According to Gartner, 60% of sales reps lack relevant learning opportunities. So how can you provide consistent training and coaching with a unified platform?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Here to discuss this topic is Felix McCabe, the head of global enablement execution at Dropbox. Thank you for joining us, Felix. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Felix McCabe: Shawnna, thank you for having us today. I started my career in sales, so I have a lot of empathy for the sales force. My career trajectory has taken me through different avenues from marketing to commercial to where I sit now in enablement. I have a unique perspective on the whole sales process and the different components and parts supporting our sales team. So as I transitioned into enablement at Dropbox, what I do today is lead the execution arm of our enablement team, helping to upskill the level of our sellers at Dropbox.
SS: I love that, it sounds like you are the perfect guest to talk about skilling up your sales teams. And I know on LinkedIn you mentioned that you like to push the boundaries of seller development from onboarding to productivity to mastery. And that is a key focus for you. As an enablement leader, what does streamlining the path to mastery look like?
FM: From where I sit I think about the seller life cycle, like you said, from onboarding, to ramp, to starting to become productive, to ultimately becoming a master in that role. That starts with onboarding and equipping the sales professionals with the right sales skills they need to really be able to sell in today’s market. You layer on top of that product knowledge and any specific sales process nuances we have. Then you’ve got to check that learning, test the delivery, and ultimately sign off and certify and say this salesperson is field-ready. But development can’t really stop there. It takes continuous practice and that comes in the form of coaching, and that’s what’s required as we move closer to mastery. I’m not saying we’re fully there yet at Dropbox, but it’s certainly the ambition we have to put those right pieces in place to accelerate that journey through the seller life cycle.
SS: So tell us a little bit about the value of training and coaching in this. How do you build effective training and coaching programs to help sellers achieve mastery?
FM: The training is only as good as the reinforcement that happens afterward. Because how many times have we seen a seller go through, tick the box, “I’m certified”, but then they struggle to articulate your value prop in the market or something like that? The challenge for frontline managers is often that there’s not enough time to coach each rep effectively, especially if I’m managing a team of six or eight reps.
But the functionality that we now have with Highspot – thank you – has given us the ability to scale that learning with the ability for managers to really jump in on the platform and be able to coach in a more async and time-effective way. From an admin perspective in my world, I’m able to ensure that coaching is happening and we’ve seen that ramp up since we’ve started to implement this process. The next step for us is to see how AI can accelerate that.
SS: Absolutely. Now, from your perspective, what is the strategic value of a unified enablement platform when it comes to ensuring sellers are ready and building that path to mastery?
FM: We’ve heard a lot about Zoom fatigue over the last few years, especially since the pandemic, but for a seller, it’s tool fatigue. There are so many places to go to do different parts of the process, and that’s just annoying. It’s in my way, and at the end of the day, I’ve got a clock above my head and a target on my back. I’m trying to get that job done anyway, so it’s confusing, and it slows down the sales process.
But what we now have with you and Highspot, there’s a way of bringing some of those elements together so that our sellers are moving closer to a single source of growth. For me, I love the idea that I can go to one place. I can learn about my products as a new seller through courses and learning paths.
But then, as an experienced seller, I’ve got a place to go and refer back to. If I’m on a customer call or preparing for a big meeting, I have an evergreen or always-on space where I can get that information that’s key and critical.
SS: And Felix, you’ve actually leveraged Highspot at a previous enterprise organization as well as Dropbox, and based on that experience, what are some of your best practices for effectively implementing and really driving adoption among your sellers, particularly as you mentioned, while there is all this tool fatigue?
FM: My various experiences at GlobalTelco, Vodafone – shout out to the guys there – and actually a lady at Highspot, Laura, who implemented that at Vodafone, and who introduced us to the platform, and I used it as a rep. That’s why when the opportunity came up, I put my hand up and said, “I know this can be a lot better than what we were doing with the platform at Dropbox.” In terms of best practices, I’ve borrowed from some of that experience, but I’ve also learned from other enablement practitioners, like Manny, who I met in Seattle last year at your Spark conference.
I’ll shout out here to Donnie Miller over at American Woodmark. I know he was on this podcast too, but he gave me a tour of their instance of Highspot, and that gave me a lot of food for thought as I came back and started to relaunch the platform. So in terms of adoption and helping us get there, number one: it’s making things easy to find. It’s as much about curation as it is creation because you can have a lot of stuff in there. I like to use the analogy that we’re the gallery, and we work with the publishers as the artist and we help them curate the best assets and showcase what our reps need to know. Then it’s about building good governance around the platform to make sure it’s always good content and stuff that’s outdated is getting out of there.
Quality is something we struggled with and now we’re getting a lot better at. And investing time in bite-sized learning, to show how you can get the best out of the platform. That’s a value add and a key tidbit that we got from our Highspot CSM, Kelly, so shout out to her as well.
SS: You talked about how important it is to really make sure that Highspot is seen as a platform, that trusted source, and you guys have seen a lot of success by implementing a lot of these processes that you just talked us through, including great governance, you guys have actually achieved a 29% increase in adoption of Highspot over the last few months. How do you gain trust with your sellers when launching new programs or initiatives?
