Win Win Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.

Recent research from Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations that leverage enablement technology is four times more likely to effectively provide insight into what’s working well within enablement. So how can analytics be used to drive business impact and how can an enablement tool, like Highspot, help you gather the insights that make the difference?

Here to tell us all about the power of analytics in enablement today is Highspot’s very own Vice President of Revenue Analytics, Paul Lisagor. Thanks for joining us, Paul. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role here at Highspot.

Paul Lisagor: Absolutely. Hi Shawnna, I’m responsible for revenue analytics here at Highspot. My team is supporting sales, marketing, and the go-to-market strategy and planning functions for the organization. As far as my background I worked in analytics my entire career starting with reporting analyst and a reporting developer role while I was still in high school. Working through the years and across industries I built expertise both academic and practical in data architecture, data science, finance, software development, and business strategy. I’m super excited to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

SS: We’re super excited to have you here Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’d love to start by hearing about the value of actionable insights from your perspective. How can analytics help enablement teams grow their business impact?

PL: Look, the days when legacy companies could win just purely by showing up are over and for some of the younger companies and newer industries, these days have never really existed. So companies today must really understand what’s going on within their business environment, what’s going on outside and around them, and of course is going on in our unpredictable world so they can quickly pivot, make decisions, and make adjustments to what and how they operate.

Running a business without having actual data and actual analytics is kind of like driving at night without your headlights on. You can sort of get away with it for some time, but ultimately, it simply doesn’t work. Within the enablement space, I find it to be particularly rich with opportunities or analytics can really help. So because of enablement’s indirect impact, it’s been historically very difficult to get good data and good metrics on the most important thing that enablement teams do, provide and improve business outcomes. So connecting enablement work to business goals, to business outcomes, is what analytics can do to help, and with knowing the impact we can start to see where we’re steering toward and point the organization in the right direction.

SS: Absolutely. Why might some teams struggle to uncover insights or leverage the right data? How can enablement teams overcome some of these challenges?

PL: Yes, getting the right signal from the data is difficult. It takes much more than good data technology, much more than fancy and shiny reporting, and certainly much more than simply investing in analytics. It takes time, it takes skill and it takes discipline. I found that most go-to-market organizations operate with so many unknowns and move so quickly that developing the new muscle, like analytics, just seems too impractical, too slow, too difficult, and too uncertain. But these investments in my experience and the patients around it have proven to be worth it every time.

To be a little more specific and to be successful, leaders need to find low-cost examples first. These low-cost proof points are extremely valuable. They establish executive support and build understanding within the organization of what analytics can do. Then move into hiring the right people, putting the right tools in place, and starting down the path, but starting down the path slowly and iteratively and measuring outcomes every step of the way.

SS: That’s fantastic advice. What is maybe some of the key ways that you use Highspot analytics in your day-to-day? How do you leverage insights regularly and how do these help you in your role?

PL: Yeah. Highspot provides a unique set of reporting and a unique set of tools that helps us get started significantly earlier and faster than we normally would. Bringing someone into the organization to build out analytics is of course very expensive. Takes a long time. They need to ramp up and truly understand the business to build something that truly works. Plus getting it done in time and on budget is exceedingly complex and uncertain. So having analytics built by experts is incredibly valuable and helpful and becomes a huge accelerant in getting started on the journey.

SS: I love that. For business leaders, having access to actionable data is essential for decision-making. How do you help ensure that your stakeholders have access to and understand the analytics that matters to making strategic decisions for the business?

PL: Yes, thank you for that question. This is actually one of the most important things we can do as analytics leaders and as enablement leaders is to make sure that it’s not just the analytics team and not just a select few that have access to data, but it’s the larger community and business decision-makers who are able to self-service and get insights and metrics right away. So like we talked prior, having the most sophisticated data technology, and most beautiful reporting won’t accomplish anything unless it’s used. So what I would recommend is using the three ingredients that over my history and experience doing this, I came to appreciate and recognize. Three ingredients to success for getting stakeholders on board and using analytics in a meaningful way. Number one, not surprisingly, is enablement. Companies must develop skills and practices outside of their analytics organizations and within the teams that make decisions to get the right metrics on their own when they need them. Number two is building the culture. The culture around analytics is fairly unique. It’s a set of business practices were arguments are supported by evidence, that are supported by data win versus those that aren’t supported by data. Number three is bringing the right blend of technology and tools and putting that in place. Those are the tools and tech that unlock simple answers to simple questions for key decision makers and personas within the organization that need to make these business decisions and at the time that they’re needed. So the tech and these analytics and reports need to be simple so that they are also simple to enable and train on. That sort of completes the loop of three. Beginning with enablement, building the culture, and creating the right tools.

SS: Absolutely. A common challenge for many organizations is moving from, you know, “random acts of enablement” to a strategic enablement approach. How can analytics help enablement leaders prove the value of enablement as a strategic function?

PL: When I think about a strategic approach to me, it means achieving long-term objectives and creating enduring business value. It also means being systematic, having a framework and the program with specific outcomes in mind. So analytics is the connecting tissue that really ties enablement to business outcomes. So companies that successfully implement practices that we discussed earlier become able to now set business hypotheses using data and reporting, conduct research and analyses on top of these hypotheses, capture the insights in the process, make business changes, experiment, and then ultimately measure the business outcomes that these changes bring about. That sequence of events then helps attribute business value to the outcomes and investment in enablement and in enablement analytics. So measurable business outcomes are the proof in the pudding.

SS: This has been fantastic, Paul. To close one last question, I’d love to hear about your predictions for how analytics will evolve and continue to play an essential role in elevating enablement value in the next year and the years to come.

PL: What we’ve discussed so far has really been about turning the lights on and confidently staying on the road and steering around the obstacles, but when I start thinking about the future, what comes to mind is autonomous driving. There will be more and more data, more and more complexity in this world, and exceedingly more and more difficult for humans to process and manage this information and synthesize it into confident decisions without being overwhelmed. As we all know information overload is real and it will continue to become more and more acute across organizations, across industries, across businesses, across departments, domains, and people. So we’re going to need help and I believe AI and ML will have to step in and make decision-making faster, simpler and easier. I think companies that will do it well and we’ll figure this out, will turn enablement into a true differentiator. They’ll be able to set themselves apart and then quickly move into the fast lane and accelerate past their competition.

SS: I love that vision for the future. Thank you Paul so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.

PL: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on.

SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Jarod Greene: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of leading the way the sales enablement podcast. My name is Jarod Greene, and I’m the Vice President of Product Marketing here at Highspot. And today, I’m delighted to be joined by HARISH: reaches a growth oriented executive with over 20 years across industry, product management, and product marketing experience. And on this episode, we’re discussing how to effectively land your product launch with the field. Thanks for joining me rich, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Harish Peri: Sure, and thank you Jarod for having me on. You know, we’re big Highspot fan. So this is doubly fun for me. Yeah, reach Perry. You know, I’ve been in technology for a little over 20 years, and half of that time actually has been in product marketing in different flavors. I like to think of myself as like a recovering developer who became a product manager and then a recovering product manager who became a product marketer and never left. And really, you know, just helping tell stories that help the field and help our customers and help drive revenue. That’s what I love to do day in, day out. So that’s why product marketing is for me.

JAROD: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I’ve never met someone who just got into product. But no one majored in product marketing, right, everybody just kind of fell into it. Everyone I know has been a former something that found product marketing, and fell in love with it. So that’s awesome to share. So you know, even when you have a solid strategy in place in Product Marketing is one of the big agreements, there’s around product launch. And everyone’s got a piece of it, the corporate marketing team to demand team enablement, sales, customer success, product launches require, I think, a lot of coordination, a lot of a lot of cat herding. And so when we think about what it really means it’s about change. It’s how you effectively manage change at scale. And a statistic from our friends at Salesforce is that not many sellers can adapt to changes in strategy. So what’s what’s going on here? 71% of sales leaders believe that the sellers can adapt to change feels like a really high number, and reflects what I might think is low competence. curious on what you think.

HARISH: Yeah, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I think it’s unfair to talk about competence. You know, I think change is the exact right word. On the marketing side of things, we get caught up a lot in the sugar highs and the quick hits of the launch, which is, did we get the press mentions? Do we get the social coverage? And did we create the right buzz and if you’re doing a launch event, did we have the right entertainment there like people, we get caught up in all the trappings of the launch. But you know, you have to realize it like salespeople are going through an entire kind of mental model change exercise with their own prospects. And when you launch something that disrupts that mental model. So a lot of times, like the fact that something is new or something, we think that something that’s new isn’t good enough for that sales process. In fact, it may not have been impacted at all. And so it’s it’s less about the you know that reps are not able to deal with changes in strategy. It’s almost like the launch strategy doesn’t match up. Our rep is, you know, enacting a kind of a mental model change with a prospect or a client if you’re upselling them. So I would, I would argue that it launches a lot of time spent a lot of time spent on the trappings and the fun stuff, versus very little time to spend on like, how can we inject the benefits of this launch into existing deals that are in flight, or into existing plays that our reps have with customers, and almost molded the launch to fit those models, versus trying to just throw something new and see whether it sticks. And look, it’s tough being in SAAS, right, like everybody is competing, everyone’s got to come up with a new thing. Everyone’s launching left and right relaunching and so I get the pressure. You know, in Product Marketing, this is our life like we see this all day every day. But I would almost argue and say that it’s up to the product marketers to say, your shiny new product almost doesn’t matter how it fits into the enablement and the playbook and the mental model of different reps in different segments and how they talk to their customers. That’s really what the launch should be about. Yeah, I would say that the reason you have this stat is us PMMs are not really doing our job to the best of our abilities.

JAROD: Yes, that’s great. It’s a great point of view. One of the kinds of things I say a lot is if you’re doing pm right, nothing feels like it’s being thrown over the wall. Kind of carefully orchestrated the is this strategy at the very top and how that ties in with the product strategy which tries to go to market with strategy, all the things that people need to do to support that product launch is one key side of authentically It’s like almost like wedding planning, it’s great to plan for what what is going to be fun, we’re gonna dance, we’re gonna eat cake, it’s gonna be a really good time. But there’s a long tail. After that there’s a lot to be done after, then the work starts. And so I can, I can understand that really well. So really, when you think about coordinating all those bits, the business strategy, the product strategy to go to market, there’s the whole world of what you just got to do internally, mapped against all the external constraints, your competitors are doing things to. Sometimes there’s a gap between what you talked about the mental model for the reps, there’s a gap between what the really good reps can do, what the not so good can do and what the really struggling ones can do. Yeah, when you think about a launch, that construct still applies, right, the good reps are going to pick it up. And the not so good ones are how do we how do we solve for that? Because everyone’s heard the 80/20 rule: 80% of the sales made by 20% of our reps, launch can complete the exasperate that or accelerated? And how can organizations think about moving that needle and getting the whole team on board what the launch is intended to support and drive?

HARISH: Yeah, that that really is where enablement comes into play, right. So like, the worst thing you can do is, hey, we launched this new product or this new feature, it’s amazing, for these reasons, good luck, which is what we were talking about a second ago. And yeah, there’s going to be a small portion of AES or reps, they’re going to take that and say, I know exactly how this fits into my world. Because maybe they already were proactive, and we’re in sync with the product teams. And we’re thinking about this ahead of time, right? That’s part of what makes them really good reps. But you want it, you want to systematize that out of the equation, where it isn’t about, like you’re not so reliant on like a star performer, you know, you’re more, you’re building a team that’s covering your entire customer base correctly. And that’s done through proper enablement. So if there’s the right education, the right enablement, and the right pressure from sales management to say, we are only executing these plays, this is kind of how you take these products to market. So whether it’s combinations of products, whether it’s a specific industry use case, whether it’s a specific kind of compelling pain point, whatever those plays are, then and that those plays are enforced, essentially, then the key is to get the launch to fit into those plays, or create a new play that supports that launch, right, then you’re taking the kind of the Voodoo factor of saying, Oh, well, this guy, or this person is a star, therefore he or she knows exactly how to run with it, you take that out of the equation. And it’s more a question of it’s in the playbook. Everyone has been enabled, and everyone’s demonstrated that they can execute the playbook, then you take that, you know that that kind of risk factor, or star factor out of the equation. You know, that doesn’t take away like whether some reps are more proactive than others. And you know, they have the right number of touches with their customers. And that’s kind of up to each frontline sales manager to deal with their reps. But at least to to kind of reduce the, the whether the launch will land or not, you know, is really getting that enabling machine working and getting those launches, plugged into those plays. And getting those plays really enforced across the ADA base, at least in my view is something that is a way to fix that. Yeah,

JAROD: 100% I mean, we believe in the power of plays as well. And one of the things I think a play does to your point, it evens the playing field, it takes the ability to also understand what the star reps are doing. Yeah, there’s a way we think about play development where, you know, we almost start with the reps point of view, and think through what are the things they specifically you know, say, Show and do the other reps who may be a little more in tune of an industry or a persona or segment, there are some reps who may have had experience selling similar products selling similar capabilities. So there’s a whole series of activities you’re doing through a launch, but I absolutely cosign the fact that the power is in the play, in that if you can get everyone literally on the same page with how to execute that play. The analytics are now and how effective is the play in driving the goal? You don’t have to chase down individual folks and say, Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? You now have the data to know if you run the play you’re like, that’s goes up by a factor of x, as opposed to here’s some content, go figure it out. Or here’s a lunch and learn. We hope it all sticks and so that we absolutely cosign and believe in the power of plays for sure.

