Win Win Podcast

Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. According to the State of Sales Enablement 2025 Report, 20% of organizations see the sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you optimize your sales process and drive higher win rates for your team? Here to discuss this topic is Aaliyah Patel, senior specialist, customer marketing at Ansell. Thank you so much for joining us. Aaliyah. I’d love if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Aaliyah Patel: Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. My name is Aaliyah Patel. I’m a senior customer marketing specialist here at Ansell, where I’m a part of the customer marketing team. My role really centers on leading our sales enablement in digital MarTech operations, so ensuring that our systems, processes, and data flows that support our go-to market motion are aligned, connected, and easy for our teams to use.  A large part of that includes overseeing the digital tools like Highspot in our tech stack, supporting content governance and building scalable frameworks that help reps access the right insights, messaging, and assets across the buyer journey. The goal is to ultimately empower sellers and partners with the clarity tools and visibility they need to drive growth and deliver consistent customer experiences. RR: Just from what you mentioned there, it sounds like we have quite a lot of ground cover  in terms of your experience, your background, and then the work that you do with Highspot. Before we kind of jump too far into the deep end there, I always kinda like to start by getting a sense of the environment that you’re working in. So I know that Ansell manufactures and distributes a really wide range of products.  What are some of the unique challenges that go-to-market teams face when selling in this environment? AP: Absolutely. So, Ansell serves an extremely diverse markets, so anything from industrial safety to scientific to healthcare. And each customer group has different expectations, buying cycles and safety requirements.  Reps often need to shift between very different conversations throughout the day. And the challenge isn’t necessarily complexity, it’s clarity. Reps need to quickly position the right solution, especially when our portfolio is broad and customers span multiple industries with unique needs.  There’s also the constant need to stay current on new product developments and differentiators across categories; our priority has been making sure that our teams have a unified way to access information, understand messaging, and communicate competently no matter what business they’re supporting. RR: I love the shift that you mentioned there: it’s not necessarily complex, instead the challenge is making things clear and easy to navigate because yes, there’s a lot going on. You can’t change that, but you can pull certain levers to make it a little bit easier for your teams. Knowing that’s kind of where you’re at, I’d like to turn towards some of the actions that you and the team are taking. So, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on? And then how are you enabling reps to find clarity in Ansell’s sales environment. AP: A major focus for us has been simplifying how our teams access and leverage content to drive more consistent, confident customer conversations. We’ve strengthened our content governance, we’ve centralized materials, and we’ve made it much easier to connect the right message to the right audience.  We’re also aligning more closely with sales to ensure that our go-to market initiatives are really grounded in real customer challenges. Whether through targeted campaigns, sharper product positioning, or ongoing training and enablement, everything that we do is centered on helping our teams articulate our value across the diverse markets and products that we sell in.  We’re seeing the impact of that work in real time: We’ve had over a hundred thousand content views with almost a 90% reoccurring usage rate, which tells us that the structure we’ve put into place is resonating and helping our teams move faster and stay aligned. RR: I love that you came in with the data to back it up—actually, not just the data to back it up but great data to back it up. That’s super impressive, especially knowing that you guys are a little bit early in your journey, that you’re already finding that significant success.  One of the things that we’ve heard is that a key focus is the sales process. So in your experience, what are some of the essential building blocks for creating a sales process that’s driving these business results that you’re seeing? AP: For us, the foundation comes down to three things, so it’s simplicity, alignment, and insights.  When you bring clarity, consistency, and real data together, you create a process that’s scalable, repeatable, and tied to business outcomes, and it allows teams to adapt their approach, depending on the customer segment that they’re working with that day. RR: I think you touched on some really compelling aspects there, and I think I’d be curious to double click into a little bit more of what you said and about how you’re bringing some of those building blocks to life, especially with a platform like Highspot.  So, can you talk about the role that an enablement platform plays in helping you streamline that sales process? AP: So the value is truly structure and connection. An enablement platform brings content, people, and insights together, and it gives everyone one place to operate from. It reduces the time the seller spends searching for materials; it makes sure that our messaging is aligned across our campaigns and launches, and it also creates visibility into what resonates in the field. So, it’s truly become the backbone of how we support consistent execution across the buyer journey. RR: I always love to hear that consistency is kind of what’s coming out of your usage of an enablement platform. I think that’s really the goal, right, to help standardize your messaging and bring consistency to your teams. I would love to dig a little bit deeper into that and kind of the benefit that you see of partnering with Highspot. How does this partnership help you drive some of those core initiatives? You touched on this a little bit already. AP: Partnering with Highspot has been incredibly valuable because it gives us a partner who truly understands the complexity of a modern go-to market environment that helps us operationalize our strategy in a really scalable way. For us, the benefit is twofold. First, Highspot provides the structure we need to centralize our content, our launches, our campaigns, and our customer facing materials, so our field teams can execute with confidence. It creates alignment across marketing and sales, which is essential when you’re supporting multiple markets and product categories. Second, the partnership helps us accelerate our core initiatives. Whether we’re rolling out new product messaging or enabling our teams on evolving customer needs or programs, Highspot gives us the platform, analytics, and support to execute and quickly measure the impact. We’re not just using the platform, but we’re truly maximizing it, and the collaboration has helped us build stronger governance, improve adoption, and really tie our go-to market strategy back to real behavior and engagement. It allows us to deliver a more consistent story, support our reps with clarity, and really create a unified experience across every touchpoint.  RR: That certainly makes me, and I think all of our teams happy to hear. One of the things that’s really interesting about what you said is that earlier you gave us the data to kind of back it up and say that yes, we’re seeing these things anecdotally, but we’re also seeing them empirically.  Thinking of that data, I know that it kind of speaks for itself when it comes to the work that you and the team are doing, but we’ve heard that Digital Rooms have been a key driver in your enablement strategy and in your strategy with Highspot. In just 90 days you’ve generated like 3,000 views with your Rooms. How have you and your teams been leveraging Digital Rooms? Can you talk to us about what impact you’ve been seeing so far? AP: Digital Rooms have become a core part of how we help our teams go to market. We use them to create curated experiences that package our messaging assets and resources into a structured, easy-to-navigate format that aligns with the story we want to deliver so reps can use them to deliver a clear and consistent narrative and everything they need is in one place.  This helps our teams guide customers and partners through a cohesive experience. That visibility supports stronger account planning, more intentional communication, and better alignment with customer needs. The engagement has been strong. We’ve created over 500 Digital Rooms with an average of 30 minutes of viewing time per Room. Some have accumulated between 20–60 total hours of engagement, and several have been shared externally more than 40 times, which shows us that our customers and partners are engaging with the content in meaningful ways. RR: I love to hear how you’re using that Digital Room scorecard to keep a pulse on how they’re performing out in the wild. When you are supplying go-to-market teams with these Digital Rooms, is it the marketing team that’s building them? And if so, what kind of use cases are you building for? AP: It’s in partnership with both marketing and sales, so we can help them create them if they’d like, but then they also have full autonomy to go and create them themselves for their specific customers. Use cases can include any specific i

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report, 2025, 29% of companies still rely on multiple disconnected GTM tools. So how can organizations leverage a unified platform to scale sales readiness and achieve GTM success? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.  Here to discuss this topic is Heather Hubner, advisor distribution and agent relations at Priority Health. Thank you so much for joining us, Heather! I’d love it if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Heather Hubner: Thanks for having me, Riley. Again, my name is Heather Hubner, and my role is a somewhat newer role in our company, but I came from the employee benefits side of the industry and then moved into sales. So I was a sales rep for several years for priority Health and that has evolved into the distribution side. Really my role is to ensure that our agent partners have a very aligned message as far as our products go, and just ensure that we are giving them the tools they need to represent our product in the field appropriately. RR: I kind of wanna double click into something you mentioned, which is that you started on the sales side of the house at Priority Health. So with that background in mind, can you walk us through some of the unique challenges that reps in the healthcare industry face, and then maybe a little bit about how enablement can help them overcome those things? HH: Yes, and I love this question. Being a sales rep in this industry—I think anyone who has worked in it understands the complexity—-is complex, it is fast paced, it’s somewhat seasonal, but we’re also learning that those seasons are no longer such. It’s just a high pace all year round.  As a rep, one thing that I really learned was we have time wasters: we’re looking for a certain material that an agent wants, we’re reeducating ourselves on a product because maybe it’s something that we don’t delve into on a regular basis, we just need to reeducate ourselves as a rep.  Before Highspot, so much time was spent digging around for that information and therefore less time was spent selling and building relationships and building trust with the agents. That was, that was very challenging. You know, I always thought: “Goodness, if I had everything at my fingertips, frankly, I could sell more for our company because I would be spending my time in a valuable way.” So I would say about four years ago, that’s when we first started using Highspot and it was an absolute game changer. I mean, it changed our world. We could get everything in one spot, and there was a lot of emphasis on making sure we had a source of truth.  Reps know they know to go to Highspot, they can grab what they need when they need it, send it to an agent, reeducate themselves, and there isn’t any more guessing about where to look at our system, which drive, how do we find out who has the most up-to-date information. It really has been an amazing alignment tool. RR: I love that you’ve walked the walk so much so that you’re like: “I know what was hard, and I can now have the agency and also the tooling to go in and fix it.” I think that’s wonderful. And I think that’s always the goal of enablement, right? But when you have that background, you’re so much more in touch with what your reps need. So now that you’ve kind of made your way into this new role, I’d like to dig into what you’re working on now. So, what are some of those key initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business this year? How are you hoping to decrease complexity like we just talked about for Priority Health’s reps and agency partners? HH: To give you an idea of our journey so far, we started using Highspot for our reps and really went hard this year on ensuring that we had similar tools for our agents creating pages, specifically for our agents by market segment. We have created digital pages, so to speak. We call them engagement pages from an externally facing standpoint, and we have tailored the tools that those agents specifically need. This is important because, you know, if you are a small group agent, you generally don’t have all the complexities that large groups have, and therefore you don’t wanna weed through all those materials.  So it really is the same principle applies, right? It’s giving them the tools they need when they need it, without having to sift through a lot of things that they don’t need. So creating very tailored pages for them has been really important.  We’re going to take it a step further this year. So, to get to your actual question, we’re gonna focus on training. So when we get new agents in the field, they are the ones that we count on in order to sell our product, and oftentimes they are getting in the trenches, learning about all the carriers all at the same time. It’s a lot to digest.  What we are gonna focus on is working on our training and our onboarding experience for our agent partners, and that way they can get in the field quicker with the right type of information, stay compliant with what our product actually is offering, and feel more comfortable. The hope there is truly we’re gonna sell more, more quickly, and they’re going to feel more comfortable repping our product. RR: I love the kind of internal enablement philosophies that are being extended out to the partner network—we know what you need and we want to give it to you in an easy, digestible way that is tailored to your workflow, because I’m not going to make you dig for something that you don’t even need. Keeping that in mind, I’d love to know what some of those other key building blocks for effectively equipping agents and building strong partner relationships are for you. HH: Gosh, the biggest piece is trust, right? They’re building trust, um, spending time with them. Listening. Listening is the biggest piece. When agents are telling us things, we have to listen to them and act upon them. Otherwise what’s the point? The fact of the matter is in our industry—and anyone that works in health insurance knows our agent—partners are very direct. Sometimes too direct, but they’re very direct. So when they’re telling you something, they mean it and they are going to be truthful because their livelihood is also reliant upon the information we give. But I would say relationships are the strongest one. Trust, transparency. You know, being honest. If we are, you know, if an agent questions us on something, or frankly, sometimes they’ll compare us to other carriers: “Hey, this carrier does this. How come you guys can’t do that?” Be honest about it.  But it really goes back to listening and forming those bonds to where they trust you. Because the more an agent trusts you, the more willing they are to say: “Hey, this group is a really good fit for your product. And I feel confident that you’re going to onboard them smoothly. I feel confident you’re going to take care of them from a customer service standpoint. And I feel confident that when there’s a problem, I’m going to call you, you’re gonna answer and you’re gonna help me solve it.” RR: So, you mentioned listening and building trust and transparency, and then using what agents are saying to kind of build your programs and how you support them. How are you kind of creating these channels to get in touch with your agents? Is it just getting on the phone and talking to people and then taking that information back to your strategy? How are you kind of creating that feedback loop? HH: So our team, I wanna give a little, um, shout out to the team a little bit. We are very unique, so we’re a newer team. There was not a distribution and training team before. We’re really working on the strategy for exactly what you said. How do we strategically get out? How do we make sure that our interactions are meaningful, and how do we enable our sales team to do the same?  So what we have really come up with—and it seems to be quite successful—is we’ve created a premier partner program. What that means is we’ve got different levels, essentially of our partner groups: gold, silver, and bronze. For each one of them, we provide different levels of service, so to speak, but it’s really rewarding them for their business with us.  With that, we’ve created a strategy on formal meetings. So formal meetings are when we actually go to the agency, we’re bringing our team of leaders and some of our reps, and we’re spending time with them in person and talking about our new products, some of the intricacies and nuances about what to expect, getting feedback about what they’re seeing in the industry and what they need in order to keep their clients in the space that they’re hoping to be for their employee benefits. We do that twice a year, and then we have kind of the other agency partners who we hit once a year. But on top of that, you’ve got kind of this less formal interaction, and that’s where we really come into play from an enablement standpoint. We want to make sure our sales reps have what they need when they need it. We help create some content for them so that when they are having more informal meetings—maybe they’re going to lunch, they’re going to breakfast, and they want to build a relationship, but they also want to bring some value and bring some meaningful messaging. That’s really where we’re focused. We understand that there’s different levels of that relationship building. You know, those individual reps, it’s so important that they have those relationships, but as an organization, as a whole, it’s important that we have those relationships and that vantage point in the market to where they’re saying, yeah, they have it together, they understand what we need.  They are being formal when they need to b

According to Forbes, sales reps spend 35.2% of their time selling and 65% of their time on literally everything else. So how can organizations cut through the noise and focus reps on the activities that matter most? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.  Here to discuss this topic are Yvette Boucher, Director of Sales Enablement at CentralReach, and Chelsea Louro, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at CentralReach. Thank you so much for joining us, both. Just to kick us off, I’d love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Yvette, would you like to kick us off?  Yvette Boucher:  Yeah, thanks for having us. I’m Yvette. I’ve been with Central Reach for about six years now, building out our enablement programs. We’re an AI-powered platform for autism and IDD care providers. Our end-to-end software and learning solutions help organizations deliver quality outcomes to help every client succeed. I’ll pass it over to Chelsea. Chelsea Louro: Thank you. I’m Chelsea Louro, senior manager of sales enablement. I’m also approaching six years here at CentralReach. And then prior to coming to CentralReach, I was a teacher for a little over a decade. I also did teacher training and recruitment and then education sales, then that brought me here where I was in SDR, an account executive, and then also now in enablement the last three and a half years. RR: Amazing. Well, we’re super excited to have you here, especially knowing that you guys were both up for a Spark Award this year. So you are doing some really wonderful work that I’m really looking forward to digging into as we kick off. I’d love to start with you, Yvette.  Let’s open with what’s difficult, what you’re up against lately. So, what are some of the core challenges to GTM success that you’re seeing, and how have those challenges kind of evolved throughout your enablement career? YB: One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen recently is just how short the timelines have become between a product announcement and when reps are expected to start selling it. We’re moving faster than ever, especially with our new AI products.  That means enablement has to get the reps the right information, the right messaging, and the right training almost immediately. It’s been a constant balancing act between speed and depth. We want reps to feel confident and well prepared, but we also need to deliver that enablement in a really agile way, so they’re ready to have meaningful conversations from day one. So the pressure to move fast has definitely shaped how enablement operates today. For us, it’s not just about building training, it’s about building our systems and processes that can scale and flex with the business. RR: I think you’re certainly not alone in some of those challenges. Organizations across the board are struggling with similar things, and everyone’s kind of looking for that silver bullet. Chelsea, I wonder if you can maybe help us kind of build on this. So, from your perspective, how does an enablement platform support you and the team in addressing these challenges and helping reps focus on selling? CL: Yeah, so I’ve been in roles at other companies where there wasn’t much organization. There was no enablement platform at all. Both as a seller and a leader, I spent a lot of time trying to find the resources that I needed, and sometimes just—out of pure frustration—had to create my own. I know a lot of sales reps come across that as well.  So, having a platform like Highspot gives us kind of that single source of truth so we can get all of our content guidance training all together in one platform, one workflow. Our reps aren’t spending time trying to find things and they can focus on what they really need to do, which is sell. It also helps us deliver insights back to our leadership, um, and lets us see what content and sales plays are actually driving our sales.  That visibility allows us to continually refine and to make sure that the reps are supported and then focused on selling. RR: Kind of moving forward, I would love to maybe focus on some of the ways that you’re using an enablement tool. I’ve heard that you and the team are doing some really wonderful things with Sales Plays, and that’s kind of part of what earned you that Spark Award nomination.  Yvette, knowing that Sales Plays are playing such a critical role in supporting some of your AI-centric product launches this year, I’d love to learn a little bit from you about what that strategy is, and how you’re using plays to streamline rep workflows. YB: We’ve really built our Plays with simplicity and speed in mind. So, the idea is that we get the right information in our reps hands as quickly as possible with who to target, what to say, and what resources they can use so they can jump straight into the action instead of digging through multiple tools or decks. When we launched our AI solutions last year, the Plays became a living guide for the team. And because the plays live right in Highspot, reps can easily pull them up in the moment. So as our products continue to evolve, the Plays evolve too. So they’ve become a go-to reference point that helps stay, keep everyone aligned and stay confident in how they’re positioning our solutions. RR: It’s funny because you know, a Sales Play is such a humble thing, but it can be so powerful if you use it right. It’s not just the strategy that I think is really impressive with what you guys are doing.  Chelsea, I’ve heard that you and the team have driven a really incredible 99 again, 99% adoption rate of your Plays. So can you walk us through how you maintain such high sales play adoption? CL: I think a lot of it is just constant repetition and reinforcement. Our teams have kind of become used to our enablement and go-to-market communications, so adding in Sales Plays was just a nice easy process.  Every time we roll out a new Sales Play, we emphasize the importance to them. We let the team know that any changes or updates will be made in that Sales Play. So that’s where they need to go to find their source of truth.  I put out a weekly newsletter called the CR Morning Brew every Monday, and in the Brew we share new marketing content, any updates to those Sales Plays, any initiatives, things that they need to know. Then we have a live sales meeting on Tuesdays where everything that was shared in the Brew is reinforced. So again, the reps are reading it, they’re getting it in sales team channels—because I share out that Brew in every single sales team channel—and then that live, vocal repetition and just making sure that they’re paying attention and, and they know what’s happening. RR: I think one thing that’s really important that you called out there is that yes, you’ve driven really high adoption, but you also built the foundation of communication beforehand. So you had these levers in place that you could pull and be like: “You trust us. You know where we’re coming from, and now I can send you to the right places.”  So, you’ve built a strategy. You’ve seen near unanimous engagement with it, but it goes further than that.  Yvette, you shared that using Sales Plays during a recent product launch led you to influence over 900 opportunities. Could you walk us through how you drove those results and then how that impacted the launch outcomes? YB: I think it really came down to how we set up the Plays to begin with. Like it came down with that alignment and teamwork. So prior to the launch we worked cross-functionally with product marketing, sales leaderships and our SMEs to make sure the reps had everything they needed for messaging, positioning, and the hands-on product support, which I think was key there. They needed someone that knew that product. We also knew we would be learning in real time. So every team at CR leaned in to help them, everyone. By the time the Play that went live, we were already making edits and updates based on early feedback. Every update and change was communicated in our Morning Brew. sales team meetings, and individual team meetings, and we continued that communication and support from our SMEs, and that’s really what helped us influence those opportunities. It’s also great that it was a great product for people to have. RR: That is the kicker—it’s hard to sell when you don’t have something exciting. So I’m glad that both cylinders were firing there. You guys were doing the right things and so was the product.  Now, I feel like we could probably continue digging into Sales Plays, there’s a lot there. Again, like I said, they’re one thing that gets overlooked, but they can be really, really high impact.  I would like to maybe switch gears to another win that you’ve shared with us. Chelsea, you leveraged Highspot to redesign your onboarding program, achieving a really impressive one hundred percent adoption of required training and reducing ramp time by one to two weeks. Can you walk me through what you were thinking about as you were improving this program? What impact has that has had on rep productivity, ramp time, and all of those good things? CL: Yeah, so we kind of reimagined the onboarding program to be a little bit more personalized and performance driven. Using Highspot’s training module, we built out role-specific Learning Paths that kind of combine product knowledge, our Sales Plays, and then real world scenarios. We also created an onboarding homepage. So when a brand new rep first joins the team, they log into Highspot. They have an onboarding homepage that clearly links all the Learning Paths but also defines the expectations, the deliverables, and what they should expect every single week. We also hold weekly check-in meetin

