According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, organizations are 80% more likely to increase their win rate when using a unified platform for all of their enablement needs. So how can you leverage a unified platform to drive sales productivity?
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 Karl-Philippe Clement, the VP of Sales and customer experience at RIB software. Thank you for joining us KP. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Karl-Philippe Clement: Yeah, well the pleasure is all mine. I’m responsible for everything which is sales operations. We very often call it, or sales excellence related to software company RIB software. We do sell software for the construction industry. We were acquired by Schneider Electric. It was a lot of smaller company, and now we are consolidating our approach, working much closer with the software.
Of Schneider Electric, and we have possibility also to improve our sales enablement, but also our sales approach and sales operation for our market. So I’ve been hired two years ago by this company specifically for this approach for sales operation. Previously I worked for Bosch Rexroth and Siemens, and I was there 6 and 16 years respectively. I was able to really focus on growing sales operation and sales improvement along the way.
SS: Wonderful. Well, we’re excited to have you here, KP Now you have a lot of experience in both sales, marketing, as well as customer experience. How does this experience across go to market teams really helped to influence your approach to sales enablement at RIB?
KC: Well, the experience has a lot to do because when we talk with sales very often, it’s uh, you have multiple age group. What I’ve been seeing, and you have people which are much more familiar with new technology and some are less familiar with technology, some are less ready to go with new technology while the.
Looking back at the experience that I was faced with a different job, it was really about not only the customer experience, but the user experience of our salespeople in order to bring sales enablement to the next level. If we cannot tackle our users, our people enablement, I’ll have a big problem to reach our objectives with sales enablement. That’s definitely one of the biggest experiences I gathered in the last years.
SS: Absolutely. And RIB actually recently implemented Highspot as its enablement platform. What were the main challenges that led to this decision to invest in enablement and, um, how do you see a unified platform helping to overcome those challenges?
KC: There was multiple challenge, right? The user challenge was definitely one, right?
Fortunately, with HighSpot, I must really be honest. It helped us a lot because it’s really user friendly. It’s also part of our approach to roll out our new CRM, where HighSpot will be able to help us getting a better user experience within Salesforce. That said, there were also multiple objections to getting another tool. Why I say another tool? Because we are submerged with quantities of tool and different company coming to us, hey, my tool is better than the other tool. Which tool should I use? And there’s so many different tools and we come to an IT stack, which.
Unsustainable. So it’s really about how we approach to rationalize what do we really need and what will be the output. So this was a challenge to bring IT organization and make sure that we have the money to fund a new approach, because this is definitely one of the challenge. What do you get? And everybody has their own answers – hey, you can make a lot of money with the tool. So it was one of the challenge we were able to, with the help of Highspot supporting us there for the use case, we were able to resolve those challenge and a much nicer way I would say, which facts very clearly that we could put in front of our.
SS: I’d love to learn a little bit more about that, especially as a leader in the evaluation process. How did you go about building the business case for enablement and, and securing that stakeholder buy-in?
KC: If I can be honest, Highspot helped us a lot. That’s what I mentioned a little bit prior, they took the time and, and I must say that working with Burak, who work with us from Highspot, really taking a deep dive on looking at our process and really taking the time to analyze and build a pilot and get the right data out. And then we are able to go forward. It’s not rocket science in a way, but the support made it a reality, and that’s mainly how we took the problem to fix it.
SS: I love that. I’m curious, as you go about implementing this new platform for the first time, how do you plan to drive adoption and, and really build excitement amongst your sellers?
KC: It’s all about the value they can get. It’s quite simple. It’s all about the value they can get. So far from what we’ve been doing during the pilot, the value that the sellers could get out of Highspot was quite high. It was pretty good user journey and they got a lot of value. They were able to tackle, uh, lease much faster. They were able to focus on the leads that are interested in what we sent, and see directly activities in the Digital Rooms and everything. So it’s really about what values the users get so they sell more, they get more incentive. Everybody’s happy. And that’s really to the basic, how can I sell more and faster? Everybody’s focused on efficiency, so it’s as simple as that.