HARISH: Yeah, also, you know, it is just good hygiene, right? Because there’s always this  like, product is from Mars and sales are from Venus. And you can think of it that way. It’s like, there’s, what does it do? There’s, why does it matter? But then there’s why does it matter now? Right? The relevance is what drives urgency with the field. And then why does it matter now to dismiss The thick sub sub segment of our prospect base, that’s when the plays become super powerful. And so really are both your questions, the first one and this one. A lot of times like the reason launches this land flat is you haven’t done that translation, right? Like product marketers will say we our job is we take features and we turn it into value. But that’s still 50%. The other 50% is why is that value matter to this specific rep at this moment in time, to that prospect that they’re going to talk to tomorrow, and that’s where that that’s when you start to get the hyper relevance that will tip of the spear that can help them get ahead of a lot of the competition. And that actually can help a lot of, you know, quote, unquote, not star reps to say, oh, yeah, I guess if I’m going to lead with a conversation like in in my world, right, security, you know, cybersecurity is hot all the time. But right now, there’s a whole kind of nation-state actor threats, like, feature wise, there’s, you know, we can compete all day with on a feature basis, or even on a value basis in terms of like cost savings, or reduced fines, or whatever. But the relevance now is like, literally the barbarians are at your gates, are you ready like this, if you just switch the conversation to why that matters at this moment in time, given what’s happening in the world, that’s a play that any rep, even if they’re brand new, and ramping can take and start to then generate meaningful pipeline.

JAROD: Now, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s a, I have heard the before where you know, we’re from Mars or Venus, there is a thing that I think we do share desire to do, which is like we want to drive the business forward, we both have the same goal in mind. And I think the way to attain it is just everyone in their respective areas, but working really hard across the aisle to serve that need. One of the things I want to ask you about is, you know, taking the same plate concept, you know, extending that into sales managers, one of the things we’ve learned is that enablement only really goes so far as the sales managers and the sales leadership team allows it to do that, if you enable the rep, the first question they ask is not back to the product marketer, or back to the corporate market, or back to the product is to their manager, hey, just launched what is this? How does this work? And if the sales manager isn’t informed, we just find that it or worse, the sales manager is not on board. Bad things can happen. So how have you kind of understood the dynamics between not just sales but the hierarchy of sales and sales leadership in the context of a launch?

HARISH: Yeah, there’s there’s different different tactics depending on kind of how big your company is, and what what the culture is, but it comes down to relevance, ultimately, you know, the larger the company is the, you know, it’s always a fight to get your launch to be relevant to some kind of corporate initiative or company level goal. Because then it’s like, look, we’re supporting it. So then a manager has ammo to say, look, in executing this play, you’re supporting something big that the CEO, you know, him or herself wants to get done, right. So there’s, there’s a certain level of politics, I will say, a larger company and a smaller company, it’s much easier, you just go to the VP of sales and say, Listen, like this is what’s gonna get your, your reps to get the quarter faster, right. And this is, this is how we’re all gonna go to club. And so you make it relevant in that way. And it becomes a no brainer. If if there’s a way to tie it to, you know, a deeper customer success or values outcome, then that’s even better, because you know, the best sales manager will want their customers their own customers to succeed, in addition to the rep succeeding as well. So it just it really depends on kind of what the what stage you’re at how large it is, and, and what the culture is ultimately about.

JAROD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s, let’s shift gears a bit. Let’s talk about the the other side of things, what we think about launch a lot, and I’ve been guilty of it in the past as a product marketer, let’s just write it all down. Let’s create all the new content that you booked the white papers and video all the assets and let’s update the value calculators, let’s, let’s get all the content queued up. And then we’ll launch publicly and we’ll have the event or we’ll have the moment in time and the new features released and we got the quote in the analysts we feel really good. And again, we could throw that over to the Wall Wrap and say you got it now you guys you guys have all the content you need. And even if we put it in a play, and even if we structure the guidance on uses here, uses here uses here. There’s still a world of trading and coaching to think through. So you’ve created the strategy or you’ve done something different. But most reps are going to forget how do you think about the training and sales learning side of a launch?

HARISH: Yeah, I think it’s, um, there’s two parts to it. There’s the kind of maybe push and pull right on the pull side of things. It is an easy thing that power marketers can do is like really highlight the Your wins. So there’s kind of like that scary initial month, let’s say after launch, where once a sugar high fades like PMM you’re like desperately looking for, okay? Which my reps one, like, I want some some deals where they actually succeeded with this new launch with a new product. And then like you want to latch onto that rapidly document that and publicize the heck out of that with your reps. Because you can say, look like one of you, somebody in your team uses this to execute in this way, let them explain it to you, because that is way better than any marketer talking to a sales rep because it’s a credibility thing, right? Like, ultimately, there’s the fine line of product marketers are not they’re not the Spartans in the field. Like, that’s always the big difference. We can take it up to a certain point, but we’re not the ones who’s who’s you know, who are feast or famine from a quota perspective. So you want to fulfil, a rep comes in it says, I use this to close XYZ, here’s how I did it. Whether or not the deal was humongous, you know, it’s that’s a segment specific thing. But the story is very important. This is why I went after this is the messaging that I use, this is the opening that I had, oh, by the way, here’s the thing that’s not documented, also look for accounts that have these characteristics. Because you know, what marketers, we may not have known that when we launched it, that’s the learnings you get from the field. And so the deal winds are supremely important. The second thing is, you know, as much as this can be codified into the actual sales process itself. So like, you know, I have to plug CRM because I kinda, that’s, that’s my day job. But, um, if it is like in all of your opportunity stages, are you tagging things correctly with whether you use a certain player or a certain methodology that may have been impacted by this new launch? That’s something from a push perspective, where a manager can really coach on a day to day basis to say look like why or why aren’t you using this approach? Why aren’t you talking about new capabilities from this launch? I’m not seeing documented in the in the CRM, for example. So it’s a push and pull thing, but in my experience, like the deal winds are, by far, the thing that just removes any skepticism and almost creates a little healthy competition, because we all know, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s the culture, right? It’s you motivated by a little bit of competition. So

JAROD: I’ve heard that once or twice, and sales folks are competitive.

HARISH: Maybe a little. Just a little.

JAROD: I absolutely see the value in kind of your we’ll call it the post launch, the post launch launch or the post launch strategy is to kind of reinforce we, we have a philosophy I might seem says always be launching, never miss an opportunity to launch How many times have we done this as product marketers, the launch is done, the sugar high is over. And then we move on to the next launch. So next to launch the next thing? Well, just because we had that moment in time, and we spiked the football and had the party doesn’t mean everybody’s dropped it, our sales seem to have dropped it, the market at large hasn’t dropped that our analysts haven’t dropped it. So at every touchpoint we have with the market, we try to reinforce the thing we last last just now. It’s now part of the narrative. And so we do that both internally. And externally, I 1,000% see the value of making sales kind of the voice of it as opposed to you know, Product Marketing, saying, Hey, guys, remember, you know, this is how you do a discovery on this. So we’ve just having a website around that play. It works. You guys crazy not to do it. And if you want, you want to make money it would behove you to run the play this way. I absolutely love that.

HARISH: Absolutely. I would almost argue that there’s like launches, product launches and sales success, they’re almost orthogonal to each other. And most product launches, like you shouldn’t be looking at them more from a noise making capacity. So made noise were in the market are relevant. It’s a lot of top of the funnel buzz. And it’s actually a good data point for reps, even if it doesn’t impact a play for them just to go back to an open deal and say, hey, look, we’re innovating. Right? If nothing else, it’s just a way to go back to your customers and prospect and have a touch point. So that that alone is enough, even if it doesn’t directly impact play. That’s why like it’s a little orthogonal. And if it does directly back play, and it helps accelerate deals or treat, you know, fills in a gap that stalling some deals great. But if nothing else, it’s still like a an opportunity to make noise. Yeah, as we know is important. SAAS is a hot hot hot space. And so you gotta stay relevant.

JAROD: Yeah. Andit’s a busy space and again, like you say, everyone’s launching something at any given time.

HARISH: Or everyone’s creating a category. That’s the thing.

JAROD: Yeah, everyone’s creating a category one and there’s no competitor like them. No one does what they do not even close. Yeah, yep, we’ve all been there too. And, and if you think Think about it again that the culture of launch and readiness, I firmly believe is the function of of enablement. At the core of it. We believe enablement is about driving change at scale. Launch represents a change, it represents a change in what your product does, it represents a way you have now changed the way you position and compete change the way you may deploy in some cases, or the way you price and so a lot just continues to be a theme. What What would you tell anyone out there who says, Look, what’s what’s the real secret to launch success, if you had to kind of summarize and say, to do launch, effectively, you must do X or X and Y, what would be some of the pearls of wisdom you’d like to pass to the audience?

HARISH: I think the hardest thing, but the thing that really makes a launch successful is just everybody needs to fundamentally have the same. Same definition of what success looks like. Because there’s this, there’s always you have this huge kind of trough of disappointment afterwards, where it’s like, somebody didn’t get what they wanted, or somebody didn’t see the outcome they wanted, because in the very beginning of the process, you know, the launch owner wasn’t I would almost say brave enough to say, listen, listen, like this is not something that’s going to impact sales, that’s okay. Right? If it’s, if it’s if the goal is to is to create buzz, then focus on that, and leave it at that and don’t then the next day, go to Sales and say, Hey, are you folks using this in your, in your processes? They’re like, No, this doesn’t affect us. And if that wasn’t known, objective, great, then no one’s that happy, right? But if you notice, your objective is actually driving sales success. Don’t spend so much time on all the fluffy noise making stuff and get into the weeds with the reps and say, reverse engineer, how do we position this launch. So it’ll help you the minute it hits. And so it’s, it’s, it’s always this, like, wrangling the folks that matter to come to an agreement on what the definition of success is, if do and those are very hard, annoying conversations, but like the launch owner needs to be brave enough to drive that they are and to get alignment, then those are the situations I’ve seen where it’s just like, it’s smooth, because there’s people that want, there’s no one out there that has really disappointed after the fact

JAROD: very much. So very good. Let me ask one final final question. Before we wrap any thoughts on how product marketers can help the enablement team and by product sellers be more consistent in their ability to execute?

HARISH: Yeah, that’s, that’s a big one. Um, I think it’s a cultural thing. It’s almost like part of marketers need to have a little less hubris. So it’s, it’s less about believing that, you know, they created the right bill of materials, right, they created the data sheet and updated first called deck and the demo video when the things and assuming that that’s going to make a difference, and really actually understanding what is the language of enablement? What is what they do day to day? And how can Product Marketing create the right outputs coming on for launch that will help enablement function? How can we create the right outputs? That’s going to help? See and sales being a broad definition, like at a segment level, right? How can they help the SMB function, the mid market folks, the enterprise folks, the stratacomm folks, how can they frame the launch to help them? Because proper argument sits in the middle of everything, right? Yeah. And fundamentally, like our job is we’re literally just linguists, we’re seeing different languages who talk one thing product folks, one thing to them and enable people wanting to the reps wanting to analysts and customers. And so it’s really understanding that mental model of how does enablement succeed? And then what can we do to help them so it comes down to plays, it comes down to the right. The right kind of materials may not be sexy stuff, but it’s important stuff. That I think is some—is it’s a work in progress, but it’s a thing that PMs have to get better at.

JAROD: Yeah, yeah. Be humble. Yeah.

HARISH: You’re saying the middle of everything and it’s a you have a lot of power, but you know, great power, great responsibilities, you got to learn their language.

JAROD: Absolutely. Always. This has been a pleasure. Thank you a lot. Thank you. So with the insights, the pearls of wisdom, the best of luck to you in a team, everything you do from here on out, and it’s been great having a conversation with you. Appreciate it.

HARISH: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was a ton of fun. Right. Thanks a lot.

Lawrence Chapman: Thanks so much for tuning in for the latest episode of Leading the Way. If you’re looking to enhance your sales number and credentials, the marketing alliance has just a ticket in the form of sales enablement certified, no matter where you’re at in your product marketing journey. This course is packed with real life examples, case studies, expert tuition, templates and activities that you need to build and scale awesome sales and open programs. They’re by Sapphire Reels, Director of portfolio and integrated marketing at Pluralsight. The course will help you articulate the importance of sales enablement and sell internally design a sales enablement programme from scratch based on business objectives and sales needs. launch and iterate sales enablement programmes, demonstrates the importance and impacts of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation. Enroll on the course now at pmmalliance.com/salesenablementcertified and get all the tools you need to design and launch impactful sales enablement programs.

Jarod Greene: Hi everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Leading the Way, the sales enablement podcast. My name is Jarod Greene. I’m the Vice President of Product Marketing at Highspot. And today, I’m delighted to be joined by Jen Bunting. Jen is a product marketing leader, currently responsible for go to market strategy, sales enablement, product launches and product adoption. And in this episode, we’re discussing how enablement needs product marketing now, more than ever, thanks for joining me, Jen. Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Jen Bunting: Hi, Jarod. And hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. So my name is Jen Bunting. And I’ve been a product marketer for almost 12 years. I’ve been in marketing for about 20 years. I’ve been at LinkedIn for a lot of that time. And I’m currently based in London. So I look after product marketing. Basically if you’re on LinkedIn, and you see our ad products, that’s the suite of products my team looks after, and I focus on the EMEA LAM region.

