According to a report from Harvard Business Review, 70% of all change initiatives fail. So how can you design and implement an effective change management strategy to help your reps adopt change within your organization?
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 Matthew Leiggi, the senior revenue enablement manager at Rectangle Health. Thank you for joining us, Matthew. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Matthew Leiggi: Absolutely. Great to be here. and like you said, I’m the senior revenue enablement manager here at Rectangle Health. I have almost a decade of experience in sales enablement, go-to-market strategy, spanning industries such as. Healthcare, SAS Data, and FinTech. I’ve had leadership roles in organizations like Rectangle Health, where I’ve been for about four and a half years now where my work really focuses on creating scalable enablement programs that empower the sales teams to articulate value effectively and deliver meaningful results.
I also have my MBA, which has helped deepen my ability to align my business objectives With impactful enablement strategies, and at Rectangle Health specifically, I’m responsible for designing and implementing these programs that drive revenue growth. And enable our sales team to succeed in complex competitive markets.
SS: Well, Matthew, I’m excited to have you join us today. One thing that caught my eye on your LinkedIn profile was that you state your mission is to empower sales teams to successfully land the value of your solutions across the buyer’s journey. Can you tell us more about this philosophy and how it drives your enablement strategy at Rectangle Health?
ML: Absolutely. And this philosophy really kind of centers around ensuring that every sales interaction is value-driven and customer-focused. It’s really about, from my perspective, equipping my team and the sales teams with the sales knowledge tools, and confidence to address what the buyer’s needs are at every stage.
At Rectangle Health, that’s translating this into actual strategies by creating sales playbooks, and dynamic training programs, ongoing, both in and onboarding. And then creating content that’s aligned with our specific buyer personas in the healthcare industry. Also, for example, I’ve implemented programs that have emphasized consultative selling, where we know that we’re going to have a conversation that’s going to be value-based, that’s going to articulate ROI and align those solutions with the customer’s pain points.
Again, depending on who I’m talking to because everybody cares about something else. Or something different than maybe that next person that you’re going to be interacting with. So your approach has to be tailored to each of those individuals.
SS: Absolutely. Now, Matthew, in the last few years, Rectangle Health has had a few acquisitions. In your experience, what are some of the challenges that sales teams can face when navigating an acquisition? And how can enablement help overcome these?
ML: Acquisitions can bring changes in product portfolios, processes, organizational culture, and I know sales teams can struggle with alignment and a clear understanding of what the new value propositions are, having to adapt to new technologies they might not have used before.
So enablement can help bridge those gaps by providing clear messaging frameworks, updating training on the integrated offerings, and fostering collaboration through workshops and cross-functional alignment sessions. When Rectangle Health underwent these acquisitions, I facilitated post-acquisition onboarding training to ensure our teams understood what the new value propositions were, focused on operational processes and really took a handheld approach to what the changes were.
So how did it used to be done in your old system or your old process? And then how’s that going to translate into what we’re doing now in our new system? And that’s going to help confidently engage. Our teams to then feel more confident in the process to then more efficiently engage. Our prospects and our customers.
SS: Absolutely. I think those are some fantastic tips and tricks for our audience. Now, I know silos can often also become a common challenge after an acquisition. What are some of your best practices for breaking down those organizational silos through enablement?
ML: Absolutely. And breaking down silos really starts with creating a unified vision and fostering collaboration.
So for me and kind of the enablement role of that, it really kind of starts with that collaboration. I always say enablement’s kind of the third leg in a stool between sales and marketing, product, you know, kind of the rest of the organization. So cross-collaboration is always paramount and that includes hosting alignment meetings, workshops, and what have you with sales, marketing, the product teams to make sure that everybody is on the same page.
We’re all aligned and understand exactly what we’re supposed to be marching towards. The second piece is having a centralized place for resources, using a platform like Highspot so that everybody knows that the knowledge and information are all in the same place, creating that single source of truth.
And then having regular communications, whether it’s participating or holding our own weekly stand-ups, or cross-department meetings, to align our priorities and initiatives. These practices ensure everybody is aligned on goals. And has access to those shared resources, so everybody is marching to the same beat, saying the same things and understanding what everybody across the organization is doing to the best of their ability.
SS: And the desire to break down silos and unify your teams was part of the impetus behind deciding to invest in an enablement platform, I believe, at Rectangle Health. What are some of the ways that you leverage your enablement platform to help drive alignment across your teams?
ML: Enablement platforms like Hotspot are really invaluable to help drive that alignment.
And at Rectangle Health, content centralization, like I said before, is really kind of number one. We’re a small company. When I first started, we only had about 100 people. Everybody was really kind of using SharePoint. And now as we brought in those acquisitions, as you can imagine, everybody has their own places for content and resources.
So bringing everything together under one umbrella was really a step number one to make sure how can we even understand what exists before we can say, is this even the right content? So that centralized content to create an easily accessible repository. For those playbooks, competitive Intel training material was step number one.
The second one is to track engagement. So yeah, we might have several hundred resources that came in from a bunch of different libraries or different places, but what’s actually working when we’re able to analyze what’s used and what’s most effective, we’re able to refine our content, create better content, and being able to bubble that content up to the team.
Where it’s most appropriately effective because we’re able to track that engagement. And the last part is feedback loop. That goes beyond just kind of working from a content perspective. Feedback loops are critical for enablement to be successful anywhere, but taking that seller feedback directly. And for me personally, working one on one with a lot of our sales reps daily, outside of just from a content perspective, but their feedback and understanding of what they do and the struggles that they encounter.
