But when we talk to customers, it’s really all over the map still. Some companies are investing deeply, they’re aligning enablement with the business, other teams are underfunded, overwhelmed, and really just basically trying to keep their noses above the water line. So I’m here today with two seasoned experts in the enablement space who’ve really been helping to mature the discipline generally and especially within their companies. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to share with us.

Heidi runs enablement at Nvidia and Bradford runs it for Slack. Thanks for joining the conversation and let’s dive in. So I want to start with what enablement really tries to do. One of the key things that it tries to do is help companies take on really hard challenges.

Heidi, we were talking about this the other day, and you shared some of your experiences in helping to move Nvidia into this incredibly lucrative, but also incredibly complicated new market, which is to use GPU’s for AI and machine learning. How did you help the company which had traditionally focused on very different spaces, really try to enter this incredibly complicated, but exciting new space?

Heidi: Thanks very much for the question Oliver, and you’re right. Embarking on sales into areas like artificial intelligence, which your customers are going to have potential fear or see some areas of risk has to be done in a very careful way and a very well-informed way.

The way that that happened with Nvidia is that we would hire absolute experts, top of their craft in a specific industry area. For example, when we were embarking on introducing the power of AI into healthcare, we brought into our sales organization, heart surgeons. Somebody who had the credibility and had the language and understanding of the market to be able to connect the dots between the value of accelerated computing that Nvidia could offer in both hardware and software and putting that into play in specific healthcare use cases.

That model has actually worked quite nicely by spreading into other industries. Nvidia isn’t a unique position where we’re not competing on price necessarily or just performance factors alone, but it’s really specifically meaning the challenges of an industry use case. So we’ve also brought in experts in the areas of, autonomous driving in the automotive industry or oil and gas and on and on.

Now here’s the challenge though, that does not scale. We won’t have a team of sales leaders that come out of healthcare expertise, but we will have at least one. And that’s where enablement comes in. The enablement organization will partner with that subject matter expert on the sales team that understands the complexity of that industry really well.

And they also understand what conversations resonate most, and what types of, enablement resources have the biggest impact. What kind of training really helps scale that knowledge and we’ll codify that and spread it across the rest of the sales organization. So we don’t have just one expert, but we have a team of experts that are tackling that industry.

It’s made a big difference in our ability to grow and scale. And it’s happened through the enablement organization.

Oliver: So that sounds like a really hard challenge because, you know, if a typical seller doesn’t know anything about heart surgery and you bring in this heart surgeon, I could imagine that those sellers would be really scared about engaging with people in this industry, in a space they really have no background in.

How did you help them really overcome the fear of having those conversations in such a challenging area?

Heidi: Another great question. And I would say that we would not be setting up our salesforce for success if we were bringing people in who had no expertise in the area of healthcare, into the healthcare sales team.

So we might bring somebody who came from another organization, which is common in so many different tech companies in particular, but, but any industry. We might bring somebody who had been selling networking equipment, for example, or working with different software or working with different audiences within those different organizations.

But what we’re looking to do is to scale the true understanding of connecting the value of NVIDIA’s offerings into these use cases. So you might understand healthcare, you may not understand the power of AI in medical imaging. Or the power of AI specific to, proteomics and, and the types of research that is being done.

So what we’ll do is bring people who have general industry expertise and make them prepared to scale that very specialized expertise that we begin with.

Oliver: Got it, that makes a lot of sense. When I talked to enablement leaders in a wide variety of industries, though, many of them are grappling with much more prosaic problems than the kinds of things that you’re describing.

Many of them, you know, they’re just really struggling to get out of fire drill mode. They’re understaffed. They get hit by this constant succession of demand after demand. It feels like they’re on this sort of perpetual hamster wheel. You know, the business is saying, “I need you to do more of this and more of that and more initiatives and build more content.”

Bradford, when we were talking about this and how you’ve seen enablement teams get out of that mode, one of the things you mentioned that really struck me, and I’ve always sort of kept thinking about is, turning that team into essentially a special ops teams for strategic initiatives.

Tell us a little bit about what you meant by that and how can an enablement team really develop that ability?

Bradford: Well, first, I’m just turning over in my head, the term proteomics. And what it must be like to have to learn how to sell to someone who’s asking about that, but I love what you shared Heidi, it’s fascinating.

In terms of creating an enablement team that really is a special operations team for strategic initiatives, there are a few ways that I break that down. The first is that an enablement team above all can be uniquely positioned to harden the problem statement. What is it that we are trying to achieve?

And how will we know if we were successful? Even in relatively mature sales organizations, that question is not asked enough and not interrogated with enough rigor. An effective special operations team like mine, dare I say. Practices that skill practices, the skill of asking that question and demanding an answer to that question in a consultative and supportive manner, because a special operations team for strategic initiatives is not an execution team.

A special operations team is not simply carrying out a mission. What we are doing is upleveling a go-to-market organization to be successful against discrete objectives. And so for us, that means for enablement to be successful, we need product marketing to be successful. We need business operations to be successful. We need sales strategy to be in place. We need sellers to be communicated with. We need managers to be prepared. We need sales leaders to be providing air cover.

And we can do that in a scramble mode, which certainly I think most enablement leaders have experienced, and it is transparently a scramble mode when that happens. It’s hard to target outcomes when you’re scrambling. I’ll give you an example, just perhaps if it’s helpful. We at Slack relatively recently went through a verticalization exercise. Similar to what you shared, Heidi, where we took our sales teams and moved them into a number of much more strategic verticals.

The objective was sort of similar to what you shared, Oliver, enable people on these industries and we could have left it at that and said, okay, we’re going to go enable across 12 industries and 22 subsectors and a hundred subsectors, and we’ll get back to you when we’re done. Everyone involved in that initiative would have been set up for failure, if, in fact, that would have been our mandate.

So we have to prioritize, we have to specify, we have to understand revenue goals and how those goals are going to be broken down from pipeline and targets. Then start at the top.

Oliver: I love that example because I think it really puts your finger on something that a lot of companies struggle with, which is they have this new initiative, they get excited about it, they try to do a lot of things simultaneously, and then it just doesn’t land. It’s hard to prioritize because prioritizing means you have to say no to good ideas.

How did you convince the organization to say no to good ideas when you were deciding which of those things to prioritize?

Bradford: It’s a great question. And I’m very open to debate on this, but I don’t think it is enablement’s mandate, it should not be enablement’s mandate to be responsible for the decision-making. Enablement’s mandate is to facilitate decision-making and ensure that the decisions that have been made are actionable.

But I do not see my team as responsible for saying healthcare is the focus over manufacturing. That’s simply not where we are positioned to have credibility. However, where we can be really good is saying okay, if healthcare is prioritized over manufacturing, here’s how we can action on enabling our healthcare teams to be effective against the defined goals.

Oliver: Heidi, I’m curious if you’ve run into challenges where the business wasn’t making those hard trade-offs and decisions, and how do you go about really convincing people to do that if you need to?

Heidi: In fact, I couldn’t agree more with what Bradford had just said, the decision does come from the business.

Each of us are business people with a different perspective. We have opinions and that’s great, but when it comes to limited resources and important deliverables that need to be prioritized, the best way I’ve seen to do that is basically to go back to the business and those senior decision-makers to explain there’s four things we can do.

Which four would we believe is going to move the needle most effectively and in the biggest way. And then it becomes a natural conversation about what gets left behind or what gets shifted out by whatever time period. But it’s a more logical conversation rather than the big conversation of I’ve got 22 things I could be doing, tell me in what order they ought to be. That that’s not necessary to get from senior leadership, but what is most important is if we can only do a few things, let’s agree on what those are.

Oliver: When you started at Nvidia I think the team was pretty small and since then it’s grown quite a bit. I’m curious for those people in the audience who have a small team and who want to grow its capacity, what did you learn in the process of really building out the team that they could potentially get benefit from or learn some lessons from?