According to research from Forrester, 70% of marketing content goes unused. So how can you effectively structure and govern your content to unlock its value and drive measurable business results? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Chanique James, marketing lead generation and enablement specialist at MSCI. Thank you so much for joining us, Chanique. To kick us off, I’d love if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Chanique James: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I have several years of experience in brand and product marketing, focusing on promotions, trade marketing, and event management, as well as sales enablement. Over the years I’ve managed from product marketing initiatives across both B2B and B2C environments, developing integrated strategies that connect creativity, storytelling with measurable business outcomes. I’ve always been passionate about connecting strategy with people and finding the balance between creativity, data, and impact. That perspective has shaped how I approach marketing and enablement today. In my current role, I focus on marketing, lead generation and enablement. Ensuring or grow to market teams have access to the right content at the right time, along with insights and tools to engage clients effectively. I see my work as connecting digital strategy with operational excellence, bringing clarity, consistency and impact to how marketing and sales collaboration. RR: Amazing. Well, from that background, it seems like there’s a lot of ground we could cover here. A lot of experience across a lot of different arenas that I’d love to dig into. So let’s just start with maybe a bit of background on kind of the environment that you’re working in. So I know that MSCI provides a pretty broad range of services to the global investment community. So what are some of the unique challenges that your go-to market teams face when activating at scale across global regions? And then to your point, how does digital enablement help address them in global environment? CJ: I believe that scale introduces complexity from different regulatory environments to language nuances and varying buyer expectations. Go to market teams face similar challenges across regions. They have to balance consistency, compliance, and connectivity. Ensuring that messaging feels unified, yet relevant in diverse markets. Managing that balance requires both structure and flexibility, and that’s where digital enablement comes in. By centralizing content, data and workflows, digital enablement gives team visibility into what’s working and empowers them to adapt quickly. These tools make it possible to deliver localized content and timely materials to client facing teams around the world, helping them navigate campaigns efficiently as well as, I would say more confidently. RR: Amazing. It sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate, so I’m excited to dig into kind of the strategies for approaching those obstacles and those challenges of scale beyond kind of some of the unique obstacles that you encounter as a global organization, as a financial services organization, I’d like to focus on some that pretty much every organization is gonna face, which is the disconnect across the go to market organization. So as a marketing leader. What go-to-market initiatives are you focused on to better align your marketing and your sales teams? CJ: For me, I would say alignment starts with visibility and connection. It’s really about making sure marketing and sales teams are working from the same playbook as well as working together so that content, messaging and data tell one cohesive story. That alignment creates focus and efficiency. It means simplifying access to marketing and enablement tools, making insights actionable, and keeping collaboration front and center with both sides. That is marketing and sales are connected around shared goals and clear communication. Everything else from productivity to performance naturally improves. RR: Absolutely. And I think one of those key levers that you can pull on is the content that you’re sharing across. When it’s well managed and well socialized, you unlock really strong cross-functional collaboration when it’s not, we know the consequences in your work. One of those key focuses is content management. So from your experience, what are some of the common pitfalls that financial services organizations like yours might face when developing and managing content, and then how can maybe they avoid them? CJ: I would say possibly a big, or the biggest challenge that we have is fragmentation content often live in silos owned by different teams, sometimes with different goals that can lead to duplication, outdated materials, or even inconsistencies in messaging and compliance. Key, however, is strong governance and collaboration, establishing clear processes around how content is created, reviewed, distributed, and even maintaining open feedback loop across marketing, compliance, and sales can actually help us ensure that every piece of content is purposeful, consistent, and UpToDate in addition. I believe that when organizations take that structured approach, they move from managing content reactively to managing more strategically, and this can actually turn into a real advantage for the business. RR: Can you talk to me a little bit about like the value of that strategic approach as opposed to a like reactive approach? CJ: So I ultimately believe that in terms of content management, you really need to think strategically, how are teams accessing it? How are they using it, and also is it relevant for your market? I believe that one of the key things that we can do is always leverage the data. Enablement tools allow us to get a lot of insights not just into client engagement with content, but also how our sales team are actually using it. When we actually leverage that data, that helps us to drive strategy and that strategy actually helps us improve over time. The content that we continuously create and the content that we also continuously share with our clients. And I think that’s a big portion. That’s a big part of actually making sure that we’re not just reacting to things, not be being used well, but also strategically ensuring that moving forward when we see certain metrics, we use that to create better content, to have better client relationships and conversations for our sales team. RR: Yeah, I think that’s such a great perspective. I think sometimes as marketers, you get really caught up in like what you’re excited to create, and sometimes you have to take that step back and go, what is actually useful? What are our reps like, what are our clients like? And how can I lean into that? So I, I love that you’re taking that approach. Um, and I know good governance and good content creation strategies can be really, really crucial, but they can also be really difficult to maintain. So I’d like to talk a little bit, maybe about. The impact of taking the time to focus in on that. So what do you see as the value of having compliant up-to-date content and how does that enable reps to succeed in the field? CJ: Sure. I believe that having quality and compliant content is very essential, and also having enablement platforms actually serve as a great deal in terms of ensuring that the content is easy for sales reps to access. Enablement platforms are transformative because they turn content from status assets into living resources. They centralized content distribution, enforce compliance, and provide clear insights into engagement and performance. For financial organizations where accuracy and timing are everything, this gives our sales team confidence that what they’re sharing with clients have been approved and is also relevant. So I would say that it’s not just about access, it’s really about assurance, agility, and trust. RR: I think that that last call out is so key because it’s ultimately just about trust, right? Your reps need to know that your content is reliable and aligned to their needs. Your business needs to know that you’re compliant and aren’t gonna create unnecessary risk that nobody wants to deal with. If you can prove that and build that brand of trust. You’re set. And maybe that’s kind of how you’ve achieved such a high recurring usage rate in Highspot. So can you walk me through, in addition to some of the governance pieces that we’ve been talking about, but what best practices have been effective in helping you drive strong adoption? CJ: Adoption thrives on relevance and experience. We treat our environment as more than a repository. It’s really a dynamic workspace that grows with our teams. We’re focused on building a clear content structure so users can easily find what they need, and we partner with champions who will help drive awareness, as well as share best practices. We also offer focus training and share success stories with our new users. That highlights real results. In addition, we integrate with platforms such as Salesforce so that the tool actually fits naturally into the workflows of our sales teams. I think that when people see genuine value in how it helps them, it actually allows them to work smarter and adoption really naturally flows from that. RR: I love touching on the ecosystem piece and creating an environment that works for people. ’cause a lot of the time when enablement feels like a mandate or it’s not built with workflows in mind. You don’t see that adoption, so love to hear the best practices that are working for you, but I know that it’s not just adoption that’s going well for you and the team. We’ve heard s

According to the GTM Performance Gap Report, 98% of leaders say their GTM strategy is active, but only 10% see it driving results. So how can organizations bridge this gap and turn strategy into meaningful execution that drives outcomes? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Winland Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Becky Payne, Vice President of Sales and Success Digital Enablement at Sage. Thank you so much for joining us today. Becky, we are super excited to have you. As we kind of get things kicked off, I’d love it if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Becky Payne: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me on the Win-Win podcast today. A little bit about me and my background. I’ve been at Sage for seven years. I’ve been in corporate America for almost 17, and what I can tell you is. When you really get under the hood of go-to market, that’s really what makes an organization home, right? And so my experience and my background is a lot of understanding the channel, a lot of understanding how go-to market works in real life, which is a phrase I like to use quite a bit. As well as then understanding how that connects into our strategy as we think about where we need to drive transformation to get to our ultimate outcomes along the way. My role at Sage is very unique. I sit in our routes to revenue organization, and so I get the privilege of enabling our go-to-market teams to drive the revenue that they need to and the various motions and go-to-market aspects of what they do every day. RR: Amazing. First of all, I love the Routes to Revenue team. That is the best team name. Based on what you’ve said here, it seems like we’ve got a lot to dig into. As you mentioned, you’ve got a pretty extensive experience in both channel and sales enablement, so can you walk us through how you journeyed into sales enablement, and now that you’re here, how that background influences your strategy today? BP: Well, I think my experience is probably a little bit of a unique one, but I’m happy to share it. So prior to this role, I actually served as our chief of staff or business executive in the North America space, and prior to that actually for our global partners and Alliance leader. So I have spent a significant amount of time in both of those spaces, and what I was able to identify is that. We had the most brilliant pieces of technology out there. We had the most brilliant strategies out there, but we didn’t have a great way of connecting those into the workforce every day to get them to drive the outcomes that the business really needed to see. So coming into this role, first of all, I think I have the best role at Sage, so I love to brag about what my team does. But what we get to do is we get to connect in with solving real world problems. We get to work with these sellers and these channel partners every single day to be able to deliver incremental value into what they do directly in relation to the customers, but also then how we make them operationally efficient in their day-to-day activities to be able to execute on that go-to-market strategy. RR: It seems like we got the exact right person to talk about the strategy and execution gap. I think you mentioned everything that I hope to cover, so super excited to dig into how you’re making that all this happen. Before we get into kind of the fix it strategies, I’d love to start with where we are today. So as you’re looking across the go-to-market stage and seeing some of the obstacles that pretty much every team is encountering in their day-to-day, what are some of the top challenges to sales success that you’re seeing? And then how are you addressing those challenges for both internal reps and channel partners? BP: Well, I don’t know that we have enough time today to get into all the details, but, but when you really think about it, it’s common in a lot of places, right? Yes, we might be in the high tech world, but a lot of what we’re experiencing is what is happening across the globe today. So if you think about it, a lot of our, both internal sellers, as well as our channel executives and partners, actually are experiencing information overload. And quite honestly, they’re not able to make the understanding of where that information overload then meets the relevance. Impact driver for what they’re dealing with every day. You know, a lot of our colleagues are flooded with content tools, data galore. We have a very, very data rich infrastructure here, which is amazing. However, the challenge isn’t access. To that, right? It’s really the precision and the action that they’re taking on that. We also have a bit of a previous history in having some consistency gaps when you think about that, right? So both direct teams and our channel partner teams that are out there selling and they’re engaging with these customers. Until recently, we didn’t really have a global blueprint. We didn’t really have a ton of global sales place, so we had a, a large inconsistency in how things were showing up, which their format, how we were measuring those outcomes and those impacts couldn’t be aligned on the day-to-day basis. We also are seeing a ton of pace of change. I mean, every organization is experiencing not only the AI transformation and AI change, but overall as a team at Sage, we experienced a significant amount of transformation in the last 24 months. So we’re kind of embracing that as we see a lot of the challenges as we embrace the AI transformation that’s on our doorstep. RR: You called out a couple things that I think most teams are gonna resonate with. Information overload, crazy pace of change, consistency issues across your channels. There’s a lot of noise out there, which makes it really difficult to create enduring, trusted relationships that drive the results you’re looking for. So from your perspective, what are some of the key building blocks behind a strong, effective partnership with your channel teams? BP: All right. This is one that goes a little bit like near and dear to my heart, right? What we have such a great ecosystem around us at Sage and such a great channel partner team, both internally and with our partners directly, is the clarity of the purpose. And the incremental value that they add to Sage. A lot of times our managing director of North America, Mark Hickman, he references the one plus one equals three equation, and that’s generally how we feel with our partner ecosystem. We have the best partnerships and those best partnerships start when both sides are really clear on the outcome and the impact that we mutually drive together. And what we’re able to see is when we do that in a very cohesive, consistent, and aligned strategic way from the leaders all the way down to the front line, we’re able to see incremental value driven through with and to our partners as well as back into Sage when you think about that bigger ecosystem play. RR: Okay, so we’ve covered a little bit of the philosophy of alignment, outcome, shared outcomes. I’d like to talk a little bit about the execution piece, so how you’re bringing that strategy to life with technology. Can you walk us through how an enablement platform helps you better equip both the internal and the partner side of the house? BP: Yes, this is where I nerd out just slightly ’cause this is absolutely what I love. So when you think about it, it does absolutely start with a unified go-to-market motion, which we have been able to deliver over the past year with my partner in crime, Mark Jackson. But we also have now, literally a couple weeks ago, launched our global unified enablement platform, which happens to be Highspot. And what we were able to learn from that is when you take a consistent blueprint and go to market mission, right, and then you add that. The best platform that we can. Not only can we surface insights and leverage some of the AI technologies that Highspot is offering, but we also have an ability to have mutually shared documents, mutually, you know, shared Digital Sales Rooms. Things that allow us to go to market together in an effective way that we’ve never had before. We really feel like this is a game changing strategy for us and really is a way for us to bring our blueprint, right, and that kind of strategy to life in the day-to-day execution. Some of the genomics aspects of your platform bring visibility into some of these sales plays and other items that we’ve never had before. We can now go in and we can see what partners are engaging with us, who within those partners are engaging at a different way, allow us to provide reporting to senior leaders, but also at those frontline sellers. So they’re going into their weekly strategic team meetings with these partners with a strategy that’s very clear. They’ve got content they can reference. They have points of which they can then articulate what is or is not working in sales plays and other things, and we’ve never had that capability before. RR: Well, that’s absolutely what I love to hear that the platform is becoming such a game changer for you guys, and you’re already seeing that difference between before and after. One thing I’d like to double click into what you said there was that you’re starting to dig into Highspot AI capabilities. So can you share how you’re building some of those features into your enablement strategy and then where you’re eventually hoping to go with them? BP: The future’s endless, right? Endless possibilities is where we’re hoping to go. But if you think about something like Sage, we are a global business. We do, you know, a significant amount of business across the world, but we also have, oh gosh, 160 ish products across the world. S

