Sales Enablement Metrics That Matter: Now & Beyond – Sales Enablement Soirée, Summer 2020

CT: Welcome to our panel on Sales Enablement Metrics That Matter: Now and Beyond. This is such an important topic and very top of mind for a lot of practitioners today, because many of us have been. Transitioning into a more remote and virtual world. And so, it is increasingly important for sales enablement practitioners to really be showing that business impact and continuing to do that even as we pivot to this digital world.

And so, metrics are such a key, important thing that a lot of practitioners are really paying attention to right now. And I’m actually excited about all of the panelists that we have today. I am just going to ask each of you to introduce yourself, say your name, your company, a little bit about yourself.

Cody let’s start with you.

CN: All right. Thank you so much, Cassandra. So, my name is Cody Normans. I’m a senior manager on our sales, productivity, and enablement team at HubSpot. Been at HubSpot for a little over six years.

MA: My name is Michael Aloe and I’m with Accent Cloud, we’re a solution provider to enhance CRM and empowering leaders to improve individual and team performance. I’ve been with Accent Cloud for about a year now and then in the software solution providing industry now for almost 25 years. Thanks for having us, Cassandra.

CT: And Brooke.

BS: Thanks Cassandra. So, I’m Brooke Simmons. I’m our director of enterprise sales strategy at Outreach. I’ve been with Outreach for four and a half years, primarily in a customer success role. So, focused on making customers successful. But this year really focused on making sure our sellers are just as successful when they’re setting their customers up for their outreach journeys. So excited to be talking about metrics today.

CT: We’re excited too. And Arup.

AC: Thank you. I guess I’m the only Brit on the call. Arup Chakravarti. I head up sales enablement and commercial analytics at Elavon, Elavon Europe, we’re a payments provider. So actually, we have a much larger footprint in North America. So, you may have heard of us we’re a little bit like First Data. As I mentioned, head up sales enablement and commercial analytics.

CT: Absolutely. Well, thank you all for joining us today. I’m very excited to get started on this panel. So, we’re actually going to jump right in. First question we have is we actually recently did a study on the state of sales enablement. We found that 50% of respondents said that sales enablement’s ability to use data to really analyze business impact is either average or below average. So, I would love to get your thoughts on what those key metrics are that practitioners should be looking at to analyze impact. Arup let’s start with you.

AC: Sure. Well, thank you very much, Cassandra. And actually, thank you so much for giving me the privilege to open the panel discussion and definitely looking forward to hearing from everybody else as well. So, by the way, this is a complex question, right? And one that research has been looking at in an engaged manner much more, since the late sixties. And it is difficult to try to build that notion of how do you understand where you’ve got interventions and those types of interventions, and then linkage through to some uplifting in terms of productivity or performance.

So, whatever you characterize as being a beneficial outcome. When I’ve done it, I’ve looked at it and I’m going to practically within really two buckets of data or information, and then started to shape the metrics from that. And then again, started to shape what we can see as outcome deliverables. So that falls into, as I mentioned, two buckets for me. Kind of a hard measures or a hard metrics bucket, and then a kind of a softer organizational process-oriented bucket as well. So, starting with the first, and then just kind of orienting this back to, perhaps a real example.

So last year, my team supported the learning and development team. I, by the way, don’t have that, I have other aspects of sales enablement. I don’t own the learning and development piece, but my team, but the analytics part of my team supported the learning and development team in terms of being able to quantify and calibrate them value of, sales methodology, refresher training program that they undertook for our corporate setting team, right. And again, the question that came in to me from L and D, it was very much that notion of how do we calibrate the value? How do we show? Because increasingly this is the question coming through from management is, we invest in these programs. How do you show that that type of intervention actually ends up leading to an uplift in sales or an uplift in revenue or some type of performance improvement?

And I think the key there is as we discussed this with the L and D team, is that actually trying to get, particularly in a corporate setting environment, trying to get from a sales training intervention all the way through to a revenue uplift. I mean, that’s hugely challenging and there’s a lot of contextual and temporal noise in that space from trying to get from A, in terms of your training, to D because of your output, performance options. It’s better to try to see that as a lagging indicator and then try to identify the driving, constituent parts of the leading indicators that get you to that place. And actually, that’s the program around that we factored out with the learning and development team. Don’t try to get from A through to D, because that’s a difficult causal relationship to be able to not only to Justin five, but then again, when you’re articulating that back into the organization, back up to management, it’s difficult to explain that, trying to go from A to B, and B to C, and then C through to D right.