Heidi: Well, what I learned is that you start at the beginning and you have to have a solid foundation. If your sellers are not clear on the basics of what your selling motion is, what resources help them with their product set, what the products are, and what the value is. Those are just the minimum requirements.

So firstly doing that really, really well and really well means not only have great information and resources available but do it in a practical sense, such that people can find what they need easily. They know where to go. Where is the watering hole? Get what’s the easy button for me as a seller. So I’ll make sure I take advantage of those chest foundational resources.

So I organize the team by product set. We had three significant product groups. My sales enablement leaders were each assigned to a different product group. They sat at the go-to-market and launch table so they understood what was happening when and they were constantly thinking about how to translate that into field readiness. For those launches and for the ongoing care and feeding of the product sets.

So we started at the place where you can’t skip. We had to start with the product and as the team grew, because we became more complex. We went through something awhile ago that Bradford just mentioned that he went through and that is how do you then ensure that there’s another layer of sophistication and that is the map to your go-to-market.

Our go-to-market is by industry use case. We needed to ensure that the next couple of headcount that joined the team could then take that product enablement and customize it really customize it for individuals who are focused on a specific industry verticle. And again, to do it in such a way that it felt like an easy button.

If I was in the financial services industry, I knew exactly where to go, to get what I needed. I’m only being asked to be informed and educated in the things that I will actually deploy in the market. And then thirdly, to get even a little bit more sophisticated, we started to look at who are our key go-to-market partners and is there value in us investing dedicated enablement resources for some of those really important partners.

With NVIDIA’s primary hardware side of our business being focused on chips and processors, major OEMs were really important to us, and we need to ensure that we’re connecting dots for our OEM sellers.

In terms of the value of upselling, a GPU accelerated systems rather than something that might be CPU-based or other solutions. So we now have added additional resources to focus on each of the major OEMs so they’re speaking their language, their delivery and resources directly through OEM sellers and then onto those OEM seller partner community.

So as you get more and more sophisticated and want to reach a more relevant and resonant message for those different markets and audiences. You start with a foundation and then you continue to move with your go-to-market model and your commercial strategy in order to ensure that you’re supporting the way that has the biggest impact.

Oliver: That’s really interesting. The focus on partners is hugely relevant for some of our customers. Obviously, some of them are more of a direct business. Bradford, I’m curious, sort of building on that. What do you find is the best way to organize an enablement team because that’s a topic that a lot of our customers ask us about. What are the best practices, what do you think works really well?

Bradford: It’s so interesting listening to you share, Heidi, because in some ways I just have a lot of feelings about this one. I think I’ll share my fear because I do think in some ways my organizational structure is oriented around compensating for my fear. And my fear is that enablement, as we grow drifts up into the clouds and becomes a high altitude, global scaled function that is out of touch with the seller.

That is what I at all times want to mitigate against and am committed to mitigating against because I’ve seen that it’s scalable and maybe your metrics are easy to pull, but truly doesn’t matter on the ground. So for me, the foundation of my enablement organization is my field enablement team.

Those are field-embedded, leader-aligned, enablement partners who are literally having daily conversations with ICS and managers, literally shadowing calls, literally hearing from customers that feedback loop back to the global enablement organization. There is pressure. There is a temptation to say, maybe I should divert some of that headcount up into a more scaled global role, because I need to be enabling all AEs rather than a specific team.

But to date, you know, talk to me in a year. But to date, I really resisted that because a field-connected enablement team is a strong enablement team. In my opinion, it does add extra pressure to enablement to unlock that feedback loop. Right? So as we grow, as we scale, it is more and more important that the feedback loop with the field matches based on the conversations that any given enablement partner is having.

But we have to aggregate what’s happening with customers and we can do that in a number of ways. Conversational intelligence has been a remarkable boon for enablement and our ability to aggregate insights from customers and use those to inform both our enabling roadmap, as well as our product roadmap, our product strategy, our go-to-market strategy, has been hugely impactful.

So there may be a world in which someday we can tap into the minds and read the minds of sellers and managers, but in lieu of that, having enablement as considered to be part of the sales organization and living and breathing the experience of the sales organization is the most important piece. 

Oliver: That’s super interesting the way you couch that. Heidi, as you were thinking about scaling a small enablement team to make it larger. What are the key areas of expertise that you think the team really has to be or become great at kind of building a little bit on what Bradford was saying?

Because I think that’s something a lot of enablement people struggle with a little bit is where should I try to get great. I’m curious as you scale a team, how do you think about that?

Heidi: It’s not easy. I’d say that we typically when looking for a new team member or considering where we’ve got gaps and looking to close them, the term unicorn comes out of the mouth in every conversation because you really want somebody who has sales, empathy, and understanding.

So you want somebody who’s been in this sales field and is interested in willing to move into an enablement role and that’s a bit of a unicorn. In our case, we also want somebody who’s got probably, some decent engineering chops. They may have also had either formal education or a deep experience in a very technical role in the past.

Again, that adds another layer of that unicorn. But what we’re looking for, I think, is somebody who is empathetic and understands the reality of being in the field. And that’s where I resonate a hundred percent with what Bradford said, you can’t move your enablement focus away from the field in any way, shape, or form, it’s that honest advocacy for the field.

And you can only be an advocate if you understand what the challenges are when you’re out there. So you’re looking for the ability to listen well, understand well, and then translate that into what the resources are that are provided to the field, whether it’s training or anything else, programs and sales motions, and so on.

I think in addition to that, you also have to be that face back into the company. So we have a lot of forums where the sales organization has dialogue back with everybody from the product development teams to the product marketing team. So that there’s a lot of understanding of what’s working and what’s not working. That doesn’t always come into play, or it doesn’t translate into the final mile in enablement.

What has to happen is I think that you’re looking for individuals who have the skill set to also negotiate internally. They’re also able to have the dialogue and educate the corporate headquarters in a lot of instances that you’re trying to create that sensitivity and empathy more broadly for a more efficient delivery against the support that the sales team needs.

So those are somewhat soft answers, but that’s what makes up that unicorn. It’s skillset experience and the way that they go about that. That together makes the difference whether you’re really successful in enablement or not.

Oliver: I want to pick up on something you mentioned earlier, Heidi, about the importance of really nailing the fundamentals. Bradford when we were talking recently you mentioned that you had a situation where you ran into some trouble because you kind of drifted away a little bit from the fundamentals. Can you tell us that story and what you learned from it?

Bradford: It’s interesting. I think as we’ve grown and as some of our programs became more mature. You mentioned earlier onboarding, you said it’s probably the first thing you set up, and then to keep paying attention to it or not our onboarding program, didn’t keep up with the change that our organization was experiencing. We reached a moment, avery significant change in Slack as an example.

Acquisition. Verticalization. Sales process changes, tooling changes, expectation, changes, and hiring profile changes. I think that we missed a little bit, the fact that we had turned a little bit more onboarding a little bit more into a cultural and product evangelism experience than a do my job and be successful in my role experience.

There were lagging indicators in the business so what we’ve done is reapplied with rigor, our approach to onboarding, to say the purpose of onboarding is not purely to welcome people into the organization and make them feel part of a shared culture. Certainly, that is important, but even more important, is that they understand what differentiates Slack from other enterprise software organizations they may have seen or experienced before and what makes us successful when navigating and executing against defined goals, whether you are a success manager, solutions engineer, a BDR, or an AE.

That reorientation has not been hard to sell to reps. That is in fact, what they ache for, help me understand how to do my job successfully and quickly.

And that’s been a bit of an eye-opening moment for me. There are moments in enablement where you feel like you’re forcing content into the sales organization’s collective mind. And there are opportunities where it’s very fluid and the enablement that tends to go down very fluidly and where I’m going to continue to apply even more focus, is enablement that is incredibly actionable, incredibly relevant, and hopefully quite delightful in design.

