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The transcription is about a virtual meeting with participants introducing themselves and discussing topics related to revenue enablement. The meeting includes an overview of the company, SBI, its focus on growth strategy, operating model, data and insights, and commercial talent. They emphasize the importance of having the right people with the right skills for growth. Participants share challenges related to adoption of enablement initiatives and product launches. They discuss the need for sponsorship, agreeing on priorities, and addressing complex topics. The meeting aims to facilitate discussions, share research insights, and collaborate on addressing challenges in revenue enablement. All right, now we're getting people. We're going to give it just a minute or two more. And you can rename yourself if you want to be called something else than shows up in your title there. Be careful what you ask for. That's right. I would say however you want to be referred to, you know, it's all good. Well, welcome, everyone. Yeah, we did have a really good turnout for this, so I imagine we'll have a few more people trickling in here. There you go, Brian. We got the right Brian. I think we do that to manage the individual links so that we can have you all in as panelists so that we can interact and chat and be off of mute. But we're still using the Zoom webinar feature, so I think that works well. All right, well, definitely some familiar faces. Nice to see everyone again. I'm Ray McAuliffe, Managing Director of the Talent and Training Business here at SBI. I'm joined by my colleague, Dave Lindelbach, who will be walking us through some of the research and the work that we've done with the Revenue Enablement Society. Some of you may have seen a preview of some of this material with the webinar that we did with RES a few weeks back. And also we had a pretty engaging discussion at our summit last week. And so because not everybody could attend our summit in Atlanta, we wanted a chance to kind of lean in on the topics. And we will take the discussions in a different direction. But for several of you, Don, I know you were there in person as well as Kurt will. I don't see him on yet, but I know he registered. But we'll pick up those conversations where we left off. Just to set the stage, I'll go ahead and share, and we'll be going through the slides to some extent. But we really want to make this more of a discussion. And so, as you may know, these are leadership forums that we do on a quarterly basis. We started this one last year for enablement professionals. And it's really grown and kind of taken shape, I think, over the last year. Our goal is really to introduce some discussion topics. We'll introduce research as we go along and get feedback. So really use this as an input and discussion forum. And then also lean in on topics of the day, so things that you all may be challenged with or working on. And so we're going to have a chance to collaborate and pull in that information as we go along. So appreciate everybody joining today. David, I'll let you introduce yourself as well, and then let's jump in. Thanks, Zach. I'm David Leibovitz. I'm a researcher on SDI's Insights Team. This topic is near and dear to me. Before I joined SDI, I was in civil enablement myself for about four years. So really awesome opportunity to both practice and then study the role. And just really excited to have all of you join us today so we can discuss revenue enablement. That's great. Yeah, thank you. And we will. We won't have a chance to go completely around the room in terms of introductions, but I do want you to do that in the chat. But before we do that, I guess just to set the stage, is everybody seeing the slides? We're good here? Okay. I just wanted to ground everybody, or I guess if you haven't seen this, kind of how to think about SDI. We've been a go-to-market consultancy for going on 20 years. As you may know, SDI acquired Sales Readiness Group, so my company, about two years ago, the sales training component. And we've really brought together a best-in-class model of different components that all impact go-to-market. And so what I wanted to just touch on, just a little bit of infomercial, but really to set the stage for the discussion here, at the top we think about growth strategy and really making sure we're aligned with the business strategy, how are we growing. And we actually have a forum for chief executive officers that are kind of focused in that area, but thinking more at the strategy level. To the right, on the operating model, that's really everything around go-to-market and maybe the traditional consulting work you may be familiar with. Sales playbook, segmentation, sales process work and alignment, and that's really focused. And often we have the chief revenue officers or kind of go-to-market leads in there. We do have a growth forum for that group as well. At the bottom, kind of data and insights is you can think of as revenue operations, RevTech. We acquired the Carabiner Group a year ago, and so they represent us and are taking that kind of technology perspective. And then today we're really focused on the commercial talent. And as you may all know, and you're here to probably speak to that, commercial talent is a huge lever in that go-to-market conversation. Do we have the right people in the right roles with the right skills doing the right things to enable our growth? And so that's really what this group is focused on. I'll just pause there. I guess any general questions or thoughts about that? I want to introduce this. You may see this more from SBI. And also the fact that I don't think anyone else really pulls all of these four components together the way that SBI does, and we're able to cross-pollinate and really leverage that appropriately. Any comments or questions on this? Again, we've heard that. We're good. So we will definitely lean in more on the talent piece today, and we'll talk about that manager enablement. You know, what we really wanted to do was share some of the insights specifically from this section of the research we just completed and published around enabling frontline managers and, you know, talk about some of the implications, and, again, with a larger audience today that may lean in on that. But before we do that, and I see some of you already introducing yourself, I appreciate that. I'd love to if you could just – well, and we'll make this brief, but if you could in the chat, you know, again, some of you have already introduced yourself, but it's great to connect each other in this forum. And one of the things we saw in person was the connections being established when people were talking about similar challenges and how we can support each other. You know, the stage in the room here, the experience in the room, I think is really powerful, and so we can learn from each other. So if you would, you know, who you are and where you're from, if you want to say, you know, kind of how large or what your enablement responsibilities are, if you can do that in the short blurb. But really, if there's a challenge that you're struggling with, if there's something you'd like to get out either for today or it may drive topics for our future forums, if there's something that's on your mind that you'd like to present to the group, we'd love to hear about that as well. So let me give you just a few minutes to think about that and type in in the chat. It looks like we've got all the corners of the country here, at least, of Jordan and Denver. So we've got Central, Kurtz in Florida. Yeah, I know we've got Nashville covered. Don, nice to see you again. So, yeah, we've really got a good breakdown. And I see, you know, a few challenges coming in here. Leon, you mentioned with 70 people, pre- and post-sales, adoption of enablement and enablement-adjacent initiatives across your teams. Can you say a little bit more about that? How is that showing up for you at Hack the Box? Hack the Box. Hey, hello, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. Leon from New York City. I've been with Hack the Box for about three years now, leading sales enablement but focuses on pre- and post-sales. What I meant with that comment, and it doesn't really change from company to company. It's pretty much the number one challenge every time, which is why the role exists, is adoption of enablement and or enablement-adjacent initiatives. And what I mean by that is we roll out something new as part of, let's say, the reinforcement of our sales methodology. We're a Metbix shop. How is that getting adopted? How do we monitor that activity? And how do we enable our managers to be able to monitor that on their teams? So that's number one, very hardcore enablement directly impacting that. But product launches a lot of new stuff. Other teams will launch a lot of new initiatives and projects. They need enablement being done on those. Getting adoption for those priorities is also a number one challenge. That, to me, shows up every single time. Yeah, I saw some nodding. Anybody else run into that kind of a challenge? Yeah, I think a lot. And, Don, I know we talked about this when you were on site, but, again, just getting the sponsorship, agreeing on the priorities, and really having the time when we have all of these competing priorities to lean in on some of those complex topics. You want to say anything more about that, Don? I don't know if that's evolved at all. I guess it was just last week, right? Since last week, I wish. Oh, problem solved, right? All of it's done. That's great, yeah. No, I think that there's just a lot of competing priorities. My scope is beyond just sales. I do have John Wesch. I asked John Wesch, who leads sales management for me, to join as well. It's just really for us, it's not only the priorities, but we live in a complicated product environment. And it takes