According to research from Gartner, buyer uncertainty leads to a 30% reduction in a buyer’s ability to make a purchase decision at all. So, how can you create a buying experience that builds confidence, drives engagement, and ultimately improves win rates? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Annabel Hosking, Global Sales Enablement Manager at LexiNexis Risk Solutions. Thank you so much for joining us, Annabel. Just to kick us off, I’d love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Annabel Hosking: Hi everyone. I currently work as a global sales network manager at LexisNexis Risk Solutions within the data services brand, so I’m very fortunate to work across. Four different brands that will work within the data space. And within my role, I lead the sales enablement team. We’re a global team. We’re a small team, small but mighty, and we work across methodology enablement. So all about our sales methodology, how we go to market, how our customers. Experiences. And I also work across all of our onboarding as well as all of our tech stack as well. So my role is really varied. I’m very lucky I get to work with some really great people across the world. And yeah, it was never a dull moment, I’ll say. RR: Isn’t that always the case? Small scrappy teams. Wearing a lot of hats and it’s always exciting. We’re super excited to have you here because I know you have experience spanning a lot of core parts of enablement, so I think there’s a lot to dig into there. Could you walk us through, because I think everybody’s story is different, maybe your professional journey and then how that background led you to enablement, and then how it’s kind of shaped your approach to enablement today. AH: Absolutely. I have what I like to think of as, and it comes from a podcast I’ve been listening to recently, it’s called Squiggly Careers, and I feel like my career was like a very squiggly career of how I ended up in enablement, because I did not at school think, oh, I’m gonna become a. Sales enabler whatsoever. But my background is very much actually in content management and platform management and communication. And how I moved into enablement was I was actually hired in my current company and one of the brands, the beginning of the pandemic. To essentially deliver enablement content. So I worked on delivery of content, content management, delivery of our Highspot system as well. And that was how I started to move into the enablement realm. And I will say it was completely unknown to me originally. I. Wasn’t even clear that I was doing sales enablement per se, but at least a good 18 months in my role here. I thought I was just delivering content and it wasn’t until working with vendors like Highspot where. That term enablement started to come out and it started to change, I suppose, how I delivered my content and it’s really come into its own where now I’m very fortunate where I’m have on my team who does phenomenal content and through my experience.  It’s really understanding who my audience is, understanding how they like to consume their enablement, but also how we can consistently stay, um, ahead of what the trends are and how people like to change, how they like to consume, what they’re seeing day to day, because that has vastly changed as well in the last six years. So thankfully my background and being adaptable, working globally, working with a lot of different people have really helped shape that. Because you know, I always say if there’s one thing, so my career of, you know, working in content management and working with platforms, working in technology. It has really shaped who I am today because it’s all really embedded in those user Jo Journeys user stories, and that translates into what I hope is a good enablement experience. RR: Well, amazing. I love the phrase squiggly career. I think I am certainly going to have to steal that one, and I think it’s such a good way to describe how so many folks end up at enablement. You start in one place and you bring all of that knowledge that you acquire in that early discipline. Into enablement programming that’s more effective for it. \And thinking about, you know, your background in content management and creating content and all of that fun stuff, I’d be curious to know how they kind of come together. So you recently spoke at Spark EA and highlighted the importance of the buying experience, so. What are you seeing as some of those biggest challenges in engaging today’s buyers and how are you addressing them? Maybe through content, maybe through enablement? What does that look like to you? AH: I mean, I think the buying experience today in 2025 is unlike anything we have seen. Ever. It is a completely different world for both salespeople and for buyers as well. And what I’m seeing is, you know, buyers are not only overwhelmed with information, they’re also inundated with it. There is so much content out there for a buyer to consume and not just through their sales individual. This is content that they can easily go and either get themselves or with things like AI and Copilot, they can have. Harness and surface to them. So that makes the role of the seller that much harder because we don’t always know what the buyer is viewing and whether it’s of value to them, and that means that their time, the buyer’s time is so precious. We are seeing that, you know, buyers, and I mentioned this when I was at Spark, there are so many people now involved in the buying decision. We’ve moved, I think it was from about three people a few years ago. We’re now at. Six to 10 people. And if you think about it, those are all new personas that sellers have to understand, have to get to know, potentially map out, connect with. And what’s really unfortunate is we’re also seeing that for a lot of sellers, our buyers are actually taking. Long to make a decision that they kind of get to a point of no decision. We’re at this decision fatigue. We’re a information fatigue, we’re a decision fatigue. And I think on the whole, our buyers are they tired. And I can talk as a buyer, myself as a customer, it’s really exhausting. And so what we try to encourage where I am in data services is sales have to differentiate themselves. If you wanna get in front of buyers nowadays, you have to think what are you bringing to the table that’s different from them? That’s a unique experience, that’s an experience that makes ’em feel important, makes ’em feel, listened to, makes them feel like they really can understand why we are doing business together. And that starts in how we as enablement get that content to our salespeople. If we are not able to identify the value that we are bringing as brands into that conversation, it becomes really hard for sales to know how to articulate that to the buyers as well. And so. As enablement, we are that bridge between the, a lot of other functions and the sales teams and the commercial teams of making sure that value identification is really clear. So by the time it reaches the buyer, they absolutely know why they’re having that conversation. They absolutely know what the value of that conversation is going to be. And that really does start with how are you getting that information into the hands of your salespeople? How are you making that content? Really accessible, really palatable as well. I think traditional enablement, we defer to a lot of very wordy, very long documents, which from experience, no salesperson really wants to read or look at or go through. So just as we’re seeing the buyers experience evolve, the enablement experience has to evolve as well in order to stay ahead of that and to give them the best experience to our salespeople. RR: I think you’re absolutely right on all of that. It is only getting more difficult, and as things change externally, you need to adapt internally. And so kind of thinking about how you’re making that change, and to your point, how you’re distributing materials in a way that is usable and usable for a sales audience that maybe isn’t gonna read 10 pages of written content. What would you say then is kind of the unique value for an enablement platform when it comes to helping sellers? Create and deliver these impactful and differentiated buying experiences that you’re looking for? AH: Oh, huge value, absolutely huge value. The power of enablement comes in the ability to be able to streamline that messaging. But in order to do so, we do need a channel to do that, you know, and that can’t exist. In ad hoc documents that you just hold on someone’s computer. Our journey with Highspot started many, many years ago. I think it was about sort five or six years ago, very early days for Highspot even themselves. And we set out with a mission statement, which was that Highspot would be a single source of truth holding up up-to-date relevant sales content. And I am happy to say that five years later we still maintain that mission statement. The platform has got bigger. There’s more people, there’s more content, as I’m sure you can imagine, but we have stuck to our statement that it is a single source of truth. It is up to date, it is valid information that sales are getting, but that all comes from having a channel with a witch to push that through to the sales audience. It just makes your role as an enabler that much easier, you know, day to day. As you know, we spoke about at the top of the call is no one day looks the same for enablement. It will always be different. There’ll be different priorities. There’ll be different go to market, there’ll be different initiatives. But if you know that at least you have somewhere that you can reliably put inform

According to research from Gartner, 77% of sellers say they struggle to efficiently complete their assigned tasks. So how can you successfully implement an enablement platform that truly helps sellers become more efficient and drive tangible outcomes? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Here to discuss this topic is Alexia Wilkinson, senior sales enablement specialist at Revvity. Thank you for joining us, Alexia. I’d love for you to start just by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.  Alexia Wilkinson: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m Alexia Wilkinson, senior sales enablement specialist at Revvity where I’ve been for the past two and a half years.  My career actually began in SaaS sales nearly a decade ago with a strong focus in the life sciences industry. I was based in Boston, so it’s the global hub of biotech and pharma. Over the years, I developed a deep appreciation for the strategic role that enablement plays in driving sales success. So my transition into sales enablement was really fueled by the belief in its power to support new sellers, season professionals and entire sales teams to become more effective, confident, and customer-focused.  So one of the things I love the most about my job at Revvity is the opportunity to be involved. With so many different parts of the business, whether it’s collaborating on sales processes or sales efficiencies, it’s integrating tools into the seller’s daily workflow and making sure they’re working and fit for purpose, and also improving communication across teams.  There’s so many different people to communicate with. We wanna make sure that each initiative contributes to what I see as the foundation of sales excellence. Bringing all of that together, bundling up and making sure that our sales org has the right tools and a clear. Guide and plan into how they can sell effectively.  RR: Amazing. Well, we’re super excited to have you here today. I think you spoke to the role of enablement so eloquently and I know that the great foreshadowing for the session to come. So to kick us off, I’d like to start with something that you mentioned, which is that you’re working in the life sciences industry and that probably creates a few unique scenarios that you have to combat in enablement.  So what are some of the unique challenges that reps in that industry face? Then how can someone like you at enablement help them navigate those unique challenges?  AW: The life sciences space, it’s wide, it’s broad, it’s complex. There’s so many things going on that when you look at sellers who are in this space, it’s not just selling a product.  They’re selling trust. Compliance and scientific credibility in a very highly regulated budget, constrained and an evidence-driven environment. So all of these things contribute to stakes can be high, and the conversations can be really complex. So helping navigate these challenges. Enablement plays a critical role in really navigating what we can do, and so I look at enablement as being the air traffic controller.  I may not be the expert in all the little things like, you know, regulations or some of the scientific evidence that is being done. I can help get the right people from all across the company together and making sure that if this information is in five different spots, it’s all consistent and it’s very clear to help make sure that there’s no friction for the rep moving forward.  So really it’s about making sure that these challenges that I highlighted don’t become obstacles.  RR: Yeah, I really liked the air traffic controller metaphor, kind of connecting all of these disparate groups and building that connective tissue. So you have one team that can run together. I know part of that connective tissue and creating that connective tissue is an enablement tool that can create a single source of truth for all of those conversations.  And I know in the past you had switched off of a previous enablement platform and decided to make the move to Highspot, so I’d love to know a little bit about like. What motivated you to reevaluate, and then how did you make that decision to change your tech stack? AW: So Revvity is a very large company. It’s a public company, and our company is continuing to evolve. So it’s essential that our sales enablement strategy evolves with it. So it means equipping our teams with not just the right messaging or training. But it really relies on the technology. It’s agile. It needs to be scalable and aligned with our future goals.  So as we look to reevaluate, we wanted a platform that could grow with us. It could adapt to our changing needs and act as a true partner in innovation. So Highspot actually stood out because we felt like they could tackle these three objects for us in this changing environment within life sciences.  And especially with what the platform could do, having all of that in one place was extremely beneficial. So really, this platform allowed us to be more proactive versus reactive in how we support our teams. So really in the end, the decision was about future proofing our enablement strategy and making sure that our sellers have the right tools and insights in this fast-paced competitive environment.  RR: Knowing a little bit about what motivated that decision and how you came to your conclusion of what the right platform might be for you. I know that next step is never easy of, we’ve chosen a tool and now we have to implement it, and that’s the hard part. So knowing that you guys just recently went through that implementation process, I’d be curious to know from your perspective.  What are some of the common pitfalls that you think organizations might encounter when rolling out a new enablement platform? And then how can they be avoided when you’re prepping for that launch?  AW: So three common pitfalls that I see is one being treating the platform as a simple content repository.  People may look at it as just a place to store assets and. If that happens, reps are gonna struggle to find what they need and adoption declines quickly. Another challenge is lack of governance. Without clear ownership or defined guardrails, materials are gonna become outdated or really irrelevant. And additionally, if the platform is not integrated into tools and workflows that sellers use daily, it’s just gonna become disconnected and reps are not gonna wanna use it.  So from these three things, I think to avoid these issues, it’s essential to establish clear, consistent messaging across all stakeholders and making sure that they understand it’s the single source of truth for all things. It can be about connecting the right material, making sure everything is relevant, and also the actionable resources are up to date.  Also ensuring that there’s strong governance and fully leveraging integrations are just going to help again, make sure we’re driving both adoption and long-term success.  RR: Yeah, I think those are all really important things to be cognizant of as you’re trying to embark on a big change like that.  Implementing a tool, like I said, never easy, but with the right support in place, you’re better prepared to make it happen. Kind of on that subject, we saw on LinkedIn that you highlighted achieving cross-functional leadership and helping create alignment there as a key strength of yours. So during a new platform rollout like the one you just did, how do you effectively communicate with cross-functional teams and create that alignment that leads to a successful rollout?  AW: I will say cross-functional leadership was not a key strength while back in the day. I’ve had a lot of experiences and opportunities to learn from. So being able to showcase that as a strength, it’s because of my past and all the great things that have happened in my career. So looking at this new platform rollout.  Effective communication starts early. It’s bringing in those cross-functional teams into the fold from the beginning. So taking a look at our new rollout of Highspot, we did an internal road show. So we were sharing the high level vision and the rollout plan. So it’s not just about informing them, it’s about making them a part of the journey.  So throughout the rollout, ongoing communication is key. I think the key thing here is people wanna be proactive contributors and not reactive participants. So when teams where colleagues feel that they’re an afterthought, it’s harder to build momentum and support. So that’s why with this rollout, we really prioritized updating and engaging across business units, sales, leadership, marketing, frontline managers, users on ensuring that everyone was aligned but also excited.  It with this internal road show, we made space for early feedback, so if there was a group that maybe didn’t feel like it was the right move, let’s hear it and let’s understand it better. If we have a group that really wants to be on board, how can we bring them in earlier and make sure that they’re set up for success?  So that really contributed to the communication and making sure the alignment happened early on.  RR: I appreciate the call out that these aren’t skills that you get overnight. The people management part of it is hard and it takes a long time to learn it. But I will say, looking at the data, it seems like you and the team have really landed it.  Even in the early stages of your Highspot implementation, you’ve already achieved a pretty impressive 88% platform adoption. So. In addition to that early alignment, how did you drive that high adoption and build excitement for your programs, especially among your sales teams who are gonna be those end users?  AW: Thank you so much for highlighting the 88% platform adoption. It is a number that makes me smile, and I couldn’t have done it without the team, our u

According to research from Harvard Business Review, in 2022, the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, driving higher levels of change fatigue. So, how can you lead a change management strategy that helps reps navigate these shifts while maintaining GTM efficiency? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Megan Backus, director of MarComm and Sales Enablement at Culligan Quench. Thank you so much for joining us, Megan. We’re super excited to have you here today. As we’re getting started, I’d love if you could just kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Megan Backus: Yeah, so Megan Backus. I am based outside Philadelphia, so you might pick up a little bit of my Philly accent. I can’t help it. So I’ve been with Quench now Culligan Quench for about 12 years, the last two in this MarComm sales enablement role. Prior to that it was marketing and I like to joke that I’ve probably touched a little bit of every single aspect of marketing in that time. So always kind of. In the role of creating the content as part of our customer’s buying journey. Another way of looking at it is the content that our sales team needs to close deals. So currently the best way to describe it is it’s kind of this weird crossroads between marketing and sales enablement, where I think with a marketer’s hat on making sure our reps have. The tools, the collateral, and the talking points that they need to combat any sort of questions or objections that they might get in the field? You know, the easiest way of saying, and my wonderful team, and we are a very small but mighty team of five women, we create all the collateral that our sales team uses. So everything from items for prospects at the very top of the sales funnel, everything to lead ’em through the sales funnel, and then even some items for after the sale is closed. RR: Amazing. Well, I think one of my favorite things about talking to folks working at enablement is all of the different weird ways that you come to enablement as a function, and everybody always has a different slant on how the function works and how it operates in their organization. So super excited to get that kind of marketing slant on it today. Got kind of a big question to start us off. I saw on LinkedIn that you mentioned being driven by impossible problems. So what are some of those impossible problems and maybe some of the key initiatives? That you’re focused last year? MB: Yeah, so it’s actually a misnomer. It’s that marketing hat that I wear, but in my view, there is no impossible problems. It’s in a belief in life that I have, whether it’s at work or outside of work, nothing is really impossible. Everything is actually figureoutable and I will be trademarking that. But, so I don’t necessarily view ’em as impossible problems, but I guess the best way, you know, kind of think of it is those problems where you’re just like, I don’t know how I’m gonna tackle this. So this year’s quote unquote impossible problem is finding the time management and the time to accomplish everything that we want to accomplish this year. Quench calling and quench, if you will, we like to have lots of key initiatives happening at the exact same time. My poor customer success manager with Highspot, I feel I always give her like anxiety attacks when we meet. ’cause I’m like, all right. I know we talked about this two weeks ago. We’ve moved on and we’re doing something else. But so some of the things that we’re working on this year, so this past January, we kind of ripped off the bandaid, if you will, and moved our sales team from being very territorial focused in their selling to more, we call it domains, but more brand focused and brand selling. So a lot of this year has been evaluating our newly rebranded content to make sure. It aligns with that focus and realigning it where necessary to support that transition. And like I said, we like to do multiple things at the same time. So last year we did our US rebrand. This year we’re also focusing on finishing up that rebrand, supporting our friends to the North and Canada with their rebrand and our friends to the South and Puerto Rico with their rebrand. While ever supporting our ever-growing sales team, so a lot of things all at the same time. So being the impossible problem, if you will for this year has been being able to juggle all of those key initiatives while maintaining my team. I’m gonna call it sanity, but making sure no one gets burned out or frustrated or just getting to a point of like, no, I don’t wanna do this. Because, you know, with that, we, you know, kind of ask the team to walk through fire. So every once in a while you gotta make sure you’re, you’re not getting burned. RR: Yeah, absolutely. It seems like you guys are no strangers to being agile and being asked to being agile. That is a lot on your plate, so I love that you have that. There’s no impossible problem perspective. ’cause I think you can’t approach this work without it. Especially, and you touched on a little bit on this, knowing just the volume of work that’s been going into the rebrand process, both in the US and in Canada and Puerto Rico, as you mentioned, for one, congratulations. Just knowing how much change that a rebrand like that tends to bring to sales teams. I’d love to know what some of your best practices for helping those teams effectively navigate those transitions are. MB: Yeah, I think, I don’t know whether it’s taking it back to the basics or best practice, but I think the best way of thinking about these big changes in, in our case, these rebrands is. They’re not thinking of them as anxiety inducing events, but thinking of them reframing it in our minds, which helps us reframe it for our sales team of growing opportunities. They’re just opportunities to grow, to learn, to do more, to do more exciting things. And I think that’s kind of really, I guess if I had to put a best practice on something, is recognizing that big change. You know, whatever it is, is just an opportunity to grow and adapt. So with our sales team, we do have some, uh, I affectionately call them nervous Nellie, but those who their first reaction to is not to embrace change, to help those people and they can, you know, hurt your momentum and hurt the morale. But having them kind of come on board and recognize that it’s not as big as it looks. It’s not as daunting or scary as it looks. And we do that by reiterating what’s staying the same. What support they’ll continue to get. And we break down this, these big overarching changes into more bite size and manageable bites to kind of ease those anxieties of like, alright, we have over a thousand pieces of collateral. You know, we have 200 and some odd sales reps and we have to rebrand everything on, you know, new colors, new ev, let’s backtrack it. Let’s do our product sheets first. Sales reps, the products aren’t changing. You can still sell the products. We’re just gonna have different colors. So kind of just breaking it down for them to be like, oh, this isn’t really as big of a change as I thought it was. RR: I feel like I’m getting a philosophy lesson here from you. Nothing is impossible. Change is an opportunity, not a scary thing. I’d like to switch gears a little bit. So we’ve talked about the rebrand, but I also know that as a part of that rebrand and maybe as a. Result of that rebrand, you guys have also experienced like hyper growth over the past year sales team headcount has increased significantly, which again, never an easy problem to tackle, but also a great opportunity. So what challenges have you kind of noticed that came with this growth, and then how have you overcome them or maybe reframed those challenges into opportunities? MB: Yeah. So yeah, hypergrowth, I wouldn’t classify a hypergrowth happen with the rebrand, but it’s one of those things we’re like, we’re gonna do lots of things at the same time. But yeah, we hired 50 reps in a three month period. As with any sort of hiring process, especially, uh, at the hypergrowth. Level, it was the onboarding. How quickly can we get these new reps talking about our machines, understanding our sales process, understanding our customers, and we have a very incredible training team who took on a lot of that, those sort of challenges of how do we get them onboarded as quickly as possible. But I think having Highspot as our content management system. Was incredibly helpful in that regard because it new and tenured reps, so whether the new rep was still in the training class or whether they’re sitting next to Joe Schmo and Joe Schmo needed to help them find an answer, any question, they could go to Highspot. And you know, one of our favorite features at Collagen Quench is. Using the search bar to ask questions, adding that little question mark in that search bar, and it allows the rep, whether they’re new or tenured, to be more empowered to find the answers themselves. Because with onboarding, what we find is there’s a million questions and they can be as minute as, I don’t know what the to price this as, or as big and philosophical as I have no idea how to put in a sale into Salesforce. So by having everything in one spot and. Really honing in with our sales team, our tenured reps, that everything they need is in Highspot. They can help each other. And so for our small mighty training team, our small mighty sales enablement team is not bogged down in, Hey, I don’t know how to do this. Hey, they can kind of work together. And you have peer leaders to really get them. Using Highspot, finding the answers themselves. And if they do have that, that issue of legitimate issue, then the training team an