And B might be, well, again to get to that place, you need to see an uplift in activities and an uplift in meetings and you know, conversations. Great. So, let’s track that and then tend to, to go from that to an improved in terms of qualified opportunities. Let’s okay. Let’s track that and ensure that we have A.

Confidence in terms of those causal relationships before you then go from, okay, we’ve seen an improvement in terms of the qualification ratio. So, by proxy, that means we should see an improvement in terms of the seller conversion ratio now. And that just gives you that confidence of being able to explain the value back up to management and to the organization.

And again, to sellers as well, right? If you’re taking them through a training program, you want to in a relatively short period of time and go back to them and, and it can kind of. Re articulate back to them the benefits and how we’re seeing that and how they should be seeing that, et cetera, et cetera.

So that brings it full circle. And that for me, is that sort of, that harder measures bucket of activity in the softer, which I do think is really important. And arguably is maybe more. Kind of a process oriented, maybe hygiene factors in this space. you know, and again, maybe to bring a material example, my team looks after, the annual account portfolio allocation process.

Right. And, and I think this is like target setting, like, onboarding. These are different organizational processes. That again are difficult to link through directly on a causal basis to some sort of positive outcome, but they’re really important. And they feature sort of these kinds of hygiene, foundational activities that you’ve got to get right in an organization.

And you’ve actually got to show your individuals, your sellers, your account managers that you take that seriously and you take process improvements in that space seriously. So, when I joined Elavon, we were getting portfolio set by the end of March. Right. That’s still almost a full quarter before arguably an account manager knows what company they’re looking after in terms of that portfolio. Over the last three, four years, we’ve improved that through to having portfolios designated by the middle of January, which is great. So now, as an account manager, you enter a given year, you’re very clear intent terms of who is supposed to be engaging with.

You can start to set your own, by account engagement strategy. And that that’s important that sort of those foundation elements of driving motivation, driving role, clarity, driving the expectation set, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, and I know this, as I mentioned, it’s a difficult question to try to distill down, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a flavor of some of the hard measures and in breaking that down, decomposing those and some of the more processual measures and actually again, just aspiring to drive improvements in that space a repair.

CN: That was awesome by the way. Thank you for sharing all that. And so at HubSpot, I think I share the same sentiment around measuring sales enablement is a challenge. But at HubSpot, what we do is we focus on three core metrics. and that is rep PPR, which is productivity per rep, ramp time, right, the time it takes a rep to fully ramped a quota, and then attainment by tenure.

So, I’ll dig into each of those at a very high level, of what they are. So, rep PPR, the way that we calculate that very easy calculation, take your total revenue, whether you’re on a monthly quota, quarterly or yearly, we’re on monthly. So, we’ll take our monthly revenue that we bring in for a given month. Total revenue divide that by the number of hours, global sales reps that we have. Your PPR number or the productivity per rep. Obviously we want that to be as high as possible. Right. And it’s something that we watch weekly, monthly, yearly, et cetera.

Then ramp time, pretty self-explanatory. How long does it take a rep to get to their full quota? That’s a really important piece. Then attainment by tenure. This one is probably the most telling sign, at least metrics that we watch and that we are acutely aware of on the enablement team.

And we break it up into three tenures. We break it up our month zero to six reps, then we go seven months to 12, and then 13 plus. HubSpot, we’re a very transactional, in a way transactional business. So, some of you might be, and you know, your deals take a year or two to close, right? Our sales cycle is anywhere from 30 to 60 days. So, our ramp time for our reps is six months, right. We give them six months to ramp to their full quota. In the way that we analyze that data and how we use that is obviously all free 10 years to be above a hundred percent, the average above 100%.

So, we’ll see, okay out of our cohort of reps that are in their first month on the floor between their six months on the floor, what percentage of those reps are hitting 100% over their quota? Right. And then the month seven to 12 buckets, that is the bucket that is most important. Cause that’s when you’re off of ramp, right?