time to learn the solutions and how to adequately position those solutions in a competitive manner. And a lot of times people think, oh, I just need to sit through a quick webinar and I'm enabled. And that doesn't get it done. We know that. And it's really just getting the leadership to acknowledge it. It's an investment made to be able to learn things adequately so reps can confidently communicate and differentiate value propositions to their customers. Yeah, and we're going to get more into it, Don. I know one of the on-site conversations is around how do we make sure our leadership is aligned and we have the sponsorship we need. Sometimes they say they want it, but they don't necessarily know what the lift is going to entail. So I think that's a really interesting topic. Brian, you mentioned your scope at Google, so obviously a large function there. I'd love to hear more about the meaning to lift the skill sets and the strategies to keep it focused. Yeah, sure. Brian Collins, everyone, here in New York City. I'm a part of Google, our global go-to-market function. We primarily focus on ad sales. It's about 80% of our business, but the other 20% is focusing on other Google product services that we have that are non-cloud, like enterprise-related services. Within the current go-to-market function, there's a little less than 2,000 people that are focused on product, also sales enablement, technology enablement, but also integration components to our customer service and our long tail of our sales process. I think our biggest challenge is that we serve clients in all different verticals and regions because we're a global company, and I think our biggest challenge is being able to get a consistent sales methodology and strategies deployed across all these different multiple functions, and I think that our sales force is lacking some skills, and we've been trying to figure out different strategies of being able to up-level their skill sets, competencies, and strategies to actually help us. We have a very complex product mix that many of our sellers are struggling to really understand and position within the market, and so now we're trying to figure out ways of simplifying but also being more effective as competition is getting hotter within the ad sales market. Yeah, absolutely, and across that many sellers, I can only imagine the challenges there. That's great. Well, so we'll try to address some of these or at least have a discussion around some of these, and we don't have time to get to all of them, but I appreciate everybody leaning in and kind of understanding where you're coming from. I guess one question, Patrick, I know you're working on first-line manager skills and enabling. Can you say a little bit more about that at BeyondTrust, how that's working? Sure, yeah, so I think when you think about it, what we think about enablement is we try to level set the organization, but the success of anything that we roll out from an enablement perspective really lies on the first-line manager's ability to coach and develop in that moment. So we're working on a big thing right now called a morning skate. If you know anything about hockey, the coach gets on the ice with the players, and I've invited a couple of my team members, Nina and Lucy here, but we're really getting the mindshare. Caitlin, this is a big issue in front of enablement, getting timeshare plus competing priorities. I mean, leadership wants to support us, but it's the field that is pushing back or taking us out of the selling or active selling. So what we're really trying to do is meet our sales leaders where they are. So instead of pulling them out from an enablement function, my enablement team has now gone into the field, and we are participating in team meetings and team reviews and providing coaching and developing of anything that we've rolled out. So we sort of said, okay, we've had issues with timeshare, not a problem. We'll come to you versus asking you to come to us. That's a big component. As you know, Ray, we rolled out high-impact sales manager in KIP-1. That was a big lift. It was a really good level set for our organization. Now we're in the field making sure that we're taking advantage of the tools that we've equipped them with. Yeah, and I think that's always the pull-through, the follow-up. After the capstone, they've kind of proved it, but now they need to put it into the flow of work. So I think that's really critical. One of the things we'll talk about with the research, and let's go ahead and jump in there, is building the case, right, which I think can help all of us. If we have some backgrounds and data at our disposal, like why should we be thinking about this and why does it make sense when there are so many other priorities that we need to kind of lean in on. So, Dave, maybe I can lean on you. I'd love to have you kind of talk through, maybe you can set up the research that we did, kind of the backdrop of where it came from and what we were looking for specific to this manager enablement question. Yeah, that's right. So we did a study in partnership with the Revenue Enablement Society in Q3 of last year. So collected responses from 134 different sales organizations. So one of the things that we asked about, obviously it's pertinent for today, is how enablement teams are upscaling not only sellers but also sales managers. So all the data that we're going to be looking at today came from our partnership and our study with Revenue Enablement Society. So what you're looking at here right now is just, you know, we asked a general question about how teams are upscaling or how they're doing training for their sales, the front-line sales managers, and we found that about 38%, roughly 40% of the teams out there don't have a program in place specifically for their sales managers. So this is not to say that sales managers aren't getting training in some of those organizations, but they may not be getting the kind of training that we know, you know, really moves the needle with sales leaders. So leadership training, understanding how to coach, how to, you know, manage pipelines, the things that are really more squarely management as opposed to selling. So, you know, again, we found this is just, you know, given the importance of the front-line sales manager and the overall ecosystem or engine for commercial teams, it was just kind of striking for us to see that this is a large group that, you know, even Brian, I was going to put in the comments there, just to share that I appreciate you sharing. When I think about your challenge, front-line sales manager is the first thing I think of. You know, that's the person that, you know, is going to be able to kind of pull everything together in, you know, for every individual team at, you know, at Google, for your example, or, you know, any kind of international team. When I was at Gartner, that was one of the first things we thought about, because we had an international team as well. We had 23 teams spread across the world. And that was one of the first things we always thought about is how are the front-line sales managers going to take in and run with our plan. And so, Ray, I know I have to back to you. I don't know, thoughts for the group around, you know, just how you put a dedicated sales manager training program in place yourselves. Yeah. So currently we have a dedicated account manager, account executive training that goes globally. It's required because we have this system called OKRs. So basically every person that's in those roles have to go through these trainings. We've evolved it over time, of course, but right now we have a particular training that's doubling down on a couple of key skills that we're trying to get across our sales process, and it's called Compete Academy. And it's primarily to help with product knowledge, but also some skills, but also to make sure that we convert in the flow of work. So we're doing a lot of reinforcement for that. And we're using some AI to assist in that particular, like, reinforcement. But we have seen some mixed results in different places. So we're still trying to problem solve specifically of, like, what is the best approach and strategy to get that content embedded into the flow of work? And we can start to see some of those win rates actually go up. But, yeah, we're still testing and learning out of that, because last year was our pilot, but this year is our full-scale plan. So a lot of learning this year, a lot of learning. Yeah, and I think that, I mean, we've all probably struggled with that. How do you actually get it into the flow of work, right, and get the compliance around that? I'm curious, and I put the question in the chat, but, you know, is this surprising to anyone? And also, you know, why do we think this is? If we believe that manager training is important, why are we, you know, as an industry, if you will, or a cross-industry, really only, you know, 60% or so actually have dedicated programs for that? And maybe that's partly good news, at least 60% do, but that means 40% are getting no enablement, right? Well, we've incorporated the manager into Compete Academy. So the thing that we found that's been super helpful is that we've leaned in on specific things around coaching for our sales managers so they can actually lean in with their sales teams to actually help on certain specific things in the flow of work. And we've decoupled the performative element to just more the improvement element, which I think we've seen some positive signs on that. But we've now folded in our sales managers into that larger program that we have that's globally called Compete Academy. Okay. Yeah, so you've integrated that, and I think that's a best practice, like let's make it just part of our overall enablement. I think as, you know, Patrick and Don are both kind of chiming in, it's often we miss that piece, right? You promote the best salespeople. They