According to the State of Sales Enablement 2024, 31% of industry leaders see consistent pipeline generation as a key priority. So how can you effectively leverage your tech stack to drive pipeline growth and maximize revenue generation? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Here to discuss this topic is Alyssa Sigafus, sales enablement and host B2B marketing manager at Lifetouch. Thank you so much for joining us, Alyssa. As we get started, I’d love if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Lifetouch today.  Alyssa Sigafus: Sounds good. Thanks Riley. Super excited to be here. So my name’s Alyssa Fuss. I’ve been at Lifetouch for the past three years as our sales enablement marketing manager focusing on the host side, which is like our schools and B2B side of the business. Personally, I have one daughter, two dogs, my husband and I, we live in central, Northern Minnesota. So we love the winter in the cold. Something I like to do in my free time, I make a lot of sourdough bread. But I’ve been in sales enablement for the past little over a decade now, and sales support is kind of the thing that I just really have loved and have loved working with all of the tools and things like that, and just seeing teams succeed from support. RR: Amazing. Well, we are so excited to have you today because of that experience and because of that passion for just helping people succeed, we wanna know how you’re doing it. So we’ve got a lot to talk about starting maybe with some of the priorities that are top of mind for you today. So in your work at Lifetouch, what are some of those key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business? AS: Awesome. Yeah. At Lifetouch, some of my go-to market focus is all about driving growth and equipping our sales team to essentially, you know, win. This means arming sellers with right tools, messaging, and using data to fine tune our approach, keeping our sales, marketing and operations like tightly aligned and pulled together. This has really helped us build that go to market motion that’s really fast focus and most importantly, customer driven.  RR: Awesome. I think, you know, you ask anyone in a go-to-market role about their priorities and things like growth, pipeline revenue, those are the things that are gonna come up. It’s inevitable. They’re core to the business and they’re what’s gonna be top of mind for you. So knowing that, of course those are top of mind for you, what are maybe some of those common recurring challenges that organizations like yours maybe face when trying to achieve those goals?  AS: Good question. I think the real challenge isn’t necessarily generating leads. It’s consistently attracting the right ones and moving them to close quickly. So building on this, for our business, specifically Lifetouch school photography, we have a defined set of leads. For example, there are only so many schools in US and Canada, so we have focused on creating like email templates, content that help sellers identify what content the leads are interested in that help that move quickly through their sales cycle and to close. RR: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting knowing that you’re, you know, you’re kind of constrained in a way that some businesses aren’t, so you need to work a little bit more strategically and a little bit smarter to find those right candidates, essentially. From your experience, what are some of the tactics that you’ve seen work to overcome those challenges and enable reps to create more opportunities and achieve those goals that, you know, everyone is thinking about? AS: Hmm, yeah, to help reps create more of those opportunities and then boost those conversion rates. I really focus on a few key practices. The first one’s targeted collateral. We really try to ensure that our reps have up-to-date, marketing-aligned materials that support their conversations by persona, by industry and stage of the funnel. For us, it’s truly just, you know, education schools, that kind of thing. The second is peer learning. I’ve kind of call it our monthly level up that we do every month with our sellers. And we kind of share best practices. We talk about what’s working, we share what tools have come out or pieces of collateral that have come out in the last month, what we’re looking forward to. Um, sometimes we bring other operations members or other marketing members in to talk about some of the things that are continuing to help support them. And then the last part I really focus on is content alignment. So we regularly audit. Update our sales content to ensure consistency with current messaging and our campaign priorities. RR: Well, it seems like you guys are kind of checking the box on all of the key things to build that really functional engine. We try. It’s always a process and it’s always that never feel like we’re doing enough, but we have heard that you guys are doing some really cool things and we are gonna dig into that in a second, but one thing I did wanna touch on is something that you mentioned earlier of one of the things that drew you to enablement and that you enjoy is the tooling and figuring out what works. So on the subject of enablement technology, what would you say is that strategic advantage of a unified platform in all of the work that you just talked us through? AS: Unified enablement platform accelerates revenue by putting the right content, tools and insights in the rep’s hands when they need them. So really equipping them at the right times, at the right materials. It ensures like consistent messaging, driving that efficiency and gives teams the data, which is something that a lot of people miss, uh, the highest value opportunities that they have. It also gives us a consistent way to measure their success that reps have. The content that we’re using to best share those practices amongst the leaders in the areas so everyone can benefit.  RR: I think that all sounds great. I know one thing that you are doing specifically is using digital rooms to scale your outreach. We’ve heard that your reps have, and these are some kind of crazy numbers, just to preface for our listeners, we’ve heard that your reps have created over 2, 600 digital rooms and seen over a hundred thousand external views. Two things there that I’d love to know. How has this strategy kind of impacted your outreach and then for those who would wanna replicate it, how did you do it? How’d you make that happen?  AS: Oh, well, using digital rooms have scaled our personalized outreach, driving that higher engagement and faster pipeline movement. Key best practices for us include that tailoring content, keeping our messaging clear, and using analytics to boost results and guide the sellers conversations and timing of their outreach. For an example, we found some of our sellers. Will share a digital room before they have a presentation with a customer, and then the seller will look to see the content that’s being viewed, and then they can tailor their presentation to see what that customer has been looking at. Mostly to make sure in their presentation that they are talking about those points that they’re really digging into. RR: Amazing. I would just love to know, how did you build that high adoption? How did you get reps bought in? I know it’s never easy to drive that behavior change, but how did you get them seeing the value of this?  AS: I think honestly the way that we did training is we really built those steps of starting at pitching, moving to some of those other higher like video recording and talking about that really personalized approach. And then we kind of ended with the training part of digital rooms as like the crown jewel of the things that they have access to and they really got excited about it having those months. Like connections, really taking the time to meet with them regularly. When we first implemented this to our entire sales team, we met with them every single week for, you know, an hour with each chin of the us, which we split it into three. So they got an hour with the enablement team every single week, and then continued to meet, we still continued to meet monthly with all of the teams, um, and showing those things. But the digital rooms, they were so excited about. It’s personal. They can, you know. Co-brand them with the school and have those logos on there and auto-enable feature that you have where if we update a piece of content, it’ll automatically just push through as we update the version. It’s been such a game-changer for them. They love it.  RR: Well, it sounds like you’ve really done a good job then of. Building that confidence. They saw the value, but you’ve taught them to use it well, and you’ve put a lot of work into doing so, and you’re seeing that kind of impact now. And that kind of feeds into the next question I had for you, which is that something that underlies successful buyer engagement is rep confidence. And you’ve shared that you’ve seen a. 77% increase in rep confidence after leveraging Highspot. So could you walk us through how you achieved that and then maybe how that boost in confidence is helping reps perform better when they’re having these conversations with schools.  AS: So by giving them that instant access to the right content and guidance through Highspot, this is really just. Resulted in more of that effective buyer interactions, that faster pipeline progression, and which moves to the higher conversion rates. When they see that someone has opened their email and they’re already looking at that content with that pitch, or they’ve already gone into that digital room, it really just makes them excited. So they’re just more eager to continue to jump in. They can instantly have that instant gratification and you know. Excited about

According to a report from Fortune, more than 70% of the 40,000 mergers and acquisitions they studied fell short of expectations. So, how can you guide your sales teams navigate transformations and come out stronger on the other side of change? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Sérgio Vasconcelos, director of revenue enablement at Feedzai. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re super excited to have you. As we’re getting started, I’d love if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.  Sérgio Vasconcelos: Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for the invite. So Sergio, based out of Lisbon, Portugal as probably with all of the enablement leaders in board, we actually just stumbled up on the position. So got my degree in computer science. I’ve been doing multiple roles from software engineering to project management till. Roughly eight, nine years ago, I started to get introduced to the solution consultant world. So supporting sales during the sales cycle with that technical knowledge and that advisory. And that has been the go-to for the probably for certain 10 years afterwards, there was a, uh, a stumble at feeds eye, you know, where I was able to, to gather that knowledge. The solution consultant and that experience of talking to the clients and I was actually invited to join recently created enablement role initially at Product ’cause the company was growing quite significantly and that organic growth was very much. Creating some challenges to what concerns the common understanding of the products and the services that we were doing, and that we had to go to market, that we had to sell, and then we had to activate and support to our clients. But then that evolution actually went really positive, and then the opportunity came for me to reach revenue, uh, on that same enablement function. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last, uh, three years, if I’m not mistaken.  RR: Amazing. Well, I think it’s definitely a common story that stumbled down the rabbit hole of enablement from a different discipline, and you look back and go, how did I get here? But I’m so happy. I am, and we’re so happy you are too, because we have a lot of interesting topics to cover with you today. I’d like to kick off the conversation by asking about today. So in your role at Feedzai. What key initiatives are you focused on this year? And then in addition to that, how does your enablement tech stack support you in driving those initiatives?  SV: First, in order for me to be able to, to share what is the focus of this year at Feedzai a little bit initially on what is enablement from my perspective. So enablement at the end of the day and the baseline, the core tenet is to address change. Experience simply whether it is in people, whether it is in product and services, whether it is, uh, market shift or market expansions, or whether it is actually in changing the ways of working. So enablement is actually the, the catalyst to promote that change. With that being said, the focus of this year for me and the team is actually three core themes that we have. The first is to raise the bar, whether it is from a soft. Hard skills perspective, but also to reinforce sales best practices. That has always been at the top of our agendas. We always need to be at the top of our game, whether it is with the knowledge of our products and our solutions, whether it is on the way that we interact, to have always a customer first mindset, the value first approach, and also to, of course, you know, to operationally speaking, to be as efficient as possible. The second one is how do we enable. Our sellers and you know, and our teams for success. That is basically the premise of how do we ensure that when a new Feedzaion comes in, they are equipped to succeed? Whether it is the first moment that we join the company with a solid onboarding program, not training, because I think that it is a wider aspect, or whether it is after the onboarding. How would they succeed on an ongoing support and that not only on the sales side of the house, but also to all departments that create the revenue function, whether it is customer success managers, whether it is inside sales team solution consultants. Others. The last, but not the least, is actually the one. And because I’m an engineer, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Right? So that’s one of the quotes I have from Peter Drucker. I’m a fan of that because we need to measure. You think that in the world that we live in, we need to. Really to focus on continuous improvement. So those small steps so that when we can do them consistently, then we can get better outcomes. And I think that that is, has always been at the top of our agenda. How do we ensure that we measure progress? And if we don’t, how do we actually identify it ahead of time so that we can adjust and adapt according?  RR: Absolutely. I think that introductory perspective of enablement as a change manager really sets the stage well for a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today. Starting with, I know in the past you’ve switched off of a previous enablement platform and made the decision to embrace change and move to Highspot, so I’d love to talk a little bit about what motivated you to make that evaluation, make the change, and then what advice would you give to someone who’s looking to do the same? SV: Yes, absolutely. So that was well investigated by the way. So there’s also a premise on the enablement, and I think that this is actually true for the overwhelming majority of the enablement teams in the business, which is we’re not big teams, right? So if we are agents of change, if you are here to actually to accommodate and to address change, we need to do that both effectively. And efficiently. And, uh, because of that, we have some, you know, simple requirements of an enablement platform that we need to consider. It needs to be extremely easy to operate. Extremely easy to use and reportable. In conjunction to that, it needs to act both as a content management system as well as a learning management system. So it needs to serve both domains because again, if we just add up on the number of tools that we are supporting, the operational footprint, it’ll be a little bit heavier. What happens is that feeds eye. Basically runs at the fast pace and we were struggling to operate under those assumptions efficiently. And uh, we were getting some feedback from the users that, um, although the information was there, it was available, it was not easy to find information. You know how salespeople and how revenue folks are, right? They like to spend their time not working on back office. They just want to make sure that they are in front of the customers and, uh, you know, and spending their time with customers. But whenever that they need to find something, they need to quickly hop in. Find the information, get back to business. So that was, you know, we had a little bit of mixed feeling on the feedback that we got. And the other part is that the reports, when we talk about reports, we talk about. Numbers that generate insights, not just the KPIs per se, the numbers per se, the number of people that have been trained on, or the number of people that have downloaded certain assets. It’s actually the impact that will give and the trends. Are we getting some more engagement out of the engagement platform? Everything that we are releasing is being used and is it being adopted? And we were struggling to have that type of intelligence on our side. Hence we had to go. And search for alternatives. RR: Yeah, that all makes sense, and I think it’s something that a lot of organizations struggle with. You mentioned kind of what led you to the evaluation, and since you’ve made this decision and implemented Highspot, I’d love to know what are some of the differences that you’ve seen and maybe some of the benefits that you’ve noticed now kind of living in this new world? SV: It’s actually, it boils down to very simple things. I think that the number one is it’s not a thing anymore for us to operate the system. It’s really hassle-free, let us say, we don’t get anxious when we need to roll out, you know, just a certain go to markets. We don’t get anxious when we need to support the rebranding, when we need to actually to curate material that has been sitting for a while. So everything, all of the aspects of adding new assets, managing existing assets, updating existing assets, it has become really a hassle for operation. That has been one of the biggest ones. So basically we removed that variable out of our capacity, right? And that means that we have capacity to support all of the go-to-market initiatives going on. The second one is honestly the support. The support of Highspot as a whole. It was. Kind of an eye opener, honestly, from the moment that we were doing basically inquiring high spots on the capabilities, the thoughtful way of actually understanding what was our problem, what was our requirements, and how to best serve them. With Highspot being very true on what was possible and what was not possible. From the moment that then afterwards we made a decision of going with Highspot and then the activation. Process started all of that thoughtfulness of, uh, ensuring that feed eye had a solid foundation that could serve this for the long haul. That was really, really interesting. And actually because we are now are at that process that we’ve passed way beyond the point of activation and we are just continually running and, and evolving with the tool, the on-demand supporters, uh, second to none honestly. And, uh, that’s. Customer, it’s not even customer support. It’s actually