When you have your full quota, you’re no more real grace period. It’s like, here we go. You’re on the floor. Ready to rock. That is the metric that ultimately, we really need to move and pay attention to, right. Because if we’re not setting our reps up for success during their ramp time, and then they get to full quota. And then I’m like, Oh, what do I do now if we get reps into that trap, then that’s where we start to see a decrease in performance, ultimately falls on the enablement team to fix that. Right.

And then obviously the 13 months plus cohort, those are our tenured reps that we like to call it. We need them to be successful. Right. If they’re not, then we’ll see, I see a lot of attrition, et cetera. So yeah. that that’s another metric that would be pay close attention to it, just to ensure that our most tenured reps are actually succeeded and doing well. So, rep PPR, ramp time, and that attainment by tenure up into those three cohorts that that’s our three most important metrics that we track.

CT: Shifting gears a little bit. We’ve talked about the pivot to this virtual and digital world. And so, I would love to hear from you on if there are any metrics that you’ve been measuring that you find especially important right now, while teams are working remotely. And so, Mike, I’d love to hear from you on this.

MA: Great. Great question. Certainly, something where we’re very experienced with here at, at Accent Cloud specifically with them, our customers leveraging our level 11 solution and performance scorecards. We not only internally here at Accent Cloud and our customers who leverage our solutions, we’re out working with them on the different metrics that they manage day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter and so on and so forth with the shift in the pandemic. We’ve seen variations as to how we shifted how our account base shifted and even a little bit industry by industry, but every organization had its own level of uniqueness through this transformation how and what they measure through the virtual environments, as opposed to the environment prior to the pandemic. Some companies had to pivot more drastically than others, just based on how they were structured prior to the panel. That being said, many of our customers utilizing our performance scorecard solutions shifted priority focus to a more granular. Level of leading indicators and daily activity, and volume of daily activity specifically call volume, live connects a, proactive check in meetings scheduled for account management.

These all became extremely important today in the virtual environment to ensure that the workforce, as they shifted from an in-office environment where they were working with each other day in and day out, to work working from home in a disperse environment. If you will it allowed it in, and it continues to allow to report up to not only executive management, but line level management that the different activities day in and day out. Right. So, increasing the goals and these types of metrics, adding real time visibility.

MA: You know, through a scorecard type of application and dashboards and whatnot has resulted in more sustainable and even improved level of situational awareness for accounts, increased opportunities, drove more pipeline, and continues to be the key to ensure the levels of activity that lead to those resulting metrics that we’re all after are continuing in a virtual environment,

BS: Similar to Mike’s point, at Outreach we work with sales teams. So, when I speak on behalf of what we’re doing internally, but also kind of what we see in our customers, as well. So, we’re US centric right now. So, at the beginning of the, taking myself back to the March 20 timeframe and this kind of colors, I answered this question.

So, we saw this immediate reaction to everybody’s really focused on volume loss as a metric, right? Are you doing enough? Are the activities higher? The calls high people are going into work from home remark environments, potentially in a lot of sales teams for the first time. And those people may have less than optimum set ups right. In situations to work from home, and I saw a lot of customers. It’s a little bit panicky about the ability to keep volume high all the way down the funnel. So, are we going to have enough activities to book the meetings, to actually create the opportunities? and so. We all went through this kind of transformation and March and April.

And it seems to have turned out that we’re pretty effective in a work from home environment for a lot of the workers, organizations I work with. And we’re feeling like, okay, we can actually, we can make the calls right where we can still engage with prospects, we’re booking meetings again. now we only really need to focus on the quality of what we’re doing, those quality indicators, and similar to Mike’s insight, are our reply rates staying as high are our call connects high? Are we converting with the same effectiveness that we want or pre COVID-19? So, we’ve shown that we can be productive at home, but are we still as effective essentially? And this is a really hard question to answer without data cause it’s hard data to get.

