In a survey conducted by Zippia, 86% of leaders in the workplace cite lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failures. So how can you increase stakeholder buy-in to maximize adoption and collaboration?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Here to discuss this topic is Gurneet Sagger. Thank you for joining us, Gurneet. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Gurneet Sagger: Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m a bit of an enablement veteran before the word enablement was invented. And in a past life, I actually led global sales teams. So about 13 years of leading sales teams, I made the jump into the enablement world.
SS: Wonderful, we’re excited to have you here. Now, prior to partnering with Highspot, you leveraged a different enablement platform. What was the impetus for deciding to switch platforms?
GS: Yeah, Highspot for us is really about ease of use to the team. I think many enablement people will relate to a lot of tall tasks ahead of you with a small team. And that’s what led me to Highspot. Highspot was easy to use on the initial demos and the interface.
SS: I love hearing that. And in bringing in Highspot, you built a really strong partnership with sales and marketing leaders including your CRO to gain buy-in. What are some of your best practices for securing stakeholder buy-in and proving the impact of an enablement platform to your CRO?
GS: Yes, I think I’ve been very privileged to have leaders that I’ve reported to who are bought into the power that an enablement team can have. I ultimately was given the opportunity of, “Hey, Gurneet, what is it you need in order for us to scale? And what is it going to take?” And one of those key things was having a sales readiness LMS tool. And that’s why Highspot was selected. But throughout the process of getting through budgets, and headcount planning, I made sure that I had buy-in across sales, account management, marketing, and our product leaders.
SS: That’s fantastic feedback. Now, since implementing Highspot, you’ve seen incredible momentum, including 94% recurring usage and really strong adoption in nearly every area of the platform in terms of adoption. What are your best practices for driving adoption across your go-to-market teams?
GS: One of the things we did out of the gate is once we launched, there was no exception to be able to relay information out to go-to-market teams unless it was through Highspot.
As a company, we use Confluence, which is a phenomenal tool for the broader team, but for all the other departments to move quickly, for example, product, if there’s a new product update, to make sure that they could roll out without any delays. Having each core product leader provide the enablement team with the information in a digestible way, which could be inputted into Highspot quickly was critical for us.
And we just didn’t have any exception to the rule. Information needed to go out. It had to be leveraged through Highspot and ultimately you want to be able to, as a leader, show the ROI on the enablement tool and the costs that you’re incurring onto the company.
SS: Those are fantastic best practices, I know our audience can take a lot from that. One area that I know that you guys have really championed the success is in your onboarding program, I know that you guys have achieved a 77% active learner rate. How do you use Highspot to effectively onboard and certify reps?
GS: Highspot is the most critical tool for us. We grew headcount from 20 sellers to over 200 on the sales side and then we also grew our account management teams and we use Highspot on every single lesson. We’ve gone from a two-week onboarding program, due to high growth headcount scale, and now we’ve moved into a three-week program. And over the course of time, like many companies, you’re coming out of the pandemic, moving into a hybrid environment. But, we’ve had sellers all across the country in multiple sales hub locations.
And so Highspot enabled my small team to be able to get the learnings out and to be able to track performance quickly. Every onboarding lesson sits in Highspot with all the accompanying resources to make it easy to find for our new hires.
SS: Now, in your opinion, what would you say is the value of having a unified platform that allows you to deliver everything from content to onboarding and training, what is the value of having that unified for your reps?
GS: It’s just ultimately speed. You know, my goal as an enablement leader is to prove and show that we can increase work rate, right? Not just for our sellers, but also our account management team. And so being able to search something in Highspot. We need to make sure that you can find them.
And if a rep can’t find what they’re looking for, we’ve got good feedback loops so we can keep things updated. But, ultimately, it is getting our sellers and our go-to-market teams, the information they need, as quick as they can get it.
SS: With all of this momentum for enablement and you’ve grown your team significantly and you’ve really done a fantastic job positioning enablement as a strategic business function.
How have you leveraged Highspot to help you scale the impact of your team on the business?
GS: We’ve used Highspot now, not only through onboarding, but increasing locations that our sellers move into, new verticals, and new product updates. And so it’s enabled us to execute a lot quicker than had we gone through the manual process or I know for many enablement folks that are still dealing with Google drives and sorting things through that.
And so it’s enabled our leaders to be able to roll out as quick as possible. We want to make sure that we’re providing the very level best for our clients, what we call our partners here. And to do that, we’ve got to certify individuals. We have some critical verticals that we sell into that need a little bit more attention to detail.
Every time we roll something out, we certify our sellers to make sure that we’re reinforcing those learnings and then enabling them to execute.
SS: You guys are having amazing impact. What would you say some of the key business results that you’ve achieved so far with Highspot are, and how do you go about measuring enablement success?
GS: Yeah, that’s really going to be critical for us going into this year. We’ve gone through two years of headcount growth, and now we’ve really got to start doubling down on obviously overall ramping success of our sellers. But I think, ultimately, we have a phenomenal platform and product and for us to get it into the hands of our partners and our professionals, those are the hourly workers on the platform, as quick as possible, it means education.
Being able to ramp our new hires faster, being able to train a seller one day, and within 24 hours, they’re certified, and that then unlocks further revenue streams, like further account pursuits for those individuals is really critical.
SS: Gurneet, last question for you. As you look to the future, you’ve mentioned that you plan to take advantage of a lot of the new enablement innovations, like artificial intelligence, to continue to scale enablement’s impact.
How do you plan to leverage AI and other innovations to continue to drive business impact in the year ahead?
GS: It’s everything from developing our call scoring and making sure that’s then aligned with our rubrics and our scorecards across all of our tool stack.
I’m excited to see what Highspot will do with AI on their product roadmap and we’re already seeing kind of improvements with just descriptions and surfacing content in the right places. And for us as a business, AI is one of those key investment areas. And so as an enablement team, we do make sure that we’re following the same charge that our leaders have set.
SS: It is an exciting future ahead that we have on that front. Gurneet, thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate it.
GS: Thank you so much for having me.
SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