According to research from Salesforce, 69% of sales reps say they’re overwhelmed by the number of tools they must use. So, how can you reimagine your tech stack and GTM strategy to maximize efficiency across your teams? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Kate Curtis, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Enablement at Kevel. Thank you so much for joining us. Kate, I’d love if you could start just by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Kevel. Kate Curtis: Great. Yeah, so I’m Kate Curtis. I’m based out of Boston and working with enablement here at Kevel, which is a retail media cloud service platform, and I just recently came on, but I’ve had a very diverse background in terms of working in different companies in different verticals. I actually got my start out of college working in a box office for nonprofit arts, anywhere from opera, theater, dance, you name it. I think it was a masterclass in doing everything with nothing and it. Gave me the ability to think about how to sell things in a way that aren’t naturally able to sell when you can actually sell artistic creativity by showing people the possibility. That was one of the first lessons I got that got me hooked into enablement, and so how do we talk about things? Whether it’s about a product you’re selling or something, you’re convincing somebody to read a book. How do you talk about things in a way that catches them, that enlightens them, that brings value to them? It was a grassroots kind of situation where you had very little, very little money and had to get creative, and so I took those skills and. Started making my way into advertising, working for other ad tech companies like Criteo, Amazon, and now here at Keval. And the uniqueness of it is everybody struggles with the same things no matter what your business is. RR: I love how you connected the dots from beginning to end working in a nonprofit initially and an arts focused nonprofit. You learn to be scrappy. You learn how to communicate with people well. You just have to. So I think part of the reason we’re excited to have you here is you have a really great wealth of experience. Kind of across a lot of different disciplines that we’re very excited to dig into. And on that note, we kind of have a lot of ground to cover today. So excited to jump right into it. So first question for you, as a marketing leader, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving for your business? KC: Yeah. If you ask any enterprise leadership, they’re going to say, sell, sell, sell. Get it out there. Get it in front as many people as possible. Get those dollars. A, B, C. Always be closing to me as somebody who comes from a background, particularly I am a child of two public school teachers. It starts with education. You can’t sell unless you believe in it yourself, unless you understand how it works. And that gives you the capability to be able to take a story to the table and solve for a customer. Tell them not just how the features and functionality work, but so what? What is this gonna do at the end of the day? So the real priorities for go to market is let’s start with educational foundation, and that’s whether you are building something out yourself internally, whether it’s coaching or you’re building out playbooks. Finding something to be able to reach a myriad of learning personalities so that they feel confident. Being able to understand themselves and tell their own story versus read off of let’s say a sales script or speaker’s notes on a deck. From there, it’s being able to give them something that they can take to a customer that isn’t built from within. And I say that by meaning. How do we keep whatever our content is, whether it’s a video, it’s a one pager, it’s a deck, what have you, how do we ensure that we are showing the value of product? But that’s not where the conversation starts. The conversation should start from how do we. Have those conversations with people to find out why we’re actually meeting today, and then being able to work backwards into the functionality of the platform where that. We bring in the education layer, right? That’s where we bring it in. We can sit here and talk hypotheticals of what you can solve for a customer, but at the end of the day, you’ve gotta be able to show the proof. So if being able to allow people to feel confident to talk about something that they can solve for understanding a customer’s needs, and then being able to provide them that proof. Is something that we’ve really focused on. So how do we make sure they have the education? How do we make sure they have the go-to market right materials? And how do we make sure that they stay aligned and then continuously learning from them, from the data of did it work? ’cause we’re all making assumptions about what the market is like and who our customers are and what they’re struggling with. But if you don’t lean into the data and validate and challenge things, then it that go to market time is just gonna get longer. And less impactful. And at the end of the day, that dollar is gonna take much longer time to come in the door. And so really starting from the basics. RR: Yeah, I really admire that education first approach. I think that’s a great philosophy, but I know that it’s also kind of, it’s hard to drive at scale. You’re trying to do a lot of things to build confidence, to build that alignment, to get reps ready to go and sell meaningfully. And so I know that’s a big challenge that I’m sure you and literally everyone else is dealing with. So I know that one of the ways that you’re kind of combating that challenge is through. Go to market efficiency. I’ve seen you frame it as operating leaner, faster and smarter. So I’d love if you could walk me through the building blocks that you and any other GTM team would need to kind of bring that philosophy of efficient execution to life. KC: Yeah. Again, starting from. Getting it right from the start. So we started off, we’ve had enablement surveys running for the past couple of quarters internally to be able to understand where people are struggling, not just with content needs, but where they are lacking in feeling confident about certain messaging or products or ICPs. Really understanding across the board what are the big gaping holes, what are the areas that we can lean on the little less into, and. Starting off with something like that, to be able to kind of add that data to again, be able to not only just understand, but measure quarter over quarter is incredibly helpful to how we kinda got started in isolating what’s the biggest areas of opportunity versus long-term goals. And from there it was about, I heard loud and clear when I came in. I can’t find anything. I don’t know if it’s up to date. I don’t understand how to talk about it. I can’t find answers to my questions. And again. Tale as old as time. Everybody has that problem no matter how big and how much money you have in the bank. And so that’s where I lean into tools and that’s where I brought in Highspot, is the idea is like we need to start from a clean slate before we can even go to market. Otherwise we’re just gonna keep repeating the same issues over and over. So this was a great opportunity for us to kind of start clean and enter into a tool. I know that everybody and their mom has a thousand tools across the business, and the names just get funnier and funnier the more you adopt them. But the idea of this is what I was trying to impress upon them is we have so many rich channels of content, whether it’s discussions happening in Slack or it’s things that are happening in HubSpot, or you know, all this rich content built by multiple different departments living across the ether. And they’re so rich in what they can provide and insight and education and just quick answering of questions and being able to help our teams become strategic advisors versus salespeople. And so being able to ingest that into one tool rather than replicating another tool was a great opportunity to say, I’m gonna help you find what you need faster. That, and then as my customer got ’em. They said fantastic. And I’m not saying it’s easy as that to get a hundred percent adoption, but that the fact of the matter is of being able to give them back time into their week to do their job was problem one that we were solving for. The next was finding my champions. So finding those people. That’ll drink the Kool-Aid with me, and so I had a lot of one-on-ones, which is exhausting at first, but as we say in sales juice, it’s worth the squeeze. After we got started doing the one-on-ones people, it was like they saw the light, specifically looking at digital sales rooms, being able to have something that didn’t just benefit the salesperson but became an effective tool to help them. At when the deal was closed, to be able to hand that over to the existing business team and everything’s there, and they’re able to then build upon that and it becomes this one stop shop for a customer lifecycle versus these different stages that we see customers in. It becomes a partnership versus just a deal commitment. And then. I’m a mom, I realize I get my kid to do things when I, you know, reward them. So I actually started building out some spotlights. So most recently called out some of the, the salespeople that got really creative in the digital sales rooms about not just taking the. Templates I built out with some of our standard content, but really thought about it and really engaged with the tool. And out of the digital sales room was the first one they built 60% of the material was engaged with by customers. And to be able to

According to research from McKinsey, companies that invest in comprehensive training programs see 21% higher productivity and 22% higher profitability. So how can you build effective training programs that drive measurable business impact at your organization? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic are Jonathan Biebesheimer and Andy Knight, Sales Enablement Managers at ServiceTrade. Thank you both for joining us. As we’re getting started, I’d love if we could just start by talking a little bit about who you are, what your background is, and what your role is at ServiceTrade. So Jonathan, if we wanna start with you.  Jonathan Biebesheimer: Yeah, sure. So thanks for having us. Here. So I’ve been in business for a little over 30 years now. Started my career owning and running technology startups, then switched over to a gig at Lexus Nexus where I was on the sales organization. I was a seller quota caring seller for a number of years, and then shifted over to sales enablement and then that led me to joining ServiceTrade about four years ago. So I’m currently a sales enablement manager, along with my colleague Andy.  RR: Amazing. Andy, I’ll pass it off to you.  Andy Knight : Yeah, thank you so much Riley. Super excited to be here. I’ve been in sales in a variety of roles for about 15 years, give or take. I’ve been in enablement for about five of those years, made the shift after finding really just a lot of personal and professional fulfillment from helping people do their job better. I’m also part of the enablement team here at ServiceTrade. I’ve been here only since April of this year, so a little newer, but. A lot has happened in that time.  RR: Wonderful. Well thank you for those overviews. I think we’ve got a lot to dig into, and I know we have quite a lot to talk about today. So, Jonathan, question that I’ll start with you. Over the past four years at ServiceTrade, I know that you’ve focused on enabling your sales teams to succeed, as we all are trying to do. I’d love to know how you’ve seen the enablement function at Servicer evolve in that time, especially as AI is becoming much more prevalent in GTM workflows.  JB: Yeah, so when I started the company was about half the size it was today and. One of the things that attracted me about ServiceTrade when I started interviewing was they, I could tell they had a very enablement culture. Right. They understood they were doing a lot of training, they were doing a lot of coaching. They understood the importance of supporting the sales organization, but they really had no structure or dedicated resources. Right? And so that’s what I was brought on. To help with. I had built a program in prior job, so it was kind of a rinse and repeat to some. I enjoyed it so much. Lemme do it again. And so, you know, it’s been kind of a classic, slowly over time building our program, what we’re able to deliver to the revenue organization, what things we’re involved in, what things we consult on. So it’s been kind of a slow, steady progress. I mean, we’ve obviously focused on the highest impact things. Another thing, you know, and in our team of two, I was a team of one for a while. So as a small team, I think one of the things you have to think about is just capacity. Like what do you do? How much do you do? We’ve always had kind of a good, better, best approach. You know, we always try to deliver high quality work, but we’ve got 10 things we’ve gotta do. You know, can we what? What can we deliver in those 10 areas knowing that when we have time, we’ll go back and, you know, kind of make ’em better. AI is interesting. I think it’s helped in that regard. You know, it’s helped us be able to accelerate certain things. So what I would, you know, call a quote unquote good deliverable AI can sometimes make that a good and a half or better, right? Just because of its nature. It’s also interesting, you know, I’m sure this is not unlike a lot of companies has. Definitely, I mean, it’s going so fast, but it feels like in the past few months, especially. It’s really shifted from just being kind of this fad to more of an expectation right? Across all departments, including ours. And so one of the things that Andy and I find ourselves asking ourselves a lot is we look at new projects or we talk about getting, you know, going from good to better to best thing is, you know, how can we use AI to help us there with those things? I mean, it’s fascinating where AI is gonna go. Who knows? But it’s definitely playing a larger role in, in the things that we do in a voting role.  RR: Yeah, it’s definitely a big question mark, but I think, you know, technology is always one of those things that you need to work with and learn to work with, and I know that’s kind of one of the evolutions actually, that you’ve seen at ServiceTrade, which is that you played a pretty key role in the decision to invest in an enablement tool. I’d love to know maybe why you thought that technology was kind of necessary to your work, and then maybe how as you were evaluating solutions in the market, you eventually made that solution to choose Highspot.  JB: So when I came in, as I said, there was really not a program per se. And so one of the things I was asked to do was just kind of observe for the, my first two weeks, kind of, you know, see what the revenue organization was doing, see what sellers were doing, see what the gaps were. It became, I, I know it was probably day three. I’m like, oh my God, this content is just, it’s a nightmare. I mean, it’s a classic. Situation where content was in like 17 different places floating around in Slack. Nothing was governed. Branding was, you know, so I kind of jotted down on my, you know, high priority list. You know, we need a content management system. So two other things I noticed. One was that, you know, when I joined the company, they were at kind of an interesting shift. They were kind of in that stage where they were from being a startup to a scale up. Right. And so there was a lot of institutional knowledge, things that were in people’s heads. And so when I came on board, the um, the volume of, of conversation in Slack just blew me away. I’m like, what are all these people talking about? And when you started to dig into it, you were realizing that sellers were asking, you know, more tenured sellers, everything about the business. And so it became very clear that that wasn’t gonna scale. And so again, a system, you know, ultimately at the, a Highspot, it was a very, I don’t wanna say easy, but it was a, a very impactful, you know, business case for me to say, look, if you guys wanna scale, you need to get this knowledge outta people’s heads. We can’t have sellers living in Slack. They need to have a place to go. The other thing that was interesting is that, you know, again, I deployed these systems in prior roles. They were enabled, but they didn’t really understand the capabilities of what enablement technologies could do. Right. And so when I came in, they. I don’t wanna say they were antiquated, but they, they were not as progressive as they could be from a technology perspective. And they weren’t. Even, some of ’em, we weren’t even aware of some of the other capabilities Highspot had to offer, you know, pitching for example, you know, as new things have have come out, like remix, you know, those types of concepts to me, I was like, oh, it’s. That’s table stakes and they didn’t have it. Right? So the business case for me was, again, I won’t say it was easy, but it was very well supported, creating a foundation to get, you know, content under control. Get that institutional knowledge documented, and give their sellers a leg up on competition. Right? You know, other competitors I knew they didn’t have, you know, a system like a Highspot. So if we could implement Highspot, we could not only get information better under control, but we can give our sellers, you know, more modern tools to sell against our competition.  RR: Yeah, that all makes sense. I’m really excited to kind of dig into how that vision is going so far. I know we talked a little bit about content, so I’d like to switch gears a little bit and touch on training. To your point of Highspot did a lot more than maybe some of the other tools in the market. Andy, I’d love to know from your perspective, because you have quite an extensive background in sales training, as you mentioned a little bit, if you could. Walk us through some of the core components of your strategy for sales training, and then maybe, if at all, if you’re using AI in there, I’d love to know. AK: Yeah, definitely. We are, we’re using AI in, in really every facet of enablement at this point in terms of kind of the core components of, you know, sales training here at ServiceTrade and, and how we like to run things. I’m a big framework guy. I love a model. I love a framework. I love an acronym, right? So there’s a framework called addie. Those individual letters stand for analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate. That’s really at the core of our sales training here. Whenever we get a request for, you know, whether it’s a product launch or a new competitor Intel that we’re surfacing, anything along those lines. Our first step is gonna be analyzing the problem and understanding. To Jonathan’s point, what do we currently have that’s available in Highspot? What are our cross-functional partners currently saying? How can we implement a lot of the content that we already have to fold into a live training where we’re doing things like. Lectures. We’re doing things like role plays. We’re doing things like take home exercises. All of that facilitated through Highspot, so that’s a big piece of