CN: So, we’ve been working with customers essentially to help unpack this, to understand are we really doing with the same effectiveness, the amount of volume, and how do we make decisions about how to pivot our data or pivot our business for the rest of 2020 based on this. So, for example, we’ve got to cut quite a few customers that initially were really concerned around remote BDR activity levels. But they didn’t see as they kept activity levels high, that corresponding drop off in quality and they started making some assumptions about. Buyers aren’t ready to buy this. Isn’t the right market. We’re going to get in trouble in these ways. When in reality, buyers had actually started responding to a different set of messaging.

And so, when you started analyzing not just the number of activities, but the quality outputs of those activities in this case reply rate, you came to a really different conclusion. About what the right thing to do for that sales team was for the rest of the year. And that was a specific messaging pivot to make sure that they were doing value added offering that was really different than their motion pre COVID-19.

So, having the data about the quality of what your team is doing is really important to avoid making some assumptive decisions, right. That could be a wrong indicator or lead you to coach the team in a different way. There’s two main metrics that we wanted to keep an eye on as moving our whole team remote, which was deal creation and sales cycle length.

So those two metrics they show me sales leader slash manager how much remote work is actually impacting our rep’s ability to execute from the deal creation standpoint. Are reps losing focus and not creating as many deals. Right? Whether that they’re just distracted by being remote.

They that they’re not making as many calls or sending us any emails. not cause they’re trying to Slack off. It’s a different world, right. They’re used to the buzz of the floor and like getting that energy, like that’s a real thing, right? Like you hear your colleague making calls and you’re like, alright, I should probably get on the phone. And your kind of just sitting in a bedroom or wherever you are. That can be tough. So that was something that we really played paid close attention to was deal size, deal creation. And then on the sales cycle length, right. Again, are deals taking longer to close with the rep kind of all on their own? You know, in their home where their manager’s not right next to them or their buddies, not right now next to them. Is the sales cycle increasing? Is it taking longer for us to close these deals? you know, we’ve kept an eye on both of them. Those metrics like talks and some of the, to Brooke it’s actually been, I won’t say surprising. but these metrics have actually improved, which we’re digging into the why just it’s a lot of like anecdotal feedback reps feel less pressure actually right now. And they feel more like, no one’s looking over my shoulder. Which I think remote work has had that stigma of in sales.

Now you can’t do remote work and sales because you know, you need that one to one coaching in person. You always need your manager right next to you. And it’s actually, especially for our rep being reps, it has forced them to step out of their comfort zone and like learn a lot of things on their own. It’s been nothing but positive for the most part for us a year at HubSpot.

CT: Oh, that’s awesome to hear. Alrighty, well, continuing a little bit on this topic, since we are talking more about this virtual world, what have been the biggest learnings that you have learned over the past few months, in terms of using data to better enable your sellers, Mike, let’s start with you.

MA: Sure. Well in this environment, we can no longer rely on those drive by moments, if you will work from working in the office, like one off coaching opportunities or seeing and hearing people on the phone or even traveling with your reps in the field and, and visiting with the, with the accounts.

So, you know, and I think Cody mentioned this a little bit, that it’s, we’re learning more, that people can continue to be effective and stay productive in different environments, even though they’re not amongst their colleagues sitting side by side, or even having management in the, in the vicinity. Right. So that’s key, we’re also relying more heavily on data iin our CA around and specifically Salesforce for us. Right. So, I think, Brooke mentioned this the value of quality, the data is so important. And to us, it’s learning how people can actually perform in remote environments, on a regular basis, the quality or a couple of the key things that we’ve seen, right.

Try not to micromanage, but still know what’s going on with your teams. Activity is key. So, you got to set up more one on one meetings and that’s fine. I think most team members are fine with that. Right. But keeping your eye on the ball on the leading indicators with the daily activities at the granular level is also very important but leveraging what you’re learning through the quality data with that level of activity through one-on-one regular one-on-one coaching sessions.

Developing improved quality with those activities, we’ve seemed to do more. I think Cody alluded to this earlier, right? It’s we’ve seem to be to do more of that in certain areas have improved with this new environment and the approaches that we’re taking here. Right. So by doing those things, getting more granular with the daily activities, more regular one on one coaching spending time there, and even gamification of the high volumes of activities, make an exciting and making sure that the leader boards are visible and you’re tying the team together that are dispersed throughout the country event, right? it’s resulted in sustained improved results in transforming into the virtual work environment.