FM: It starts with trust, and that’s key for adoption and ensuring that what we’re doing is value-add for our stakeholders. Not only the sales reps themselves, but also sales leadership and not making sure we’re adding to a priority list, but we’re part of the priority list, supporting that and partnering with content publishers. In our case, that’s a lot of our product marketing team to ensure the quality of what’s being produced as well as ourselves in terms of the learning that we’re creating is supported by those assets and then bringing it to sales in a consistent.
We’ve done that a lot using the Sales Play object in Highspot, that’s been helpful, both from a curation point of view, but also from an admin point of view, because we’ve got dashboards now be able to show how those plays are being engaged with, from a content consumption point of view, as well as a learning certification point of view.
And, another recommendation we’ve taken from Highspot is leveraging your messaging framework of what to know, what to say, what to show, and what to do. And just simplifying that messaging for reps has been, a game changer.
SS: Now, in terms of strategic initiatives, because you mentioned the product marketing team is one of your key partners. I know one of your key focuses this year is driving a new product launch. Can you tell us more about this initiative and what you’re aiming to achieve?
FM: We launched a new product last year, which we call Dropbox Replay. It’s a video image collaboration tool, enabling things like frame anchoring and commenting, and works with a lot of the main video editing tools out there like Adobe and DaVinci.
It’s got many use cases, not just the media space, but construction space. We’ve even seen some interesting use cases from sports teams that we partner with. From an enabler perspective, it’s about us ensuring that our sellers are knowledgeable about this product, its functionality, and then how it’s supporting our customers to be more productive. So that’s where it starts with Replay.
SS: Absolutely. What are some of the key ways that you’re leveraging Highspot to help support the product launches for your teams?
FM: I’ll talk a bit about the Replay launch again because what we’ve done is we started by creating a three-module learning path. Our sellers can learn about the product and test their knowledge using the knowledge checks and the video submission capability that’s in there. I think that’s really cool because we’ve tried to be creative with that type of knowledge check and the video submission. What we’ve done is create scenarios where we will have reps pitching against objections that they might get from a customer, as well as creating a scenario where they need to demo the product.
So that’s both two different use cases for that same piece of functionality within our learning paths and that’s been great. Alongside that, we’ve created an evergreen space around Dropbox, we Play products, so we’ve got our pitch decks in there, discovery questions, case studies, competitive information, we’ve even got video content from some of the reps, some of their colleagues who’ve been successful selling the product and what value they were able to bring to their customers.
So that’s where we’ve got to so far, but we’re still looking forward and we’re looking at now how we can leverage Highspot’s API, create a new flow of data so we can start tracking more of this line correlation from content, consumption training certification into pipeline generation and ultimately revenue, right? So we’re starting to build that out now with the help of the Highspot technical account team.
SS: How do you measure the impact of your efforts on your strategic initiatives and do you have any wins you can share?
FM: We’ve been on a journey from a data perspective here. As I just mentioned, we’re looking at automating some of the processes we’ve had through your API and data lake extension, but until now it’s been very manual. Last year, for example, we took our global AE team, roughly about 50, 60 sellers, and we looked at their performance across five or six criteria: performance versus target closed business, those kinds of things, and we created an aggregated score.
We did the same in terms of engagement and things that would highlight engagement, like content consumed had they completed training, et cetera. What we were able to find by creating this aggregated score was that the reps who were doing more of the right things – they were highly engaged, consuming the content in Highspot, and taking the courses that we’d built – were outperforming others significantly. I think the stat we have is between 48 to 57 percentage points higher attainment versus target than those who weren’t engaged, so that’s huge for us to be able to quantify that influence over revenue. Going forward, the plan is to automate a lot of this and we’ll be looking to leverage the API, but also the Scorecards you’ve built into the platform.
SS: And that is an amazing win, congratulations to you and the team at Dropbox. Last question for you, Felix, you have a strong vision for your enablement strategy. How do you plan to evolve your strategy in the next year? And how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you innovate?
FM: I always like to joke that we’re never in a fair fight in enablement. We’re typically outnumbered 50 reps to one of us. In that world, it’s all about being scalable, repeatable, and measurable. A couple of things that we’re looking to do is continue to invest in building more of our spaces within Highspot in those Spots. We’re bringing on other partners within the business, like our rev ops team, and deal desk, they’re all looking for their own spaces.
So we’re bringing more of the sales process and organization into Highspot to continue that ambition of being a single source of truth. We’re on to your front-line lead coaching program, so bring all our front-line managers through a coaching program and Highspot will play a big part of that with specific manager-based plays and using the Scorecards again here.
And then we’re hopefully going to accelerate a lot of what we’re doing with the AI functionality that you guys have brought to market recently. For me specifically looking at AI feedback within those learning modules, I think that’s going to be a big piece for us.
SS: Exciting. Felix, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.
FM: Thanks for having us.
SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