According to research from Gartner, 77% of sellers report that they struggle to complete their assigned tasks efficiently. So, how can enablement help cut through the noise and maximize rep efficiency to drive business results? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Kim Engebretson, manager of sales enablement at Protegrity. Thank you so much for joining us, Kim. We’re super excited to have you here. As we get started, I’d love if you could just run us through yourself, your background and your role. Great. Thanks  Kim Engebretson: Riley. I’m happy to be here and excited as well. So, as you mentioned, I’m the manager of sales enablement at Protegrity. Which is a data-centric security company, which is part of the cybersecurity industry. I’ve actually been in sales ops and enablement for more than 25 years of my career over a host of different industries, most of which was in medical devices than telecommunication, and that ultimately brought me here to Protegrity. But I would have to say that my earliest career back in aerospace and defense really contributed to my love of sales enablement because I learned about manufacturing processes, project management, and I always take that lens of a process when I bring it to looking at a sales process to say, can we refine it? Is it the most efficient? Are there things that we can do? So always using a continuous improvement mindset. So it’s really been fundamental in how I approach most of my sales enablement projects.  RR: Amazing. Thank you for that background. I love the thorough experience that kind of leads you to where you are today, and it’s part of the reason that we’re super excited to have you today is you bring a really well-informed perspective to the table and looking at your background, it’s clear that you have extensive experience, not only as an enablement leader, but in all of the different skills that make a strong enablement leader. So as the enablement landscape has kind of continued to evolve over the years, I’m curious how you’ve seen the challenges go to market teams face evolve, and then maybe what you’re seeing is the most pressing today.  KE: Yes. Well, as I mentioned, with having a pretty long career thus far, I’ve come through a couple major milestones. The introduction of the internet, digital transformation. I mean, I was in sales enablement when people had to call in a paper order was processed. So as you can mention, this is a big evolution that we’ve moved to such automation, such efficiency, and so from a go to market perspective, sales hasn’t changed. From the standpoint that a seller must know their product and service, they must bring value to the table so that the customer really perceives them as adding value and being a consultant, being a partner, and making the right business decision. But what has changed dramatically, even in the last five years and is continuing to move at an amazing pace, is that buyers don’t really wanna engage with the seller until it’s much further along in the process. So the buying cycle is still a pretty long period of time, but the sales cycle when the customer and the seller engage is really much further down the pipeline than it normally was. So from a go-to market perspective, our sellers have to know that and know what assets, what webinars, what podcasts, what materials has the prospective customer engage with through their self discovery. And it really precedes AI. But this desire to say, let me educate myself in what’s available before I start talking to a prospective vendor. And from that standpoint. When we do have that first engagement, it’s got to be solid. It’s got to be really a opportunity where we distinguish ourselves from the other vendors that the prospect or customer might be thinking about talking to. RR: Yeah, I think that’s certainly a common challenge that a lot of businesses are seeing, and I think that need to be agile, to be effective, to be efficient in that moment where you’re allowed as a seller, to have that first touch with a buyer is so crucial. I know that kind of as a solution to that. Sales efficiency is kind of a key priority for you. So can you maybe talk us through why sales efficiency is a priority and then how you’re focusing on that and what initiatives you’re using to help you achieve it?  KE: Sure. So understanding the prospect. So we have a really strong demand gen organization that is trying to provide leads or prospective leads to our sales team, but that still requires that our sellers really get to know again, who that company is. What industry are they working in? Who are the decision makers? There’s a considerable amount of research and data accumulation that has to take place so that, again, when that seller has that first opportunity, that phone call, that business meeting, that they come prepared. And I believe that customers also expect. That individual to come already knowing quite a bit about them, because again, we work under this kind of accelerated cycle. And so the efficiency part is how do we assemble all that information, how do we synthesize it? And then simultaneously using things like our business use cases, our understanding of the industry, how do we prepare our seller so that they’re not having to do that all on their own? We are providing them those materials and resources so that they can, again, bring their best, you know, representation for that first meeting. So there’s a lot of pressure on that first call, but I think the sales efficiency is building all around, making our sellers. Informed. Knowledgeable and impactful. RR: Yeah, definitely. I think thinking about that sales efficiency and all the support levers that you’re pulling to help sellers drive it, I’d like to maybe talk about enablement technology and how you’re using that to create efficiency. I know you actually switched off of a previous enablement platform and moved to Highspot just recently last year, so I’d love if you could talk us through maybe what motivated the change, how you reevaluated, and then what that process was like. KE: Absolutely. I joined Peg in June of last year and it just so happened the sales enablement platform we were using was coming up for an annual renewal. So there was a natural event that said, you know, I’m new in the role. I was given a new responsibility of sales enablement, so let me test. Whether or not we had the right product, right tool for what we needed. And so I went out and spoke to pretty much the top three or four companies giving our current vendor every opportunity to also come forward and demonstrate what they had that perhaps we weren’t utilizing in that system. So it was really about were there things that we weren’t using, not optimizing in the system. And it was through that process that really Highspot. Distinguish themselves, and I just emphasized that first meeting being so important and really our account executive came prepared, had done some research, was sharing with us ideas that we hadn’t had, even though I had researched all the vendors independently myself, and so they stood out. And that continued through the next engagement and the next engagement. And as the account executive brought in other resources from Highspot through the solutions team, everybody came prepared and demonstrated to me an interest. They were interested in what we needed and they wanted to showcase how they thought the Highspot solution could meet the business needs that we defined. And that really just. Changed the kind of trajectory. So it was up for our incumbent to really lose the business, and unfortunately they did because they didn’t really fight hard enough to sustain it. And again, across the vendors, a lot of common functionality. But it was the way. That the Highspot team was able to really demonstrate what did they think that their solution could do that would be different? And it was, uh, a couple things. Digital Rooms. It was the close integration with Salesforce. Were, were really two of the key decision makers, the decisions for us.  RR: Wonderful. Well, I first of all am so happy to hear that you had such a fantastic experience with our team, and I think that, you know, kind of speaks to the value of enablement in the work that you do of. How else are you getting sellers ready to deliver these experiences? And then also congratulations on one year. Super exciting. Just past that mark. So gotta call that out. I’d love to know maybe drilling a little bit further into that process of switching. So when you switch an enablement tech stack, what maybe are some of the best practices that you would share for managing that change and empowering reps through that transition? Because I know that’s probably not an easy process.  KE: Agreed. That’s probably the biggest challenge with any technology transition is implementation and then change management. So from the implementation side, again, I think Highspot had a great enablement support where the project plan was clear. The kickoff was good. I did have a partner at the time who was working with me on the transition so that I was able to focus on the enablement side. The other person was able to focus on the content. Implementation. So I would say having a good project team internally was really important because you really wanna have people who can focus on the different elements of that transition. But the thing I also focused on was ensuring that our sales leaders really understood why we’re making the change. That they were also helping to articulate the business decision and the value. And then it all came down to just communication, really keeping the sales team well informed why we were making the chang

According to research from Revenue Grid, organizations see a 25-40% increase in average deal size and win rates with better coaching. So how can you build a strong coaching program that helps your team win, especially with the support of new technologies like AI? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Carrie Kuhrt, who leads sales enablement in the Americas for FCM Travel. Thank you so much for joining us. Carrie, I’d love if we could just start by talking a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Carrie Kuhrt: Lovely to be here again. My name’s Carrie Kuhrt, based in Denver. Most of my professional journey has been within sales, whether that’s inside sales, outside sales. Been with FCM for nearly six years now, and just for over two years, I’ve been in the enablement function for the Americas region. Just been an adventure for the last six years with FCM, and I am just all team enablement now. RR: Awesome. Well, we’re so excited to have you here, especially knowing that you’ve kind of bridged that gap from sales to sales enablement and can bring that dual perspective to this conversation. So I know before your current role as an enablement leader, as you mentioned, you worked in sales at FCM Travel, so can you share a little bit about how you made that transition into enablement and then how that background maybe shapes your enablement approach today? CK: Yeah, well, kind of a funny story. I actually rejoined FCM after the pandemic the same day Highspot was rolled out with FCM. So it was just really kind of funny timing, how it’s all come really full circle. So I’ve always found myself wanting to help others succeed, and I have just a really big — like, I just really love all of the enablement tech stack and thought it just is an absolute game changer for the selling role and found myself always helping or always wanting to lend a helping hand to my peers. And so when the opportunity came up to join the enablement team, I eagerly embraced it, wanted to help fine-tune our sellers and using that enablement tech stack that the business has invested in. RR: Amazing. I love that take, and I love that this full-circle moment. I’m so happy you could join us and kind of bring this story almost to its conclusion. I’d love to maybe double-click a little bit into your approach and talk specifically maybe about how you develop your teams. So I know you lead the development of training and coaching at FCM Travel, so I’m wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about some common challenges you’ve faced when creating effective learning programs and then maybe some solutions you’ve created to address ’em. CK: Yeah, just knowing myself as a learner, we all learn in a different way, so I wanted to make sure that when creating something, it’s important to incorporate all the different learning styles that people have, whether that is through videos for people who’d like to watch, or people who like to read, or just a little bit of a mixture, and then including the hands-on approach. I really like the knowledge checks that you can do where it’s a little bit less test-centric and a little bit more of just making sure everyone is understanding that information and having it kind of connect the dots in their mind. So I think that’s always really good to incorporate in having like a welcoming and affecting learning environment for everybody. Just knowing that not every single person is the same. You wanna be able to have the ability to kind of touch everybody in the way that they need to help understand any initiatives. RR: Yeah, I think one of those biggest challenges too — any sort of learning program — is the assumption that one-size-fits-all works.It never does. I love that approach and that acknowledgement that everybody learns differently, and in order to get where you need to go, you need to meet them where they are. I think definitely a very actionable take that listeners can take away. Shifting gears a little, I’d like to touch on an aspect of enablement’s role that I think maybe goes a little bit unspoken, which is that in addition to creating effective programs, enablement is often tasked with building a culture of ongoing learning and development. So do you have any best practices for creating that culture and driving that culture of ongoing learning? CK: Yeah, I like to talk about it as kind of like an internal sell. So having that sales background kind of comes into play here, and we’ve actually branded our training and coaching as Take Flight. Being a travel management company, we love the puns. It worked perfectly. And so with Take Flight, we have created logos that you’ll see everywhere within Take Flight, as well as the same imagery over and over again, just kind of helping to reinforce this is where you go to learn, to upskill, to onboard, whatever it might be. And so using those on all of the training materials, helping everything remain consistent, it helps kind of guide your users to where they need to be for that training and coaching, because training and coaching — sometimes people might be like, oh, I don’t wanna do that — but Take Flight sounds so much more fun. I mean, who doesn’t wanna take a flight, hop on, and go somewhere new or learn something new? So that’s kind of the approach we have taken. RR: Yeah, the internal sell. I love it, and I love the branding. That’s so much fun. Your sellers are your customers, and I think you’re serving them well. I’d like to maybe chat a little bit about how you’re using technology to support programs like these. I know that in May, actually, you joined us here in Seattle for a workshop in the Highspot office. We chatted about real-world coaching capabilities, and you shared that you’re working on a pilot program to roll some of them out to your teams. So can you talk us through how you’re developing this pilot program and how you plan to leverage these capabilities to help with that ongoing learning culture? CK: Yeah, so we like to roll out all of our initiatives through pilot programs. We are leveraging Highspot across all of our sales organization globally now. And so having the peers involved — for my customers, our internal sellers — it’s really helped involve them and being able to be more impactful and engaging, understanding they are in the seat, they are utilizing it, and so using those pilot programs to help reinforce what’s gonna work best and being able to kind of test things out before full rollout globally. It’s just incorporating even those champions, as we like to call them, in part of the training so they’re able to talk about their experiences during the pilot testing as well. RR: Yeah, that sounds like a really thoughtful approach to a pilot program. You know, you build buy-in with a few, and then that kind of disperses out, and then all of a sudden you’ve won over the entire team. I’d love to know a little bit more about that like early getting-started phase — so how you’re planning to identify and select users for your pilot, and then maybe once you have selected those soon-to-be champions, how you enable them on your new approach. CK: Yeah, so we tend to select champions based on those who use the platform quite a bit. So our top users, they help guide us. And for the meeting intelligence pilot that we’re working on right now, we’ve chosen about five champions in different roles within the sales org and each region to start using the feature. So they’re gonna collaborate with myself and my partner in enablement that sits in Europe to help navigate those best practices, figure out what does work well, where we can improve, and like just sharing the feedback on the process because it is something brand new, something that we’ve never done before. But why not have like a test phase to work out those kinks before you roll out something globally? Just wanting to make sure that we have everything sorted and ready to go to make it as easy of a change as possible with — I mean, change management being key. It’s a new feature. Not everybody’s gonna be comfortable with it. You’re gonna make some people a little uncomfy, so why not bring in people who are in their same role, who can help kind of drive the value of it home? RR: Yeah, again, because you know when you are making that internal sell, you do need that evidence. And so when you have people in those roles speaking to it, you have a little bit more validation than just you kind of top-down being like, “Hey, let’s do a thing.” So I love that approach. And it seems like you and the team have obviously put a lot of work into this new strategy.So I’d love to know, maybe as you’re progressing, what outcomes you’re hoping to see and then what success looks like for you. What, at the end of the day, would make you be like, we did what we needed to do? CK: Yeah, I think for kind of the initiative, initial purpose is — as we all know — technology is fantastic except when it doesn’t like to play nicely. So working out those bugs is a huge part of it. That’s not something that might need our attention, but we carefully check and make sure all the platform integrations are working smoothly, kind of working those out beforehand, even before the pilot group even starts. To be completely honest, I’ve been within meeting intelligence since I could — I mean, just trying it out so I can figure it out, understand it, ’cause I am that hands-on learner, kind of talking back to how we approach that. But making sure that we have everything for the AI part of it — we are very much invested in AI. We have an AI Center of Excellence here within Flight Centre Travel Group, and so really leaning on that and making sure that the results th

According to research from Gallup, 21% of employees who voluntarily left their organization said their departure could have been prevented by more positive personal interactions with their manager. So how can you create a coaching culture that keeps teams motivated and drives sales success? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Robin Handley, Senior VP of Sales Enablement at Direct Travel. Thank you so much for joining us, Robin. We’re really excited to have you here. To kick us off, I’d love if you could start just by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Robin Handley: Yeah, I’d love to, and thank you so much for having me. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here. I have actually been in the travel industry for 30-plus years, so I guess you could say I grew up here. I am the SVP of Sales Enablement at Direct Travel, like you mentioned. Under my current remit, you know, I am responsible for sales enablement, managing also what we call the inbound and outbound lead generation with our sales development reps and the proposal writing team. So I’ve got pretty, you know, three different distinct lines of business within my remit. And then I think it’s important to share that in my prior roles, in addition to sales enablement, I also led teams related to reporting, data analytics, CRM platforms, as well as change and transformation. RR: Wonderful. Thank you for sharing. It seems like you have a wealth of knowledge acquired over a lot of different roles, and I’m so excited to kind of dig into it and steal some of your best practices. Thinking about your experience—maybe in data analytics, product, customer success, all of these things that you alluded to—I’d be curious to know how this diverse background kind of comes together to influence your approach to sales enablement at Direct Travel. RH: You know, I think having experience spanning across, you know, many areas, it gives a broad perspective around how things intersect, how they influence, and, you know, how they support each other. So, for example, leveraging data points such as why we win, reasons why we lose, as well as listening to customer feedback, you really start to see trends and start to understand the customer and industry pain points. So from there, you can really start to work with key business partners—I would say in marketing, product, customer experience, you know, those different areas—to make sure that you develop content and assets that are gonna arm your sales reps to overcome objections, to highlight key differentiators, and to align solutions to customer pain points. And when, you know, you’re leading in enablement, I always say it’s like vitally important to ensure that the right content and collateral and training and coaching is available to enable those sales reps to quickly advance through those sales cycles and close, win that business. RR: Wonderful. I’d love to maybe double-click a little bit deeper into that enablement approach and philosophy, especially focused on coaching, because I know on LinkedIn you’ve highlighted the importance of people-centric leadership, especially in sales coaching and feedback. I’m curious to know maybe how you bring this philosophy to life in your enablement efforts, and then how that affects your overarching coaching culture. RH: Yeah, so people-centric leadership, you know, it really isn’t just being caring, empathetic, committed. I think, you know, that’s all highly important, but it’s also about being intentional in how we grow our teams. So developing individuals through coaching, feedback, and recognition is so critical. So one thing I do is I run pitch exercises where reps record themselves, and I always tell them, this is your playground. You know, you can mess up here, not in front of a customer. And it feels like a safe space. So that mindset shift makes a huge difference. And this approach not only helps individuals grow, but it also fosters a culture where, you know, feedback becomes normalized and valued. So over time, this creates, like, that ripple effect as well. And so what I start to see is reps start to coach each other. They feel comfortable sharing tips or tricks or feedback. Even, you know, it’s not so much then from that top-down directive. It feels like it’s more of a collaborative community. And as a result, I think it’s also important just to call out that we start to see reps become more confident and collaborative just in general. So as a result of that, I would say, you know, it even helps increase or improve our win rates and, you know, helps people be better prepared and hopefully, again, win that business. RR: Yeah, I love to hear that. I think the idea of like making a safe space for practice is so important. People need to be able to make mistakes. That’s where you learn. So that’s great to hear. I’d like to switch gears maybe a little. I know that in addition to creating a healthy coaching culture, improving sales efficiency is a key focus for you at Direct Travel. I’d be curious—maybe some of the challenges to GTM efficiency that you’re seeing your teams face today. RH: Oh yeah. I say, you know, quite a few come to mind, and I think that’s normal, right? I mean, in any company there’s always those things. I would say, you know, sellers using old, outdated collateral, sometimes trying to find where are those assets stored, because they could be stored in multiple different areas. I would say another big thing that we’re challenged with is related to long sales cycles, and so, you know, for me it’s always top of mind: how do we continue to shorten and shrink those sales cycles? And then I think a lot of times you’re not getting full visibility into buyer engagement. So without that data, a lot of times the sales reps are using their gut. There’s only a few data points that they have, like, oh, are we able to have another meeting? Are they responding? But you’re not really getting that buyer engagement. And then, in addition to that, you know, really cumbersome and manual ways to coach the sales reps. Just—I can tell you—doing a pitch session a year ago without Highspot, it was so cumbersome. Just having to build out what is the talk track, sharing that video through email that we recorded of the pitch, and then coming together with a rubric and then trying to do all the scoring. It was very labor-intensive. RR: Yeah, I think you’re spot on with these challenges. There are things that we’re certainly hearing from our customers, we feel ourselves, and other organizations are talking about. And I think the big thing is that everybody is trying to solve for them. And so, as you kind of mentioned just a little bit, you have found a platform to help you with that. So I’d be curious if you could tell me a little bit about the strategic advantage of an enablement platform and how it’s helping you kind of overcome some of these challenges that you’re seeing. RH: Absolutely. So using Highspot is a dream come true, to be honest. Number one, you know, having one central hub for sales content is so critical and so important. So I feel like our sales reps that are in the Highspot environment no longer feel like they’re digging through email or SharePoints or going on a team site trying to find that collateral. So that is a huge efficiency gain, but also think of job satisfaction. Those sellers feel like, wow, this is so much easier for me to navigate. I would also say, again, going back to the real-time insights and analytics from buyer engagement—so now we’re able to see what content is being viewed, and it’s also helping us tailor our follow-up as well as being able to close deals faster. The other I would say is consistent coaching and training. So going back to the example I just used—very manual process historically—but being able now to leverage AI to provide feedback instantly is incredible. RR: Wonderful. That’s absolutely what I love to hear, and I’m super excited that you’re finding these wins already so early. Thinking about platforms and enablement technology, I’d like to maybe call out a win that we’ve heard through the grapevine, which is that even though you’re early in your journey with the platform, you’ve already achieved a really impressive 96% recurring usage rate. So I’d really love to hear what some of your best practices for driving that adoption are and how you’ve achieved that. RH: Yeah, absolutely. So right out of the gate, timing-wise, this worked perfectly because we were having our sales kickoff meeting in person, and so we used that as our launch, right? So we were able to get the hype going, and we had sessions where we did a whistle-stop tour of all the tools, key capabilities, and really got people excited about what was coming around the corner. So after our SKO, we then did what we called mandatory kickoff implementation calls to get everyone set up. And what we really wanted to make sure that we didn’t do was one big bang because we know there are so many features and capabilities in the platform that we wanted to be really intentional about phasing that out. So the first thing that we did is we focused on content management. Again, you heard that was one of our challenges. So we wanted to make sure that we had one stop shop for all of our content and make it super easy for people to navigate and find anything that they need for their sales cycle. In addition to that, the next thing we wanted to do was roll out digital sales rooms because, again, you heard that was a challenge. We wanted to start to see buyer engagement. So that was really well received by the entire group. So it was very easy for us to get them excited and into the tool and the repeat usage. So tha