CN: Yeah. Mike, it’s almost actually, it’s funny you bring that up. It’s, well we’ve seen it’s almost like the reps have really enjoyed the autonomy. And it’s almost like a, let me prove you wrong attitude. Like it always is with the sales reps, but I’ve been getting a lot of that feel from our sales floor on like, “Oh, you don’t think I can be successful working remotely and working from home, like watch me.” Right. That’s kind of like, it’s spread or like all around the globe for us, which is great. Like it’s awesome and people are happier and I’m working when and where they want to. It’s been really interesting to see that shift.

MA: Yeah. I’m certainly intrigued and encouraged by the results that we’ve seen thus far. I’d like to see more of a balance, right. More of a less social distancing when it’s safe to do so with the teams coming together. But, to your point, I think you’re right. I think the teams are encouraged and even putting forth that effort to almost prove the fact that it can be as productive if not more in with working remotely.

CT: So interesting to hear that, Arup, did you have any thoughts on this question?

AC: Yeah. So, I think my, my heart learning certainly over the last few months is that particularly in terms of serving up data and data-oriented insights to our sales and account managers, is that all of the data’s just gone out the window. Like there just isn’t any data any longer. So my team also, we utilize our customer data platform with embedded AI and ML in it, in terms of being able to do more intelligent segmentation, again training those models with historic information so that you can pass through current prospect and customer lists and get a view in terms of where.

So, they should more effectively focus their time, et cetera, et cetera. That’s all just out the window. Everybody else the moment it looks like they’re going out of business will certainly back in March, everybody looked like they were going out of business. Right. So, it was just like, yeah, actually what was interesting, and the key learning now was all of this sophisticated technology.

Just pocket for the moment, right? There’s just no point actually what you’ve got to do is get back to having, really genuine on tone, messages with customers. Stop trying to do anything fancy and just get back to having like, really simple conversations with customers that show that show that you do value that business and actually you’ll find a way of being able to give them some allowance for it. So yeah, absolutely. The one learning is all the data’s kind of useless, right? This is no value in any event. It’s just going back to doing simple things and do them well and do them honestly. That’s it.

BS: We’ve seen something really interesting kind of manifest around that and I think you articulate that in a great way. A root of, okay, what was the truth prior? No longer holds. Right. But getting back to the basics has been so key for the team here at Outreach. And one of my biggest learnings has been no matter what people still want to know what their peers are doing.

So, the data they’re looking at is different. They’re still looking over the fence a little bit. but they still want to know, okay, well, what’s the guy next store doing. And how’s he being effective in this environment. So, we’ve switched from like that sophisticated enrichment data, which has questionable value at this point in time to saying, okay, let’s share the wins in a more tribal fashion.

And I think this goes back to Cody and Mike’s point. Yeah. It’s around that collaboration and positivity. We’ve got like an 80 prospecting back to the grassroots initiative happening right now. Basic leaderboard everybody on the teams on it. You know what I mean? It goes out twice a week with a win video, and that is somebody dressed ridiculously at home, talking about their prospecting when for a minute in a YouTube video, full of emojis. And those have led to really genuine fun threads about prospecting tactics and collaborating on things that are working and not working in a really safe space that like management’s there, but we’re not necessarily driving that the conversation it’s coming from the reps in their experiences.

So, it’s like this very nice balance of the data. Okay. The leaderboard tells us from an activity perspective, did you do or not do something, but then you can that context and the story of the results too, which has been really fun. I think for the reps to keep that collaboration high in this environment, expanding a little bit on this topic.

CT: What are some of the challenges that you have faced in terms of getting these metrics that you need to bring to your executive teams and how have you been addressing those? Cody, I’d love to start with you.

CN: Yeah, sure. Pretty simple. It was just a lack of an analyst on the enablement team. Right. You know, when you think of enablement, you don’t think, ‘Oh, they need a full-time analyst.’ But it’s becoming way more apparent that we do. Especially as the executive team wants to see impact and ROI and we’re like, yes so, we would love to have some help building some Looker reports and digging into all that stuff.