JAROD: Awesome. So we look at strategy enablement, volunteers and adoption. How do you find time to get anything else done? That is quite an extensive range of responsibilities.

JEN: It is a lot. It’s all about prioritization. We spend a lot of time thinking about the year ahead, the half year ahead, the quarter ahead and trying to work really closely with the product teams, the sales teams, cross channel marketing teams, and my team in EMEA. We focus on me and London is much smaller than our global PMM team. So we really focus on what is going to drive the needle most for our customers and our sales teams. And we have to make those hard prioritization calls.

JAROD: Absolutely. And speaking of prioritization, that’s one of the challenges we see a lot for marketing leaders, they’re under a lot of pressure to do a lot of things. They have to build a tonne of pipeline, they have to now convert that pipeline and improve the win rates they have to improve customer experience. And ultimately, we see that there’s a lot of things that can get in the way of them doing that. Stop me if you heard this before, but one of the things we hear is that buying teams are more sophisticated. They’re larger, they’ve gone from five to 12 to 20, in the latest Forrester b2b statistics. So with a buying team that large in that form, it creates a lot of consternation for things because we find that sometimes the buyer comes in more informed than some of the sellers in some scenarios. At the same time, the product line’s getting more complex. And so to meet the needs of these buyers, some companies are building more capabilities into the products, different pricing models, different licensing models, different skews. So now the products are becoming more complex. And that creates some consternation for marketing teams, your sellers now have to know it all they have to not only be subject matter experts in the products that they sell, but also information connectors across that bond committee. How do I understand the needs of persona A, persona B, and persona C and not tell them contradict your stories? And then most of the things that we hear that sales and marketing, they’re just focused on too many things. Too many initiatives at once too many sales plays, too much content, too much training, too many tools. Jen, again, have you seen these challenges in either your day-to-day or as you talk to other product marketing leaders, of these things that resonate with them?

JEN: Now it’s so easy. Now I’m obviously sorry, just trying to surprise your listeners. But yeah, it is definitely a challenge. That is my day to day. And so I’m a member of the product marketing Alliance. And I’m also on the IAB UK board for social media. And it’s a challenge everyone is definitely facing. And on top of that, so all of those things are true that you said. And I think another thing too, as businesses are returning to growth, for product marketers, the headcount of our sales colleagues is typically faster and higher than us. So that means we have more stakeholders to learn what their needs are, and balanced that with business objectives. But also, if you’re trying to, if your sales team isn’t ready to sell the product, you’re just not gonna be able to go to market, you’re not gonna be able to drive adoption, you’re gonna have high churn. So you also have to all of a sudden, onboard all of these salespeople from scratch, they need to learn your business and your client, or customer or prospect needs to feel like they are part of the team and they always have been there. So how do you help them get up to speed really quickly and like it’s in everybody’s best interest if they can hit their quota and, and their clients are happy? So there’s all of that going on at the same time, as you know, new products, launching all the challenges that you just mentioned?

JAROD: Yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting. You say that because it sounds like that. You put sales in the same bucket as you do your customers. You know, they need to be enabled, aware and powered, knowledgeable, insightful. And the ability to make sure that the buyers, your customers or prospects have that same level of knowledge and context in confidence. Is that an accurate summation of the situation?

JEN: Definitely. I mean, these sales teams talk to the customers more than anyone else at the company. So even for like ours, we think about the voice of customer at LinkedIn, but we also think about the voice of the field. And so that’s part of the process in terms of deciding what should we think about putting on the periodic product roadmap. So we talked to sales, prior to talking to customers, and they helped introduce us to customers as well, that are facing challenges so we can have those conversations directly with them. Yeah, they’re, they’re vital, vital to the success of the business and having that partnership.

JAROD: Absolutely. Absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about what that feedback loop looks like. Is that a formal charter? Is it more informal, more, more Lunch and Learn More? stop and chat to the hallway talk about what that structure of the feedback loop between product marketing and the field looks like? I’m sure our listeners would be keen to understand that.

JEN: Sure. I mean, it’s definitely for me anyway, it’s changed over the years, when I joined LinkedIn, we were still technically classified as a startup public, we got acquired by Microsoft. So there’s been changes in that over the course of time. Right now, it is definitely more on the formal side. But even that, I would say it changes. We evaluate how effective the process was each time. Right now the process looks like we hear from sales teams, what customers have talked about from the sales team perspective, since we’re talking about sales enablement. So we hear from the sales teams, we do a lot of account prioritization and talking to, like, how are they going to grow these accounts. And so, in that, what always comes up are all the challenges that salesperson faces to grow that that size of the account. And product is often part of that. So we listen to them. And we do a lot of trying to like size up the price. Like if we make this change, that means we can’t do something else. So what is going to drive the biggest, solve the biggest customer need. So sometimes for salesperson that might be growing revenue, protecting revenue, or it might be making the platform easier to use so that our customers are happy, and they want to keep coming back for more. So we look at all of this twice a year, we have conversations after we talk to sales and customers, we then have conversations with the product teams. And we have to prioritize because resources are limited, like at every company. And then the closing the loop happens, which is we need to now tell the sales team, what we did with all that feedback, we need to show that we listen to them. And we involve their leadership in that conversation. And so the closing the loop session feels maybe formal, but it is kind of formal. So it’s a it’s a Zoom call, the guts of it, it is a Zoom call with head of product and the product teams. So there’s a lot of products. So marketing, the ad solutions or marketing solutions alone has around 100 to 150 feature updates and changes every year. So there’s a lot of different product people and product marketing people on that call, and we invite the sales team. And it’s really a great opportunity for them to hear directly from product, why those decisions were made. Because the reality is they’re not asking for something that they don’t need or a customer doesn’t need. It’s just what is the greatest need for the customer. And so we try to be really transparent, and help them understand why we couldn’t do everything we want to do this coming quarter and show what what the what the vision is to get where we want to go in the future.

JAROD: Love it. Yeah, I’m a big fan of kind of product marketing, setting the table. It’s always been a challenge of, how does Product Marketing get a seat at it. And I love the notion of just setting your own table and inviting people that need to be a part of the conversation. It ultimately is one of those areas where I I think product marketing as I call it are unbiased observer who can understand the go to market strategy, understand the product, understand the market, understand the needs of sellers, obviously understand the needs of customers can kind of be the team or the function that puts it all together. And again, I think that that becomes really important for enablement, because again, they’re not going to be able to create content for every single thing that they need. But your ability to to understand what the company’s strategy is, what the goals and objectives are, how many, how much demand you need to produce, how much demand you need to convert really allows you to set those priorities that that is phenomenal to hear and kudos To you and the team for facilitating that kind of touchpoint

JEN: Thank you. It is an ongoing learning process that always has this other thing I guess for your listeners, one year, it’ll work perfectly. And just when you have it figured out something in your sales team or your own marketing team, your structures change, and you have to revisit the process, but it’s, it’s its product, and also, like organizations are living beings, and sometimes their needs change. So we try our best, and we work really closely with product and sales to make it happen.

JAROD: Yeah, it’s the only constant change for sure. And so I’m gonna give you an alliteration alert. I have a little equation that I use, and I think my team’s tired of hearing it. But it’s a simple one that says, If you give sellers content, without context, you get chaos. They just, they just won’t know how to use, you just throw content over the wall, you just bombard him with all the stuff and say, here’s all the stuff Steve asked for, here’s all the stuff Megan asked for. For you just throw it over the wall, what ends up happening is that you see low pockets of adoption with it. And it can run the risk of being kind of incongruent with a larger set of motions. And so we flip the equation and say, content plus context equals confidence, if I can give you context and how to use the content we’re supplying you with, you now have competence to go execute it effectively. And then that’s where we start to see the adoption, the satisfaction, the retention will go up. Feel free to disagree with the equation, but we would just love your thoughts on that frame to think about the way we arm sellers to be successful.

JEN: I love it, I’m going to steal it. I love a good alliteration, and it really rings true for me. So I guess a story that backs that up. So I was in product marketing when I lived in Sydney for LinkedIn. And then I did a slight career shift. And I went into content marketing, before I eventually came back to product marketing. But when I was doing content marketing, I was still working with all the same sales teams. And one of the people in sales that I worked with was just really sad. He’s, he’s like, Oh, you’re going to content marketing, you’re not going to be working on anything that I need anymore. And it was a learning moment, because anything I produced from whether it was giving feedback to product and launching something to go to market or the adoption, or whether it was okay, I’m going to build a content strategy for your market from scratch. Everything that is being produced is for your clients and you. So I’m still doing everything for you and your team. And so we did a lot of, for lack of a better word like evangelism or branding of our own content marketing with the sales team. So we would have our external launch. And we had an internal launch and said, here’s these resources, this ebook is coming out, it maps back to the product roadmap, so you can sell something that’s coming out but allows you to elevate your conversation, it’ll help drive leads, but we had we it’s similar to I guess, sales enablement for brand new product launch. But even from like, content perspective, anything your client sees, they may ask the salesperson about and so we just tried to make sure they felt completely supported through that whole journey. And I think the simplest way to do this, I gave them the context. So they would know why it’s on the roadmap.

JAROD: It’s fascinating, right? Like that notion of, you know, everything we create as marketers is for the customer, or for the audience. It’s for the buyer, the prospect, the the analysts, sometimes right, there’s a tonne of content we do. But knowing how and when to use it, I think is the most important, you know, lever to pull or consideration to make when you think about before you put pen to paper on it. How is this going to be used? What channel does this sit in? What’s the goal of it? Because I also think there’s the world and I’m sure many can relate to this. It’s, at some point in time, everybody’s a marketer. Everybody’s a content marketer, but as a product marketer, everyone’s built a pitch deck. Everyone’s built their version of an e book, everyone’s written their own white paper. But without that context, it is very easy to live in a world where there are now 20,000 things out there. And a seller is going into a meeting in 15 minutes and has no idea what context they need to be successful in that.

JEN: Yeah, it gets back to the prioritization element to like we have so many products and features at launch. And part of my job as a regional product marketer is to explain to the regional marketing team, this is what is going to make the biggest difference in the EU. This is what’s going to make the biggest difference in Brazil and have the same conversations with the sales team. Because otherwise everything, everything to product is equally important and valuable. And they put the same amount of blood, sweat and tears into all of that. So when it comes to taking that to our customers, we have to do all of that, you know, contextualization and prioritization so that it makes sense. Otherwise, it would just be a continuous waterfall of information. And people wouldn’t know what to do with it.

JAROD: No, definitely not. So I, I hear another element and you talk a little bit about this in the feedback loop with the sellers. But you know, we as product, we do a lot of research on the market in general, we look at kind of trends, we look at win loss analysis, we keep a pulse of what our competitors are doing, we look at shifting buyer needs. And then we use that information to kind of support the notion of campaigns, whether they’re formally structured, you know, multi-channel, omni-channel campaigns, whether they’re internal campaigns to drive awareness of all the great stuff you did, as you mentioned, a few minutes ago. But again, talk to me about the handoff of that content. How does your product marketing team partner with the enablement function, which we haven’t brought up in detail, but we think about the sales enablement world? What role do they play in helping make sure that that context for the content gets landed the right way.

JEN: So we’re really lucky at LinkedIn now that we do have a sales enablement team. But when I first joined, we didn’t. So it was very difficult. But even now, even on LinkedIn, as a big company, we only have a very small sales enablement team. And their responsibility covers, not just making sure that we that they, you know, are there that kind of content between product marketing and the sales teams, but they think about sales best practices, and how do they how do you basically be a better more effective salesperson or customer support person. So they have a whole range of curriculum, they have online learning, they have in-person training, there was a point in time where we used to travel and do like in-office training with different teams. That wasn’t scalable after a while at LinkedIn. But there’s a variety of ways that you can get in front of the sales team. And so the sales enablement team today helps us understand what that is. And they kind of own the roadmap of time learning time for the sales team. So LinkedIn is very fortunate in that we own LinkedIn Learning, which was formerly lynda.com. So there’s all sorts of like learning outside of even their day job, they could be learning Python, or Photoshop if they wanted to. But we have specific curriculum that they are required to learn in order to sell the newest products or to report back to the business on what they’re doing. So the sales enablement team kind of owns that. So we do have a quarterly product release. And the global cams work with the global sales enablement, and they kind of come up with a calendar. So they have, they do have kind of monthly trainings, I believe, but there are required elements on a quarterly basis that map up to like the biggest launches that happened that quarter. And they use an online platform that they can kind of look through and help to understand. Was this training resonating? Did people make it all the way through? How did they go? Were they able to take the practice questions and stuff? So they helped kind of create all of that so that as PMMs, we think through, what what are the main things people need to know? But the sales enablement team thinks about how do we put it into place? And they can also let us know are there other things happening in the business that the sales team needs to be trained for, that’s going to be kind of a conflict on their time, because they want to make sure they spend as many hours as possible selling, whether it’s on the phone, whether it’s on Zoom, whether it’s now back in person with clients. So it’s all about maximizing the sales training time. But also, it’s that kind of, it’s a very delicate balance of, you still have to know about the product that’s coming out. Otherwise, you can’t sell it, you won’t hit your quota. And the worst case scenario, I think, for a lot of salespeople is for a client to ask a question about something they just saw a press release or a blog post or saw something from your company. And the salesperson did not know that is an awful feeling. It feels like you’ve lost face in front of the client. And so my goal, which I don’t know how to measure it, but my kind of unspoken goal for me and my team is to avoid that feeling for salespeople. That way, they at least know where to go to have that information. So there’s all of those trainings. And then also we think about email comms. So how often do we email people like there’s so many different cross functional sales, cross functional marketing teams, so we have to be very careful that we don’t just spam the sales team that otherwise they won’t be able to find what they need?

