According to the State of Enablement Report 2024, organizations that leverage technology to power sales training are 50% more likely to improve quota attainment. So how can you optimize training technology to amplify your enablement efforts and drive business results?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I’m 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 Donda Daniels, the GTM Learning and Development Manager at Vehlo. Thank you for joining us. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Donda Daniels: Thanks Shawnna for having me today. I’m excited to be here. So I took kind of an unconventional way, started out as an elementary school teacher, and I’ve actually listened to enough of your podcast to know I’m not the only one that has started in that area, but I did elementary, mostly like fourth grade ish or whatever, and then I went into interventions and that’ll be important to some of the other things that we talk about going on in this interview. And then because of some life changes, I ended up going into sales and I went in kind of kicking and screaming, but realized I was pretty good at it. I liked all of the strategy. And there was actually a lot of teaching components in sales skills that transferred pretty well.
But I realized even though I was pretty good at selling, you know, doing all the president’s clubs and whatever, I miss teaching and training and really wanted that to be my focus again. And so that’s when I made the change into sales enablement and ultimately into my role now is go-to- market learning development manager at Vehlo.
SS: Amazing. Well, Donda, thank you again so much for joining us. If you’ve heard this before, I have tremendous respect for teachers, especially in elementary school, given that my two little ones are there. And so amazing, amazing career path. Now, because of that, because of that experience in learning development, especially the classroom teaching and life coaching, how does that experience impact your approach to sales training and coaching?
DD: So I’ve had some pretty big aha moments as I’ve gone along and one of the things that I realized as I got into sales enablement and was really focusing on my sellers was that it was actually a lot like being an interventionist in my classroom where I was in a pool to look and find out what were the barriers that were keeping my students from reading.
I now was in a position that I was looking at what are the barriers that are keeping my sellers from attaining their quotas, reaching their goals. So really taking the step back to identify is where’s the skill gap. Or the knowledge gap, you know, do they not know their product as well as they should? Or do they not understand the systems or the processes that we’ve put in place? And do we maybe need to provide job aids or extra training for them? Do we need to simplify our systems for them? Are they actually bogging them down from getting to where they wanted to be? And so putting in those interventions or supports for my sellers.
So that they could move in the direction we wanted them to, as far as connecting it to what I learned in life coaching, coaching is really about identifying what our thoughts and how did they connect to our results. And so having a really strong mindset in sales is probably the number one tool that you need.
And then taking that approach as I build out resources, understanding that our brain’s number one job is to keep us safe. When things come up that are going to challenge us, our brain is automatically going to be like, ah, you know, what’s going on here. And so for training, really approaching it. How can I make sure that we lay this out so that it’s very clear, concise, intentional that we can kind of calm things down so that they can actually take in the material and do what we need them to do so they can grow.
SS: I love that. And on LinkedIn, I noticed that you also mentioned system optimization plays a really key role in your learning strategy. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and how you’ve leveraged your enablement platform to streamline your tech stack?
DD: Yeah, so at Vehlo, it’s kind of a unique situation. I mean, I’ve been in other companies where we have had acquisitions. Vehlo was built up of 17 smaller companies that came together to serve the aftermarket in the automotive space. And so they all came with their own systems and processes and onboarding and whatnot.
And so being able to use a platform like Highspot to centralize all of that information and set expectations to be a single source of truth has been paramount in us being able to grow at the rate that we need and want to.
SS: Amazing. And you’ve already seen some amazing success. I know that you’ve been working to develop product training for new hires and you’ve been able to reduce ramp time by 50%. Can you tell us more about this effort?
DD: Yeah, that effort has been intentional, organized, and then providing accountability, which Highspot gave us the ability to do all three of those. And so, being able to create tech stack training and product training that we know we’re delivering consistent. Training to everybody across the board, no matter what product they’re attached to and then really using the platform to provide for our learners to absorb the information, but then to make it their own before they’re practicing.
On our customers, like we want to give them that space to make that content, that messaging their own before they’re in an actual selling environment.