Oliver: How do you identify the enablement that meets those criteria? Because I think that everybody aspires to that, but I think that if for those of you out there who are sellers, you can attest to the fact that enablement doesn’t universally achieve that.

So how do you do that? What are some ways you really make that happen?

Bradford: So I will address that, but I will say we do aspire to that, but there are must dues and there are a lot of must do’s and enablement, which occupy enablement bandwidth. Whether that is a big product launch or some sort of organizational shift or restructure or a change to a particular system, which simply aren’t delightful experiences.

There are things that aren’t delightful that occupy bandwidth and so I think in an ecosystem where that is true, it is setting a vision from people like me and Heidi, that the highest leverage and brand protecting elements of enablement are outside of that.

There will be a temptation to focus on the big or either sexy or necessary kind of operational moments. But outside of that is the, how do I generate this order form where tons of sellers are falling down, potentially deals are getting posted because we haven’t created a simple two-minute video or experience, which walks them through that process.

So some of that, those fundamentals, I don’t know that it’s, that we don’t know that they’re necessary. It’s that we get distracted from those things by the, um, kind of Olympics of enablement. The kickoffs and the launches and the other things.

Oliver: Heidi, how do you make sure that you’re staying focused on and keeping fresh the basics at the same time that you’re exotically figuring out about heart surgery and entering entirely new industries, which sounds hard and super fun, but what about, you know, the order form and making sure quote to cash is in the right shape and so forth?

Heidi: You know, as Bradford was talking through what the basics mean in Slack, we’re, we’re really living in different worlds in some ways. If I think about what the basics mean at Nvidia, the predominant value that enablement brings is in the form of education. Going back to the fact that our business model is to work through partners. So a lot of those steps in the sales process are done either differently or you’re relying upon your partners to fulfill so much of that.

So what a lot of the objective around enablement is, is to ensure that both partners and sellers are doing a fantastic job of sharing the art of the possible. It does seem like it’s a very different role and a different world. And that’s probably partly the reason why so many enablement organizations have different definitions as to what enablement means.

So for example, we do use a CRM, of course, and we’ve got a lot of rigor around the CRM and my team does support the aspect of training, whether it’s new hire onboarding or adjustment to process through CRM, we’ll, we’ll deliver the training and resources and all of that in that phase. But a lot of the traditional multi-step process that lives within an overall broader sales process looks dramatically different. For us, it’s more about deep proof of concept or it’s about bringing somebody into our executive briefing center as part of the sales motion.

And we want to ensure that we have clarity for our sellers about all the different steps in those motions as well as resources available to them throughout and make that as simple as possible. But there is a lot more art than science in the type of sales motion that we’re supporting.

Oliver: It’s really interesting to hear about the challenges that you’re both facing because in many ways, there are some really different aspects to it, depending on the nature of your go-to-market. And also the challenges that the business faces.

Sometimes it’s really getting the very basic process pieces in place. In other cases, it’s mastering areas of knowledge that are novel and challenging for the sellers involved. And it really speaks to how enablement, I think has to be a bit of a chameleon and it has to figure out what does the organization need and how do you then go drive that?

So Bradford, I’m curious if you were parachuted into a new company and you wanted to figure out what was most important for the sales organization and how could you deliver the most value, how would you go about figuring that out?

Bradford: That’s a very good question. A tough question, Heidi, you said something earlier, focus on the process, right?

Start with the basics. What is our selling motion? How do we execute against that selling motion? It’s interesting for me, certainly in my time at Slack that has evolved and changed so dramatically, that has never been one. Just as an example, when I started at slack, we didn’t have a professional services arm.

Our executive briefing center was a kind of once a quarter, there’s an event type of thing. And so I really think it does depend so much on the size of the organization and the go-to-market. But for me, if I’m putting myself in a sales mindset rather than success for a moment, the most important thing is where are my leads? Are they good? Can I action on them?

And that never goes away. That is always true. And sometimes that sits with enablement. Sometimes it sits with more than enablement, but it should never not sit with enablement. Our focus should always be on, are we supporting reps to have the right conversations, with the right people, based on the right attributes? And for a product-led growth organization like Slack, we have some real advantages in that regard in that we have what we call product qualified leads or signals based on usage of our free product or customers paying with a credit card.

But even without that, in the broader ecosystem of pure green field accounts, the highest leverage thing that any sales organization or anyone attached to the go-to-market process can do, including enablement is support reps to disambiguate good from bed and to get in front of customers early with the right message.

Oliver: Heidi, when we were talking about ways that the enablement team supports Nvidia’s go-to-market, you mentioned one of what is often a foundational piece for many sales organizations, which is the sales play. It’s an area that there’s a tremendous focus on right now because I think a lot of companies tell us that the sellers have a lot of resources, but they don’t always know what to do with them. And the company doesn’t always help them enough.

They might say we’re launching a new product. Here’s a pitch deck. Here’s a description of it. Here’s a demo script, but they don’t give them really clear guidance about how to go sell the darn thing. You had a challenging experience with sales plays when you tried to address that, tell us a little bit about that and how you’ve evolved your approach on this?

Heidi: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing that up. I’m still feeling the bruises from that. What we found is for the most part, the way that we strive to operate within the bigger field organization is to understand what we, as a bigger Nvidia are trying to achieve.

By understanding what we’re trying to achieve, that allows us to bring some recommendations and proposals as to how that might come to life. In the span of enablement, our sales play exercise many years ago now came in the opposite form. It was, Hey, I’ve got a great idea. It hit someone’s desk, and it was activated.

This is as we became increasingly focused on this go-to-market by industry. So we used, as I mentioned earlier, these subject matter experts who truly understand, we used them to take their knowledge and create sales plays. Who do I talk to? What is the conversation? All of the great resources that really bring that to life.

Years ago though, the size of the team that would be focused on each of these different industries was very small, which meant they were already experts. So we were preaching to the choir. We were burning a lot of cycles by going through the preparation of this sales play, delivered it to people who didn’t need help, they already understood these things and really kind of burned out the opportunity for us to do this in a more meaningful way.

What we realized is we didn’t ask the right questions right up front. It really should have been more of a, what are we trying to accomplish? What is the strategic objective here and then figure out how to address it? Fast forward to today, the team has grown in size by at least double in the last five years. So we don’t have 1500 specialists around the world. We have a lot of account managers. We have a lot of partner managers, and then we’ve got a series of specialists as well.

What we understand today is that sales play concept is going to be quite valuable and we’re at the early phases of reigniting. Now that we’ve got a bigger need, we have a better understanding of objectives. We’re early on in the process of defining what needs to be done, and what the value will be.

So we’re now coming all the way back again, starting with those small groups of subject matter experts, but the audience who is eager to take this guidance from their peers and to do so in a way that is easily scaled. That audience is very hungry, so it’s rather than trying to feed a hunger that didn’t exist, we’ve got great demand.

Oliver: That speaks also a little bit to some of the things that you were mentioning earlier, Bradford around making sure that the enablement team really stays connected to what’s happening on the ground. It doesn’t drift up into the cloud layer. One of the things that we’ve seen repeatedly is that sales plays are often built by people who really don’t understand the details of the go-to-market at the ground level and in some cases, have never actually sold anything. And those sales plays really struggle to land with the field.

I’m curious, given your focus on connecting with what the field needs and what’s really going on, how do you think, providing guidance to them can be done in the most effective way?

Bradford: I love that question, a lot. And I also love what you started Heidi, especially because what you shared, really proves to me that you are paying attention, which is the most important thing, right? And that you can try something, fail, learn, change, and come back to it because it was a good idea. It just wasn’t the right time.