don't always have the management skills. And I think what we need to recognize, and we'll get to some of the other breakdown, is it is a different skill set. And, you know, as much as we say that, we still kind of throw them into the fire or expect that whatever made them brilliant and great as salespeople will transfer over. Don, I saw you come on off mute. Were you going to comment on that? Yeah, you know, I'm curious if other teams, other folks are sensing this, but because a lot of our managers are highly successful, we're highly successful reps, when they now manage teams, if a deal within their team starts to go south, it is easier for them to revert back to sales mode and take over the deal and just close it themselves versus actually coach their rep through the deal. It's just easier. They default to what they know, right? So that's what we've seen. Especially when we have the pressure, one, it's very visible in terms of the performance of the teams. And if it's end of quarter, end of year, you know, they're leaning in to get it over the finish line because that's what they're wired to do. And, unfortunately, I think that takes away from building better reps and building that motion long-term where they can do it themselves. And I think, you know, it's always the case, I asked the question, if you feel like they have to jump in and ride to the rescue every time they're on a call, what's happening the 95% of the time they're not there, right? And the reps are fumbling through or they're learning on the client, and that's kind of an expensive way to do training. So, I mean, that's the premise of probably why we should lean in on it. Yeah, good discussion. Any other comments before we move on here? I was just going to jump in, following on what Patrick has said. I think part of the big challenge I'm seeing right now also is we spend a lot of time taking them through med pick training or whatever to try and build their muscle memory so that the reps know exactly, you know, when I hear this or when I see this or what have you. The next conversation has to be how do we build that same muscle memory as a coaching mechanism within their leadership? Because exactly what you said, right? When push comes to shove, when stress starts to hit them, they go back to that old memory and jump right in and try to solve the call. So it's retraining their brains to look at this from a coaching perspective as opposed to a I'm just going to jump back to what's familiar and what's comfortable for me. So a lot of what we're trying to do right now, and Patrick already outlined a bit of it, is we're sitting through their reviews with them and we're giving them feedback at the end to say, great process. You did this really well. Here are some suggestions for the next one. And, by the way, we'll be on it to see how you do. Right. Well, it's coaching the coaches, right? Because they often don't get that. And it's also a little harder, right? I mean, you can listen to a call recording with a client but saying, well, I want to lean in on your one-on-one and see how you're doing that. There may be some discomfort, but I think there's a lot of value in being able to do that. One of the things I'll just share, I'm really excited about with some of the AI role play technology coming out. And, you know, we think about that for reps a lot, practicing their outbound or their call discussions. But from a manager's standpoint, to have those scenarios and say, hey, let's practice this. You just saw a sales call that went off the rails. Now let's have a coaching conversation. What is that going to look like? Or let's talk about a deal that's stuck. You know, what are you looking to do? Well, you can enable and use some of those, like a second nature or Rainmakers or, you know, some of the AI role play to practice those conversations in a safe environment. And I think that's going to evolve rapidly over the next, you know, 12 to 18 months. And we're going to see that, you know, able to put that into play with an easier lift. At least that's the hope. Caitlin, I'd love to lean in on your question a little bit more about, you know, perception of the teams are misaligned, individual contributor and their own skill sets. How do you see that in your situation? Yeah. So we've invested a huge amount in, I work for Open Text and, you know, support a couple thousand sellers and we've invested a huge amount in what we call sales excellence, which is measuring our team's competencies. And it's a full 360 that we do about every half year where we understand what are the competencies of our individual contributors or sellers. And as part of that 360, we asked the managers, what are your team's skills? Where are they at? And the data shows that the perception, the individual contributors have of their personal skill set across the competencies that we measure. Is much lower than the perfection, the managers to feel that their competencies are at. So we have a huge gap, bigger than industry standard. And it's completely shaped how we think about our manager training because it just demonstrates to us that there is no calibration. The coaching gap was huge. They're not sitting with their teams, understanding where they're at, understanding where their skills are. And it was a, and so it's been a huge investment that we've had this year in making sure we close that gap. And we're starting to slowly. We just did another reassessment and we have incredible participation. We get to 98% participation rate in our surveys, which is like unbelievable across thousands of people. So it's good, but it's, it's really eyeopening and it's shaped how we think about our managers in a huge way. No, that, I think that's a great, I mean, to be able to benchmark, right. And back to the, if we don't benchmark. And as we'll talk about, oftentimes the questions are just focused on sales coaching because that's what the leaders know. And there's, there's obviously more pillars, right? There's more to being a frontline manager. So if we haven't assessed them, we may not know where the other gaps lie or kind of where they're coming from. That's great. And I know you had a question and I'm curious if others can lean in on AI coaching tools. And I know, you know, as I mentioned, we're, you know, testing out and working with second nature. One of our large clients uses that for AI role play. I will also give a shout out. I mean, a number of the tools like on a Lego and seismic and others, you know, are building AI coaching into their platforms. And then the other one I'll mention, we partnered at zoom with ambition. Ambition is a coaching platform that allows you to capture that coaching conversation. What were the priorities? What were the next actions? And what's brilliant about that is now you can aggregate that across the organization and see what people are actually coaching on. Right. And where are some of the skill gaps? And also is that correlating with better performance when you start integrating Salesforce data? So I love, you know, some of the technology that's helping to enable that because in the past, and we've had those programs where it's like, all right, collect the PDF forms, right. Cause we want to see what those look like. And regardless, however, you're doing it, you should, we should be doing it, but leveraging technology, I think is a great play there. So fantastic discussion that, you know, it's always great with this group. We, we, one of our goals is to make sure we engage and have discussions. So this, this group is not disappointing, Dave, let's continue on. I mean, you know, we talked about, Hey, there's a gap there and enabling some of the manager teams and why that's happening. Can you talk a little bit about the performance and, you know, this helps to start build building the business case and maybe some information we can take back when we're trying to support that manager and implement. Yeah. So Ray, this is the, this is the so what, right. So when we looked at attainment figures for teams that had dedicated sales manager training programs versus the teams without, you can see we found a seven point gap in FY 23, which if you internalize that, I mean, that's, you know, for, if you're doing a hundred million dollars in revenue, if you're doing a billion dollars in revenue, it'd be tens of millions of dollars in, you know, in course revenue that you're leaving or the difference, you know, between having a training program for yourself managers versus not. So it's just, you know, it's kind of a striking difference. And it really speaks to the, you know, again, the so what really about why it's just not just, you know, it seems like logical sense, but there's solid numbers behind why this matters so much for your commercial performance as an organization. It's just the team that has a massive impact every day on selling performance. And do you see that amplified through attainment figures here? Yeah. And, you know, obviously it's a correlation, but it's a pretty strong correlation that those teams that train their managers tended to outperform and a measurable gap. I'm curious if others have seen that, you know, have you actually been able to measure the, the improvement from a sales management program and what does that look like? It's not that easy. I was just going to add in there that if it was the number one thing that enablement team has found that they struggled with relative to the folks that had that as a responsibility, it was the biggest gap we found in proficiency. So not surprising if people aren't jumping up and down to talk about measuring the impact of enablement, because that one is definitely hard. We got that from survey responses and just, you know, experience, you know, it can be difficult. I mean, I think the key is the, like for us, it's the management operating rhythm. Like what is it? I mean, I'm sort of old school. I, my, my second sales