SS: I think that’s phenomenal. And just given your extensive learning and development background, I’d love to hear from you about some of your best practices for designing effective training programs.
DD: So one thing that I live by when I’m creating out content or resources is that people say adults, but really everybody, we don’t learn things until we actually have to. And so, you know, we can put forth what we would call training to our customer success or sales reps, whatever team we’re working with, but if we don’t give them that space to make the information their own, then it stops, it’s just awareness.
And so understanding that and then identifying, do our people need some deep training where we’re providing that space for them to make the messaging or the process or whatever their own and giving them space to practice it and then check for understanding, making sure that they have it, or is it just awareness?
Sometimes it’s enough to give them the information. Here’s the feature update. This is how it impacts your customers. And here’s a job aid to support you in that moment. As opposed to, no, we really need to make sure that you have this down pat. And so using the features in Highspot where we can do the training and then being able to make a recording and turn it in and get feedback as that space, because you know that they’re going to record themselves more than once.
And so we’re giving an artificial timeline. Really for them to learn the information and make it their own before they take it out to their customers.
SS: Amazing. How are you encouraging your reps to consistently engage with and adopt your training programs?
DD: We branded our instance of Highspot “the garage”, which is appropriate that we serve automotive shops and dealerships and all good mechanics keep the right tools.
In their garage, and so we work on keeping our garage organized and maintained and always with the intention that they’re going to find what they need in this few clicks as possible. And so then also adopting the mindset that build it they will come. If we build it so that it is purposeful and useful, they’ll know, and they will come and be in there.
And so it really just. Trying to always be intentional to keep them foremost and build it so that it serves our end user.
SS: I love that philosophy. That’s spot on. Now, another thing that I noticed on LinkedIn was that you mentioned you specialize in cross-functional collaboration. And I think this is absolutely essential to anyone in enablement. How do you go about partnering with your go-to-market teams across the business to align your programs to key business objectives?
DD: Yeah, I work really closely with our revenue enablement leaders. For each of our divisions, and they really have a pulse on what’s going on with sales operations and marketing and product and whatever for each of their divisions.
And so working closely with them so that they help me get to the right tables. And sometimes kind of pushing my way in to be at the right tables and not because when I come to the table that I’m necessarily changing the direction, but so helpful for me to hear how the ideas are being created and what the end goal is supposed to be so that I can start connecting it to the platform and resources and training and whatnot to be able to support my stakeholders in this is how I think we can roll this out.
And so really just a lot of communication and hearing. Listening and seeing what the issue or the problem really is that we’re trying to fix.
SS: Amazing. Pivoting a little bit, I’d love to understand from you as well, some best practices around how you think about leveraging data to optimize your training programs.
DD: So you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher. You know, we always used summative and formative data when we were working with our students. And it’s no different when you’re working with adults in sales. And so using the hard data that we have from Salesforce, Highspot, the other tools that we’re using, but also taking the time to get that authentic feedback from our end users, our sales leaders, our sellers, and being able then to take that information. And really ask what I think is the most important question, based on what we’re seeing in the data, why? Why are they performing better than we had expected? Or why are they meeting the goals that we thought they were going to? Why are they underperforming? And being able to connect that to what did we do that we know impacted them positively. And what do we do that? Maybe we need to go back and rethink that it maybe didn’t serve the teams in the way that we had thought that it would.
SS: I love that approach. Last question for you, Donda. With the new year just getting started, what are you hoping to achieve as you continue to enhance your learning and development programs in the year ahead?
DD: Yeah, the biggest is going to be our adoption of Highspot. We’ve done kind of a tiered rollout with teams and so really supporting that adoption and working with our sales leaders and the stakeholders in the company to make sure that it’s serving them.
The way that it needs to continue to build out more product training for some of our different brands and just courses in general for onboarding and also further development of our existing teams, then really supporting my leaders. And the stakeholders to know the data that is available in our platform and how they can use that for coaching and supporting their teams as we go.
SS: Donda, again, thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited for what’s to come ahead for you all, um, but really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today on this podcast.
DD: Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
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.