I think that is so important for all of us in enablement. To admit that we don’t know, and that there’s a lot of good ideas out there and sometimes you’re just going to have to try and learn and adapt. I like the sales play. I certainly liked the concept of a sales play less because it is the answer for a seller and more because it formalizes the coalescence of supporting teams across the GTM organization.

So often what partner marketing, product marketing, solutions, strategy, are looking for is a way to tell a single story. The sales play has provided a mechanism by which enablement humans don’t have to serve that function, that there is an asset that there is collateralization of steps in a process and a suggested modality or motion to be successful.

And I stress suggested there because rare is the seller who will look at a sales play and be like, they figured it out. Here we go. I’m in the money. That’s where my field team and sales leaders really have to pick up the ball. Right. What we’ve given you is a guide. What we’ve given you is a way to navigate through the forest, but what we haven’t given you is the answer.

A sales play well-executed should accelerate, and mitigate against the time spent, not knowing where to look and not knowing what to do, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking it is the solution.

Oliver: Let’s take a minute and look forward to where the discipline of enablement is headed. Heidi, what are you excited about in the future that you’re working towards to really take your organization and enablement generally to the next level?

Heidi: Great question, and it’s a question that’s probably a different answer every six or 12 months.

Today’s answer a couple of different things. Personally, Nvidia is at a point where we are, I feel that I’m constantly describing us as being at an inflection point, but we absolutely are. Where we are today is identifying the fact that we are growing the organization. One of the areas in doing so is to move to a more mainstream market.

Nvidia tends to have very high share in some really high potency, but narrow markets. If you’re looking to expand more broadly, the things that Bradford just mentioned are really, really critical. What is the map through the forest? That’s going to allow somebody who’s new to the market, and more importantly, talking to customers who probably have not given these topics consideration.

So they’re talking to more lay people, rather than those really fabulous lunatic fringe who finish your sentences for you. But instead, you’re talking to people who are in their early stages of consideration. So what I’m excited about is that we are, I see enablement is being very critical in codifying some of that map through the forest to help get that journey to success.

The other thing is in going about that map, you need to understand what’s working and what’s not working. What I’m excited about going forward is more of the analytics that come back to us that say, do more of this and do less of that.

Not only does that help you do a better job of defining either what your sales motion is or what your sales process ought to be, or where you’ve got the strengths and where you’ve got some gaps that allows all of us to become surgical in where we put our efforts as enablement professionals. It also allows you to avoid those pitfalls of here’s the laundry list of things that I’d like for you to deliver as an enablement organization.

Instead, it puts the focus on what are we trying to accomplish and how do we believe based on data, data that comes from the different systems that we’re now using, the engagement with those systems, that tie between them that tell us the correlation between certain activities and the success of closing a sale. All of that is going to allow us to become much more strategic and much more aligned to the outcomes that the business is looking for. That’s what I’m excited about.

Oliver: Bradford, same question for you. What are you excited about looking forward in terms of things that you want enablement generally to step up to, and specifically at Slack?

Bradford: I think I’m pretty aligned with Heidi. I will own up to something that I would guess other enablement leaders do, but which just isn’t going to work in the long term for me is, I have a Slack channel called Bradford’s buds.

In the Bradfords buds channel are a bunch of ICs, sales leaders, people who’ve collaborated with enablement in the past, people I trust, people who are generally high performers and what you might call enablement minded. I will confer with them on our prioritization, our suggested it’s kind of modalities and timing.

I think historically I have over-relied on that group of people. What I would like and where we are moving forward, you know, we’re a seven year old kind of sales organization, and we are sitting on an enormous wealth of data and information in terms of what works and what doesn’t work. I alluded to conversational intelligence before I, we are sitting on just the world’s greatest trove of product metrics.

But what we haven’t successfully done at scale, is provide a robust recommendation engine and an aggregation of winning tips built out of that mountain of data. And I see the technology like really moving in a direction and Highspot certainly is part of this, moving in a direction to provide people data-driven trend analysis and indicators. Discrete from what sales strategy and operations tend to look at that is built on the more qualitative aspects of the sales motion, which forever have been the hardest to unlock and why enabling organizations tend to rely so heavily on those five or six friendly SMEs who will come in and speak at your training is because we don’t know what else to do.

That is changing and it’s changing very rapidly. I think enablement teams that can capitalize on creating intelligence out of information will really be the most successful.

Oliver: Building on that, I think it’s a really interesting point. Doesn’t that call for the enablement team to have new skills? And how do you tackle that? Because traditionally enablement was, I would say, I think it’s fair to say a more intuitively. As it becomes more analytical and more anchored in data. That means you’ve got to have people who are able to do that. I’m curious how you think about that and how you take taking that on?

Bradford: I would disagree, I think not fully Oliver, but I think the same could be said of sales, right? Sales used to be an intuitive art and we, there probably are sales organizations that put sellers through a data analytics bootcamp with some kind and certainly data of fluency is critical to be a seller of Slack.

I don’t put the onus on enablement to learn how to pour through mountains of data and pivot and build a recommendation engines. I put the onus on the systems. We rely on to make that easier for us. And when I’m in conversations with vendors, for example, that is constantly where I’m pressing and probably what you hear a lot in your conversations.

The hiring profile and sort of the enablement profile will change over time, much as it has with the AE. But for me, what will always be most important are the relational aspects of enablement. Someone who can build credibility with sales, someone who can lead and inspire a room. And I don’t want to trade that for someone who is a data analyst, I want to enrich that with someone who’s armed with insights.

Oliver: Heidi. I’m curious how you respond to that answer and what your take on it is?

Heidi: Similar and different. So I agree that the core enablement profile in terms of what kind of hiring profile you’re looking for, it won’t change much, but I do see augmentation in the organization.

For years have worked through a mound of data and I’ll be quite transparent a couple of years ago, we would get reporting from Highspot and really do some gymnastics in order to figure out what the value and what was the message it was telling us. Now I’ve seen great improvements so that it’s more intuitive for us to take other reports directly and make some decisions with it.

But I still think that, uh, you know, to Bradford’s point, we’ll continue to look to the vendors who are coming up with improved analytics that are actionable analytics, but there’s still multiple vendors that we’re working across. How do you decipher the key, um, connective tissue across those different solutions that you’re using?

For us I would say I would augment my team and we have since done so by hiring somebody who’s really good with understanding data, even if it’s just wrangling data from different sources. Even creating high-level insights out of it, that’s a value we couldn’t operate without having a dedicated role like that.

Oliver: One of the things that I find very interesting about what both of you bring up as we look forward in terms of where the discipline is headed is you both focus very much on analytics and data. That’s something that we’re hearing from many, many of our customers. It’s definitely one of the reasons why we’ve been making such really heavy investments in that space and we see huge promise from it.

I was listening to a venture capitalist and I stole a phrase that he is, he described a lot of SAAS environments as moving from Madmen to Moneyball. The notion that you’re moving from a, you know, a world where it’s people who are making decisions on intuition and conviction and charisma, and have the ability to it’s way people to a world where you’re making decisions through a combination of intuition and data.

That really unlocks possibilities that have been latent for so long because both enablement, marketing, all of these disciplines historically often just sort of threw things over the wall and hoped they were landing. Now you can know. And now you can make decisions based on that. So I think that’s really exciting and it’s an area that we, as a vendor are very heavily invested and encouraged by customers like yourselves.

We’re really excited to see how that helps the teams that we serve to be able to really go to the next level in delivering strategic results, not just tactically running programs that are necessary, but that are just so much less than what enablement can offer to the organizations that they have.

Bradford: Oliver, can I ask you a quick question?

Oliver: Yeah, of course.

Bradford: This is not been enablement driven, but certainly enablement supported. We’ve invested heavily in what we call a sales intelligence function at Slack. That is an organization that is separate from strategy, separate from enablement, and it is its own thing and they are product builders truly.

