GitLab's Best Practices for Effectively Driving Adoption

As a DevSecOps platform dedicated to supporting companies in their efforts to develop, secure, and deploy safety-compliant software and reduce tool sprawl, GitLab is passionate about sourcing software solutions for common pain points. After noticing inefficiencies in its own internal processes, it sought a platform equipped to centralize its content and help its sellers go to market more effectively. Looking to ease the sales process for its reps and develop a more comprehensive sales strategy, GitLab turned to Highspot.

Embracing Enablement to Ensure Field Success

Without a single source of truth, GitLab’s sellers struggled to surface content, and its sales enablement team faced low adoption when rolling out strategic initiatives. To curate consistency in the field, GitLab needed a robust enablement solution. But first, it had to develop a plan to effectively utilise this solution and ensure its enablement strategy accurately reflected its goals.

Before selecting a platform, GitLab needed to determine what enablement could do for the business. Understanding its desired outcomes — creating a single source of truth and landing strategic initiatives in the field — allowed GitLab’s enablement team to identify key areas for improvement and, from there, seek the best solution to address them.

Fostering Alignment by Curating Content and Guidance

When first implementing Highspot, GitLab’s enablement team stressed the importance of prioritising content governance. “We initially focused really hard on ensuring we got the most value from equipping the sales teams with the right content they need to be successful,” noted Shahrazad. “The team did a great job of ensuring that we had the right governance in place, that we have a model for contribution and ongoing management of the platform to ensure that we have quality content.” Their early efforts proved successful, and now 64% of GitLab’s content is well-governed.

Having created a single source of truth, GitLab could turn its attention to in-the-field behaviour, using Highspot’s capabilities to boost reps’ adoption of strategic initiatives. “One of the things we do when we leverage Highspot is to tie our enablement initiatives to the capabilities within Highspot,” shared Shahrazad. “We use the Sales Play capability as an underpinning of everything that we do. Additionally, the insights and analytics that we get are extremely valuable for us to tell the value and impact of our programmes.”

Using Sales Plays, GitLab cultivated alignment across its teams, easing the ideation and implementation of its collaborative sales strategy. “Our Sales Play adoption has been really positive and is directly related to the level of collaboration we have within the company to deliver our Plays on a regular basis,” said Shahrazed. “We work with product marketing, field teams, and ops teams to orchestrate the right Plays for our field team members to make it easy for them to communicate value to customers.” This strategic alignment created a simplified process reps quickly bought into, resulting in 84% Play adoption across GitLab’s sales teams. And, with its enablement strategy still evolving, GitLab continues to partner with Highspot to set its sights ever higher.

Engaging Buyers Through Strategic Alignment

With Highspot, GitLab solved content inefficiencies and cultivated alignment, generating a 36% increase in rep engagement in enablement programmes. And, with newfound visibility into content usage, GitLab could develop a more efficient, data-driven sales strategy. “One impactful business result we’ve measured is productivity, the time it takes for a seller to find the information they need,” explained Shahrazad. “The second one is something we haven’t ever been able to do before, which is get basic insights into how content is used, how it is consumed, and how customers engage with it, which gives us unparalleled vision into the mind of the buyer.”

Line of sight into rep behaviour and buyer engagement allowed GitLab to move forward strategically, using Highspot as more than just a solution for content management and rep alignment. With a data-backed pulse on buyer engagement and a consistent sales strategy equipped to effectively target buyers’ needs, GitLab enabled reps to more effectively connect with customers.