JAROD: No, no, we say it all the time. It’s like if they find out about the release or capability or partnership or integration through a press release, we all we all messed up something horribly arrived, or or or very likely to weren’t paying attention.

JAROD: Yeah, the accountabilities that I’ve just done. A big fan of that. But I think when you do have the dynamic, you talked about where product market and enablement are tied at the hip, there’s the notion of a calendar, a forward looking schedule, it might be the case that Jake misses the Tuesday meeting, but the recording is here, and that place to go to get that is context that’s relevant. So I do agree that that is a very, very effective way to keep yourself kind of mindful of what sellers go through exercise a little bit in the empty you talk to, but also we’re gonna hold them accountable.

JEN: Yeah. And sometimes things happen that you can’t predict and product marketing, I think the worst assignment you can be given at the product marketer is to sunset or deprecate or product. No one goes into product marketing, thinking they’re gonna have to do that. You’re thinking about the future, and what the possibilities are and the next new thing, or how do you use what’s existing to grow revenue and grow your company? Sometimes removing a product is very difficult. It’s difficult for you as a PMM, but sales teams, they absolutely loathe it, they don’t like having to tell the client that even if it was something the client rarely ever use, that something’s being removed. And those things tend to happen with shorter notice. And so then, kind of how do you like, like, I don’t want say beg for time. But sometimes it’s kind of like, please let us talk to the sales team, let us come to a sales meeting, let us go to all these sessions. We don’t want to ask sales teams to take away time from their clients. But they have to know this change is coming. And that is also a more emotional conversation if something is being taken away. But they do pay attention.

JAROD: They do, they do. Yeah, I absolutely believe that. You know, salespeople have a very difficult job to do. And, you know, confidence is key to everything. If they can be confident in their abilities to land those messages, whether they’re good messages or not so good messages, they can build the right levels of credibility with their audience. And that’s that’s key to it all. I want to shift gears a minute, I have a question on the way you guys think about personas. We’ve had some debates internally on do we go really deep into persona marketing. Product marketing builds the personas and says, here’s the persona for above the line marketer, above the line sales, above the line enablement. And we’ll have kind of an understanding of a data life and information sources, but then become real. One of the ways we use them is we build content from the persona guides. And we work with our sales team to validate that yes, these are the traits and themes you see amongst personas you work with. There’s also the side that says if you go too deep on personalization, you run the risk of speaking too specific to one persona. And then when you have to now back out and talk to their peer persona that you’ve changed or altered the messaging. How do you deal with that kind of complexity? I don’t think we’ve got this quite figured out yet. But I’m curious how you think about personas and outcomes across five teams. Because with that complexity, the need to do this well, I think is really important.

JEN: That’s a very good question. And we also haven’t cracked that puzzle yet. Our teams in the US have done tons of work around persona building. I think it’s very, very challenging, especially if your organization is international, and your customers’ levels of sophistication and company sizes, like it can just be so so drastically different. For me, what is easiest at the moment is thinking. So we have clients that are kind of segmented, how do we do it? There’s lots of different perceptions and segments, I guess, is the long and short answer. So when I think about my role, specifically in product marketing, and something that is launching and coming out from an app perspective, I’m off, I’m often more kind of in a persona of someone who is the user of our ad products. So they are an individual contributor. They have to have their hands in the weeds, but we also then have to influence all the different decision makers, stakeholders within the organization. It’s really difficult and the sales team may have what I have found most challenging is where we’ve tried to build a persona. And what we needed from a marketing standpoint didn’t match exactly what the sales team needed. So I guess my my, my short thought is, it’s really complicated. And the only way to get better at it is to constantly be trying and testing and see which which persona is going to work but I think for us we definitely, I definitely find it easier when I think Think about, here’s your C suite, here are your kind of leaders who are not quite in that sea level yet. And then here’s your individual contributors, and then thinking through who needs what product information along that journey, because A, A person who is going to go, for example, we have something called campaign manager, that’s where you set up your ad campaigns on LinkedIn. In most cases, unless you’re talking about very small startup, your CEO is not going to be in there. And the CEO is wanting to think about how can LinkedIn solve a variety of problems even including attracting and retaining talent with for Furthermore, at marketing org, as well as how do they use LinkedIn to to get buyers and leads to know about their company? So it just becomes, for me thinking about what does that individual—what’s their role within the decision-making process? And then I can map how much information they need given time. I feel like I’ve waffled a bit, I think that’s just testament that it’s a very difficult nut to crack.

JAROD: Very difficult. Yeah, we would love the adoptive touch base offline and get a sense of some of the ways, you know, we can do it better, too. And we haven’t solved it yet. And I think my biggest fear sometimes is, you know, we’ve told a marketer, this salesperson this and enablement person, this and they should all aligned to the same set of outcomes, they should be the things that they all want, right, you want to make more money, you want to reduce your sales cycle time, you want to increase your average deal size, but the house is a little different for each of those roles. Market is gonna have a different angle on that the enablement team is gonna have a different angle on that so that nuance becomes really important. One more question for you. Before I ask you the final, you talked before about prioritization, and notion of how you can’t do all the things. One of my mottos is that, you know, less is more, let’s be super specific and super intentional about what we do create and provide because we’ll get better leverage out of it. But Product Marketing at any moment in time can be grabbed into any room, whether it’s the customer success room solving adoption problem, the sales room to solve a complete problem, the marketing room to figure out how to jumpstart a campaign, the product room to figure out how to talk about the value of the thing, there’s so many rooms you can get pulled into. And this is just Monday morning, before you sit down and had your coffee. How do you prevent your team from being pulled into so many directions? And diplomatically saying? No, we’re not now in a way that allows you to maintain the credibility you’ve worked so hard to build?

JEN: That’s a question we think about every day. And also, we just had, like our we plan on our fiscal year, which starts in July, we just had a team off site where we had a reminder training called the necessity of No, and just trying to get everyone on the team, whether they’ve been here for three weeks or 12 years like me, reminding them you have to say no, you cannot do your job without saying no, we even had our head of sales for the region. Come and buy him for like a fireside chat. And he talked about how important it is for him to prioritize as well. So I think one thing that makes this a lot easier is when everyone from the top down knows it is not humanly possible to do everything. So you knowing that they’re prioritizing and we are going to prioritize that kind of puts us in a really good position to, Okay, let’s prioritize together now. Then the next part I try to think about is, there’s from a strategy perspective, what are going to be the big bets, a lot of people at LinkedIn use something called the I think it’s called the Eisenhower matrix. I don’t know if your listeners have heard of that. But it looks at your, your responsibilities, as I believe it’s critical and urgent, and then you put it in like a four by four and think about critical to urgent, and then that helps you prioritize your day, but that doesn’t always help me personally, when I’m thinking about building the strategy and we have quarterly objectives for each person on the team as well. So how do I help my team start to compartmentalize this and do it on their own without me. So one of my previous managers has a version of the Eisenhower matrix, which is about on one on your on your vertical axis is time. So how much time is it going to take you, how much resource is it integrated into it? And the other one is revenues for the horizontal revenue, and then I try to map it and so if I have a bunch of things that are being asked for my team or myself that are low revenue, yielding high time taking things I try to nix all of those and focus on things that are going to be a lighter lift but have outsized results, very little actually falls in that bucket either. It feels like the reality is, is you have things that make a big impact in terms of revenue, but they also take a lot of your time. So then I try to kind of think about how much realistically can people do there. And so that that space starts to get very small. And it’s having conversations at the annual planning stage at every quarterly business review, or quarterly Marketing Review. This is what we focused on. And here’s, here’s the result that that had. And it means you get better results for doing fewer things. And so once we have success with that, it’s easier to continue that momentum, but it’s getting everyone’s buy in early on that, like, just as you would say, here’s the things I’m going to do this quarter, I also tell my stakeholders, here are the things that unfortunately, even though we want to work on those things, we are not going to be able to do that this quarter. And that makes it that preserves those relationships. It’s we focus a lot on transparency, which sounds like, you know, a fancy, like, business jargon word, but to me, I interpret transparency is I am, I have the opportunity to tell my stakeholders and my team, what matters to the business to grow it and invite them into the conversation so that they feel like they are part of that process rather than being dictated, or that PMM is working in an ivory tower without involving them.

JAROD: I love that. I must feel the necessity and no. And I do think that framework is very useful to help, prioritize work out the listeners feel feel that way as well, it is a very difficult thing to do. And I love the idea of saying, you know, here’s what we’re not going to do. And it’s okay to be able to showcase that because I, I found just in my travels that sometimes showcasing what we’re not going to do can be a helpful conversation starter. If it’s then framed as well, what if you could, what would you need to be able to pull this above the line? Would this be an investment would this be headcount, would this be a tiger team, we think this is critical. But we also think that things above are critical. How do we work towards a scalable solution to kind of pull this What up, and those are the ones that I always find being the most impactful? Because for it not to be done by Product Marketing means someone’s going to do it in a rogue kind of silo scenario, and just, you know, call it what it is, it won’t be as good as it could be, had had product marketing and enablement, they touched it. So it’s a very helpful framework to be transparent on what we’re not doing. Because it brings the right amount of attention to something that if we truly believe it as a priority, what are we willing to trade off? That’s awesome.

JEN: Yeah. And also, like, there have been times where we were able, it looked like we were going to be able to do to release more than we thought we were like, then it becomes, there’s another problem, which is very luxurious problem to have. But if you’re launching too many things, how is your sales team going to still be maintaining those client relationships and do all of the training that’s required and all of the reporting that’s required? So I had one situation a few years ago, it’s like, actually, can we delay training on that? We’re gonna, so it Yeah. If you Yeah, what’s the what’s the curse, like, you get what you wish for some time. So?

JAROD: Yeah, it’s a good year and a good problem to have. But you could almost put, you know, sales training in the way of same analogy as furniture, you buy good furniture, once you buy bad furniture, you pay for it twice. But often find if you’re not going to be able to get the attention and the energy around the sales training, push it, delay it, because if you if you you will do it again. And that becomes an opportunity to not do something else. And so I think those are words to live by. Okay. I promise. Final question. final final question for listeners thinking through now. How do I build a better relationship with enablement? How do I strengthen my partnership? How do I make sure we’re aligned along the journey? Some of the ways you talked, what advice or recommendations would you give someone asking that question?

JEN: So if you are good question, and as you’re if you’re lucky enough to have someone who specializes in sales enablement, like I am I try to think about them as an extension of the team. I help them understand what the product roadmap priorities are. And I also want to understand what are their priorities? Are they being asked to train the sales teams on something and how are we each defining success and kind of bring them in on the process? Something else depending on how your teams work, you may share responsibilities for creating that sales enablement material. So PMM in general, typically owns all of it, but sometimes they want to recommend to do something kind of above the line. And so then you have to bring them in on that journey of even the content development for the training or just even sales assets. So making sure that they actually understand enough about the product that they can be your partner in it is the main things that I tried to do.

JAROD: So awesome. So awesome sound advice. So this has been a blast, I can talk to you for hours. I appreciate the context, the color, the candor, trying to come up with more deliberation. It’s always been this has been phenomenal. So so thank you for the time. Thank you for the energy and we appreciate it.

JEN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JAROD: All right. Thank you. Take care. All right, everybody, take care.

Lawrence Chapman – PMA: Thanks so much for tuning in for the latest episode of Leading the Way. If you’re looking to enhance your sales number and credentials, the marketing alliance has just a ticket in the form of sales enablement certified, no matter where you’re at in your product marketing journey. This course is packed with real life examples, case studies, expert tuition, templates and activities that you need to build and scale awesome sales and open programs. They’re by Sapphire Reels, Director of portfolio and integrated marketing at Pluralsight. The course will help you articulate the importance of sales enablement and sell internally design a sales enablement programme from scratch based on business objectives and sales needs. launch and iterate sales enablement programmes, demonstrates the importance and impacts of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation. Enroll on the course now at pmmalliance.com/salesenablementcertified and get all the tools you need to design and launch impactful sales enablement programs.

Marissa Gbenro: Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of Leading the Way: The Sales Enablement Podcast. My name is Marissa Gbenro, and I am the Senior Manager of Content Marketing at Highspot. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Sapphire Reels. Sapphire is the Director of Portfolio and Integrated Marketing at Pluralsight and leads the teams responsible for volleying the organization’s story as a multi product platform. Her team is also responsible for creating and deploying global integrated marketing programs, so they do it all. In this episode, we’re discussing three ways marketers can measure the impact of sales content. Thanks for joining me, Sapphire.