What they’re building are Slack native products fed by information from multiple database, including Highspot and others. We surface signals from that data, both to enablement and directly to reps and managers, in Slack. And I think it is one of the greatest differentiators of selling in Slack is that we have that function.

Would I want that function in enablement? Potentially I can see that, but I also really love having it as a district function within the organization. I wonder if you are seeing that or Heidi, how you think about that more in the marketplace?

Oliver: Well, let’s let Heidi go first and then I’ll give you my take on it.

Heidi: We haven’t been thinking about it in a discreet fashion. I’d say it seems to me Bradford that you’re in a really fantastic position in terms of your ability to get data and insights. It seems to me that you’ve got a more advanced situation than perhaps where we’re starting from and that’s probably why I emphasize that that’s something we’re looking forward to the evolution of in the future.

So we do have sales analytics, but we don’t have a great way of connecting them. We don’t have a great way of connecting sales, analytics, enablement analytics, some marketing analytics, but I’d say that today, unfortunately they’re not fully integrated. It sounds like you’ve got a more holistic visibility of which I’m envious.

Bradford: I don’t want to overplay it.

Heidi: I like the aspiration.

Oliver: What we’re seeing is people are experimenting with different models and nd also many people are struggling to be able to get access to the analytics and BI resources to do these kinds of experiments.

We’ve had kind of funny situations where we have customers who are extremely large, extremely well-funded technology companies, and they struggle to get a very simple BI initiative really funded. We’ve seen some people experimenting with the kinds of things you’re talking about, Bradford.

And then we’ve seen a lot of people say, can’t you just build some scorecards for us, so we don’t have to do any of that stuff. So we get a lot more of the latter. I think that the former, but there are definitely people exploring in this space and I think there’s just such possibility there I’m really eager to see those experiments begin to bear fruit.

I think ultimately we will develop industry best practices for how to go pursue that. I think we’re very much in the early stages and we’re still experimenting, but I’m really excited about it and to see where it’s headed.

So with that I would just like to say thank you to both of you for taking the time, love the insights that you shared with us and really appreciate you giving us a glimpse into what enablement is like at two of the very successful companies in the technology industry and how you’re tackling these problems and upleveling enablement functions in your company. So thanks very much.

Heidi: I appreciate the opportunity, and Bradford, I was furtively taking notes. I’m sure we’ll be in contact.

Bradford: Thank you, Oliver and thank you, Heidi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCOTT: My pleasure.

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

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

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

Today, we’ll discuss how COVID-19 and virtual work have changed the marketing landscape. I’ve invited my friend, Robert Rose from The Content Advisory, to help us explore these challenges and opportunities. Welcome, Robert, and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and your role to our audience?

Robert Rose: Oh, I certainly can Marissa. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be a guest on your show, which is really, really wonderfully fantastic.

My name is Robert Rose and I am currently — well, I have two roles, really: the chief strategy advisor for an organization called the Content Marketing Institute, which is a media company where we evangelize the approach of content marketing through events and blogs and webinars and all those kinds of things, and then my role as a consultant, where I work with lots of brands all over the world, mostly by Zoom, and help them operationalize their content. I work with these brands to figure out the people, the process, and the technology of how content can be made into a functional strategy in their business.

In between all of that, I, as you know, host a podcast or two and I’ve written a couple of books and keep myself busy in this wonderfully locked-down world that we find ourselves in.

MG: Thank you so much, Robert. I have been a huge fan even before I was able to join your podcast. Thank you for letting me be a part of the amazing content that you’re creating at the Content Marketing Institute as well.

So, Robert, recently at Highspot we conducted a survey across different marketing functions and the goal was to uncover marketing challenges that have emerged as a result of the global pandemic and virtual work. Both, I think, bring similar but different challenges to marketers across the world and the results of the survey felt very relatable. Nothing truly surprised me because I am a content marketer and experienced the same things. But I thought it was really interesting that though they are similar challenges that we’ve seen forever with marketing, it seems these challenges have become even more heightened.

The three biggest challenges that we found through the survey were understanding how to better engage customers, uncovering what content is most effective, and understanding what content sellers find most valuable. Again, this has always been an issue for marketers — I think everyone has these goals that they’re trying to solve — but it seems that they have been exquisitely heightened by working virtually and not having sellers next door to you. Everyone is vying for the eyes of buyers that are also working virtually and every marketer only has virtual ways to now engage with those buyers. Robert, would you say that these are the biggest challenges that you’re seeing as well with the marketers and organizations that you work with?

RR: I think you said it well. These are not necessarily new challenges, but I think they have a new wrinkle added to them which is something that we’ve been calling “the de-commodification of physical space.” Sort of the overarching new wrinkle to those three challenges is the idea of how to engage customers and how to create content that has an impact. All of the things that we were challenged to do with content were always in a world where the digital experience or the content experience we were creating was an adjunct to the physical space. In other words, it was where you went and downloaded the conference presentation after you attended the conference, or it was where you went to get the experience after you had the salesperson visit you in your office, or it was the website that you did the research on before you invited people into your group. It was sort of sitting alongside it. Now the idea of the digital content experience is not just sitting next to — it’s a replacement. It has to actually act as a proxy of that physical, intimate relationship building that we could do in-person at a conference, at a client, wherever it is.

What I see when I see the same challenges that we’ve seen forever is that this wrinkle is really just extra emphasis on the need to get great with digital content and the digital experiences we’re creating because they’re just that much more efficient.

MG: I absolutely love that term “digital experience” because I think what also has become profoundly clear through the last year is that customer experience is more important now than ever before. It’s always been really important, really guiding your buyers, potential customers, or existing customers through a virtual experience that actually convinces them that you are the right vendor or partner.

I feel like marketers have become so much more important to the funnel for organizations because this is really the only way to get buyers in the door before sellers are able to wow them with the product and sales pitches. What is your take on how to elevate these virtual experiences for customers to ensure that marketers are really getting that foot in the door and able to help fill the funnel and convince these buyers to move forward?

RR: Certainly, all of that is true and I think the one thing we’re seeing companies do that are leading this charge is the same things that make up the wrinkles and the challenges that aren’t different. It’s the same answers, but they’re more accelerated now; in other words, the answers to the challenges are the same, which is to get better at it.

What I mean by that is — because that’s an unsatisfying answer for sure — what we’re seeing is the need to connect these digital experiences. What has happened as we’ve gotten more proficient with digital content and the creation of digital experiences is we’ve also become just as siloed. We’ve become siloed in marketing, sales, customer experience, and customer loyalty. All of those digital experiences that we create were kind of off on their own island. In many cases, and while that was okay, everybody sort of realized that’s a problem and we really should try and solve it.

It’s really difficult and it’s not okay anymore. It has to be the pressure to get those things connected. We often look at our website and the only insight that we have into improving it or personalizing it or making it more relevant is the insight we get from the ad tech, basically whatever report that says how visitors were accumulated there. We don’t have data going back and forth between the experiences to help improve them and to connect them in a way that makes them more personal and more relevant and more useful for customers. The answer to that, or where we’re seeing it get elevated, is where you can actually start to connect things to your blog, the website, the e-commerce channel, the email channel, the text experience, all of those things that they know about each other. And they’re using the data in a smart, transparent, and intelligent way to deliver a better experience, instead of the siloed thing that we’ve been dealing with for so long.

MG: I love that answer so much, and it makes me pause to think about ways that we can better provide a cohesive experience from website to email marketing from demand gen to content. A few other challenges that we found in the surveys, as we said earlier: uncovering content that is most effective, better understanding what content resonates most with your sellers, as well as understanding what buyers are looking for. whether it’s topical, what topics are they most engaged with as well as what kind of content. Is it a webinar? Is it a podcast? Is it an infographic? Is it an ebook?