manager was a guy named Bill McDermott. You may know him as the CEO of ServiceNow, but he was a second line sales manager 30 years ago when I worked for him. And he had a saying, success without a well oiled plan was nothing more than luck in timing. Lack of success with the well oiled plan was a temporary situation. So for us, it's what is your management operating rhythm? Like what is it that you do on a weekly basis? Yeah, there are going to be occasions where you have to jump in and win the deal. Right? Because for the most part, rarely do we promote mediocre sales people. So they do have that skill set when needed to jump in and rectify a situation. But for us, it's what's your operating rhythm? What are your expectations from your weekly call to your opportunity reviews to your win strategies? And how are you doing that? And then how do we enable that from my team? Right? And so, you know, the whole thing was, you know, don't take me out of the field. You know, I sold for 25 years before I moved into education and enablement. I play golf weekly. So I know there's plenty of time out there. But so I've basically taken the attitude like we're going to come to you. We're going to go to the team meetings. We're going to go to the opportunity reviews. We're going to draft it. Right? When I was a sales leader, the thing that I wanted was like the thing that I loved about sales people were ones that closed large deals, influenced decision criteria, and relentlessly qualified deals. Those were the three characteristics of elite sales people. So if that's what we want, then we as an enablement organization have a responsibility to give them the skills to execute those complex sales conversations, the knowledge of what my company does and how it impacts. And then lastly, the culture of who we are. I think so much of what like I try to establish at BeyondTrust is the culture of who we are. Right? That we are elite. What we do for a living matters. We're experts in our field. Like we bring value. Right? Every day we wake up, we should bring value to the organization. But getting back to the first line manager, it's the operating rhythm. I think like I don't know. I'm really good. I like telling stories and analogies. Like when my first child was born, my mom was like make sure you learn how to do a swaddle. Right? So they knew. They were like locked up. Everyone was locked up and wouldn't cry. I think sales people would say what? Managers who have strong operating rhythms really excel. And I think this slide, I think the number's great. I really do. I think it's more than seven points. I think it's double digits. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. No. And so I think, you know, establishing that and if that comes through a playbook, if that comes through the training, we're going to talk about manager playbooks and some interesting findings, you know, as we go along here. But I think it is so critical and, you know, understanding what we're going to measure. One of the things we're seeing, and some of you are familiar with our digital talent assessment and then we try to correlate sales performance, which is great for the individual seller. It's really interesting when you look at that for managers and say, well, let's look at their skills across these competencies and let's look at how their team is doing as a portfolio, right, of producers and which teams are hitting the mark and where are they struggling and what can we do about those. Is it a proficiency problem? Is something getting in the way? So I think that's interesting when you start to benchmark the teams, which you can also then look at where were they at the beginning of the training and then where were they, you know, six months after. Obviously it takes a while to pull through those skills, but I think we can see that uplift. Like you said, Patrick, I suspect it is higher. I mean, obviously this was a sample size and, you know, self-reported, but, you know, we know that, you know, historically those teams that invest in manager training and manager development tend to outperform the others. So let's keep moving here, Dave. You know, we talked about if we think it's valuable, maybe we're not doing as much or the way that we would like and there are some things getting in the way, and so I think one of the recommendations was, you know, what are those short-term priorities that are obstacles and what else is getting in the way? Maybe you can speak to the data in terms of how we looked at obstacles and what the survey told us. Sure. I mean, you know, it's fairly straightforward. We were looking at, you know, obviously there's a correlation between, you know, higher attainment, more effective sales managers if you can put them to training programs, and I don't think anyone would really argue with that, you know, just in general as a point. But teams are still not actually getting the job accomplished. We touched on it a little bit at the top of our research review here is that, you know, only about 60% of the teams have the training programs themselves. We found that, you know, digging a click down from there, about a third of those teams actually managed to get the job done. So it's just even more eye-opening when you think that, you know, there's dedicated resources to do it, and then, you know, teams are still finding reasons, even if they have a dedicated program, to get in the way of being able to actually deliver training to their frontline sales managers. That's really pointed for sales managers. So we wanted to ask just, you know, in general, what's stopping people from actually being able to accomplish this? And that's, you know, really budget was a consideration. Time was almost not cited at all. Other is kind of a mishmash of a few other things, some write-ins that didn't really kind of amount to a consistent theme. But overwhelmingly, it was competing priorities, just finding, you know, it's the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year. We're launching a new product. We don't have the time to do this right now. So it's kind of just kicking the can down the road. And I think as we've had this conversation with other enablement leaders, we've kind of heard the echo of the same thing. So I'm curious, you know, Ray, if you want to put this out to the group, like what are the things that, you know, are stopping your teams from being able to execute on this? Yeah, I'd love to hear. And I know we had a discussion about, you know, the leadership support. Time is an interesting one. I think this was taken as time, you know, from an enablement standpoint versus time from the manager. Because I know we consistently hear the managers are overworked. They don't even have time to do training. It's probably a separate discussion. But, yeah, how does this resonate? And any other thoughts or ads on this? I'll chime in. We attempted to roll out a frontline sales manager training. I think, like all programs, it was supported initially. It received some attention in the beginning. But when push came to shove and we were trying to get managers to attend, attendance was the first problem, right? You know, you try to book sessions far enough in advance, and people are unable to commit, or they commit, they decommit, right? And when you have a paid program, you know, there's costs associated with that. So you can't just redo it. I think the worst thing is, you know, whether it's SBI, SRG, or anyone else, all of these programs are designed to be interactive. We know that. And I think the most disappointing thing for me, aside from not showing up, were managers who felt they could simply just watch a recording and that was sufficient, right? And, in fact, we actually didn't even want to record them because of so much emphasis was placed on the participatory aspect of it. And we actually looked, we actually asked, and we did it. And it's just we struggled because at one point it was like it just became a checkbox. Well, you know, I sat in the recording. And even if you have the follow-on kind of office hours, you know, put into practice, come back and share with you what worked or didn't work, just the participation was very off. And I'll be frank with you. We suspended the program halfway through because we were not getting the time commitment that would make it worth our while. And I think I made a comment earlier last week or, you know, when we met, right, that we'll go where enablement is wanted. I'm not going to force the program. There's so many other areas that we can put our time and attention that if I cannot, I'm not going to force it onto them. They have to understand that it is there for their benefit and they want it because we will go deliver a program in another area of the Salesforce where it is wanted. So just give you my own personal experience. Yeah. No, and I think it's one that we've all maybe run into. You know, if you build it, they won't necessarily come. You put it out there and you're like, well, wait, this is really good. And, you know, I think we talked about some of those factors that we found, you know, gamification, the sponsorship, making the progress very visible. I have a recording from a webinar we did with Diebold Nixdorf where we took a number of, in this case it was sellers, but, you know, same kind of challenge. But because of the Credly badge, the points that were being allocated each week, you know, the success criteria that we established, they had 98% completion rate across a six-week blended program. You know, I mean, it was just exceptional. But a lot of that was because they were leaning in on every week. They got personal follow-ups. They got that visibility. So, you know, I think there's a lot we can do. Yeah, Brian, I know you made a comment about both, you know, not doing recording, so I understand that, make it live and interactive, and also tying into incentive or comps or outcomes. Was that