Sapphire Reels: Hi, everyone. Hi, Marissa. It’s great to be here today. So I’m Sapphire Reels. I am the Director of Portfolio and Integrated Marketing at Pluralsight, which is a very long and jargony title that just means part of my team focuses on our portfolio and solution story. So my background is as a B2B SaaS product marketer. And so I started in product marketing for one product at our company. Over time, we have acquired companies and grown our own portfolio. So now we have multiple products. And so we have separate product marketing teams that service those individual products. And then two people on my team manage what is the kind of the overall portfolio and solution story. So that changes the types of thought leadership content that we’re creating, it changes our go-to-market because we’re selling to, you know, high-level problems and outcomes for solutions versus products. And then the other part is managing all of our integrated marketing campaigns. So making sure we’ve got a consistent experience and messages across every channel from the moment someone hears about Pluralsight, all the way down through when they make that sale, they decide to be retained as a customer. So it’s been fun so far on that journey.

MARISSA: It sounds like a lot of fun. I am very, very envious of all of the knowledge, I bet that you are able to mine from your customers and prospects. So you have such insight into what’s working, what’s not, you know, what experience did they have when they were prospecting or in our customers. So yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s get into it. You know, we are obviously dealing with buyers who in the last couple of years have gone through a lot of change, the industry has changed, buyers have changed, everything has has sort of shifted, some things have stayed the same, but but a lot has shifted, you know, today’s buyers, they’re really, really busy adapting to the world around us, right. And in order to get their attention and to keep them engaged, sellers really have to just, you know, make videos that are personalized and interested in are going to grab attention. And so as we kind of think about what the new buyer looks like, you know, 74% of buyers choose a seller that first added value and insight. However, 65% of marketers are still challenged when it comes to understanding what types of content are actually effective and engaging buyers and buy-in content is so important to the buyer’s journey and to the sales cycle, you know, 17 pieces of content, on average being used throughout the sales cycle. So we have marketers who aren’t really sure, you know, what’s working and what’s not. We have sellers who really need this amazing content to engage buyers and get them to close deals. So far, what have you found is one of the biggest challenges or maybe multiple that marketers are facing when trying to gain visibility into content performance, what would you say? Are those factors that are keeping them from unlocking that knowledge?

SAPPHIRE:  Yeah, yeah, that’s a great tip and a really great question. So thank you for that. There’s a lot, I don’t know how much time we have, but no, there’s definitely a lot. And so when I first joined my company, one of my first projects actually was sales enablement. So today we have product marketing teams on my team. We also have a separate sales enablement team. And they’re now like specialized, they focus on specific regions and roles and personas. There’s a sales leader enablement person, there’s a CSM enablement person. So we’ve really grown over time. But when I joined five years ago, product marketing did sales enablement. And so my first big project was not only trying to figure out like, what is the state of sales training. I will say that is what I would call it at the time. But we were going through a massive overhaul of like updating our messaging and our personas and our whole go-to-market was shifting. And so there was a lot that I uncovered and as I’ve gone out and talked to many other people in the PMA and some of the other groups, a couple things, you know, I experienced and they’ve experienced. I think one of the first big things is like data and system limitations. And that is a reality that everybody faces. And what I mean by that is like system limitations is like some people simply don’t have a tool, right? Still using their internet, they’re still just kind of sending things out on. Like, they don’t really have this good system to give access to the content for sellers. And what I mean by data limitations is, you know, being able to not just give access to sellers, but also knowing what are sellers using? When are they using it? How are they using it? You know, every IT team is so bogged down. So you have sales folks running sales enablement, who want a tool, and their IT team is like, sorry, you know, our sales for the architecture and our data architecture takes priority. So it can be really challenging just from like, how do I get the data and systems? Couple other things I’ve seen, as you know, anyone will tell you that it’s really hard to get sales reps using new assets and building new behaviors for that. But like, it is really, really, really hard. You know, it’s not just about having a system to make content available. It’s how do you make it consumable? How do you make it actionable? A lot of times there is a lack of a really good relationship with sales. Marketers are so focused on how do I create this awareness? How do I get someone who knows about us, but like, what happens to that person, once they know who you are? And kind of what you’re about? How do you bring them down that funnel, right? There’s definitely a gap there. And you have to be able to really build relationships with your sales teams. And you even brought up that customer success. If you have professional services teams, you have support teams, like those are the folks who are in the trenches every single day. And when they don’t trust that you understand what it’s like for them to be in the trenches, it’s really hard for them to say like, I’m gonna go use this new marketing asset that you’ve created. There’s almost this like, bias that those folks have. And sometimes that comes from a feeling of like, look, the marketing content that you’re creating, like, it lacks my buyers’ perspective, or it lacks this type of conversation, and I’m actually having in the sales cycle. And so yes, said simply, like, a lot of data and system limitations, a lot of relationship and trust issues, and then a lot of the relationship and trust issues kind of come back to this feeling of like, marketing doesn’t actually understand how I’m talking to my buyers, or what, what they’re telling me I don’t see that reflected in the content, and therefore I’m just I’m not going to use it.

MARISSA: Yep, all of it. All of it rings so many bells and rings true. And I’ve experienced all of it, you know, when you touched on, a lot of people don’t have access to data when you came in. And you said one of the first tests that you were asked to kind of go through was unlocking some of that data. So what did that process look like for you? Did you have a tool? Was it just you needed to talk to it? Or the team or you know, revenue ops or whatever team owned the data? How did you kind of get access to finally uncover some of that? What did that look like for you?

SAPPHIRE: It was messy. And upon anybody, we had nothing like that, at the time. We just had sellers who had things like saved, saved on their desktop, and like, I went to, you know, one seller, and they’re like, I’m using this asset from like, 2012. Or like, it’s 2017. You know, homie, what do you do when, you know, it was highly manual? We didn’t have, you know, we have like an internal intranet where people uploaded their content. And like, yeah, I could see how many views it had. But I had no context of like, who in sales was using it? How were they using it? And so one of the first things that I did is like, partly, this was about building trust. And partly it was about understanding what’s available. Like, I just went to sales leaders. And I was like, look, I know your teams are using some sort of content, whether we provided them or they created themselves, like they’re using something so like, who are those sellers? Who are super high performers? Who are those sellers that are like middle of the road? And who are those sellers who are struggling and need a little bit of help? Can you give me like, five names from each of those groups? I’m gonna go talk to them. And I’m going to figure out what they’re using. And so I just started with sales interviews. Really just asking them, you know, a conversation when you get a lead, yeah, like, where’s the first place you go to look for content? What content have you used? What’s been successful? So, through those conversations, I was able to uncover a lot of the like, “I don’t know what to go find. I just kind of use whatever I’ve created or used in the past.” And I was also able to kind of, you know, on the marketing side, obviously, we know everything we’ve created. So I was looking at, like 200 assets that we had created. And I was able to really map that to what the sales team told me they were using. And like there was a massive gap between the amount and volume of content we’re creating, versus what they actually use. So I was able to start with like, okay, here’s what they’re using, here’s what they’re at least telling me is helpful. Now, what are some of the gaps we have in content? I know when what they’re using is not successful, and then what are some of the gaps of like, ooh, we probably don’t have that thing. And we should go create it. So highly, highly manual without having any of that data.

MARISSA: I have been there and I know I feel your pain, I feel your pain. And I, once I, you know, started working at Highspot, it was my first interaction with the sales enablement tool, and it completely changed everything and changed how easy it was to gain sales buy in, because it stopped being about “I think you should use this and I want you to use this,” and “I created this and it’s beautiful, why aren’t you using it instead” became a conversation around data of, “hey, this is working, I want what’s best for you, I want you to be able to close deals, and this data is shows that this is what’s helping, you know, other high performers.” And so it was so nice to use data, as this, you know, as a partner in crime, go to Sales and ask them, you know, what’s working? What’s not, but then also, what do they wish that we had? And sometimes, you know, case studies are always a pain point, I feel for every seller or sorry, every marketer of what was more case studies, it’s like we actually have 12 that you’ve never used. So maybe it’s fine. The ability, right? Maybe it’s search that is actually the problem, or you know, you find an ability you didn’t know it existed, because you’re asking for something that does exist for you know, so in the vein of of, you know, the importance of that data, because you said if you don’t have it, and we kind of went through that. So once you do have to really understand how much value your content provides to your sales team. I think you have to know what content what is being used. So what are they adopting? What are what is their toolkit, right, of the five assets? Like you said earlier? As soon as you get on that, you know, demo, what are you using? What is your go to, but then you also have to understand just because they’re using it doesn’t mean it’s working. So then having that visibility? And so what’s actually engaging customers and what they’re clicking into, and what they’re finding value with? And then also, you know, what I just touched on the fungibility. How are you searching for content? How are you finding it? You know, and I think a lot of that is, is really you have to have, you know, data to really help you kind of get some of that unless you’re having those interviews, like you said, so my question to you is, what would you say is the first step into kind of unlocking content performance insights, like when you have the information and data? And you know, maybe if you don’t? What was your journey to kind of unlocking content performance?

SAPPHIRE: That’s another great question. I think a lot of what you just hit on are the types of conversations I’ve had once I had data and like, I started with that really manual process. And it was a really simple conversation to go back to not only my leadership, but sales leadership to say, Look, I know that we have like 200 assets available. And here’s how they are mapped to different kinds of conversations. And I know that it’s not surfaced in this way to you right now. Like, I know that when you go into this tool, this intranet, you just see a long list of like one sheet PDF, like overview case study, and like, How the hell am I supposed to use this? And so not having the data helped me create the vision of like, well, what if we had the data? What if I was able to tell you that we actually do have a ton of content that can help you with a first line sales call or a competitive conversation? It’s just right now, it’s really difficult for your sellers to access. And I don’t have any data back that shows me how they’re using it, when it’s successful, what types of customers are engaging? So yeah, it was really that first, doing the manual process to help me paint that vision for what we could do if we had data and analytics and it it was really just vision casting to say what if I could tell you this and it sounds like Hell yeah, I would love you to tell me that like, then those are the types of things they take back and then coach their team like, sales enablement is just setting up sellers for success. Obviously, there’s so much that goes into it, but like coaching of a salesperson comes from a sales leader. So that sales leader has very specific data and information to say, I heard I hear you your job is tough. I hear you have this challenging calm Association. Have you thought about using this battle card when you’re in that competitive conversation? And they might say like, No, I didn’t even know is available. So yeah, just not having the data and like knowing what we could create, set me up. So it’s definitely getting those analytics first step. Yeah.

MARISSA: That’s awesome. I love everything that you’re saying. And it rings. So true. And I think you know, most marketers have, have had all these experiences that we’re talking through. And to your point of, you know, sales enablement. The job of sales enablement is to drive seller success, right, is to drive consistent execution. And you said it earlier of going to your top performers, and seeing what they use seeing what if you don’t have the data, right? Going to your top performers and say, walk me through your deals from start to finish? What are you using? How are you saying what you’re saying, and that’s such a great place to start. And then when you have data, if you put less burden on the sellers, it’s you saying, Hey, here’s what the data is showing us is working. And here’s what you know, Kevin, the amazing performing high performer goes over numbers every quarter can validate that. Yeah. And Kevin is the top person who pitches this, as you know, more than anybody else. And it’s showing in the data. And so it helps to have these conversations, again, because sales and marketing will always have our attention and you know, different points of views on things. But right, I think when we come to the table with information that is really valuable, that helps sales leaders have, like you said, those tough conversations of I know you’re struggling, why, you know, is it that you don’t feel like you have the content? Okay, well, you didn’t know this existed, here’s this battle card, you know, or, Hey, you don’t feel like you have content that’s really speaking the way and it just allows us to have more effective conversations overall. And I think, at the end of the day, we all have the same goal, right? Like we want the business to do well. So if you tell me that, in order for the business to sell you to sell more, I need to you know, start using different terminology. Okay, we all have the same goal. So I will, if you give me information, I will run it, that’s what’s gonna take like I spent on board I’ve signed up. Yeah, exactly. And so I, I love all of that, because it just I, in my experience has allowed us to have way more effective conversations. It’s not about what’s working or what’s not, it’s about why. And then if you say, well, sellers don’t want to use this, because they feel like it doesn’t really sound like that. Great, let’s, I’ll have a meeting with five sellers. And we’ll get you know, we’ll update this to make sure that it feels really organic and natural for them to use it and pitch it and, and have conversations around the content. And one question that sparked as you were talking, I don’t want to forget to ask is, how do you measure the success of content and your assets? Do you kind of go in? Do you have a set benchmark for success in terms of like, what you want to see for engagement, or what you want to see for internal usage, you know, when you launch campaigns or, or just assets themselves? Maybe a battle card? Is it like we want to see us at least 50 times in a month? Or what does that look like when you’re kind of going through the process of creating what success looks like for your campaigns?