What are your best practices that you can offer or have seen work for some of the organizations and marketers that you work with to really better understand your content landscape as well as what topics and kinds of content are buyers engaging with now to really help move that needle?

RR: Yeah, it’s difficult. There’s no doubt about it. These new wrinkles certainly haven’t made it any easier. The one thing that we say that is helpful to think about when starting is that in many organizations and especially those that have separate field sales, field marketing, enterprise sales, enterprise marketing, demand generation, there are siloed teams working on various parts of the customer journey.

For a moment, don’t think about de-siloing the organization. That’s typically above our pay grade. But what we can do is start thinking about how we decipher the customer’s experience, even if we start with one bridge. Just something as simple as, “Hey, if I subscribed to the blog, I shouldn’t have to put in my email address if I want to subscribe to the resource center on the same website.” Those kinds of simple, easy changes that I know are not so simple and not so easy because you need good technology in order to do all of those things. But really finding the small, easy wins where we can start to connect these experiences in a way that one, gives us a better singular view into the customer journey themselves, and two, starts to join the content journey for them so that they’re not frustrated, that decreases the friction on the things that they’re trying to do as they go through our various digital content and just start small and then do the next one. If you can start to decipher the journey, what happens is you start de-siloing the organization as a result. Maybe that can be a helpful 2021 tip. Don’t think about trying to de-silo everybody. What you can do is start looking at the customer’s journey and start seeing how you can de-silo that, one step at a time.

MG: You got me thinking about some of the organizations and vendors that I follow very closely and you’re right; I downloaded an ebook and clicked a button that said yes, send me newsletters and blog posts and so on and so forth. That’s how I’ve become so consumed by these brands without even realizing it. They swindled me the way that you’re recommending.

I completely agree that it’s all about — coming back to your point — keeping buyers within this virtual experience. It’s about making sure that they have a cohesive experience from start to finish with your brand, regardless of what activation you are putting forth at the time, whether it’s a blog post, a new ebook, podcast, or webinar, it becomes a lot easier to consume that content when you’ve made it easy for me and it’s not taking a lot of my time or energy. I’m going to be more prone to say yes and see what you have to say and mention it to a boss or a colleague as I move further down the funnel and say, “I actually listened to a podcast episode recently that talks about this exact thing.”

This topic has sparked another question for you. What are some predictions that you have that content, product, or field marketing may see change over the next year?

RR: I think it’s a related thing. I mean, there are lots of wonderful predictions and I think many of them you and previous guests will have spoken to the idea of the rise of audio as a format — not this podcast withstanding, right? But then there’s also video and multimedia and the delivery of that, the resurgence or renaissance, if you will, of email marketing. I think there are a lot of trends for 2021 that will continue and, certainly, we’re going to still see the more direct-to-consumer types of efforts both in B2B and B2C because of everything we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about.

But the one prediction that I will mention because I think it’s really important for digital marketers is to join up the skill sets needed for what we would commonly call “content” in the business. It used to be good enough for content marketers to be able to write well, create some good content, maybe do a little design, maybe have some brand journalism in their background, but now we’re seeing businesses say, “You know what, things like taxonomies, workflow, CMS, measurement, SEO, and content structure and all of those things are incredibly important too.” Where we’re seeing content marketers really succeed is when they start to add a bit to their T-shaped skills. So, in addition to being great storytellers, they should also be great content strategists as well. The ones that we’re seeing really succeed are those that can broaden out their skill sets to some of those more technical types of approaches.

MG: In order to be successful with the changes that have occurred over the last year, and we’re still waiting to see how much more things will continue to change, you have to wear many hats and you have to have different sets of skills and talents in order to think outside of the box. You can’t just be a content strategist without putting together what you see this buyer’s journey looking like, or a campaign looking like. I think that, as a content marketer myself, that has been an area that I’ve been forced to grow in over the last year. No more is it just about words, but when I meet up with our design team or our digital team, what is the experience that I want our buyers to have? What does it look like? What is it going to feel like? What kind of emotions are we hoping to tug at to get them to be interested in the things that we’re saying, the story we’re trying to tell? I think that’s hard to do when you’re so siloed in one function of the business, it’s hard for you to come outside of yourself to say “Hey, even though I’m a content marketer, this is how I see it weaving into a campaign for product marketing, customer marketing, or demand gen. Here are ways that we can thread the needle through multiple different functions to make sure that the audience, our buyers, our prospects, existing customers, are getting the best experience possible because it’s not just one way of viewing this interaction and experience.”

One other question I did have for you — similar to the previous one about predictions for the year — are there trends that you have taken note of that you think are a good idea to watch for or jump on board? Are there any insider insights to share from what you’ve seen working with different organizations and marketers?

RR: Well, we just spoke about two, which were the idea of audio and video for sure. We’ve all seen the rise of Clubhouse and some of the acquisitions that Twitter has made in the audio space. We can see podcasts certainly as a new trend with companies like Amazon and Spotify making acquisitions very, very quickly in this space. So, as a content marketer, as a marketer, it really just perks up my ears to start to think about things like audio. How do I start to really take advantage of the audio and video that goes along with it?

My thinking these days has really been around this idea of linear experiences. So, both audio and video — even though you edit them in a non-linear way, they become linear experiences for your consumer. It’s not the kind of thing that people just sort of skip around and browse through, right? Either you’re in or you’re not, right? You’re either listening or you’re not, or you’re watching or you’re not. It’s a huge challenge for us to get really good at this, where we look at great television, movies, radio, and podcasts and go, “Wow. They really know how to create a strong set of narratives there in that linear experience.”

I think that’s where we have the most growth and, quite frankly, a huge opportunity this year with so many people being stuck in front of their screens. Well, we can give them something to look at. We just really need to push ourselves and push the medium and push our creativity.

So, for me, it’s all about audio and video this year and how do we as brands and marketers get really good at it.

MG: I absolutely love that and completely agree that audio and video is the kind of content that I’m consuming and the kind of content that I want to create for other people. I appreciate the recommendation. Is there a recommendation that you have for how to think about that strategy and how to start to deploy that within your organization?

RR: You know — and here’s the funny thing — this will go right back to where we started the show, which is experiences that sit in parallel to the ones you’ve already created. We talked about this as a challenge that we have, and this is really where we can start to expand our brains when it comes to how do we develop content. Just simple things. If you’ve got a blog, one of the things that I’m working on is making all my blog posts available as an audio stream. If you would prefer to listen to it rather than read it, there’s that opportunity. If you’re taking a walk or whatever, and you want to have a five-minute listen instead of a five-minute read, that’s one thing. Webinars, the idea of online content delivered through video shows. Then, of course, there’s the classic launching a podcast, launching a videocast, getting your YouTube channel all set up. All of these things I think are going to play into one side of the spectrum, launching actual shows that we want people to subscribe to. All the way to literally just offering up different ways to consume the same content we’ve been creating. That interview with our CEO? Yes, it’s nice that we have it in a wonderful 1,200 word blog post, but let’s get the audio of that up or let’s get the video or both, where we can start offering ways to consume the content based on the ways that people really want to.

MG: I think that is such a great recommendation because sometimes I will have time and energy to listen to something, but if it’s a video, it feels for some reason more consuming for me to watch a video, even though I can avert my eyes and continue to listen. It’s the idea that it’s in video format that makes me feel like I don’t have the time for it. You say that, “Oh, it’s an audio file,” or, “It’s a podcast,” and somehow I have time for that.

I really appreciate the idea of taking a blog post and putting it into an audio format or taking a video and decoupling it and putting it into audio and video. So, whatever your preference is, giving your audience multiple ways that they can consume the same exact thing.