part of a requirement then? They needed to do that to kind of achieve their MVOs? Correct. Yeah, so for our manager population, there's three different components that we drive. One is the OKR-based training. So they have to complete it with their ICs, if it's an AE or an AM, particularly from the manager side. And then also, like, we've tied the completion of your training to their incentive system. So meaning how they've now followed through on the reinforcement strategies that we've, you know, taught within that particular training, they're given points to be able to increase their compensation outcome for the year. And also it ties into their rating. So those are the two main, you know, drivers that we have within our system. The last thing that we do is that we also track through AI and also through assessment the coaching capability of managers. And so we're using an internal proprietary system for AI and another partner system from a previous ex-Googler that created a system called Udily that now is recording and tracking the coaching opportunities from the manager to the IC to be able to get the qualitative piece on that. Now we're still testing to see how that ties back into our incentive system. But that's also showing that they're following up on some of the things that we want the manager population to kind of reinforce within the sales team and the flow of work. So those are some things that we do. We don't record any of our trainings. They're all live. They're in person. We have global hubs across the, you know, the country and also outside of the country. But primarily only recordings that we do are product knowledge based. And so we have several products in our suite, and those are typically recorded with top level sellers or even our top, you know, executives explaining the product and the positioning of the product and how it compares to, you know, competitors, so on and so forth. But all of the additional training enablement skills and outcomes that we want are done live. And then we follow it up with reinforcement activities that I kind of highlighted before. Yeah, I love that. And it also speaks to something, you know, we've talked about previously. But you need the sponsorship then to say, yes, we are going to make that part of the comp plan or we are going to put this into their management objectives, which also says, yes, we're in it. We're behind it. You know, we really support this. And, you know, that's going to be critical. I know the best programs that we've run where the leadership is involved, I've shared this story before, but, you know, we had a CEO sit in on the kickoff of a Fortune 500 company and said, this is so important to me. I want to see your plan. Please send them to me. I'm excited. And, you know, what it did is it put everybody on notice and also said, leadership is behind this. And you can't always manufacture that, but finding the right sponsor, building the business case, hopefully getting that alignment. And, Don, to your point, this is what we need to be successful. But if we're not aligned or bought in, you know, maybe the timing isn't right or maybe this isn't something that we want to take on on top of everything else you have to do. Yeah, and that's so important, right, because I think our top executive, Phillip Schindler, actually models. He's gone to all of our sales enablement trainings, and he also talks about it visibly within our monthly GBL Live, which is like all sellers across the whole company globally sits together on a monthly basis. So primarily that's been a huge unlock for us, particularly when it comes to like reinforcing like the strategies we're trying to deploy from a sales enablement perspective. That's been very helpful. Well, I think packaging that executive sponsorship as part of any program, you know, charter, and it's really part of a change management journey. You know, we need to have that in place. How do we get it? You know, what are some of the things we can do? It's probably a topic of a whole separate session that we could do. So I want to keep us moving and touch on a couple of other places or parts from the research. And I sent this out as an attachment. We'll also have a portal at the end where you can download our latest research and some of the other tools that we'll share. But, you know, Dave, maybe you can talk about the idea of sales performance management versus coaching versus leadership, some of the other areas we looked at, and kind of how those broke out. Sure. I don't know. I thought Karen had her hand up. I don't know if she does any previous comment there, or you can jump on if Karen, I don't know if she still has the same comment or whatever. Well, I have this general comment, and I got some good nuggets from Brian, but really interested in just more ideas for getting buy-in and support from leaders for more accountability around, you know, we do the training. They're top notch. We know that they're best practice because we work with SBI on a lot of them, you know, and so, you know, the quality is there and yet there's no inspecting what we expect from our senior leadership team. And therefore, you know, our sales leaders, all things being equal, change is hard. And so they're going to go the path of least resistance and don't really incorporate a lot of what they learn through training. They're not doing the motions. They're not, you know, getting to real coaching. And so that's just been a real challenge for us. And, you know, it's even more challenging to have the resources dedicated to make those things happen. But knowing that there's not going to be accountability, you know, there's not a lot that can happen without that. Somebody else address that challenge or found anything that's worked there? I don't know if this will work for you, Karen, but what I decided to do was I, when our CRO or an SVP would go into a meeting, I would send them like speaker notes. I did their job for them. I basically told them what they needed to say or do. And so I made suggestions for them. I said, hey, all right, we're going into this monthly meeting with the entire, with the sales leadership. We are, you know, three weeks post last SBI High Impact Sales Manager. We're two weeks out from the Capstone event. Here's what you need to say. And then more importantly, anything that we've launched post, I've written communications for him to send out and I would send to his administrative assistant. I hate to say it, but I'm a ventriloquist. I'm delivering the message through them. When I've needed our CEO to say something, I've suggested or made suggestions to her in a direct email or Teams chat on how it would tie back to the lowest level denominator. So for me, I think we all know this. Without buy-in, it's not going to work. And so instead of asking for the buy-in, I just started making suggestions. Yeah, Patrick, first of all, I love your analogies that the swaddle blanket and now the ventriloquist. I'm totally sparring them. Yeah, you know, I wrote a book years ago. It only got published one time by me. But, yeah, it's sort of – I love it. I love it. Yeah. Just to follow up on that, though, I think that there's like this – and, yes, we do have a lot of seasoned sellers who, you know, started in 1980 and have never left the company, by the way. Okay. They are a challenge. And, you know, taking that one step further, though, you know, leaders who think because you say something makes it so, it's not that they're not bought in. They're just not really understanding the dynamics of what makes things happen. Yeah. It's a little more complex than that. Yeah, it's a big thing. Like one of the things that was really interesting in the SBI rollout was understanding the mindset, like, of a coach. Like what makes a really good coach? In my mind, it's somebody who can take somebody to a place that they can't get on their own. Yeah. That's what I like. So, like, I always tell the story of, like, you know, Ted Williams considered probably the best baseball hitter of all time, even though he's a Boston Red Sox and I'm a New York City kid growing up in the Bronx and I'm a Yankee fan. Right? So, you know, mentioning anybody from Boston, especially the Red Sox, is not a priority in my life. But the really interesting thing was he was a great baseball hitter and he hit 400, which puts you in the Hall of Fame, but he also managed at the same performance, meaning he only coached four wins out of every ten victories, out of every ten games, and that would get you fired, of course. But he didn't have the ability to take his skill set and transmit, and that's really, like, that's, like, so important. And so I realized that I can't just ask leaders to make comments. I somewhat have to control the narrative. And so, yeah. So, Ray, if you're recording this you cannot be playing this back for Brent or anyone that I'm treating them like ventriloquists or puppets. Not that, you know, they're very professional, you know, and I came here. I came to Beyond Trust because of my relationship with Brent. But, you know, I think it's critical to control the narrative as much as possible. Yeah. And I think it makes it successful, right? So I think most executives, at least, we found are appreciative of that. And, you know, if they're not, then you need to have a separate conversation, like, well, are we invested? I know where we find either we're ghostwriting a video that we're playing at the beginning of the program or they're joining live and, you know, we're giving them some talking points. We just kicked off a program in London a few months ago, and, you know, the VP of Europe and North America were both in the room for the full two days, and the CRO joined at 4 o'clock in the morning his time, because he was still in the States, to kick off the program. And, again, it set the stage, and, you know, we said these are the things that we want to reinforce. So, yeah, I