How Fastly Improved Buyer Engagement by 19%

Edge cloud platform Fastly truly understands the benefits of a great training program. With their programs serving about 20% of all existing internet traffic, it isn’t hard to understand why they need a training platform that can keep up with their needs. With a sales team of more than 250 across traditional sales, SDR, account management, and sales engineering, Fastly is committed to delivering an exceptional buyer and customer experience. This means reps must be equipped, trained, and coached to communicate exactly how Fastly can optimize the delivery of customers’ web and mobile traffic, ultimately leading to an improved end-user experience. After leveraging Highspot, Fastly was able to enhance the consistency and flexibility of its sales materials and training programs to improve productivity.

Lack of Training Customization Limits Productivity

Before adopting Highspot, the training environment at Fastly followed a more traditional path. Most training was conducted live, presentation-style. This posed several challenges to their global sales team, such as finding enough presenters who could speak knowledgeably to reps in every time zone. This scheduling issue was exacerbated by the fact that running only live trainings meant that not every staff member would be available simultaneously.

The Fastly sales enablement team was also finding it a challenge to curate content so that it didn’t get buried in a course and would remain evergreen. Meanwhile, lack of a centralized system to manage and deliver training made it difficult to track the impact of training. “Our sales cycles are long,” explains Stephanie Aylward, the manager of revenue enablement at Fastly. Because of this extended sales cycle and the lack of effective training metrics, “it’s sometimes hard in our space to make a direct correlation between training programs only and business results.” This static training format and difficulty managing the continuity and utility of their training materials hindered Fastly’s ability to evolve their training to suit their strategic initiatives.

Fine-Tuned Training Delivers Better Sales Outcomes

Setting up a more effective training environment, creating practical evergreen content, and developing better training metrics for improved feedback were all top priorities for Fastly. To do that, their sales enablement team leveraged Highspot’s Training and Coaching capabilities, starting the relationship with a significant cross-functional project.

Using Highspot for this strategic initiative helped drive engagement from the sales team from the beginning, boosting learning retention. Sellers could absorb information on their own time, rather than only being shown presentations live and expected to simply remember key takeaways. From there, managers could monitor their team’s progress and validate mastery of the new knowledge and skills. This approach was instrumental in helping Fastly achieve a significant behavioral change in a short amount of time.

Fastly has also leveraged Highspot to be more responsive to feedback, making their training even more useful for their sellers. For example, in addition to consulting the company’s Sales Readiness Council to solicit regular, detailed feedback, Fastly also embedded a SurveyMonkey survey into all their Learning Paths in Highspot and used Analytics to track completion. “We want to be looking at the same pane of glass that sales are looking at in order to drive decisions on what we focus on,” explained Aylward.

Personalized Training Leads to Improved Feedback From Sales Reps and Buyers

With the new possibilities created through Highspot, Fastly was able to accelerate their training and create a process that offered sales reps more practical, self-directed training options. With a 95% improvement in content efficiency and a 15% boost in content usability since implementing Highspot, Fastly’s sales reps have been able to get up to speed on new information and initiatives faster. In doing so, they can not only educate themselves but also educate buyers,  leading to a 19% increase in buyer engagement.

With these improvements in sales efficiency and effectiveness through the use of a unified enablement platform, Fastly’s enablement team has also benefited from a boost in productivity, as they can effectively maintain their sales solutions and materials without needing to spend extensive time on frequent updates.