Tim Hughes is the CEO and Co-Founder of DLA Ignite as well as Executive Director of HighChloeCloud.  In both cases, these businesses are focused on the social transformation taking place in the business world as a result of social media.

In this session, Tim shared:

1️⃣How to replace your recruiting spend with a smart use of social to find the right talent.

2️⃣How to differentiate yourself from the noise on social to truly stand out and find the right business opportunities.

3️⃣The important three areas you must focus on to succeed on social, especially on LinkedIn:

• Make your profile work for you.  It's not a resume, it's a story that helps prospects find you and want to have a conversation.
• Build your network while remembering it's not about the number of followers, it's about the relationships you build with these followers.
• Create content, don't simply share what others are creating.

Lauren Turow, Head of Growth at LatelyAI, joined The Collaborator again to provide updates on life inside of a fast growing startup.  In this session, Lauren shares:

1️⃣ How LatelyAI has taken their churn rate from 3% to below 1% over the course of the last 3 months by focusing less on process optimization and more on the success of their customers.

2️⃣ That they are now crushing their sales numbers by getting smarter where they invest their sales cycles.  A startup is often focused on winning everyone possible sales, even the wrong ones.  Sellers generally do not have enough time to sell, most only have about 37% of their working hours to focus on selling activities.  They need to focus on the right deals.

Meghann Misiak, Associate Director of Go-To-Market Training at Moveable Ink, stops in to chat with The Collaborator about enablement's role in and around the discovery process.

Lots of insights from Meghann, including:

1️⃣The power of the MEDDIC sales checklist to help uncover the key pieces of information required to win deals.

2️⃣An approach she used when interviewing for the role at Moveable Ink (and it's one you should use if you are looking for a sales trainer job).

3️⃣The importance of building multiple champions in deals and how to approach it.

4️⃣Tips on helping your buyers better their own corporate goals so as to allow you to reach higher into the organization.

5️⃣A 4P Discovery Framework...

✅ Pain
✅ Personas
✅ Plan
✅ Process

Christina Brady, President at Sales Assembly and Co Managing Director of VentureSCALE, will stop by to chat with The Collaborator about these ventures, the future state of sales, how enablement teams can better support and collaborate with sales, and so on.

A few takeaways:

1️⃣ Enablement should partner with ops to identify trends and areas of opportunity.

2️⃣ Customer-facing teams need to work on non-verbal skills

Susan Savona, VP, Global Sales Enablement at Monster, will share her insight and experiences about building a global enablement program.  

1️⃣ Her team of 4 support between 350 and 400 sellers globally.  This is in line with the ratios we are seeing across this series of conversations.  The enablement team is made up of people with strong product/program management skills who facilitate and drive enablement projects forward.

2️⃣ 80% of what the team creates is able to be used by the entire business and 20% of the output is for specific geos, verticals, or other segments.

3️⃣ Susan reminds us to focus on understanding the business impact.  Always understand the why.

4️⃣ A sales content repository is critical.  Sellers need one source of approved, branded, up to date content that is easy to find.

5️⃣ A global certification program on solutions being sold.  Her team built this program to educate the sales team on four solutions and certify every person in the organization.  At the end of it, the sales person would have to do a 30 minute role-play that demonstrates their knowledge on the solution.  While it just rolled out, it's already getting positive feedback from the sales team with examples of major wins as a result of the knowledge learned as a result of the program.

Jeff Bajorek and Todd Caponi  stop in to chat with The Collaborator on when, and if, social selling is of value to businesses.  

Note: We did have a couple of network issues at the beginning.

Give a listen as their points are spot on.

1️⃣ Selling hasn't changed dramatically over time. Yes, we have more channels, but that doesn't change the fact that the goal is still to help customers understand, and then overcome, their business problems using your solutions.

2️⃣ There are certainly people doing amazing on LinkedIn in terms of social selling. Their products are a good fit, their customers are there. 

However, there are many more not using LinkedIn at all for selling who are still killing it. Make sure it fits your business needs and that your prospects are there.

3️⃣ All connections are NOT created equal. A connection that simply likes your posts is not as valuable, in a sales sense, as someone who would introduce you to a potential buyer. If you are looking to sell on this platform, you must understand how to tell the difference.

What does it mean to be Rebound Ready?

Kristie Jones, Principal at the Sales Acceleration Group, will join The Collaborator to discuss what it takes to be Rebound Ready.

1️⃣ 65-70% of your clients are ready to give a reference but only 11% of sales reps ask for one.  Get your reps to ask for that reference.  Kristie shares tips on when to ask to maximize results.

2️⃣ The reasons why your sales ops team is more critical than ever right now.

3️⃣ The importance of regularly delivering value to keep deals moving.

4️⃣ How to uncover  if you are hiring the right sellers for your business.

Shamis Thomson, Global Manager of Sales Enablement at Hootsuite, shares his insights around mindset and intellectual curiousity.

In addition, conversations about:

1️⃣ Building alignment across the organization through collaboration.

2️⃣ Supporting social selling in a social selling company.

3️⃣ Using curiosity to support personalization the right way.

Marie-Louise Dalsgaard, Head of Sales Enablement at Pleo, joined The Collaborator to discuss her on-boarding program as well as to share insights on the state of enablement in Denmark.

Jen Jortner Cassidy is the Senior Customer Success Manager, LinkedIn Learning.  Jen joined The Collaborator to discuss how customer success teams can thrive and explore how enablement teams can support these teams.

The following topics were discussed:

1️⃣ What does a customer success manager do?

2️⃣ How do you measure the success of customer success teams and individuals?