So that’s been the challenge, but what are we doing about it? We are planning to hire a full-time analyst. So that it’s, again, just got an easy solution to the problem, but I think what that analysts will actually do. It’s not just like, alright, we have an analyst now. Like we’re going to be able to report on stuff. What it actually will be able to do is to truly dig into each project and initiative that we roll out. On an enablement projects in hone in on the specific metrics. So not just deal creation, sales cycle, length, PPR ramp time. Like I mentioned, those are the very kind of high level and macro level stuff that we’re looking at.

But on a given project how did this project impact how much. We sell all of our marketing product or how much we sell of our CRM product by region, by segment, like really get super, super granular on metrics that we can ultimately control because a lot of those other metrics like deal creation and PPR, there are so many competing factors that actually impact that number.

Not just the enablement that we do. It’d be unfair for us to take 100% The ownership and praise for things going well, because of us the same time, it would be unfair of like, things are going not well, that there’s just, there’s so many factors to that. So that’s what we want to ultimately grow into is the ability to really hone in on exact type of metrics, project by project. To report on the ROI of a given initiative, not just the enablement team as a whole. It’s something that we’re hyper focused on getting done in the next 12 months.

CT: Brooke, did you have any thoughts on this topic?

BS: Yeah, a big challenge for me and it changed in the past three, four months has been my iterative cycle is way shorter, so I get less time to figure out what’s working in a very real way. So, like from an enablement perspective, we’re all rolling out new materials, new strategies, new talk tracks on a pretty regular basis. And instead of getting the time to fully bake, there’s an urgency, to get things out now and fast and pivot, and then you need to measure that new leading indicator really, really quickly too.

Right? Like I’m going to ask okay. The thing we rolled out last week, how is it doing? Right. And you’re going okay, great. I would also decode his point. I would love more data and help. And I’d like to know that as well. But I need to now get really into the weeds of understanding I’m not in all those conversations. So how are customers reacting our reps using it right? First of all, is it actually happening on calls in a way we assume? And then how are the customers engaging with that material? Does it resonate? Right? And does it work? And so, you know, to kind of strategies, we’ve been taking one like really deep, we’re going back to basics. Like call recording and understanding, okay. If you use this, this material, this deck, this talk track, hand raise, and let’s listen to calls, let’s parse out the customer reactions we’re gone customer and that’s when I huge tool for me to just understand. How are buyer priorities shifting, or if we’re talking to a new market or a new segment or using a new value prop right now, did that work frankly, on the call and what was the reaction to that?

And then can we use these clips to also share with the rest of the team again, to amplify out, Hey, here’s examples of using new material to help speed enablement. and then the second thing is from a content perspective we’re using our own. Beta features around email intent classification.

So, if we’re using a new sequence right of content or we’re targeting new buyers, with a potentially new value prop, which is happening right now, outreach to say, “Hey, I really think that we’re a solution that fits a need for you in this current environment.” How are the buyers actually responding to those emails? Or the positive early objections, if there are objections, what kind of objections and is the team have we equip them to handle that?

So those are the big pieces of data that we’ve had to accelerate looking at, because the timeline is days now, right? Like we’re launching something one year and I have five, seven days left, and I start looking at calls and emails to start to understand how that early indicators are coming back.

And then obviously taking rep feedback into account for that.  we kind of know and assume this will have that downstream impact down the funnel over time. But to Cody’s really good point, it’s like, “Hey, there’s going to be a lot of other factors that play into what we can create and close from an opportunity perspective during this period. But what I can influence right now potentially is some of these leading indicators slightly.

CT: I love that. All right. So, to finish off the panel today, for anybody that’s been to a Sales Enablement Soirée event, before we always love to ask all of our panelists to leave the audience with one key takeaway.

So, I would love to hear from each of you on one key thing that you would love our audience to walk away with today. So, Brooke, why don’t you kick us off?

BR: Yeah. I think of data balance, especially for our sales team, the balance of quantity and quality. I see so many outreach customers fall into a little bit of the trap of more is better, and it’s such a basic lesson, right? Like we can do more. We can be more productive. Let’s just get more activities out. Let’s put more people in sequence. Let’s make more calls, but if you’re not equally aggressive at homing in on the quality of all those actions your rep is taking, it might be work for not right.