Have each day and kind of what their processes are. Taking that and working that back into our platform and our content so that everything again is aligned and is going to work from the top down. And that’s going to help foster that consistent messaging and ensure all the teams are equipped with the right tools in the right time.
SS: Absolutely. Now, with any change initiative, bringing your sales team along for the journey can oftentimes be easier said than done. What advice do you have for motivating sales reps and helping them to adapt to change?
ML: Yeah, change is definitely easier to navigate when sales reps see the value that it brings.
Just in my short time here, we have, again, gone through a lot of these acquisitions, processes have changed, leadership teams have changed. So the number one thing is really transparency and being able to clearly communicate the why behind what the changes are and involving the reps early and often in the process.
So that we get those champions coming across in our trainings or updates, whatever it may be, because our reps are wonderful, love working with all of them, but it’s always a little bit different when it’s coming from one of their peers than when it’s coming from anybody else, right? We’re not just telling you to do something.
We’ve worked with your peers to be involved in the process, and they’re helping us communicate that not only is this change just happening, but why is it going to make this process or this thing better? And then kind of piggybacking on top of that is the recognition piece. So celebrating the wins and highlighting those early adopters who embraced the processes and really kind of celebrating that and then bringing that to a tailored support approach.
So role-specific trainings, one on one coaching to address any of these individual challenges so that no one person feels like they’re not supported. It’s going to help create an environment where change is seen as more of an opportunity than a disruption.
SS: I love that advice. I think that’s phenomenal. Now you’ve already driven really strong engagement from the sales teams with your enablement programs. You’ve achieved an 81 percent recurring usage rate with Highspot. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption?
ML: Absolutely. I mean, number one is stakeholder buy-in. Being able to work with our sales leaders and other stakeholders across the business that have a say in the content that’s being created, and how our sales teams are effective every single day.
So engaging with those leaders early to champion those initiatives is always kind of step number one. Number two is to have a user-friendly tool or to use something that is going to be easy to understand. De simplifying access to the resources through something like Highspot where It’s extremely easy to understand where’s our content working with the Highspot team in particular to say, well, what’s the best way to organize that content and go into, hey, here’s not just a library.
I should go into this with the intention of what am I looking for and how can I easily get to what I need to find more quickly. And then the real key to success is continual ongoing reinforcement. There’s a million things that happen. Every single day where the priority is always changing. We work in healthcare.
So we work with these providers that have, you know, limited resources and limited time because they have patients coming in every single day. So they can’t always just kind of sit on the phone. And our goal is to capture their attention within the first 10 to 30 seconds and get their buy-in. The exact same approach is the same with our sales team.
So continually being top of mind, whether it’s through email communications, hopping on team calls, really just kind of embedding enablement into the daily workflow through some microlearning. So manager-led coaching and reinforcement have contributed to that 81%.
SS: I love that. That is amazing, Matthew. Now, I know that you guys are just getting started, but do you have any early wins that you’ve experienced so far that you can share with us?
ML: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been able to help streamline our onboarding. With Highspot. So reducing the ramp time by helping to centralize the training and the resources, actually this morning, I was on with our latest group of new hires.
And today was basically let’s start execution. So what that means is let’s make sure you have access to all the right tools, and systems. Process flows, everything was right in the high spot. So get them right in there so we can make sure that they have access to everything. All of our different job aides, it’s all right there.
It’s all very systematic and programmatic. So we didn’t need to spend more than about half an hour making sure everything was all set up. That’s also helped improve and increase our engagement. Like you said, we have an 81 percent recurring usage, which indicates kind of strong adoption. And a lot of that has come from, again, the reinforcement constantly saying, well, have we looked in Highspot, sending links to Highspot, help themselves get to the right content instead of just maybe sending, let’s just say an example, the training video itself, helping somebody navigate their way through Highspot to get to that training content on their own.
And then the other one that we found is improved message consistency. So our team has reported greater confidence in the content that they’re sending aligning. Their specific conversations with their follow-ups and pitches versus maybe just a static email template that they had before so they can actually see the engagement, be able to have more purposeful follow-ups, but also have tailoring the content and the conversation altogether to that prospect or that cross-sell customer that they’re working with.
So these wins have really helped kind of validate. A platform’s impact and provide a foundation for helping us scale in the future.
SS: Love it. Matthew, last question for you. The new year is right around the corner. As you look ahead, what are some of the key things you are planning to achieve next as you continue to evolve your enablement strategy?
ML: It’s crazy to think that 2025 is right around the corner. So our main focus as an enablement team going into next year is to further refine our sales onboarding and providing greater support to our new hires to help decrease our ramp time. So that’s priority goal number one. Number two is to help enhance our organizational alignment.
By integrating more teams and resources into Highspot. So we’ve really worked with our revenue team to anybody who’s customer-facing become aligned in terms of our content, our processes, and now our goal is to expand that out to the rest of the organization. And then for me, I would really love to expand into the use of.
Kind of AI and automation and enablement, such as personalized learning pads, maybe some automated content recommendations to help really scale our reach and our impact because we have a pretty small but mighty team here at Rectangle Health and we’re continuing to expand and grow pretty significantly that we have to be able to use some different tools and be creative around how we can get to that reach because we don’t necessarily have the human resources to do that.
SS: Absolutely. Matthew, thank you again so much for joining us. I really appreciate the time and the insights.
ML: Thank you so much. So happy to be here and have a great time.
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.