RR: From what I’ve heard from colleagues who have done it, they say it has increased engagement a lot, they are getting much more increased engagement on the content that they had created. A lot of that, I think, is because it’s that linear experience. So you think about a blog post and you go read it and, let’s be honest, we stretch that term “read” a lot. We read it, but really we read the headlines and maybe we read one of the little blocks of text in there and got the main message of it and went, “OK, I’m done.”

But if it’s a linear experience, like audio, you’re going to listen to it. And to your point, you might listen to it while you’re multitasking or doing other things, but you listened to the whole thing, right? You listen to all five minutes of it or eight minutes of it, or however long it is. So that increased engagement is something I’m hearing that is really valuable. It certainly makes for — going back to our original discussion — a better customer experience.

MG: I’m taking so many notes based on this conversation for things that I’m planning to walk away with and new ideas for our content strategy here at Highspot. So, Robert, thank you so much. This was just as informative and educational for me as I think anyone who may be listening to this, thank you for your time and for joining us on the Win-Win podcast. It’s always a pleasure.

RR: Absolutely. My pleasure, thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Gartner recently reported that 41% of employees are likely to remain remote post coronavirus pandemic. So what are some best practices for training, specifically onboarding, for a remote workforce?

I’ve asked my friend Shamis Thomson, Hootsuite’s Manager of Global Sales Enablement, to join us as we explore this topic. Welcome, Shamis, and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and your role to the audience, please?

Shamis Thomson: Thank you so much for having me, Marissa. So, my name is Shamis. I am on the sales enablement team here at Hootsuite. I’ve been at Hootsuite for seven and a half years and on the enablement team for the last four and a half. I focus on supporting our entire revenue organization within the sales enablement team, currently sitting in our sales operations department.

MG: Thank you, Shamis. So, since the start of the pandemic, virtual training and onboarding have become so much more important for organizations, but particularly for sales, who are the main drivers of revenue. And because of that, it’s really important that they get new sellers up and running as fast as possible and as effectively as possible.

I know onboarding is an area of interest for you because, again, it can mean the difference between a great seller or one who struggles to hit quota for a few months or quarters, even. Can you tell us what your biggest onboarding goals are for the next six to 12 months?

ST: Yeah, it’s a good one. We have a lot of ambitious goals around this, and I think the move to virtual has really caused us to have to look at this a lot more closely. One of the things that I’m really keenly interested in better understanding is how our onboarding efforts set up our ongoing employee experiences and, ultimately, their development, and how we can further tailor those experiences to really give them what they need in a much quicker way. That’s going to be one of the big focuses for 2021.

MG: Do you feel that with this move to make sure that everyone can get what they need a lot quicker you have seen anything in particular that has helped you accomplish that goal? Is it tools? Is it processes? Where have you found success with making sure that your sellers or the entire org that you support are getting what they need as timely as possible?

ST: So I think it comes down to a couple of things. It’s really about visibility and communication. You know, having visibility through our technology and understanding how people are potentially experiencing that onboarding experience. Then, in turn, being able to reach out and connect with those individuals and better understand what that experience is like and what we can do to continue to refine it and improve upon it has been a key win for us today.

MG: I know Hootsuite culture is really important to you guys and supporting the growth of your organization. How have you found success in nurturing company culture while also supporting that growth mindset culture?

ST: Culture, for me, is really about beliefs and behaviors. One of the most important things to focus on first is really what you’re measuring. For example, think about one of the best measures of revenue growth actually is LTV or lifetime value, right? From the customer standpoint, it’s really prioritizing that customer experience, and culture often stems from the top. We’re fortunate. We have a new leader, Tom, who is our new CEO and he has a real focus on the growth mindset and bringing that into the conversation, which in turn is helping us revisit our values and where we’re reinforcing them in the business.

MG: It’s always really nice when you have a leader who shares the same values and it’s coming from the top down, right? You don’t have to worry so much about driving this initiative alone because now it’s coming from the top and you get to say, “OK, we all have this vision. Now it is a company-wide initiative and I’m not just over in the corner tinkering and doing it on my own — I have some support here.”

You mentioned a little bit about visibility being important. Can you dive into how you cultivate visibility and accountability in your onboarding program in particular?

ST: Yeah, of course. Visibility and accountability might be my two favorite words. Visibility really comes down to what you can see from the data you have available. We’re often limited to subjective qualitative data, which in turn is often filled with a lot of bias. Getting that quantitative data really allows us to start asking better questions, getting to more root cause more effectively.

We’ve used Highspot, actually, in a number of instances to help us do this and really just shine a light into areas that are relatively dark and that’s been fantastic. Accountability may be the more challenging of the two, and I think it really comes down to trust.

You need to be able to establish trust before you can get anyone’s accountability. It sort of inherently stems from the individual and  I often say trust is the currency of movement. If you want to move forward, you need to establish trust. If you find yourself moving in the wrong direction, it’s likely an area you need to revisit.

So, from my experience, sometimes it’s going to involve working through stakeholders who already have that trust in place in order to reduce the amount of time you have to spend developing it yourself. Not to be limited by the circle of trust that you, extend that into the stakeholders you work with as well.

MG: Can you share an example of someone new, such as a new leader you haven’t worked with before — how are you gaining that trust so that you can hold their team accountable or hold their frontline sellers accountable? Everything is distant from what it used to be and being able to have these conversations in-person and meeting someone and building that trust in-person I think is a lot easier than virtually. What are some recommendations that you have?

ST: Don’t do it alone. It’s about establishing that sphere of influence around the people that you want to work with. Trust is earned over time and it’s earned through exposure and experience that you have. So recognize where there are opportunities to work with other people that are already in that sphere of trust and influence and work closely with them to align around what the common goal is. It will only expedite your time towards trust with the individuals you want to work with as well.

MG: I love that. When you mentioned visibility, you talked about one of the metrics of success for culture being lifetime value. Can you dive into the top three metrics that you look at for success when regarding onboarding? How does our audience discover what the metrics of success are for them and what have they been for you?

ST: There’s a there’s a lot of things you can measure, and measurement and tracking are maybe two sides of a coin. When I think about measuring success I think about it from the context often of the average contract value, time to close, pipeline, velocity, things like that. Obviously, we talk a lot about ARR and SAS, but I think LTV is another one that more organizations are recognizing is important.

When I look at the tracking site, it’s a lot more about leading indicators as well. Seeing how engaged our reps are, what is the volume and frequency that they’re engaging with the resources that we provide to them, the training, or the content.

It’s a good indicator of sort of the level of investment that they’re putting into themselves. Another area that we look at is how are they showing up? We use things like call intelligence and other platforms to help us get an indication of how well they’re adopting the material and the training that we’re providing to them. Then looking at effectiveness, win rates, and are they approaching the right opportunities? Are they making the right kind of decisions and digging into those areas?

MG: Have you found that any of your metrics have shifted or changed since moving to a fully remote workforce?

ST: I would say there is a natural sort of evolution and I’m not sure that that the virtual side is necessarily been the driving force behind that yet. But I’m suspecting as we continue to evolve our approach into 2021, there may be some more learnings that we’ll have around that. Today there hasn’t been anything that sort of stands out as, “Oh, now that we’re virtual now the measures change.”

MG: That’s really interesting. I think because so much has changed as a result of virtual life, but so much has stayed the same when it comes to, “Hey, these are the things that are important and this is still our north star.” That continuity for me personally has been very satisfying and helped a lot with this transition to say, “OK, my job has shifted in the way I’m going about it. However, my key metrics of success, my KPIs, the things that I need to accomplish on a grand scale, have remained the same.” I think it does take a little bit of the stress off for managers like yourself to say, “Hey, we still have the same goals. It just may look different the way we go about executing them.”

How do you know if certain actions that are being taken by sellers, certain behaviors are necessarily the right ones? How do you make that correlation between a seller sending 50 emails a week that may have equated to them meeting quota? How do you go back to the metrics and behaviors and connect those two with performance?