think we can work to do that. We can encourage that. Obviously we need to play the hand that we're dealt, and sometimes that's not possible. So, like, this whole thing, I'm really just curious on number of years. Like, I would say I was a one-hit wonder. I spent 25 years at Xerox Corporation for a variety of reasons that don't want to waste our time. But why do we put up with, and I just have to ask that, why do we put up with, like, salespeople who have this attitude that I've been doing this for 10 years, I can't learn anything? Like, this whole thing of, like, we've got all these seasoned people, we can't teach them something. It's just, it's befuddling to me that we have, that that's out there. I don't know if I was taking what people were saying, like, tenure of how long, you know, I mean, it's great having a senior sales force, but a lot of the senior sales force that we have at BeyondTrust is like, I've been doing this for a long time, Patty. I got it. Right? Well, okay. Like, how you would sell today is a lot different than you would have sold during the heart of COVID than you would have sold prior to COVID. So why aren't we, like, developing our skill sets to evolve? We have that here as well. And I think that part of that is that I think that managers have trouble knowing how to have hard conversations. Sometimes you have to get to that level and be like, look, you know, numbers are showing that we need a boost. I know you've been doing this a long time, but we have to have a time to Jesus about how this needs to change. Yeah. I don't think people are comfortable having those kind of conversations, and that's one of the initiatives I've got on our docket is to help coach managers how to have those hard conversations and help people while still being able to motivate them. Yeah. And meet them. If we can realize where they're coming from and that everybody doesn't need the same treatment, but, you know, Patrick, to continue your sports analogy, the best players in any sport have multiple coaches. They're working on improving their game. They're going to the batting cage or the driving range or, you know, whatever that may be. So, you know, why do salespeople think that, oh, we've got it, I don't need to do anything? I don't know. I cut you off, Emma. Were you going to make a comment? Yeah, first, Angela, love your last name. I've come across many other fishes. I'm going to actually speak. I think Kelsey Strayer is on this call. She runs enablement for our team. And one thing I think she's done really well in this area is if you don't have the stick, you don't have the benefit of the CRO saying, you know, this is required. A carrot piece, and I think this applies really specifically to, like, technology and process advancements, where that is just changing at a pace that it really wasn't five years ago. And there are very specific benefits to I'm going to teach you how to use this new component of the RevTech stack and you're going to be worse at your job if you're not using that and everyone else is. She's leading a lot of our, like, training positioning and enablement positioning around what is the individual benefit to the seller, not why it's good for the company, not why we want to do it as enablement, not why it's aligned with our strategic goals. Like, what are you going to walk out with that's going to make your day to day better? And it can be things that are really small. But I think even that positioning shift has helped us move from, like, why does it matter to me or Kelsey or the CRO? Why does it matter to you sitting there taking 30 minutes of your day and what are you going to come out of this able to do? I think it's really helped. It's not a carrot and a stick. Yeah. I love that. The what's in it for me, right, at a very personal level, like this is why you should pay attention. Well, great discussion. So, you know, we kind of talked about the different areas. Dave, do you want to talk a little bit more about, you know, the areas we assessed and then a couple of the key themes that bubbled up here? Sure. So, you know, the biggest thing we wanted to uncover here was just, you know, what teams were focusing on as they were trying to deliver effective sales manager training. And, you know, it's not obviously enough just to kind of show up and do it. You have to focus on the right things. So the two things that really bubbled up, you know, after we asked about, and you can see some of the other things we asked about were things like time management, leadership, recruiting. You know, these are the two things that bubbled up to the top. It was managing sales performance and sales coaching. And, you know, as an enablement professional like myself, you know, and knowing, you know, if you haven't been a sales manager, it may not be clear what the differences are between those two things. And I think we all know that they are different. And there's distinct skill sets and different reasons as to why we employ both skill sets with sellers. So that was really kind of what we wanted to make sure we highlighted is that there's a difference between these two things, and they're both very important for sales management, especially for the training. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it goes back to the, you know, on the left side is more about the cadence, the expectations. Do we know what good looks like? Have we set that in place? Do we have a way to measure? And then one of the areas we often see a gap is managers want to jump in and, you know, kind of tell them what to do the way that they learned it, not necessarily doing the root cause and really identifying why is this gap happening. You know, is this a skill set issue? Maybe we haven't set expectations or given them feedback. Maybe something's getting in the way. You know, there's multiple things that have different interventions, depending on why that's happening, but just saying, well, they're lazy, or saying, oh, it's training's fault, right, you know, kind of taint the conversation. So we really lean into that kind of root cause analysis and then what are all the actions you can take. Coaching is one of those things. So let's, you know, lean in on coaching deals, coaching skills, you know, having those coaching conversations. But that's why I think it's important to split those two. Any comments or thoughts on this? I'm going to say that I think that when it comes to managing sales performance, that's where they focus most of their time. The sales coaching part of it, that in the field, just-in-time coaching, looking for those opportunities to be able to make that seller better every time you're with them seem like they're less of a priority than managing the numbers and the pipeline. Well, I think you're right. I think there's often more pressure on managing the day-to-day or managing to a dashboard, even though maybe they don't have all the skills they need to close those gaps. Versus coaching is, you know, it's a mindset, as we talked about earlier, and it's also a longer-term play to say, oh, no, I want to build this coaching plan, I want to work on these key skills. If we do this, it's going to lead to better performance in the future, but it's not necessarily going to help close this deal today. I mean, that's more focused tactical or deal coaching. So I think we need to balance all of those things. And I think a lot of managers misinterpret number three on the left as coaching. I think if you ask a lot of managers, they would say that is actually coaching, that they do coaching because they regularly provide constructive feedback. Therefore, they are coaching. I coach them all the time. I tell them what to do, right? Right. Yeah, I think we need to define coaching very specifically, and I think that's why having that mindset and the tools to do that changes that conversation. It makes the performance reviews easier if we're doing regular coaching and we kind of know what those topics are, but I completely agree. I think it's a different function. So we looked at a couple of other areas, and this one was interesting because it was a little aside from maybe our normal focus for manager development, but it came up about technology training related to the manager. Dave, can you walk us through what did this tell us and what do you think is going on here? Sure. This one requires a little bit of a voiceover because we took a little bit of data and some of our analysis from the first report we read around enablement scaling to kind of add some color here. And it was just that, you know, we found that top performing enablement teams are more focused just in general on technology than some of the other teams that we looked at in this particular study. And it kind of speaks to the trend, and there were certainly other things that enablement teams could prioritize over technology. But I think it kind of speaks to a trend and also just the reality that we know that AI and technology and adoption in the sales stack, especially, it's changing constantly. And it's only going to become more important for front-line sales managers to have a really good handle on those technologies because it's not just CRM anymore, you know, update CRM, or have sellers just nagging them to make notes. They're now leading the adoption of technologies and workflows that haven't been done before. So it's just going to become more and more important for front-line sales managers to have that piece in their training programs moving forward. So that's kind of what we were just wanting to highlight. And I think we already, if I remember in one of the comments already in this call, there's just questions around how other teams are using AI tools. So, Brian, I don't know if you want to open it up to the floor. I'm just curious myself how other teams are putting AI to use. So just within workflows, within the sales stack. Yeah, I think it would be really interesting