SAPPHIRE: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s totally dependent on the campaign, of course, but like when I’m setting up a campaign, you know, the things I’m thinking about are like, what are the what are the objections we have with this campaign, right, from a marketing perspective, like we are trying to build pipeline for our business. And that looks like bringing new leads into the funnel, it looks like ensuring that those leads, you know, we’ve got this, we call, you know, tier one, marketing, qualified contact, right, that goes straight over to sales and gets followed up on so I’m looking at, you know, how many leads are regenerating? How are those being handled off to sales, how many of those are surfacing an opportunity. And so from a campaign perspective, like, there are goals that we have around these campaigns of like, I need to get, you know, at least I’m going to make this number of rides really low 50 people to raise their hand, but to act off of this marketing content, and to reach out to sales. And so when we create assets for campaigns and a lot of those assets, sure, there’s a lot of top of funnel, very high level thought leadership, but we also work with our product marketing teams, to make sure that we have very kind of product specific content when that conversation gets to the bottom of the funnel. And so part of what I will look at is every time we go into a campaign, I’m looking at what is their sales team actually use? So from an internal users perspective, I don’t have some set number, but if I know we created a series of content for this campaign for sales in the past, and they haven’t used any of it, that is a really big area for me to go figure out what’s going on. Do they not know about it? Are they not competent? Do they not know what to like? Do they don’t know it’s available? Right? There’s a lot of different places to go. So I think when I think about internal usage to me, I think about have that as a leading indicator, right? How many reps are using this content? What types of segments? Or segments? Are they servicing? Are they using this content? Once a week? Or every day? Like, how often? Are they engaging and interacting? And that gives me a leading sense of like, is there some sort of training or enablement we need to do to make sure people know what’s available. But I think what’s even more important that I look at is understanding internal usage mapped against external engagement. And understand it’s one thing to know, hey, a sales rep has used this sales scripts, you know, 100 times sales reps have used this, what’s more powerful for me to know is, hey, this has been used 100 times and 80% of the time, a rep, using the sales script, leads to a second conversation, right? Like, that’s awesome. So I think it’s really important to figure out, like, what are the goals that you have, and if it’s not a campaign, let’s say you’re doing a product launch, and you have some very, you might have, you know, a lot of product marketers, they share adoption goals with product management teams, and so maybe you’re creating assets for customer success managers to help get somebody on board and adopt from the platform, like, I want to be able to map you know, look at usage as the leading like, are we gonna hit our goals? And then you look at that external engagement of like, okay, are they using this one sheet, or this, you know, onboarding guide that we created or anything like that, and is that actually leading to the success that we’ve defined whether it’s new person has used this part of the product, once new person visit, so I really try to map that it’s not always perfect, you don’t always have the exact data that you need. But I think there’s a lot of ways you can get to that, once you have a content, some sort of content management platform and sort of sales enablement, platform, you know, like, you’re really able to get into those details of like, okay, within this timeframe, where we’ve launched this campaign, or this product, your goals, here, she’s used it, and here’s how customers or prospects actually engaged with it. So you have to be able to map those things. And you have to be really, really clear on the goals. So like said simply, if you’re focused on some some sort of, you know, creating awareness, right, maybe you’ve got a product coming couple months down the road, and you’re trying to create some awareness and excitement and buzz about what’s coming, and you’ve got this really awesome top of funnel, white paper, that’s, you know, bringing leads to sales, and they need to follow up on like, what I’m tracking there looks very different from, oh, I’m trying to stand up, you know, I’m trying to get somebody to adopt this platform. So you’ve got to be really aware of what your objectives are and marry those two things. But it’s always going to come down to how are people using it internally? And how are folks externally engage with it? Maybe it’s a specific segment? Yeah, right. Right. This industry, it’s really resonating with this type of persona. And all of those insights will feed back into your marketing engine.

MARISSA: Yeah, I, the three, the three metrics that we use in internally to kind of gauge the success of campaigns, initiatives, content, in general is exactly what you said, its internal usage, its external engagement, and then our usage to engagement ratio. So basically, you know, just marrying the two together to say, okay, though, it was pitched 100 times how, how many times did a buyer actually open it? Or, you know, a customer will, whoever your audience is, and then, you know, just doing the math and saying, Okay, well, that’s your engagement rate. And then what we’ve been able to do through content audits, you know, has used, we’ve used the historical data to create benchmarks where we’re saying, Okay, I’m just gonna throw out 50% is a good benchmark for in that engagement rate of, okay, we liked this content it’s performing, it’s doing well, and you know, it’s indicative of this initiative is doing well, like you said, launching a new campaign. And it being a really good indicator of what’s working and what’s not that engagement rate, because not only is it bringing in internal usage into, you know, the kind of math but it’s also bringing engagement to say, yes, our reps are bought in to this initiative to this content to the topic, whatever it’s around, but then also our buyers or customers are also bought in they’re also finding it valuable, they’re also thinking it’s interesting, because I think oftentimes, for me, as a content marketer, sometimes we’re too in the silo of, well, what’s working externally, like, you know, what’s getting engagement, what’s driving leads, what’s filling the funnel, but you have to be really thoughtful about but is your team internally bought in as well? Are they pitching it? You know, after their demo, are they you know, speaking on calls and sending it as follow ups, because that’s so important as well. They’re just as important as each other. Right? If your team isn’t using it, it’s not going to be seen externally. And if it’s not being engaged with externally, your team shouldn’t be using it. And so really like, are we it’s been really nice to just kind of have some metrics to the our entire marketing team snap to, and everyone is like, okay, that engagement rate, and it’s different for product marketing, right, because their content is typically used through the middle of the, you know, more middle to end a funnel. So their engagement rate is going to be higher as sellers who, you know, are Taan texting bases with their, with their buyers, so they have a better relationship. But I think that really locking on metrics, as simple as usage, you know, engagement helps everyone get a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. And then saying, Okay, if it falls below these benchmarks, then we have conversations about is it the initiative? Is it the content, is it the topic, is it reps who didn’t know where to find it? And then you can, like you said, you get to have these more in-depth conversations about like, what do we do to fix the problem? If there is one? Or if it’s performing really well? Okay, we need to spin this off into a podcast, we need to do a blog post, like we need to. Yeah, because it’s working so well.

SAPPHIRE: I think what what you said is really important on the idea of like, it gives, it gives you a benchmark, like, only when you have data aggregated over time, it doesn’t take a while, you know, you can write a pilot and a few months, you know, few months get to some fidelity, because like, often we don’t have any of that data, we don’t know what good looks like, like, look at look at the last three to six months, like that ratio was about 50%. Right? I know that that’s a good benchmark for us to push for. And it’s not a perfect science, you know, there’s always a million things that you have to kind of factor in, but it gives you that, you know, way to monitor your metrics and your dashboard, just say like, look at something’s dipping, I gotta go figure out what’s going on here. Like this is giving me a really good directional data point. And so you don’t have to just rely on, you know, hey, this person says they don’t like this or it doesn’t work. It’s like, well, 50% of the time, it is worth talking about why it’s not working for you. Right.

MARISSA: That actually leads me into my next question, how have you been able to use the data to improve or optimize you know, campaigns or content or initiatives? I mean, as granular as you want to get or as macro as you want to get on that example?

SAPPHIRE: Yeah, I’ve a few different thoughts on that. So one of the things you mentioned before, it’s just like, you know, sales and marketing always have different points of view. And I think that that’s something you know, that we’ll until the end of time, aliens look back on. Oh, yeah, sales and marketing, they never got along, right. Like that will be but I almost think about like, this data helps me get their point of view, right? It might be as simple as like, you know, my team, again, part of my job is creating portfolio and solution level content that is very similar to, you know, there’s a lot of thought leadership work we do that’s very similar to like product marketing, right? Right. Content, right? How do we talk about the overall value of what we’re doing? And so having data on how sales is using it, how they’re engaging with it like, that gives us a really, really are how customers are engaging with it, I should say like, that gives us a really, really good basis point to go figure a few different things out. One is the like, who should we be targeting with marketing? Right? If I know that this specific talk track and messaging that is apparent, and you know, these 10 assets are working really, really well for financial services for sales reps, as they’ve had these conversations, like I know, from a campaign perspective, wow, we should probably have something that speaks to financial services, or maybe there’s a specific problem that financial services customers have, and we should go make sure that they’re a focus for this campaign. So like, it really helps me get clear on like, who might we target? And also what’s resonating? You know, I think one of the things that folks who have not been in sales, or maybe haven’t worked as a sales as closely and you know, different variety of formats is a lot of the times the content that marketing teams create, and I say this lovingly because like, this is part of my job now. And it’s really a labor of love. Like, it’s not very actionable. Like, there’s no real way for them to follow up on it, there’s no real way for them to send it to somebody to add value. So a lot of that data gives me a really, really good place to say like, look, when our sales reps enter into a conversation, what’s actually resonating what can we build off of and like what’s going to make it like, you know, an easy button for someone to follow up so like, a big part of that is like what are the real Life selling situations and conversations or reps in. So a really tangible example is one of the things you know, every rep does is they ask discovery questions when they get into the sales cycle, right? And we also had a lot of our CSMs in our business who kind of do these, you know, planning sessions with customers, right? What are your goals? What do you need from that? What are your challenges and outcomes? Okay, now let’s talk about mapping our platform to that, here’s how you’re going to use it, what’s your adoption plan, all of those conversations aren’t happening until someone’s in the sales cycle, or until they’ve already, you know, signed on and been a customer. So a lot of what that data helps me do is bring those topics and areas of discussion way earlier into the funnel, and also, quite frankly, best practices. So we were able to build these like planning worksheets, where we said, we’re going to publish a, you know, thought leadership report about the state of the market for our industry. And we’re going to fall from that piece market is going to send these planning worksheets that say, look like you got to make the most of 2022. Here’s some data, here’s how you plan to it. What’s in the planning worksheet is exactly mapped to the discovery questions the sales reps are gonna ask and it’s exactly mapped to the planning process the CSM is going to undertake, and so that marketing content perfectly wraps up to have a conversation. And so it’s getting us on that same page. And because I have all this data, you know, part of my team’s job with campaigns is making sure this is really consistent experience for prospects and customers kind of no matter what touchpoint they have with us, like I’m able to see what is that exact messaging and language that’s resonating? What are the problem points? So there’s a lot you can pull from those realized selling situations. And I think to that point of sales follow up, like when I’m building a campaign, you know, I’m thinking about like, what’s the best CTA from us? You know, is there an opportunity to drive someone to a sales conversation earlier, you know, maybe with our webinars, we tend to just say, you know, here’s a webinar with a customer, and we’re going to send you the on demand link, as follow up, well, a really good opportunity to have someone reach out for a demo. So having data on what sales is, using, what’s resonating with our customers, helps me figure out where can I start those conversations or thoughts earlier in the funnel, and then where are the gaps, like, if we’re creating this really high level thought leadership content, and it’s not clearly connecting to our products, like, maybe I need to go work with our product marketing teams to have some more product specific content, you know, to move people down. So there is, I mean, like, I feel like the world is my oyster. On this type of data, I could go on and on.

MARISSA: I that is such a great idea to use the example you provided, look at what works well with your customers, and then say, if this is what when they become a customer they care about and they’re using us for and they’re finding value in, this should be a topic that we go position for prospects, because we want them to be a customer. And this is, you know, what our customers are using us for. So therefore, we have this topic that’s already big. That’s great. Taking notes.

SAPPHIRE: Right, again, makes it so much for the salesperson because, you know, obviously you’re selling but you’re also having the conversations around, how are we going to make you successful on Saturday, you already teed them up. And the customers have already been thinking about this and are the prospect I should say and it makes you more strategic. It really do want them to see you as the partner to get them to the future state that they want to get to. So why not take that evidence from people who are already at the future state and say this is the value that they found, this is what they find most interesting, and just repurpose it for prospects. That is wonderful; I’ve worked really well, sales as well. Because a lot of the times what you find are those angles where, you know, obviously the discovery questions you have or you know, you want it to be specific to your business. So they get to the point of like, yes, is this person qualified, you know, as a potential customer, right? So obviously sales gets that but it also opens, like broadens the scope for marketing. And what I mean by that is like, you know, every discovery question is going to have like 10 million other things a business needs to be thinking about that don’t directly relate to your product. So like it makes your marketing story stronger, because you’re able to find those problems, spaces and opportunities and ways they’re currently doing it that are probably you know, not the best that you can start to talk about it. So it definitely services a lot of different people when you do that.

MARISSA: I love that. We probably have some some listeners that maybe are not all way bought in yet still teetering on the importance on the importance of analytics. Can you share maybe one story, one anecdote of a win that you experience through us utilizing this data in the content process that we just kind of talked through? So obviously, that last one that you just said, sounds like it was an amazing campaign. I’m sure it performed extremely well. But what is, you know, whether it was a seller who was not necessarily bought in on something and then using data or if it was just a campaign that came out of, you know, utilizing data that has performed really well?