ST: I look at it from a couple of perspectives, one is looking for those early warning signs. For example, looking at the data and tracking or monitoring it to see if a particular group hasn’t adopted at the rate that we see for the broader cohort. That’s a bit of a flag that we can then chase down in a more specific way when it comes to measuring. Though typically we’re more focused on more official things that we’ve already gotten placed.

So, I think about the sales process, right? And how are our teams adhering to our sales process? Those are very quantified, measurable steps that involve both ourselves and our customers and really help us understand how we’re moving along. That’s probably where we do most of our measurement relative to that, but there is value in the tracking and those early warning flags for us.

MG: So, Shamis, I think you and I both understand and know the importance of training and onboarding for sales teams, especially now more than ever. Taking a step back and kind of getting broad, can you just share your thoughts and insights on why onboarding is so important? If we’re speaking to a sales leader, what value do you really see when looking at metrics, behaviors, and performance tied to onboarding?

ST: I’d say onboarding is very important. It’s the first impression that someone has of your organization. It can really set the tone for what that individual’s experience is and becomes. So getting that right is critical. Living in this virtual world, there is more consideration that we have to have around how are we improving that experience and adapting that experience to this environment. There are things that we would have relied on previously with face-to-face interaction and all the benefits of that.

I think that we need to recognize that this is also an opportunity for us to go deeper in terms of how we are tailoring that sort of corporate orientation and onboarding into these longer periods. So maybe onboarding was weeks before and now it’s months, or maybe it was a couple of months and now it’s several months. It’s looking at a longer tail to what onboarding is and how we can tailor that more to each of the different teams as well as individuals within those teams.

I think it’s a really good opportunity for us to recognize that we don’t want to put top performers through an experience that is meant for struggling performers. That’s going to chase them out the door. So this is a real opportunity for us to go deeper.

MG: I completely agree that it has to be tailored, especially if it’s a longer tail program. If I’m a top performer and I consistently hit my numbers and the training I’m going to for three hours a day is about engaging customers, that’s not really content that I need to consume.

When looking at tailoring programs, are you going by, “Here are the three buckets that we think are the most important and the sellers that fall within the buckets, therefore they will go to these individual lessons?” How are you deciding who should do what as far as continued education and tailored onboarding programs?

ST: I think the important piece here is to allow people to sort of self-select to an extent into this. Through their actions and their behaviors, the people that want to lean in more should be given more. People that maybe aren’t taking the opportunity to dive into what they’re given, we need to recognize that as a different type of experience that we need to align around.

Whether it’s bringing in more of a buddy system to support those individuals that aren’t as engaged and trying to find other ways to bring them in and get them more engaged. And conversely, with folks that are leaning in, how do we get their IP more distributed within our organization? How do we connect them with other parts of the business that want to hear from our sales organization? And make sure that they’re given that opportunity to sort of share their expertise within the business and reward them that way.

MG: You said something and a light bulb went off. As you said, it’s self-selection to a certain extent and the participant, the seller, whatever their job title may be, has to want to be there. And how do you get these sellers or managers on board and subscribe to what you’re putting down? Essentially, if they’re detractors who don’t really think that they need this they’re tenured, they’ve been selling for 15 years and they don’t need one more onboarding program. How do you win them over and get them really bought in on recommendations that you may have?

ST: I think one of the areas is just showing results. Seeing is believing for most when it comes to overcoming the objections of critics, I think you just have to find ways. Sometimes you have to get creative, but you have to find ways to show them and they’ll see and recognize that there’s an opportunity just waiting for them if they want to take it. We’re not in the business of standing behind people and pushing them, but we’re absolutely in the business of leaning down and pulling people up who want to be pulled up.

I think that it’s important to recognize that we’re all — well, most of us, I imagine, suffer from a resource constraint in our roles, and with a finite amount of bets to place you want to make sure you maximize your results. I am going to bias towards helping those that want to be held probably more. I’d love to help everybody, but my default is to help people that want to be helped first.

MG: I love that term that you used: “I’m in the business of pulling people up who want to be pulled up.” I think that’s actually pretty powerful when looking at training and onboarding — you can’t force anyone to do anything. What you can do is if someone is struggling and they want to get better or figure out where they’re falling flat, then I’m all bought in and I know how to help you.

I think that often with training, onboarding, and any change management role, I can’t help you if I don’t know what you need. I think that’s really at the heart of when you said tailoring programs and training to what the rep in front of you really needs to improve on.

I loved that idea of, “I can only do so much.” So, Shamis, what has helped you in building an effective and efficient onboarding program?

ST: Some of the things that have been really beneficial for us in our development of onboarding programs have really been gaining that visibility into what’s working and what’s not working. It can seem like a kind of an obvious thing. But for our processes, we didn’t have any kind of real granular visibility into just how effective was our onboarding efforts. So by starting to leverage the technology — and Highspot was critical to gain that visibility into how our new owls were going through their onboarding experience. The level to which they were going through and engaging with the resources provided to them. It really allowed us to start to see the connection between the people that were embracing that experience and the people that weren’t. In turn, we were able to work with our business leaders to build out on that more and put more structure and build accountability into that process.

That really solidified that trust element that allowed us to continue to build and refine our efforts there. It really started with just gaining visibility into what’s working and what’s not working. I think maybe if there’s one thing I would leave on, it would be that learning is a learned skill. It’s important to recognize that because it’s something that can be developed and coached, but it’s not something we can just assume everybody has developed already.

MG: Can you dive a little deeper into your experience with that?

ST: So for me, there are really two qualities that are really important in what goes into a successful rep. Emotional intelligence, which is really about interpersonal skills and the ability to control pressure and stress and adapt to the uncertainties of the job. Another area that we don’t often spend a lot of time on is curiosity. The notion of the curiosity quotient. This is, to me, one of the areas where it really stands out because one of the things that identify people that have a higher degree of curiosity is their willingness to invest in their own level of understanding and knowledge on a subject.

They tend to go far deeper than their peers that lack that level of natural curiosity. That’s easier for us to identify from one standpoint, but it’s also about how they show up in conversation too. It’s the way they approach a discovery conversation with a customer. Ultimately combining these two things leads to a better buying experience. When I say learning is a learned skill, it is, but it’s a very identifiable skill and it’s one that I’m always looking for.

MG: Have you found that curiosity and emotional intelligence are the hallmarks of a great seller or someone who’s just going to be very successful within a training program?

ST: Both. I think they are hallmarks of great salespeople, perhaps they’re not requirements per se, and we haven’t made them requirements yet from a traditional selling context. I think that’ll change over time, to be honest. I think as we continue to move into this buyer’s world, we’re going to start to recognize that these are actually the new things that we want.

You know, we’re not looking for closers and all these more historical things that we’ve associated with what great sellers look like. I think the future of great sellers is the current great learner. This virtual forward environment.

MG: I think you are absolutely right — the future is going to require someone with a decent to high emotional intelligence and curiosity because you no longer get the luxury of being personable in person. You have to be personable on an email, over Slack, on the phone. You lose some of that charisma that you can turn on when you’re in-person and shaking someone’s hand. You have to be able to translate that through emails and phone calls now, and you have to be more curious to go find your own answers now that you can’t turn around and ask Shamis anymore.

Gartner recently said that they’re expecting 35 to 40% of sellers not to return back to the office and remain remote. If that is the case, 35 to 40% of people who are selling virtually right now will remain selling virtually. Curiosity and emotional intelligence is going to be detrimental to their success.

If I were to list a few takeaways of a great onboarding program based on this conversation, they would be visibility, accountability, and trust.

ST: Completely agree with that.

MG: Well, Shamis, thank you so much for your time. This has been an amazing conversation and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. It’s always a pleasure to work with you and thank you for joining the Win-Win podcast.

ST: Thank you so much, Marissa.