to lean in. And also on the technology training, you know, it's one thing to say we're going to train you on how to use Salesforce, for instance. It's another to say, okay, you're the manager, and you need to be able to both coach your teams as well as, you know, understand how to inspect and reinforce and do all those other things. So we ask a lot of our front-line managers, and often I don't think we think of them as, okay, how are they going to help really support this, though we still add it to their agenda, right, or we put it on their list of responsibilities. So, yeah, I'd love to get comments both on the tech enablement part and specifically on AI. Are there things you're doing to enable your managers to, you know, be better coaches leveraging that? So I was going to jump in. This is not AI related necessarily. But when Patty and I are rolling out this program right now, what I've always tried to do and what we try to make sure we do in our communications is all of these, all this training that you've done already, the MedPIC training, the FBI coach training, all those things we've done, this program is bringing those all together, right? So it's really reinforcing the, guys, you need to update the fields in Salesforce. We need to see content in those. But it's just to reinforce for them that these aren't one-off activities. These all come together to help make you better sales managers and essentially the drug revenue for the company, right? So I think that's part of our constant thread and conversation is, and I think someone mentioned earlier, is what's in it for me? What is in it for them to really understand that this isn't just another enablement thing that they're worth throwing over the fence, that we're going to come in and we're going to help you with adoption. We're going to help you with reinforcement. That's part and parcel of what we do. I love that. Yeah, and it is part of the role. And unfortunately we keep piling more and more on and don't always take things off. That's always a question. Are there things we can do to free up time for them to lean in more on those priorities? And are they doing administrative work or meetings or, you know, things that now can be automated with AI? So can we take some of that mundane, repetitive task off of their plate to free them up? Because we know when we ask why don't you coach, it's like, well, I don't have time to coach. Like, really, what else are you doing? You know, what could be more important? You know, they're getting pressure to do a lot of different things. Are there other comments from the panel? One of the things that I've been doing that's actually been working, you know, I have a meeting with each of our VP sales leaders every month. And I put together, you know, a conversation guide that I go through with them with all the key priorities we meet, you know, in the spirit of the ventriloquist comment. I am feeding them the key messages that we need to be talking about with our sellers, you know, really giving them their agenda for the month. I also give them specific insights from the data that I can see through the technology. And so this has been, you know, really impactful for LinkedIn Navigator. I think that a lot of sellers are confused about LinkedIn versus LinkedIn Navigator. And so getting them to use the tool effectively and really going in there and showing them live, I actually have them pull it up and do it with me so that they can actually see what the program does. And so is this like deep training? Absolutely not. But I'm getting in their head space with something that is relevant to them that they can use. And it kind of like shocks their system and gets their attention because they can't avoid it. Because a lot of this is everybody's multitasking, right, when you're doing other things. And so I really try to focus on something that they can get impact from immediately. And that they can use to make their job easier, that's relevant. And it's really been effective in getting their behaviors to change. Yeah, I love that. Other comments or thoughts on that? Yeah, and Kelsey, I'd love to hear more about, you know, you were talking about enabling some of the knowledge management materials with ChatGPT. We actually had a case study with restaurant technology at our summit talking about how we leveraged or how they leveraged the chat GPT co-pilot with their playbook to make it available and kind of live in the field coaching and being able to support their sellers and managers. I think that's an interesting area. But, yeah, can you talk a little bit more about what you're doing there? Sure. So we just went through a merger, so officially in January. And so it's not that it's just new sellers. It's like, you know, we have a lot of new customers that are coming in. We just went through a merger, so officially in January. And so it's not that it's just new sellers that are trying to find the information. It's all of our sellers because a lot of our processes have changed, our tech stack, our systems, things like that. So what we're seeing is a lot of people are spending a ton of time. We have this amazing playbook, but it's being able to quickly find the information versus having to go searching for it. And so what we've done, and actually Martin over at Workplace for Everway started this whole initiative, but we're taking our playbook, all of our knowledge that we have essentially, and putting it into a space that then is going to be really accessible through AI. So the idea is that it's almost like your, it's sort of like your buddy. It's kind of like your contact that you can bounce ideas off of. You can type things in, in terms of, hey, I need an email. Can you help me do this using the resources that we have? So it's bringing all of that content together just to make it a lot easier for our users to be able to find the idea of, you know, obviously if that's their book, I put that in there, the book buddy boss thing, right? Like the first place you should look for your resources and your knowledge is going to be confluence through the use of that chat GPT. And then the second place would be to go to your buddy and then go to your boss. So that way, as our sales managers are out here, you know, trying to coach to actually have the time to do so versus being bogged down by all of their sellers, looking for very similar types of information. So we're just trying to make that easier and more accessible for them. Yeah, absolutely. And I think to your point, teaching them how to use those resources, you know, I think that also one of the lessons, even just using chat GPT, you know, there, there is a mindset, there's some prompt engineering, you know, just realizing that, but of those cases where we're seeing good resources available, but they need to remember and then have those use cases and celebrate, oh, by the way, I use this to, you know, flesh out a product spec and, and build a value proposition, you know, while I was in the car before the call, or what are those things that they can use? Because people don't even really think about it. Right. And maybe the next generation, it'll be more native. They'll just consider that as part of the toolkit. But I do think we have to do enablement to even be able to leverage those kinds of resources. And are you seeing that Kelsey, are you seeing kind of adoption and, and uplift, you know, based on having the information available? I will keep you posted. We're literally in the process right now of putting it all into Confluence to then train the AI. So we're a few stages away from that, but I will fill you in. I'll say one thing that like we've rolled it out with just our workplace for our B2B business. And one of the things that it's done, it's taken, we worked with FBI on our, on our sales playbook. It's made the content within that a lot more consumable and have them be able to overlay it with account level information that's available on the web. So rather than going in and reading, Hey, here's my sales play for Everway for this type of customer as a sales rep, I can go in and say, Hey, I want to know how I should approach, you know, XYZ PwC next week. Here's what I'm talking to. And it overlays all of that great sales play information, customer journey information from the playbook with publicly available information about the account they're targeting. And that has been, I think, a game changer in terms of efficiency for our reps. Yeah. And Angela, I know at restaurant technology, is that something that you and Brian Quinn and read and others have, have worked on, but it's also the case of getting people and reminding them to use it. Right. Have you seen anything working to get that kind of adoption in your case? No, we're also on the helm of this and you're in charge of this initiative, but I would say that little by little we are gaining adoption. What we're trying to do is put it, keep putting it in front of them. We actually have read going to one of our regional team meetings and he's going to do a, you know, hour long presentation and be able to really dive into how they can use specific use cases to, you know, get information they need. So I think being able to be there in person and just driving it as a real, a real life thing, you can just integrate into your day, but that people can do their right in front of you is, is really what's going to help drive that. So we'll see. We'll have more to report back by the end of the year as well. Yeah. Well, I know you're also able to track that through copilot, which is pretty cool to see what, what are they using and, and how is it being leveraged? You know, I think some of that just for the backdrop for restaurant technology, they consume their sales playbook that, that we worked with them on. They also put their product specs, their competitive battle cards and their value, you know, kind of calculator information. So there's so much