SAPPHIRE: I have a couple quick examples that I that I’ll give. I think one of the first things like when we launch our new platform, when we started to get data, is we actually saw low usage, like people just weren’t using it. And at first, we were kind of like, oh, you know, just like, it’s hard to change behavior, right. And like, as we started to dig in, you know, I’m, I, you know, I was newer my career in sales enablement. Like, sure, I knew the marketing funnel, did I totally understand the sales cycle? No, you know, and it showed, like, our platform was completely aligned around like top of funnel content, middle funnel content. And when I would train them, I beg, here’s how you go into the tool. Here’s how you search for one sheet, right? And so like two a month into launch, I’m like, Why is nobody using this? And I was able to go in and see there was low usage. And I knew there was high performers, and they had low usage. And so I went and talked to those people. And they’re like, nobody knows what MOFU, TOFU, and BOFU, you know what I mean, like on the sales side, that means nothing to me. And also, like, the training that I received was very general on the tool like, and so that allowed me to go back to the drawing table to say, like, Okay, gotta realign my content to the sales cycle. Like that was a fast learning for me at the start of my career. And the second thing was, I think you mentioned this before, but like training them in their daily workflow, like, look, imagine you’re on a call with a prospect. And, you know, they’re like, cool, love everything. You’re saying, I’m actually not the decision maker, though. Like, could you send me something really quickly, so I can forward it to Bob, my boss, like, imagine if you could just go into the tool and search like one sheet for, you know, Bob, and financial services, right, and send that to them? So the data of low usage gave me a way to figure out how do we better align to what you said sales language and terminology and the work that they do? Yeah. A second big thing that we noticed was like, there was a steep drop off and content usage when folks started going into the proposal stage. And so one of the things I was able to do is recognise that we didn’t have a good proposal template, and not every cost. Not every deal needs a proposal. But I also think there is no harm in sending like a very well-thought out, here’s exactly what we’re going to do for you, right, if you’re not an industry that hasn’t. And so we were actually able to create a proposal, a template for reps to use, and they started using it and driving more deals. So it helped me find like, what are those content gaps, and as the product marketer, I love to access it. I know they’re using this and they’re actually going to represent our product with the messaging and the value as we intended. It’s a really big third thing I think, is optimizing your own team’s time. You know, we have all and if you have not yet you will go through the process of sales reps requesting any number of assets. And you’re just like we have, yeah, like, you know, or, like, try that work. Like I don’t know, like, so it just the having that data helped me, help me and my team optimize our own time, it helped us say like, look, we already have that, or we’ve created something like that, and nobody used it. And like it also helps you get look at other data you’re tracking, and have a way to respond. So right, we’re seeing win loss rates ticking up, and we’re just starting to lose more to the competition. But when I actually go look at this content usage, sales reps aren’t using our battle cards. So, you know, maybe part of the reason we’re losing more deals to competition is they’re not using the stuff that’s already created for them. So like, No, we’re not gonna go do this whole other like initiative that you asked us to do, because our win loss data is changing. Like, we’re gonna start by training reps and making sure they know how to use these battle cards and they’re actually accessing them. Right. And then I see the last kind of quick win that we’ve had is you kind of mentioned this idea of like high performers and you know, sellers want to hear from sellers like them who are successful I think that’s like one of the number one things that we’ve been able to do like I’m able to go into the tool and say, you know, Sally over here in our European you know, customer base, use this asset use these 10 assets through a sales cycle in short the deal and landed a bigger sales, you know, a bigger deal and I actually I can tell you about it, Sally’s gonna tell you about it. So I was gonna tell you about the assets shoes, and we let the show First lead those conversations. So like, that also takes time for my team. And it just provides way more credibility. So like, everything from knowing where there’s low usage and how that relates back to the bigger work to you’re doing to like, where there is high usage, or one person using our team of people using it and getting them to tell that story for you will really, really do wonders for you, and the work that you do as an enabler.

MARISSA: All of these gems are so invaluable. And I know, that is someone who experienced life before and works at an organization, you know, that was an enterprise-level organization, with 600 locations across the US, Puerto Rico and Canada. And it was brick and mortar locations with reps who would just email you and slack you and ping you in any way that they carry your pigeon, you remember requests that existed, or it was so specific to them. And only then that it was like, hey, as an entire marketing team, we can’t put together one thing that only you will use when we have requests from literally almost 600 other people, right? And now, fast forward, you know, years to where I’m at, and having a tool where it allows for not only, you know, for them to be able to find what they need and see what works and what doesn’t, but also to remix and say, Okay, well I don’t want this page, I’m gonna instead you know, put this person’s logo on it so that it’s servicing so many people and still giving you information into what’s working and getting sellers what they need. And it just, yeah, everything everything you said, I’m like, wow, it was really taking me back to life before and life now and, and just wanting, you know, to help those other marketers out there to figure out you know, even if you don’t have data, how can you how can you get to a place where you’re so optimizing you know, your efforts and not spinning your wheels and, and not having to have those conversations a million times about case studies that are already existing.

SAPPHIRE: Really get those quick wins. Like with that proposal, like we saw that it was dropping off. But like, honestly, part of it was like, we had this really huge deal that was about to land, and it was like our first you know, deal size of this amount. You know, all hands on deck. And we all have those situations. And as marketers, like, we’ve got to optimize our time, like when you’re about to land your company’s biggest deal. And they’re asking you to come in and help create a proposal, like you’re gonna create. We use that as the basis for what we’ve provided to everybody else. So like, it gave us a way to do that one off custom effort. And then we scaled it. Yeah. And like we let them customize and we said, like, here’s where you can add a nice little graphic, you know, if your customers and find financial services, or is in telecoms, like, here’s a really easy way to kind of put this together and use that specific customer story and things like that. So yeah, there’s just some, there’s really no limit to what you can start to do with that data. And I think the biggest piece of advice that I would give to folks is, you know, not having the data as a really great time to start building your case for why you need the data and like be that squeaky wheel that’s like, look, if I had data on this, this is what I could do for you. And I promise it will come.

MARISSA: Yeah. I loved what you said in the beginning of if you don’t have the data, built using that as a tool to build a future state. So if we did have data, what would you want this to look like? If we did have data? You know, what do you think the gaps are? And then when, so building the map, the you know, foundation, the path, whatever you want to call it, and then when you get data? Sometimes it is a little, you know, gratifying when they’re like, Oh, well, we would need this, and this is what would work. And this is and you’re like, wow, the information says that actually. And so I couldn’t agree more, you know, even if you don’t have the data, using that as an opportunity to talk about future state and get, you know, stakeholder buy in, you know, get buy in from other teams and function heads to say, Well imagine if we did this is what we think, you know, and we’re going to map to this and we’re going to march to this until we have that data. But then you know, once you have the data, checking to make sure that just because you said that you’re going to do this thing or you thought that this was the thing that you need it most. Make sure that you’re looking in you’re you’re making sure you’re validating because there has been plenty of times where I was like, this is the campaign, you know, I looked at the data and I and I’m like this is the topic this is why this you know, content worked and no it wasn’t the topic it was that well I spent way more time meeting with reps training them up on why we created the campaign. That’s why it works like yes, the topic was good, you know, buyers were still engaged but it was like no actually was I did a roadshow and attended sales meetings and had conversations and landed it really well. So they felt competent to have conversations. But again, without data, I wouldn’t have known why one out far outperformed the other. And it’s like, it allows you to kind of take bias out of things and use facts to ground yourself, which I would say is, again, to your point earlier, like, makes you efficient with your time, it saves your team time, it has saved my team tremendous hours of like, well, this already exists, or we tried this before. And here’s how it worked, didn’t it?

SAPPHIRE: Right. It’s like, here’s what it is. And I think one of the one of the other small tips, you know, I know we’re wrapping up, one of the things you can do we did early on. And I don’t think we still have this today just for the sheer size of our Salesforce. But we actually took the data, you know, a lot of the time the person was his name and tools, not a sales leader. And they’re not in like the admin view. So we actually took some of that data and like, we would share snippets, we would also like pull that data from the system and build a little dashboard. And we would allow sales leaders to filter by their name for their team. And they had a dashboard of like, here’s exactly what you’re seeing is you’re using, here’s how it’s engaging. And like we put that in their hands. Yeah. Right. And so there’s just so much that you can do with this data. And, and you know, the Yeah, the possibilities are really endless.

MARISSA: Sounds like a commercial. Good, man. Well, Sapphire, I could talk to you for hours. This has been an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for all of your expertise. I know that our audience is jotting down notes. I know. There are plenty of things that I am excited to implement and, and work on. So thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. Of course.

SAPPHIRE: Thank you. And thank you to everyone listening, and I hope everyone has a great rest of their week and year. Thanks. All right. Bye, everyone. Bye.

Lawrence Chapman – PMA: Thanks so much for tuning in for the latest episode of Leading the Way. If you’re looking to enhance your sales number and credentials, the marketing alliance has just a ticket in the form of sales enablement certified, no matter where you’re at in your product marketing journey. This course is packed with real life examples, case studies, expert tuition, templates and activities that you need to build and scale awesome sales and open programs. They’re by Sapphire Reels, Director of portfolio and integrated marketing at Pluralsight. The course will help you articulate the importance of sales enablement and sell internally design a sales enablement programme from scratch based on business objectives and sales needs. launch and iterate sales enablement programmes, demonstrates the importance and impacts of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation. Enroll on the course now at pmmalliance.com/salesenablementcertified and get all the tools you need to design and launch impactful sales enablement programs.

Andy Champion: So, hello everyone. My name is Andy Champion. I’m the vice president and general manager of Highspot here in EMEA. Delighted to welcome you to this latest installment of the Win Win podcast. Joining me today, I’m delighted to speak to Scott Edinger. He’s somebody that I’ve spoken to before. He is a deep expert in his field, and he advises many companies globally on how to drive consistent growth. He has over 40 articles published in the Harvard Business Review and has contributed to over 50 articles in Forbes. Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Edinger: Thanks for having me, Andy. I’m excited to be here and talk with you again.

ANDY: Always good to get back together. So Scott, there’s a few topics that I want to touch on today. And the first one I want to start with is this concept of the great resignation. It’s something that I think that, you know, is a topic of conversation with business leaders that I talk to, and it’s been causing quite a stir. Now, I think it’s fair to say there’s been a talent shortage for quite some time now. It’s nothing new. We as sales and revenue leaders have always sought to get the best possible talent. But I think what has changed is the pandemic has caused, I think, a pause in that natural talent lifecycle. It’s caused people to pause and to delay decisions, but as we come out of the pandemic, I think what I’m starting to see is that people are taking this moment to reevaluate their positions, to reevaluate the companies that they work for. But more importantly, I think they’re really taking a long, hard look at the people that they work with and specifically their managers. So I wanted to start there and just get your take on, are people starting to leave companies, or is it really that old adage of “People don’t leave companies—they leave managers”?

SCOTT: Yeah, I very much think it’s the latter. I believe it was the people at Gallup, famous for their organizational surveys, who coined that phrase many years ago. I think it might be like 20 years ago. People don’t leave organizations, they leave their managers. And as much as we have this great resignation upon us, as it were, you know 10 years ago, we were calling this the war for talent. And I was reading some statistics about this great resignation and we certainly have much lower unemployment than we have had, but even the total number of people leaving the workforce, while statistically significant, isn’t dramatic, at least in the U.S. statistics I was looking at. So, it’s not like people who need to work are all of a sudden dropping out of the workforce. I mean, there are people who perhaps don’t need to work who are reevaluating. You know, like you said, the pandemic gives us this great pause to say what’s important in my life. And there is, without a doubt, people who are saying, “Look, I’m not going to work” or “I’m not going to work like I was.” And definitely there’s an Exodus from the workforce from that.

But people who are either sales professionals or engineers or in technology, whatever their roles are, it’s not like they’ve decided all of a sudden, well, I’m just resigning. They’re going someplace else for something better. And they’re looking for something more from the organizations and I think most importantly from their leaders. So I think it’s very much that latter idea, “What more am I getting from my leader?”

ANDY: And I know that that’s a sort of a starting off point for us on a few topics here. And you know, maybe we explore that briefly. When you look to leaders and great leaders, what are some of the core components? What are some of the core behaviors that you see come up time and time again that differentiate the good from the great?

SCOTT: Well, it’s been a dozen years since I wrote my first book. I just realized, I was going to say 10, and now I realize it’s actually closer to a dozen. And that book was called The Inspiring Leader. And I wrote that book along with Joe Folkman and Jack Zenger. And one of the analyses that we had done was to identify which leadership characteristics were most powerful—in particular, which leadership characteristics were most powerful in driving engagement and commitment. One would think that this is the key to retention, right?

So amidst all of these leadership competencies, one really stood out as strongly important. The book title gives it away: the inspiring leader. It’s the ability to inspire and motivate high performance. Now on the surface that may not seem revelatory, right? It’s like, okay, so someone who’s inspiring—this drives commitment, engagement. I can totally see, you know, we all want to be inspired. We all want to have that kind of leader in the workplace. But when you start to break that apart and say, so what is it that makes a leader inspiring? Then you start to get to some really valuable ideas, especially as it relates to this great resignation, war on talent, whatever the next iteration of it’s going to be.

Because again, people don’t leave companies, they tend to leave their managers. So some of the things we found were most valuable was this idea of developing talent. Coaching and developing talent. People were loath to find another opportunity when they worked for someone who invested strongly in their development, who coached them, who helped them to advance in their career.

When you find that, even if there’s better companies, you may find yourself in a really wonderful opportunity with that kind of growth—particularly, I’ll say this, if you’re between the ages of—call it 25 and 45. Which, by the way, is where we see most of the resignation happening, some in the 45 to 55 range. But the more concerning part of the great resignation is in the 25 to 45 year-old group.

ANDY: And maybe we can unpack that a little bit. You know, I’m fascinated around this concept of the culture of coaching. It really resonates as I reflect on my career and it certainly resonates with many of the individual contributors and salespeople that I talk with. And I think it also aligns with how at Highspot we think a lot about consistent execution at scale: How do we help everybody succeed? How do we help everybody make their best contribution? So I wonder if you can sort of unpack that a little bit for us and talk exactly about what does good coaching look like, and why does it matter so much?