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, 31% of organizations are preparing to launch a new product or service as a key go-to-market initiative. So, how can you prepare your sellers to be ready for a successful product or service launch that drives business results?  Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Kate Stringfield, senior manager of revenue enablement at Dialpad. Thank you so much for joining us, Kate. Before we get started, I’d love to learn a little bit more about yourself, your role, and your background. Kate Stringfield: Yeah, so I’m Kate Stringfield, as you called out. Was in sales prior to being in enablement, and I was in sales for about seven years, both in hospitality as well as SaaS. And then I made the jump into enablement around six years ago, and now I’m over at Dialpad. RR: Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I feel like it’s always so helpful to get insight from people who make that transition and have experience on both sides of the playing field. We’re so excited to have you on the podcast for that reason. You have such extensive experience as both a sales and sales enablement leader. So can you maybe walk us through your journey into enablement, how you made that shift, and then maybe a little bit about how that sales background helps influence your enablement strategy? KS: Yeah, so I was in hotels, like I mentioned, for a number of years, and I found my passion helping other people as they started out in their new roles and getting them up to speed. And so when I made the move into SaaS, I learned about this cool role called enablement, and I was like, oh my gosh, I gotta—I gotta learn more and get into that. So since helping others be successful was a—or still is—a passion of mine, I made that jump. And once I landed in an enablement position, I was like, man, I found my place. So I spent a number of years doing enablement for the sellers that I was once a seller for—like, I was doing that role. And then I did another two and a half years in enablement at an enablement company, where I focused on role-specific enablement, as well as launching a sales methodology, three sales motion changes, and various other initiatives that I supported along the way. And then I moved over into Dialpad, where I’m now leading a team of six incredibly gifted, talented revenue enablers across sales, success, and partner enablement. RR: Wonderful. Thank you for walking us through that. It seems like it’s been quite the journey to get where you are today. I’m curious then—we’ve talked about how it informs your strategy—but maybe how does it inform action? So I kind of want to shift gears a little bit and maybe talk about a recent initiative that I know Dialpad has been running, which is that you rolled out a new SKU after an acquisition, and product launch has become a priority for you this year. So can you maybe talk to us a little bit about that initiative? KS: Yeah, absolutely. So making sure that our product is up to speed and ahead of the market is imperative. And so, gosh, around eight months ago, back in October, we acquired a WFM company—so workforce management—which is part of a solution of ours that we did not currently have. So we acquired a company in order to offer that as a complementary solution with what we already had. This was a completely new product line, and we had to figure out, okay, how could we enable our reps to be able to go ahead and sell this? And it’s a slightly different selling motion, so we had to talk through what is it, why does it matter, as well as how do they then position the value of it. And so in true SaaS fashion, we were also, in addition to launching this new SKU, we also had other product enhancements that we were sharing along the same time, as well as a rebranding and new marketing strategy and a new pitch deck. So there was a lot going on. So we had to make sure that we also landed this and landed it well. And so we did some pre-launch awareness where we equipped our sellers with content in the form of kits as well as micro-learnings and giving them the foundation to get them ready for that launch moment so they could start having introductory conversations with customers. So how do you first scope that? Then we did our launch moment and made our just-in-time much more robust and turned them into true sales plays where they learned how to really position this product in the right way and along the whole sales process. And with that, we also did additional learning moments, such as full-blown e-learnings and certifications for how to sell this. Then we really wanted to focus on reinforcement that stuck, and so we looked at, okay, how can we get our managers speaking about this product in team meetings? What kind of activities could we give to managers to run in team meetings, such as trainings in a box? And how can we continue to evolve the conversation and get our reps learning more? And so we focused on PEC talk as well as more thorough, in-depth enablement from a product standpoint, and then that later along the line sales motion and how to sell that. And overall, we saw around $500,000 of closed-won sales initially, and we built around $3 million in pipeline. And through that, we also looked at data with the kit and with the play that—you know, the kit that shifted into the play—and a lot of our reps were using it. There was high adoption of it. They were going back to it multiple times and spending about four minutes consuming the content. And so we were able to track, alright, they did the enablement, they were using the content and sharing it with customers, and then that translated to those closed-won numbers and that pipeline build that I discussed. RR: That sounds like such a thoughtful approach and also like quite a lot of work. I’m sure that was quite difficult to execute, but I love that you’re already seeing the results that you’re looking for. I’d like to maybe dig a little bit more into kind of the initial concept phases where you’re staring down the barrel of this initiative. What kind of challenges do you see reps tending to face when it comes to things like product launch, and what were your best practices for overcoming them as you were executing over the next few months? KS: Yeah, information overload is a big one. And it’s one that—you know, I mentioned we did this in conjunction with other product enhancements and a marketing branding shift in our messaging, as well as a pitch deck launch. So you know, besides that, reps are always being overloaded with information, and so that’s always something you have to contend with as a challenge. Also, when reps are learning about how to sell a new product, it’s something that’s outside of their existing knowledge and skill set a lot of the time or, you know, is just stretching them in a different way. And so you have to figure out how to use the foundation that they already had and build upon that. And then sometimes there’s additional complexities as well. And so when I think about those challenges and how to solve for them, I think about, you know, making sure that you’re taking a crawl-walk-run approach with those product launch moments and building upon what they already have to get them into that run state, but not expecting them to run right out of the gate—which a lot of times is an expectation that happens. So making sure that we’re setting them up for success in learning and building upon that learning, and then also creating resources that really meet them where they are in their tenure and their journey, and being able to translate complex information into simple information that they can digest, consume, put into practice, and then go and evangelize. And then also weaving in sales subject matter experts that really know how to sell your current product and what talking to your customers is like currently, and using them as subject matter experts to really inform that sales motion of that product launch. RR: Great. I think those are all wonderful strategies. And I know kind of a common one when it comes to product launch that you need to keep in mind is just how crucial cross-functional alignment is for the success of a launch. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you create and maybe maintain alignment as you’re building and executing your launch enablement strategy? KS: Yeah, it is so critical. And communication in general in all relationships is so important. And so this is one that really is the make-or-break fail point in a lot of companies. And so having regular touchpoints with subject matter experts across various teams such as—you know, as I called out, sales and success—but also product marketing and other marketing teams. Operations is another really key one. There are so many different teams, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a business transformation team or a project management team that’s there to foster all of those cross-functional relationships and create that alignment. We work really closely with our product managers and our product teams. We meet with them regularly within our enablement role. In fact, we have somebody in enablement at Dialpad that’s focused on our product and pricing strategy, and so he has these deep relationships with these different teams and different individuals across the business. Additionally, we have a product launch playbook that we have socialized with these cross-functional partners so they know what that playbook looks like, how it can act modularly, and where they play in the process of the playbook—or where they fit into the process, so to speak. And so that really helps us create that alignment and speak the same language. Lastly, we focus on retrosp

According to research from Gartner, more than half of organizations have increased their investment in AI since 2023. So, how can you effectively leverage AI to improve GTM productivity and accelerate business outcomes? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Chris Sargent, the director of sales enablement at BambooHR. Thank you so much for joining us, Chris. Before we get started, I’d just love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.  Chris Sargent: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Riley. Really excited to be spending some time with you today. So my background, I have been leading sales enablement teams for the better part of the last 10 plus years, and prior to that I was a sales leader and a sales individual contributor. So have spent a lot of time in both roles and really help companies scale. You talked about go-to-market strategies. My background heavily is aligned sales execution, focusing on how buyers can achieve goals and how selling and. Our ability to sell with a process with value can really be one of the greatest competitive advantages that we take to market. And in my current role at Bamboo, I oversee enablement programs globally across all of our different skill sets, all of our different segments. And really our mission here is to equip every seller and leader with the skills to tools and processes they need to win with confidence and consistency.  RR: I love it. Confidence and consistency. That’s what everybody’s looking for. Well, we’re so excited to have you here. Especially as you mentioned, you know, you’re a pretty experienced leader and you have extensive experience spanning both the sales and the sales enablement side. And so you’ve probably seen the landscape change a little bit recently with the acceleration of AI innovation. So I’m curious, how have you seen the challenges that go-to-market teams face change as well?  CS: Yeah, I think there’s been, you know, change is the, probably the important word there. One of the biggest shifts as it relates to specifically AI is I think the timing of AI aligning with just kind of a general trend in sales, right? That we’ve seen, I think in the early teens to the late 2019, even into 2000, 20, 21, economies were fantastic globally. Every organization had what felt like, in a lot of cases, unlimited budget to acquire tools and technology. And I think in a lot of ways that created probably some unintentional outcomes as it relates to sales. And in some cases it was a lot more of what I would call order taking versus what would potentially be a value driven sales cycle in a lot of cases, by no one’s fault, other than that was the nature of how buyers were buying at the time. So I think you take that. Component of that and then align that with all of those changes. Now with AI, I think one of the biggest shifts that most organizations and sales team members as individual contributors and leaders are dealing with is that AI is happening in real time. And not only is it happening in real time, it’s new for not only the individual contributors, but a lot of it’s new for managers, it’s new for enablement teams, even the buyers who are trying to figure out how do they leverage AI. So I think that challenge that we see is how do you understand and take the pace of AI innovation and your ability to adapt to that. And that means enablement specifically isn’t just about delivering training, but how are you actually building a culture that fosters the idea of ongoing learning experimentation across the board and cross-functional alignment to keep up with the pace of change while not sacrificing. What really the intended outcome of is that confidence and consistency in the rep’s performance because that desired outcome doesn’t change. How you may get there is what’s changing and understanding how to put that as part of your DNA as an enablement organization and handle that pace of innovation is gonna be critical. RR: Yeah, so we’re sort of in a perfect storm, right of change management in across a number of different areas. I think these are challenges that we’re hearing from a lot of our customers and just feeling in the market. I think you’re spot on with all of that, but rather than kind of lingering in our challenges, maybe let’s talk solutions. So in your opinion, what is Enablement’s role in helping GTM teams overcome these challenges and achieving more success amid these changes?  CS: Yeah, it’s a very fair question, and I think this is the power of a really strong enablement organization because in that format and in that model, what you’re really asking enablement to do and what enablement should be doing is becoming the bridge between the new technology itself and the practical application at the rep level. So our role is to really translate what I would say innovation into that action. Our job is to make sure reps just aren’t aware of AI and it’s not just. Kind of a tool that they use on the side, similar to a Salesforce and outreach and a Highspot, for example. But they’re actually using it to be effective in everything that they’re doing in their day-to-day workflow. And I think about that in three core areas. And that’s how we’re trying to think about it is what are you doing to prepare? What are you doing in real time? And what are you doing post customer interaction that allows you to be better at your job? Because of AI and some of that’s customer facing, some of that’s internal. Really what I it means is we’re embedding AI into every existing process. We wanna build confidence through the training and reinforcement and giving managers the tools to coach around it. And I think that goes back to not losing our North Star of if the intended outcome is customers have the best buying experience and the reps are confident and have the ability to execute. That doesn’t change, but the modality to do it, we can make them better at their jobs, we can make them more efficient. We can create competitive advantages because of that. And it’s kind of rethinking not necessarily the intended outcome as much as thinking the journey that gets us there.  RR: Yeah. I’ve heard it put as kind of like the job doesn’t change, but the way you do the work does. CS: Exactly.  RR: We’re all still driving towards that North Star. We just have a little bit more tools in our toolkit to get there.  CS: Yeah, totally agree. And I think that’s what every enablement organization. Every sales organization on the planet is trying to solve it right now, which is what does that look like? And going back to the challenge, I think the challenge in that is there’s desired state and then there’s what can actually be executed today, all while knowing what seems like every day, every week, every month there’s some new AI application that’s being launched. And how do you kind of take all of that noise and put it into a journey that aligns with not only your AEs and your reps and your managers, but really how do your customers wanna buy from you? RR: Yeah, and to your point, I think people are like clamoring for use cases. They’re trying to figure out how do we apply this? We have a vision, but how do we bring it to life? And so I know you guys have started putting in kind of the work to answer those questions and have started using some AI capabilities in Highspot to improve rep productivity and kind of streamline some of those workflows. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you’re using AI to elevate your enablement efforts and how that fits into your GTM productivity strategies?  CS: Yeah. You know, I think there’s a few things and the beauty in that is, you know, we are fortunate enough to have an AI team that was hired about four years ago that’s led by a fantastic gentleman by the name of Alan Whitaker. And part of what we’re looking at is really aligning kind of the build or buy model a little bit. But some of the ways we’re leveraging this today is, you know, I think those core focus areas of how are we helping the rep be more efficient? And then how are we helping the rep. In real time, create a better buying experience and really help customers see the value of what it is that we do. We all know that we’re using AI, but also buyers are using AI and they have more access to information recommendations than ever, ever before. So there’s a few ways that we’re kind of leveraging AI in a current state, but also kind of hoping we get to from a desired state perspective. And we kind of look at that in a very pragmatic and phased approach way while also. Putting urgency and moving quickly. You know, I think about one of the most important things is we sell a platform and we sell, over the years have increased our ability and our product capabilities that go to market. And I think one of the things that’s really critical is in a lot of situations that’s being launched in real time on the back of other releases, and it’s really about guiding our sales team members to the right content at the right time, but also having that served up to them at the right time. We don’t have a lot of technical resources here. It requires in a lot of situations where we have a lot of high velocity opportunities at Bamboo HR. So it, it’s not even about coming back with information even a day or two later, because that could be too late. So one of the ways we’re leveraging this is serving up information at the right time based off of the rep’s ability to have a conversation in real time. It reduces time spent searching for content, for answers. It’s feeding that up proactively and it’s really increasing confidence in what our sellers need in the moment versus even, like I said, taking 30 mi