there just to say, Hey, I'm going against this, this incumbent, right? How should I think about this for this particular situation or even will this tank fit into this space? I mean, it starts to become really powerful for, for kind of the day-to-day operations. So, yeah. They started using it for prospecting. They're able to put in their route plan from Salesforce maps and be able to look at some key information that we want to look for, you know, our ideal seller looking at menus and hour of operation, something that could have taken them, you know, an hour. Now takes them literally three minutes to get the information they need. So love it. Yeah. I think that's going to just continue to accelerate. So, well, I wanted to cover the last area here, which was a little contrary. And actually we have a blog coming out on this topic, but when we, I mean, obviously FBI, we spend a lot of time building playbooks, working with our clients, you know, supporting them. But it was a little counterintuitive in terms of what the data said about the playbooks and sales performance. Dave, can you walk us through this and then this will be our last discussion, but I think it's a really interesting one. Yeah. Like you said, it was a little counterintuitive, but I think we, we kind of, if you feel back a little bit, you understand what's going on. It's you know, when you look at teams that have sales manager playbooks of which only 40% of the teams that we looked at have adoption is not necessarily, you know, high. I don't think anybody would be excited about these numbers. So, you know, we also tried to do a little bit of a correlation. How does that, you know, impact attainment and just didn't see much change at all. You know, so, you know, it was actually a couple of years where we'd be noticing a point drop or tail. But ultimately I think what you, you feel is back and try to understand what's going on. It's, I don't think that anyone would argue with the value of creating the playbook. What happens I think is, is that the playbook gets created and then that's it. It goes onto a shelf or it's, Oh, we did that. We've enabled our managers and now our managers should have everything they need. They should have their operating cadence. They should understand how to coach because we, we all got together and they got into the room. We put it all into the playbook. So I think the problem, or at least, you know, if you unpack the challenge a little bit is, is that there's a lot of, there's a lot of just follow up and reinforcement that needs to happen that will, you know, augment to the playbook to really bring it to life and make it something, you know, I think Emma and Angela, I've both heard both of you talk about it. It's embedding the content within their day to day, making sure that, you know, it's, it's in the, in the CRM when they need it, it's in their tech stack and in places where they're already looking and they can see, you know, how the information can impact them in that moment. So I would love to hear more just from the team about how you're kind of taking the goodness that we all know is in there and then reinforcing that to make sure that it's actually adopted. Yeah. Has anybody solved that? Yeah. Yeah. Raise your hand if you've solved that problem. I think the one thing we've done that started to work, we've not solved this problem to be very transparent and is part of it was by design, our own fault. Like we had so many different platforms. We had the PDF FBI playbook, we had gone, we had Salesforce, we had Confluence, we had about 20 different places we were expecting folks to go. And so a big part of what we were just talking about, Angela's doing what I think Kelsey's doing for our company is bringing together that list into a much more consolidated area, hopefully with like a chat functionality on top of it. You know, the feedback we were getting from managers, like there's just too many places to go and like the places that they know they need to be. Gong, Salesforce, they're kind of core sales tools where the places they were definitely going the places where we wanted them going and finding information where we're second fiddle. So that kind of consolidation of, of formats or platforms has helped us. Yeah. And the closer we can get to where they're doing the work, the better. And I think we will see that information being available, right? We can pull it in through an AI or an interface to make that more available. I mean, I think what, what was interesting to me about this data is, yeah, we look at it and go, wow, we're, we're spending a lot of time, you know, thinking about talking about playbooks. And I think this would probably be the same on seller playbooks as well. Are we having an equal conversation about the activation and enablement of that playbook? So it's almost like, Hey, we're not going to spend a dollar on this if we don't also put together this eight week or 12 week plan to have them use it to prove that they're using it. And one of the things I really like is, Hey, let's give them some missions to do over 30, 60, 90 days. And to be certified or to come back and, you know, get the badge, whatever that looks like, they have to show that they're using it in their flow of work, in their calls or in their coaching. But, you know, that's not always the case, but I do think this helps to kind of prompt that, Hey, handing it out at SKO is not enough. And, you know, we all probably know that, but there often isn't the extra budget or time or bandwidth to say, no, we need to do this to make it successful. And in fact, we have some data that supports, you know, if you don't do it, it probably doesn't make a difference. Other comments on this? I mean, not directly related to play, but more of the tech stack, if you will. I think it's funny, you know, I think most of us in this role have participated in evaluating different technologies for benefit of sellers or sales managers. Whenever you talk to them, they're all going to want you to want their platform or their tool to be the sticky place. Right. But in reality, you kind of just have to pick one and then everything kind of anchors off of it. So, you know, for example, if you really believe that your reps are going to actively manage their opportunities in a CRM system, then, you know, I would anchor everything to that CRM system and use your sales process. If it's coded in your CRM to then trigger, you know, touch points into other tools. So, you know, if you're using a tool specifically for account planning, when they get to that process, that activity in that stage, you know, it triggers a link out or, you know, we have high spot as a name of the platform as well. You know, yeah, of course we want people going there for their content, but they're not logging in. They won't necessarily log directly into iSquat. Some will, but if they're triggered throughout the process. So, if you have like a, you know, AI tool for, you know, meeting prep, you can launch it, you know, probably off your CRM system or whatever, whatever tool or technology you choose to anchor on. But it does help if you can anchor on something because, you know, you're right. There's just too many places to go if you try to go directly. Yeah. And it just won't get used, right. They'll forget about it or it's not easy. So yeah. Love the discussion. And, you know, I think Caitlin, to your question about, you know, how are people demonstrating the concepts and capabilities and you know, anyone else has thoughts on that, but I think regardless, just making sure that that's a point to say, oh, we are going to get together in 30 days and we want to see your coaching plans, or we want you to bring in, you know, two examples of coaching conversations. What were the topics? What were the challenges? What came out of that? Just putting them on notice. And I know when we do that from a capstone perspective, we have them present to their peers and, you know, there's definitely some pressure if they know that they're going to have to present their plan in front of their peers and get feedback. And again, just making time. And that can, you know, be a 60 minute session, but it, I think shines a spotlight on it. Right. And it makes it more likely that it's going to get used. So, you know, I know we're coming up at the bottom of the hour. I want to be sensitive to everybody's time. I did want to leave you with this link. So if you hit this with the QR and we'll send out the materials as well, but this is a resource center that we're putting together and it includes the survey or the research that I just sent yesterday. Some of the other resources we're publishing, and we want to kind of build that out as an enablement resource center for you all to get access to. So, you know, feel free to download resources there. We will follow up with a summary of this conversation and the materials as well. But let me just open it up for any final questions, comments, any thoughts before we wrap today. Well, I appreciate the invite and listening to everyone. I took a bunch of notes, so you'll probably see some LinkedIn invites and some questions coming from Patty Mac. That's what they call me at BeyondTrust. So you can get a note from Patty Mac, if I like what you said. Well, I love that. And that is the vision for this group, right? Is one, if we can share and be a place to bring this together in a, you know, informal kind of collaborative setting, but also to connect everyone, you know, offline and make those relationships, you know, a little bit better. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. I think that's the vision for this group. If you would like us to think about addressing, I'd be happy to do that. Great. Well, we'll let you get on with your day. Thank you very much. We'll be in touch. Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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