People are doing heroic efforts right now, especially to work from home, to call into tough industries. They’ve still got kids right through their offices. I speak on behalf of that on a pretty regular basis. So, it’s really important that we’re also saying, “Hey, There’s a diminishing return on more at some point for your team.”

And if you’re not also talking about enabling them to make their calls better and helping them make their emails better and helping them get better when they get into the meeting, then we’re looking at the wrong indicator.

AC: Just continuing on that theme. I’d say definitely from an analytic perspective, just keep it simple. Right? it’s easy to get caught up. I mean, I’ve been managing teams with analytic competence for a long time now. And my message constantly. So, my team is actually, when you’ve done a piece of analysis, the job starts, it’s not where it ends. It’s where it starts, right? Because 50% of what you’re doing is doing the analysis.

The other 50% is conveying that back into the organization and helping the organization understand the, so what of it, right? And this is all intrinsic to. Here’s some type of sales enablement in intervention, here is something that needs to happen from it. Here’s the whole process of doing that. If you overanalyze or if you spend too much time analyzing, you’re going to have, I think broke very safe and he describes it a degree of diminishing returns.

It’s just, there’s just no point in over itemizing it, right. Just be fought, be fast, be smart and recognize that that actually. Keep it simple because 50% of your job is the analytics. The other 50% is convincing stakeholders that you know that you’re able to showcase this value creation.

CN: This is drilled into our team, and really at HubSpot and they do it really well. And it’s called enablement is a discipline, not a department. and as it ties to data in and measuring success of enablement, if your company treats enablement as a discipline and not just a department, you will see success.

A perfect example is a product launch. Let’s say you’re about to launch a new product, enabling that can be a problematic word in something like that, where it’s like, Oh, we’re going to launch a product. And enablement is just going to train the sales team and everything’s going to be great.

Right. That’s not reality. You’re going to set your sales team up for failure and the metrics will show that right, where instead you need the product team involved to help build that content and collateral. How does the product work? Who are we targeting here? Who’s our persona, right? Any product marketing to be involved, to build those external pitch decks, right? To build those PDFs too. To build the .com, what’s going to be on your public website resources, right? And then obviously you need enablement driving the ship for what the sales team truly needs and be responsible for the sales team adopting and learning that product to bring it to them.

Right. Oh, I’ve seen the most successful enabling departments operate is where the entire company treats enabling as a discipline in every single department has a hand in enablement and they all are tied to certain metrics. Again, like I was mentioning before, there’s a lot of factors, with all of these metrics. If every team treats themselves as enablers in some way to enable the company, as a discipline and not a department. That’s where I’ve seen the most success.

MA: Great responses there. So yeah, I would, I would agree with a lot of what everybody is saying here in  I love the word discipline.

We use that often. And in practice, a lot of what we’re doing today, driving the levels of activities is more of a practice and a discipline on that practice. There’s a onetime or an infrequent activity and that’s so key, but yeah, I would leave with some.

The key points, don’t be afraid to be granular with the activities in the metrics, measuring the activities, understanding of activity as well as the quality of the activity. Right. make it fun to hit higher volumes of certain activities, right through gamification solutions and real time leaderboards.

I think that was mentioned earlier today as well. Keeping the team tied together with notifications. Brooke had a great response earlier, and I took that as a takeaway where. You know, you celebrate maybe an individual win with the team on a video call. fantastic. Right? And it’s, it’s a great approach to keep the team together and motivated to continue to hit the volume of activities that that’s required in this new environment.

And then regular coaching. I can’t stress enough how much this has helped us and the other companies that we’re working with the sales and other customer facing organizations too, to really ensure the quality of the activity continues to improve. And we’ve seen improvements in areas that we hadn’t seen before based on the level of coaching that we’re doing today, pro than we did prior, but very encouraging. So now prime time to develop a disciplined approach worked for coaching reps.

CT: Absolutely. Well, this has been such a fantastic discussion today. Right now, we are actually going to open up to live Q and A. So, we’ll give you all a moment to type in your questions and we will get our awesome panelists today to answer some of those for you.