According to research from G2, 63% of buyers like to be introduced to new products or solutions. So how can you effectively equip reps to sell your new offerings so they can turn that interest into real business impact? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Danica Bangert, the senior director of revenue enablement at ProducePay. Thank you for joining us, Danica. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.  Danica Bangert: Thanks Shawnna for having me. It’s great to be here to talk through this subject. I think it’s very relevant in today’s world and especially in this world of AI and new things that are always coming for a lot of our go-to market reps. But like you mentioned, I’m the senior director of revenue enablement at Produce Pay. I spent the last decade. In, you know, high growth SaaS companies like Zendesk, like Gong, and now kind of in the FinTech world, in the produce industry, where I get to kind of bring a, I would say, more modern enablement strategy to a very traditional industry, which is unique. And I’m really passionate about enablement in general, having come from the individual contributor side, having done sales and now moved to the enablement world. So love scaling, you know, sales teams and sales enablement teams with, for me, a lot of it’s around frameworks. A lot of it’s around consistency, messaging, and you know, programs like you said, that drive real behavioral change and not just kind of check boxes for enablement. SS: We’re excited to have you here, Danica and you actually recently were featured in an article that offered a glimpse into a day in the life of an enablement leader. Can you tell us what this looks like for you at ProducePay, and what are some of the key initiatives you’re focused on driving as an enablement leader? DB: Yeah, well, no two days are the same, especially a startup. So I’m sure many of our listeners can agree to that point, but especially navigating rapid growth and change is something that I deal with. So some days I’m deep in strategic planning and prioritization, figuring out how to scale things like the onboarding program, if we’re in a hiring phase. Or in my case a lot more is on field execution. So how do I balance the ever boarding for the different roles and different teams in the field? And then other days I’m building hands-on, right with the team, whether it’s tightening our messages on current products, building, you know, LMS courses and certifications for, you know, programs that require maybe a little less behavioral change. Launching, you know, competitive plays or just in general refining manager coaching motions. So I think it’s a mix of thinking big to collaborate with my cross-functional partners, but also for me rolling up my sleeves and helping the team. I.  SS: And one of your key initiatives I know, is enabling reps to effectively sell the new predictable commerce program. What are some challenges that reps might face when learning to sell a new solution and how have you been helping your team overcome them?  DB: Yeah. Like you mentioned, one of our biggest initiatives is driving adoption for our predictable commerce program. In our case, it’s a offering that gives a bundling almost of our services. It is a definite. I would say new product, but it’s really a shift in how we have gone to market in the past. And of course in that case, enablement has been critical in translating that into something that the field can actually execute on. So, you know, trite as it sounds, the analogy of building a plane while we’re flying it is. Is certainly something that we have to balance here at ProducePay. So we’re figuring out what the motion is to sell, to market this offering, this product, but at the same time, to try to go to those, go to market teams and give them what they need to get in front of customers during the right cycle, during the right part of the customer journey. And so for me and my team, we focused on. A lot of the like packaging of what is that narrative? And the challenge there is designing it to be really prescriptive and make sure that there’s action against, like how can we actually put these pieces into place and embedding it into the different motions that we have in our enablement cadence today. Things like onboarding or on our ongoing coaching and things like that. So it’s so for me it’s about consistency. It’s about clarity of the message for things like new product offerings and giving people the confidence they need to go and speak to their customers or their new business prospects about that potential value. SS: I love that. Consistency, clarity, and confidence. I think those are fantastic things to drive for your sales team. From your perspective, what unique value does an enablement platform provide though when it comes to equipping reps to effectively sell a new solution? DB: Yeah, I mean, for us, it’s about change management, right? Because change management is a big one, and I think when you’re asking sellers to pivot the way that they’ve always sold something, or you have to communicate and over communicate, oftentimes the why, giving them the space to either practice. Or create quick wins or come back to being intentional and being aligned. We really need to be able to have the tools in order to do that. Of course, you know, Highspot helps us along our journey with this in order to enable against any sort of initiative. So for us it’s been a game changer. Right? And it’s a critical, I think, central source of truth, but more importantly, it gives the reps. What they need in their flow of work. I’m very big on like operating in the operating rhythms of the go-to market teams and the tool sets that they’re in. So whether it’s pitch decks, talk tracks, objection handling. It should all be at their fingertips. And so, you know, we’ve also leaned into those components. We’ve leaned in heavily to Digital Rooms specifically because of our use of those with our customer. So in customer facing, we can use those Digital Rooms to guide reps kind of through that structured buyer journey and kind of ensure consistency across those touch points.  SS: I’d love to actually double click into that because as you mentioned, I know you’re leveraging digital rooms to help reps land the new solution. What are some of your best practices for leveraging Digital Rooms and how are you planning to use them to drive success of your new solution launch?  DB: Yeah. One area that, like I said, we’ve really leaned into Digital Rooms. Like I said, it’s not just about the content sharing, it’s about creating this guided buyer experience that really mirrors how we want the reps to have conversations. With our customers, especially for us post initial sales, right? A lot of times we see our customer success team who is going in there. There’s so much for us in terms of our product and our offering that they have to be able to anticipate and really guide the customer through when they’ve already signed up with us and become a member and start to utilize our products and services. So we really wanna make sure that they feel equipped to have the conversation, the CSMs, and that the customers don’t have any surprises, right? So that anticipation and the use of guiding them through that journey in digital rooms is really important. So for us, each room is really tailored to the stage of the deal. And for us, post-sales, that curated content is really important and which is why it’s a huge piece of the multi-threaded sales, post-sales journey and, and use utilizing that live on the call with our customers. So from the sales leadership perspective, I think it also gives us visibility. When we think about using the digital rooms, and we can see when a buyer ultimately engages, when a customer engages with it, what they’ve clicked in that room, what interests have been spiked and what drops off. Ultimately, that helps us kind of coach the reps that are using those, our CSMs that are using those in real time and kind of adjust the strategy and what we’re seeing in terms of, you know, buyer disengagement. So, you know, we’ve used the Digital Rooms, especially with our new product offering and ultimately with our current offerings, some of our products that have been around for a long time that are really consistent and that we know we need that customer success support for. So that making sure everyone is kind of aligned in the interactions. SS: Amazing. You touched on visibility and when I think about that, I immediately think about kind of the underlying data behind that. How are you leveraging data to continuously optimize and improve your enablement programs?  DB: Yeah, I mean, data’s so important. And of course we’ve seen real results in just utilizing those kinds of capabilities. Shorter time to first deal, or in our case, like higher attach rates for key products. Are things that I would wanna look at, um, and that we’ve seen impact for, from a lot of our enablement programs, but especially this, when we think about post-sales on new products or post-sales on existing products, I would say stronger deal progression is something I wanna look at and utilize the tools sets for the field. But you know, we also track field readiness scores. And you know, since rolling out things like our multi-product offerings and this type of program using, you know, Highspot and coaching cadences, we’ve seen a pretty significant lift in rep confidence and kind of tying that into pipeline conversion. So a lot of things that we’re looking at there. SS: Amazing. And since implementing Highspot, what business results have you achieved and do you have any wins you c

According to The Times, employees now face an average of nine organizational changes per year, up from two before 2020, leading to increased change fatigue. So, how can you lead a change management strategy to help reps effectively navigate these changes? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Sobia Younus, the senior manager of sales learning and enablement at ApplyBoard. Thank you for joining us, Sobia. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Sobia Younus: Sure. I really appreciate this opportunity. So I’m leading the sales learning and enablement team at ApplyBoard, a leading ed-tech platform that’s reshaping how international students access global education. So I lead a global sales enablement framework that focuses on performance process and people and my role. Spans everything from onboarding and ever boarding to performance improvement initiatives that firsthand impact the revenue. But to rewind a bit, my journey has never been linear, and I believe that’s been my strength. So while I’ve always been rooted in international education, my niche has always been B2B and B2C sales, and that helped me build a strong understanding of client behavior, market trends, and grow through meaningful engagements. I have been with ApplyBoard for almost six years. I initially joined the CX team, which gave me insight into the student journey and operations side of how applications are being processed. From there, I transitioned into the sales role where I gained the firsthand experience of navigating the field. Finally in 2021, I moved into sales enablement, and that’s where everything came together. It blended my passion for education, my CX foundation, and my love for sales performance into one purpose driven role. I think today I focus more on building scalable strategic enablement programs that build and drive revenue, empower people, and connect the dots between learning, growth and results. Personally, to me, and I really wanna share that, I believe that for me, enablement is where storytelling meets the strategy. That’s what make it so exciting, and what excites me the most about my work today is the blend of strategy and human behavior. Most importantly, understanding how people learn, they stay motivated, and how the right tool and messaging can turn a sales team into a high performing empowered force. That’s why I’m so excited to be here today because platforms like Highspot make a real difference.  SS: Amazing. Well, we’re excited to have you here, and given your extensive experience in education management, I’d love to learn from you what are some of the unique challenges that reps in the industry face, and how can enablement help them navigate these challenges? SY: So that’s a very important subject. So one of the most unique aspects of international education industry is how deeply it influenced by external elements like immigration reforms, global mobility trends, and even geopolitical shifts. So unlike other industries where salespeople can rely on relatively stable products or markets, education is often at the mercy of forces beyond control. And as a result, salespeople in this space aren’t just selling a service. They’re actually navigating constant change, managing expectations, and often having to realign their strategy in real time. And a great example is what recently we saw last year, the government introduced caps on your international student permits and tightened eligibility for post-graduation work. Permits. So these changes had an immediate impact on student demand, also program selection and school preferences. So practically overnight, our sales rep has to understand the implications, shift focus away from programs that no longer align with student goals and reposition alternatives that still offered strong appeal to students. This is where enablement became mission critical. And an apply board. We don’t just see enablement as a static function. It is a real time strategic engine that basically supports business agility. So within days of those updates, our team not only delivered the sessions, so we created and rolled out sales plays and updated talk tracks and Highspot. We designed objection handling strategies on Highspot to help our. Salespeople reposition options with clarity and assurance. So in short, we didn’t just inform, we equipped, so that is important. Our goal was to turn uncertainty into clarity so that salespeople could keep on building trust and drive impact through their communication. And I believe that enablement also reinforces a culture of agility. So in industries like ours, change is inevitable. But when enablement is done right. It actually becomes a competitive advantage.  SS: Amazing. And I know that at ApplyBoard, you actually switched off a previous enablement platform and moved to Highspot. What motivated you to reevaluate and change your enablement tech stack?  SY: So when we initially built our enablement infrastructure at Apply board. Our primary focus was on structured learning. So naturally our, you know, tech stack leaned towards a traditional LMS. It served its objective at that time, like building onboarding courses and track completion. But as our sales organization matured. So did the scope of our needs. So we realized that enablement couldn’t just live in siloed training modules. It had to be integrated into the daily flow of work. And our sales team needed not just learning, but relevant and up to date resources and real time support to navigate, you know, fast-paced industry changes. So in short, we needed more than an LMS. We needed a true enablement platform that could function as a CMS, a single source of truth, and I would love to call Highspot a strategic one-stop shop. So that’s what motivated our ship to Highspot. We wanted a one-stop solution where onboarding and ever boarding training and sales plays and competitive insights all could live together. A platform that doesn’t just share knowledge, but it gives. To our salespeople when they need it in a way that fits how they work. So it was a mindset shift from how do we train people to how we enable performance? And Highspot gave us the ash to just do that.  SS: Change management is absolutely crucial, especially during major product or policy updates. What are some of the common pitfalls that organizations can face during change and how can they avoid them?  SY: It’s a very crucial issue, and it is often underestimated and not because organizations don’t recognize its importance, but because they assume communication alone is enough. One of the most typical pitfalls is treating change as an announcement rather than a proper process. So when major product updates or you know, changes happen, especially in the industry like international education where external shifts can be sudden and high stake, simply informing teams isn’t enough. You need to enable them. So, and other pitfall that I wanna mention over here is failing to connect the why behind the change. So, if sales reps or CX teams don’t understand how an update or change a product shift ties back to their goals or the client’s goals. It usually creates resistance. Or worse disengagement. So change without clarity leads to confusion. And I always believe that change without a proper plan leads to chaos. So one more typical misstep that I wanna mention over here is not planning for reinforcement. So even when the rollout goes smoothly, but without a continuous enablement, like quick one pages or talk tracks, or life scenarios and sales place, trust me, all behavior will return. People default to what they know when things get tough, you know? But at ApplyBoard, we’ve learned this through the hard way, that effective change management start with empathy and end spend with enablement. So we ensure teams understand the work, the why, and how of every change, and we don’t stop at emails. We provide field ready tools, align managers as change champions, and use platforms like Highspot to make resources easily accessible and track the engagement, which is very important. So we all know that change is inevitable, but chaos is optional and you can do wonders if you treat enablement as a bridge between strategy and execution. SS: In your opinion, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform when navigating change?  SY: So, in my opinion, the strategic advantage of an enablement platform during especially the time of change, is simple. It turns information into action at scale and in real time. So change, especially in the fast moving industries like international education. Often creates a gap between what the business knows and what the field needs. So product evolves, policies, they change and market fluctuates. But if your sales teams can’t access the right information at the right moment, trust me, execution suffers. So this is where an enablement platform becomes mission critical. It just centralizes the word, the why and how of change into one cohesive experience. So instead of scattered emails, you know, outdated decks or reactive training sessions, you get a single source of truth, which is updated, which is searchable, relevant, and embedded in the daily workflow. I’m so glad to say that at Highspot has given us the ability to roll out updates with precision and speed, and when major changes hit, you know, like the recent PGWP reforms, we can respond with focus sales plays, updated talk tracks, training modules, and enablement briefs in one place. We are not just informing the salespeople, we are empowering them to act immediately with clarity, with the right message. So that’s the advantage of a strong sales enablem

According to research from Harvard Business Review, only 28% of executives believe their organization’s strategies were understood and executed effectively. So, how can you effectively define, execute, and optimize your go-to-market initiatives with your enablement tech stack? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Zoran Vulic. Thank you for joining us, Zoran. I’d love you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.  Zoran Vulic: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. My name is Zoran Vulic. I work at Bunge in the North American Oils Group. Been with the organization for about nine years now, focused on communications and digital strategy and have been somewhat new to the food space, which is fun’s wheelhouse. So I’m kind of someone that’s not necessarily a typical marketer that’s in the food space. I’d probably classify myself as a digital native first in that space. So a little bit different and so. When I came to the organization with Bunge, they were looking to change some of their go-to-market strategies. They’re come a little bit stale and wanted to increase some of the value that we offer our customers and looking to expand into different markets and be able to service our customers in different ways. SS: Amazing. Well, I’m glad that you are with the organization and joining us today on this podcast as a marketing leader, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving this year, and what business outcomes are you aiming to impact through these initiatives?  ZV: We focus on, or we service two main customer subsets within the North American Oils Group, one of ’em being food manufacturers and the other one being our food service operators. These are closely aligned with our annual go-to-market strategies and our annual commercial initiatives, and they’re really focused on expanding our products in adjacent markets. Launching new products within our target market groups, focusing on markets where we know that there is high growth potential, and then offering solutions across the entire value chain. So from, you know, your lowest commodity products, all the way up to your value added products. And these outcomes are really closely aligned with our annual go-to-market strategies, which we collaborate with all the different business functions within our organization, within the oils group within North America. SS: Amazing. And I love how you are aligning kind of your strategies with the organization’s goals. I think that’s amazing, and I know it’s one of your strengths, especially as you kind of analyze how they’re doing. What are some of your best practices for ensuring this alignment as you execute your go-to-market initiatives? ZV: A long, long time ago, one of my managers at a different organization had this quote that he offered me because I was very, very ambitious and very eager and anxious to get going and moving quickly. And he said to me, he said, Zoran, if you want to go fast, you go by yourself. If you want to go far, you bring other people with you. And so I’ve really lent into that, which is in order to get all the organization rowing in the same direction, we need to be able to socialize these plans. So part of our process is meeting on a quarterly basis and when we’re doing our planning. For 2025, we met as an organization, all the different functional groups. And we talk about these are the plans that we have that we’re going to execute on in 2025, and here’s why they make sense. And then here are the different functions and here are the different tasks at each of those different groups. So we’re talking about sales marketing. Customer service, supply chain, product line management, all understanding that these are the key initiatives that we’re going to be executing on in the coming year. And here is how you know the flow of activities is going to happen. This has kind of been a project of mine is also taking a data-first approach to this, which is really looking at, okay, what information or what data do we have available to us that can help us inform. How we’re progressing? Are we trending in the right direction? Are we trending in the wrong direction? And very simply do more things that work and do less things that don’t work. And when you use data, you take away the emotion from it, and it allows you just to be more. Simplified in your approach in terms of how you can make some of those changes as you’re executing these strategies. SS: I love that. And I know a key initiative you’re focused on is your annual category-specific commercial initiatives. Can you share more about this effort and the outcomes that you’re aiming for and how you plan to leverage Highspot initiatives to support it?  ZV: Yeah, so when we implemented Highspot, one of the things that really led us to this particular solution was how structured the approach was in terms of how we leverage the tools that are available to us. And so for some of our commercial initiatives, we’re looking to move people up a value chain. Very simply put, how do we move them from one particular product to another particular product that meets their needs in that inherently the customer sees value in part of that comes through, number one, socializing the information to the different stakeholders that need to be aware. So those include a lot of those different functions that I was talking about previously to you, which was supply chain management, product line management, sales, marketing, customer service. On top of that, what we’re gonna do is now we’re going to, again, teach our sellers, or at least provide them the information that they need to educate themselves on why is this important to their customers. After we’ve done that, it’s now, okay, what are the key messages that we want to communicate to those customers? And then very simply, what is it that we want to show them? What are our proof points that allow us to validate the claims that we’re making? And then what are the specific tools that we have enabled for our sellers to be able to do that across all the different categories and across all the initiatives? So we’re really standardizing that approach. And then based on the market that we’re speaking to, we’re providing customized, personalized solutions specific to that audience. That audience is both internal, so the people that are working on behalf of this particular initiative, then the information is really personalized and geared towards that external audience as well. SS: I love that. And you talked about this, you touched on it a little bit, how a key part of building an initiative in Highspot is really making sure that you’re aligning on the materials you’re using to drive the outcomes. You touched on ’em a little bit, like plays, digital rooms training. Can you share how you’ve identified the resources that you’re using to support your initiatives, like the annual category-specific commercial initiative? ZV: Yeah, so when we talk about those annual category initiatives, a lot of the time it’s what type of information is the seller going to need in order to communicate this directly to the customer. And then from that position, we then take a look at, okay, what does the customer know and what does the customer not know? Meaning is this a complex problem that they have? And does this require certain materials? Does this require video in terms to explain a very intricate processes that requires a little bit more knowledge and education building versus, you know, some of the more simplified versions, which are, what is the content that we need to get in front of a potential customer to, again, explain the value proposition of what problem we’re solving for them? So we’ll do an audit of what specific materials do we currently have within our database? And then understand whether this is going to be a new build, or do we have something that we can fast adapt where we have information that is about, you know, 60% relevant and we have to do a little bit of personalization specific to the category. Or the initiative that allows us then to get to market a little bit quicker. It also helps, I’ll say this, it also helps because you can then start focusing your dollars, so your marketing budgets more efficiently, because now I’m focused on dollars that are specifically to attract customers rather than developing some of those materials. So those are some of the relevant pieces we look at when we’re trying to come up with these strategies.  SS: Got it. And you recently started using the initiative scorecards to measure the impact of your go-to-market efforts. How are you using or planning to use these insights to assess the performance of your initiatives and, and really optimize your go-to-market success? ZV: Yeah. So when initiatives came out, my colleague Paul Higgs and I, were in Seattle for the Spark Conference last year in 2024. And when it got rolled out, I elbowed Paul when we were sitting in one of the sessions and I said, this is it. I can now align this with campaigns. I really hope they’re gonna tell me that I can align this stuff with campaigns, and I know that Highspot is working on that, but really that’s, you know, because I’m looking at it from like an end-to-end solution. So what information are we doing or what activities are we doing to help inform customers at the begin, which is, you know, really building that pipeline for customers, whether they be existing customers that people that we know, or they’re new customers that we’re trying to attract. And then as we push them through that funnel, we’re, you know, getting some engagement with them. We’re communicating with them, whether th