Wolf speaks to entrepreneurial business owners with teams of 10-150 people. He is founder and CEO of the largest fractional (part-time) COO firm, Wolf's Edge Integrators. Some call Ben the "godfather" of Fractional Leadership because, as leaders of their clients' management teams, Ben and his team coach, manage, and hire all leadership roles, both full-time and fractional. He wrote the bestselling first book on his industry, Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach, and is host of the popular Win Win Podcast. Connect with Ben Website - https://wolfsedgeintegrators.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwolf/ Connect with David Public Website: www.davidihill.com Real Estate University: www.realestateuniversity.club  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidihill/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidihill 20-Minute call: https://www.davidihill.com/strategycall   FACEBOOK COMMUNITY Please follow and join my Group- https://www.facebook.com/groups/ptmastery/

In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks to the Founder and CEO of Wolf's Edge Integrators, Ben Wolf. Ben is a successful entrepreneur and the author of the groundbreaking book "Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach." His journey from a corporate bankruptcy attorney to a healthcare startup and eventually founding his firm is inspiring.Ben's experience scaling a business from a handful of people to over 100 employees has given him a unique perspective on entrepreneurs' challenges. His insights led him to write the first book on fractional executive leadership and start a podcast in this niche, making him a pioneer in this field.Ben shed light on the concept of fractional leadership. He described it as a solution to the "entrepreneurial catch 22" - a situation where businesses reach a point where their old strategies no longer work, but they can't afford experienced talent to help them evolve. This is where fractional executives come in. They provide businesses with access to experienced talent part-time, helping them navigate their growth challenges. Ben further explained the indicators that suggest a business might benefit from fractional leadership. Key Points from the Episode:Ben's background and experience in fractional leadershipExplanation of fractional leadership and its benefits for businessesIndicators that suggest a business could benefit from fractional leadershipExample of an HVAC company with a low-functioning leadership teamOverview of Ben's book "Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach"Mention of Ben's podcast "The Win-Win Podcast" for small and mid-sized business owners About Ben Wolf:Ben Wolf is a renowned international speaker specializing in the entrepreneurial scaling of businesses. Often referred to as the "godfather" of fractional executive leadership, he has played a pivotal role in popularizing and advancing the outsourced, part-time executive leadership industry. As the founder and CEO of Wolf's Edge Integrators, the world's largest fractional COO firm, he has provided executive talent and expertise to businesses seeking growth and operational excellence. Ben's expertise and insights have reached a broader audience through his bestselling book, "Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach." Additionally, he hosts the well-received Win Win Podcast, further contributing to disseminating valuable business knowledge and strategies. His impactful work continues to inspire and support entrepreneurs worldwide. About Wolf's Edge Integrators:Wolf's Edge Integrators is a distinctive team comprising individuals with a rare blend of skills and qualities. These exceptional individuals must have experience in running companies, embody a Founder's drive, and possess a unique ability to collaborate with visionaries while maintaining a results-oriented mindset. Thriving on orchestrating chaos, they find vigor in this process rather than exhaustion. Their commitment to iterative transformation is a defining trait.Ben Wolf, the founder, has detailed their essence in the Amazon bestseller "Fractional Leadership: Landing...

Ben Wolf: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach Ben Wolf is the founder and CEO of the world's largest fractional COO firm, Wolf's Edge Integrators (www.WolfsEdgeIntegrators.com). He wrote the bestselling first book on his industry, “Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach,” and is host of the popular Win Win Podcast. Welcome to the Conscious Millionaire Show for entrepreneurs, who want to achieve high sales and positively impact humanity! Join host, JV Crum III, as he goes inside the minds of conscious guests such as Millionaire Entrepreneurs and World-Class Business Experts. Like this Podcast? Get every episode delivered to you free!  Subscribe in iTunes Download Your Free Money-Making Gift Now... "Born to Make Millions" Hypnotic Audio - Click Here Now! Please help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps others find our podcast. Thanks so much! Inc Magazine "Top 13 Business Podcasts." Conscious Millionaire Network has over 3,800 episodes that have been heard by over 100 million in 190 countries.