SCOTT: Well, when you consider good coaching, you know, it’s usually not in the form of just telling people what to do. Really good coaching is about investing in someone’s development, helping them to get the right kind of training, the right kind of, call it formal education. But then when they’re back on the job, helping them to actually get better at those skills, whether they be selling skills, coding skills, management skills, leadership, even other coaching skills.

So if you consider this idea of investing in the initial growth for people, send them to proper training, But then when they’re back from that, how do you engage with them regularly to help them to improve? Are you able to observe them in action? Are you able to give them proper guidance? Are you able to invest your time in helping them to get better at their job?

I’ll give you an interesting hypothetical here. So if you are interviewing for a job and the manager that you are talking with shares with you all of the really wonderful elements and all the great parts of the company and their benefits. And, you know, maybe we have a sushi chef here once a month, whatever, the foosball table, whatever these things are. They spend their time on this and how great the company is. That’s interview number one. The second interview includes all of that. But that manager says, “A vital part of my success is investing in your development. So I’m going to spend a lot of time and coaching on you. I’m going to spend a lot of time helping you to get better at your job. That way you can drive greater success.”

Which of those sounds more enticing? Both companies may be good, but I think it’s pretty obvious to me, which one I’d want to go with.

ANDY: Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I wish I’d learned earlier in my career was just how big a determinant of my success my leader and their line manager was. I only came to realize that fairly late on, and I think it was a big mess on my part.

SCOTT: Well, I got lucky on that one. I’ll share a quick story here. When I was 25 years old, I had the second interview. I had a manager who said to me, “You know, I’m going to really invest in your development, in your growth.”

Now, the funny sidebar there is that months after I was on the job—and this person rode me pretty hard on a number of things. His name is John Robens, great manager. Great, great coach. But when we talked about that, he said, “By the way, none of that is altruistic.” He’s like, “I’m not doing that just for the sake of doing it.” He was like, “I want you to grow. I want you to develop. I want you to be successful. But I know if you do that, you’re going to do a better job for me. We’re going to have more success. We’re going to hit our numbers.” There was a lot of things involved with that. So I think if you are a job seeker thinking about this, or if you’re in a job someplace thinking about your manager, or if you are managing others and looking to hire, this is a really wonderful lens to put over the hiring process.

And even more importantly, how you do your job, how you go to work every day, really focusing on developing others and helping them to grow. And that really is the key to coaching.

ANDY: I mean, there’s no downside for this, as you say, whether you are the manager looking to attract talent or whether you are the job seeker looking for your next role. But you know, there’s another aspect to this, right?

And that’s this: What about the people that are staying? What about the people that are remaining in their jobs? This should be applying to them as well. And this could be a conversation that they can have with their manager.

SCOTT: If you’re evaluating, leaving someplace, if you are a part of the great resignation, you want something better, it costs you nothing to try to ask for that at your current location.

And one of those things can be, “What kind of development is available for me? What kind of coaching? How am I going to get better? Improve my ability to bring value to a job?” You know, you have to believe that ultimately your ability to bring more value equals greater compensation, greater degrees of freedom, all the things that are important to people in this pandemic resignation—whatever moniker we’re going to give it next.

ANDY: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. One other aspect of this conversation that I’d be really interested in your take on is the dynamic between the manager and the individual, whether you’re seeking a job or whether you’re in a current job. I agree with you asking for that development is really important, but where does the balance lie between me as the individual owning my career development and owning my growth and the manager inputting into that or providing the guidance. Where does the responsibility sit? Is it with me to drive my own career? Is it with my manager? How does that work?

SCOTT: Well, I think self-determination notwithstanding, we all have a responsibility for our career and where we’re headed in our career. You know, where you don’t necessarily have the responsibility, if you are an employee, is perhaps to kick in the financial resources—though, bookmark that maybe if you want to. If there’s something special you want to do for your growth and development and maybe a company offset there, or maybe you expect the company to fund it.

But I think each of us has to be able to say, “Here’s where I need to grow. Here’s where I want to improve my abilities, my skill sets. These are the competencies or areas of focus I want to get better at or to acquire.” I think we each have to do that, but it can’t be done in a vacuum because you don’t work alone.

So being able to go to your manager, to your leader, the vice president, the CEO, whoever that may be and say, “Where do you need more from me?” And how do we come together on a vision for what my improvement looks like, getting to that proverbial next level in terms of skill development, in terms of knowledge, in terms of capacity.

And what does that look like? And being able to drive that together. In a good company, managers are doing that in collaboration with individuals who are taking responsibility for their own. That’s ideal. You can imagine there’s plenty of non-ideal scenarios where people are driving all of their own development or the company’s trying to get blood from a turnip and trying to get, you know, lots of growth out of people who either don’t have the potential or don’t want to. We see that plenty too. ANDY: So, Scott, one of the things I remember reading some time ago was a quote by Richard Branson and it went something along the lines of, “Hey, you know, train people well enough so that they can leave. But treat them well enough so that they don’t want to.” I’m really interested in exploring that through the lens of the people that are staying and how we should think about balancing all of this investment in them so that they might actually be able to go and get a better job.

SCOTT: Yeah. That Richard Branson character has a good idea now and then, doesn’t he? This is, I think, such an important point, because of all the talk about everybody leaving, the great resignation and the drama of it, it’s really easy to forget about everybody who’s staying. They’re the backbone of your business.

So when I wrote that book, The Inspiring Leader, this notion that inspiring and motivating was one of the top factors in people not leaving their company. And for those who are most inspiring and most motivating in terms of getting the most out of other people, the ability to develop talent was a key factor.

The Richard Branson story reminded me of another story of a vice president of customer service, talking with a CFO about significant investment in training and development. And the CFO responds to the VP of customer service and says, “Well, what if we spend all this money on them and they leave?” And the VP of customer service sort of says, “Oh, that’s a good point.” And responds with, “What if we don’t invest much in their development…and they stay?” Really sort of puts a point on the idea.

You’ve got a lot of people that are staying. In fact in just about every business you have many more that are staying than are leaving. The people who are staying are the real issue for you. And how are you going to invest in their development, make them better at executing your strategy, make them better at interacting with and providing value for customers?

This is ultimately the heartbeat of your strategy: the experience that you provide, not just what you provide, but how you provide that. So making sure that you’re investing in people and their growth is one of the things that I have seen that make people really reluctant to leave a situation, even when there are better jobs available.

When they’ve got really great management, they’re growing, they’re developing, they’re stretching themselves, at least as long as the job opportunities are comparable here. The people are reluctant to leave when they’re in that situation. It also has the added benefit of helping you to compete better in the marketplace.

So you have this really wonderful synergy of factors here of both making people more committed, more engaged in their work and getting better results. Like the manager, John Roben, who I mentioned to, you said to me, you know, “It’s not just altruistic.” Here is a definite gain for the business here that they’re after. And that’s laudable. In commercial enterprise you’re allowed to do that.

ANDY: And I really love that because I think there’s some gold dust in there that I want to be very specific about. You know, when typically when we look across a population in a given company, perhaps in a specific role, you see a bell curve of performance, right? You have far more mid-performers than you do low performers and high performers.

And I think, you know, the temptation can often be as a manager just to focus on, “Hey, if I can get my high performers to perform another 10% better, that’s where my big output is,” but I think what I’ve seen, and one of the things that we focus on, is actually taking some of that time and shifting your mid-performers up by 5% can actually pay off way, way, way more, because you’ve got so much more of them. The concept that I often talk about is the frozen middle. It’s just interesting to me. Does that align with your experience?

SCOTT: Yeah, I’d say there’s a couple of frozen parts. You know, typically when people talk about—this is such an important point—when people talk about coaching and performance management improvement, they almost always gravitate to improving poor performance. And that is not what you and I have been talking about here at all. We’re not talking about trying to remediate poor performers and get them to be okay. We’re trying to take, you know, the entire bell curve, like you said that frozen middle, and shift it to the right to improve everybody’s performance. And I’ll say here that the people most likely to benefit from your coaching, who are most likely to contribute that much more to your business results—it’s certainly true in sales and in technical fields where I’ve seen it—are the high performers.

And managers tend to say, “I’m just going to get out of their way and let them do their job.” But there’s a ton of value in saying, “No, I’m going to double down here. I’m going to invest a lot of time, effort, energy, maybe money, in helping them to get that much better, because they’re in complex jobs where the value that they can contribute is even greater.”

So in everything we’ve been talking about coaching, in my mind, I’ve not been thinking about poor performers at all. I’ve been thinking about average and really strong performers and getting them better because they’re the ones that contribute value. Usually the poor performers we spend a lot of time coaching and investing in performance management with them. If I had a nickel for every time someone got on a performance improvement plan that got off of it and became a top performer, I’d have about 75 cents. It doesn’t happen very often. A lot of effort goes there that isn’t as valuable.

ANDY: So as we wrap up, I want, I just want to come back to where we started, and that’s the great resignation. And we’ve discussed the importance of coaching in every situation, how there is no downside for the individual, the manager, or the company. Everybody benefits here. Just as we wrap up, I just want to touch on briefly, what does good coaching look like? And how does that manifest itself in, for example, the sales job?

SCOTT: Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, I’ve drawn from a few different bodies of work for this, but one in particular, Dr. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University wrote a book called Peak. As in peak performance, P-E-A-K. And most of you listening would not know Dr. Ericsson, but you’ve probably heard of the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. And that was an extrapolation of the research that Dr. Ericsson had done.

I’m going to give you the short version here on what really makes the difference. The short version is, 10,000 hours isn’t the key. It might be less than 10,000 hours. It might be more than 10,000 hours. There’s certainly a significant amount of practice involved in developing expert performance, but there’s no magic in 10,000 hours. According to Dr. Ericsson, who I had a chance to sit down with a few years ago, the real magic is something we’d call deliberate practice.

And that has a few conditions that we as leaders and that we as leaders and coaches can apply to our work every day. The first of which is that you’ve got to have a model for success. What does good look like? I’ll share them and then I’ll do a quick brief on each of these. You’ve got to have a model of what good looks like. And then second, you have to have a chance to practice against that model. You have to try to do it like the model. Third, while being observed by an expert who really understands number one, what great looks like, and then, four: again.

So if you think about any instrument or sport—you know, my daughter’s a violinist. She doesn’t listen to a piece of music once to get what good looks like or great looks like. She listens to it a lot. And she watches how the teacher moves their fingers along the frets and uses the bow and everything. And she watches that very carefully and then she mimics it while being observed. And then she gets feedback: what worked, what didn’t work. So she gets that observed feedback on what worked and what didn’t work. Then she goes back and does it all again. And she doesn’t do that once. She does it dozens and dozens of times, I’m going to say hundreds of times, given how much I’ve listened to some practice (delightful in our house).

But still, you know, nonetheless, you’ve got to do it a lot, whether it is learning to play a sport or an instrument, or be an effective seller. And you asked me specifically about that. So I’ll go take a quick dive on that. So number one, in sales, you’ve got to have a good model of what success looks like. What do you want your people to do differently? It’s not just generate revenue. That’s the outcome. What are the specific behaviors? From asking questions to positioning your solutions, helping clients to see issues that they hadn’t considered, helping them to understand problems in a different way so that they can develop some kind of insight. These are the things we tend to want salespeople to do.

That’s the backbone of every consultative or solution sales course out there. You got to give them that model. I think sending them to a few days of training and expecting them to absorb it and integrate at one time is probably as unrealistic as listening to a piece of music one time and then expecting someone to play it perfectly.

So then they’ve got to have the chance to go practice that while being observed by a manager or another expert. And when I say practice that, I’m going to suggest that you don’t want people to practice on your best customers, your top prospects. You want safe environments where they can get it right and make a few mistakes. That’s not great when you’re negotiating million-dollar deals. So you want to have that chance to practice these skills while being observed by someone who afterward can say, “Here’s what good looks like. Here’s what you did. Here’s what I saw. I liked that. Keep doing that. Change this. You remember when that happened with the customer, how you said that and they responded kind of negatively? I think you didn’t ask the right thing there.”

Whatever these things start to look like. And then to say, okay, when that happens once, then you’ve got one iteration. And if Malcolm Gladwell said the average was around 10,000 hours, how many sales calls do you need to develop not expert, but at least strong performance? So that gives you a bit of a model. It’s like, have the model of what great looks like, have a chance to practice against that. Be observed with it, get feedback on what worked, what didn’t, and start all over again. You can apply that to any sport, skill, competencies…

ANDY: You know, the beauty here that I think as leaders, as managers, our key currency is behavioral change. Long-term behavioral change to help our people achieve their personal objectives, their career goals. And that’s, I think, as we’ve talked about all throughout this, very, very closely aligned to the company goals and the aspirations that we have. Scott, thank you so much for your time today.

SCOTT: My pleasure.

ANDY: I think what I take away from this is that one of our best defenses as leaders in and around this great resignation is to continue to invest in our people to create that culture of coaching, using tools like deliberate practice to be a core part of that. This is about going deep on the individual and the skills and behaviors that they need. But also as individuals, when we are looking at our careers, when we’re assessing, do we make a move? Do we stay? Let’s look at the environment in which we’re in, put that alongside the companies that we look at, and make some decisions around where are we going to get that investment and that development?

Thank you again for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to the next installment.

SCOTT: Yeah, me too. Great to talk with you again, Andy.