SS: I love that. And I know RIB has a diverse set of products and use cases. How can enablement help sellers effectively navigate that complexity at RIB?
KC: Well, having the right documentation in the right place. And this was one of the reasons we selected to go with a sales enablement tool. This was one of our challenge, finding the right documentation, making sure it’s adapted in the right way. This was one of the main thing. We have a lot of a portfolio, not everybody is an expert of everything.
Onboarding new sellers is definitely one of the challenge. So in this way, we’re able to navigate and help reduce complexity on this aspect. The other aspect is to focus where we need to focus. We need to focus on all these, or do we need to focus on the one that has a real interest. So that was mainly the two main aspects in it.
SS: Amazing. And one of your current initiatives is transitioning to a new subscription-based business model. How do you plan to leverage your enablement tech stack to help drive this transition?
KC: Well, like I said earlier, a seller is about efficiency and it’s about how much money can you make based on an incentive, right?
So from a strategic perspective, we can say from a company, this is where we wanna focus, but it’s really to put the means at the right place. So the enablement will help our seller to be more effective to follow up on the right leads. The incentive, I must say, is a big portion on how will we get more into subscription, or how do we wanna focus of getting the maximum outta subscription.
So whether we use annual contract value, a CV, or conditionable a CV to help our people focus on the. More focus. More focus on those needs. The proper needs.
SS: I love that. So, shifting gears a little bit, ’cause you just mentioned the importance of, you know, that agility and speed as well as the results in your enablement approach. How do you bring this philosophy to life in your enablement efforts using data and insights?
KC: Well, there’s always two sides, right? There’s the side that we have. Data needs to be perfect, needs to be exact, and we need to use the data. And there’s the the other side to say, let’s look at the big picture and not necessarily too much on the details of every single data point. If you’re in sales, it’s about speed.
It’s about making the right decision and looking at the data will be perfect. So on speed and on right? From this big, it’s really about speed.
SS: Absolutely. I could not agree more. And one of the ways that seems to be creating a lot of expediency these days is AI. So I’d love to understand KP, I know you plan on leveraging AI to enhance seller performance. Can you share more about how you envision using AI to elevate your enablement effort?
KC: Well, I can share more a little bit on my expectations.
We have not used AI yet since we’re, we need to roll it out on our new CRM platform. We just had the pilot project. Again, it’s about speed. How can AI help us have the right insight, make the right decisions? Increase speed to grab the right customer or grab the right leads and make the most out of it.
For me, that’s really where AI is. It’s not gonna replace anybody. I don’t believe it’s gonna replace sellers. I believe it’ll be kind of a co-pilot, don’t want to use this word, but it’s. Being beside our sellers and supporting his approach to really, maybe he’s missing a few points, he’s missing some comments, coming outta discussion.
He’s missing some different views to help him make him the right decision. That’s how I see that AI will help a lot.
SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I’m excited for you to get started on that front. What do you think is the potential long-term value of embracing innovations in technology like AI to both help the seller and improve the customer experience?
KC: It’s about trying right? Try and error to a certain point. Better try and find out as fast as possible. Competition will do, try and if it works well, well much faster than in. So for me, trial error and always keeping up to date and keeping the speed and trying to make it faster because nobody sleeping and definitely not the competition.
SS: Absolutely KP. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice you would give to other companies that are considering investing in enablement for the first time?
KC: Do your homework. Look, but also be very clear on what you’re trying to achieve and where do you want to go. Keep the end in mind of where you wanna go. Speed is a key essence of any implementation and rollout to make this a reality supported by the user experience, your user experience, your sellers to embrace and make the most out of it, because there’s a lot of technology there that even looks great on paper if the users are not using it. It’s not gonna make the best.
A fool with the tool is still a fool. So make sure that you get the right tool to make sure that the people will use it properly and will get the most out of it.
SS: Thank you KP. Appreciate the advice and thank you for joining the podcast. I’ve greatly appreciated your insight.
KC: It was my pleasure. Thank you very 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.
