According to research by Gartner, 50% of sellers are overwhelmed by the amount of technology required to effectively complete tasks. So how can you enable your teams with the right tools to maximize efficiency?
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 Kathleen Kohl, the sales enablement manager at ManpowerGroup. Thank you for joining us, Kathleen. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Kathleen Kohl: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been working at ManpowerGroup, which is a global workforce-based solutions company for nearly 12 years. My expertise lies within sales excellence as most of my career has been spent in sales operations and enablement. Currently, I lead sales enablement at ManpowerGroup supporting all six of our lines of business, particularly our sales tech stack. What I love most about my job is collaborating with sales and marketing leadership teams, and showing them what all of our sales tools have to offer.
SS: Amazing. Kathleen, we’re excited to have you on the podcast today. One of the things that I noticed, particularly on LinkedIn, is you mentioned how you work to generate opportunities for sales to win through data, tools, technology, and training. I’d love to learn more about this approach. How would you say each of these components plays a role in your enablement strategy at ManpowerGroup?
KK: Everyone is talking about data, whether through AI or internal data strategies to train AI models. We teach our sellers how to use our tech stack effectively so that they can create more leads and opportunities To drive revenue for the organization.
Our sales tech stack helps sellers understand their target audience and deliver their pitches uniquely and professionally making us stand out. You need to differentiate yourself from the competition these days and with the right tech stack and knowledge, you can do that, and Highspot Digital Sales Rooms have been instrumental in that approach.
SS: I love to hear that. And I’d love to understand some of the key priority business initiatives that you’re focusing on supporting through your enablement strategy this year.
KK: Yeah, so we are really focused on automation. That has been top of mind alongside measuring the effectiveness and usage of our sales tech stack.
One of my team’s goals has been to find content in Highspot in less than five seconds. And we are doing that through tool governance, audits, and Spot policy. Additionally, we aim to increase our digital sales room usage by training our sellers and showcasing the power that DSRs or Digital Sales Rooms can punch.
We’re also exploring the learning coaching platform with our rate management brand, which will help to streamline that approach.
SS: That’s amazing. At ManpowerGroup, your team is responsible for enablement across, I believe, multiple unique brands. What are some of your best practices for managing all of the various stakeholders with diverse enablement needs?
KK: So we have a unique opportunity, as you mentioned, and that we have visibility across all six of our brands and all of our lines of business on their sales priorities. The best practice that we know is important is to ensure we have strong relationships with our sales team. Sales leadership teams who manage our sellers across their brands.
We’ve learned that building relationships with sales leadership is extremely important as they hold the power within their sales teams to implement enablement strategies that my team facilitates.
SS: I want to dig back into the tools and technology aspect of your strategy. How do you leverage your enablement platform to help you execute your strategic business initiatives?
KK: We utilize our tech stack throughout every aspect of the sales life cycle. A main driver is always leading our sales team back to a centralized place where they can find information and how-to’s for all of the tools. Highspot has been extremely helpful to us with this as we host all our sales kits and sales plays here which gives our sellers a prescriptive approach to what to know, say, show, and do, to create a standardized process for how we sell at ManpowerGroup. Highspot is where we communicate and drive our sellers to as a one-stop shop for information. It helps us to facilitate new marketing campaigns and enablement strategies for the field.
SS: You mentioned in your intro you have a lot of experience in sales operations and enablement technology roles at ManpowerGroup, and you have a lot of expertise in curating an effective enablement tech stack. In your opinion, what is the value of having a unified platform like Highspot?
KK: I would say one of the most essential aspects of Highspot is that it integrates with our CRM system and multiple other sales texts that we use. This really helps our sellers track their pitches and their effectiveness and seamlessly track that ROI.
Additionally, our adoption rate at Highspot is, I would say, exceptionally high. And really, that is our central place for sales to go to, to find what they need and understand how to sell and utilize our sales kits.
SS: You touched on training a little bit earlier, and I know you recently began to use the training and coaching capabilities with one of your brands, Right Management. What are your best practices for designing effective training programs and how are you planning to leverage Highspot to help?
KK: Yeah. So again, relationships are essential with all of our stakeholders. For Right Management specifically, we have a strong relationship with the product owner and the sales leadership team to build the training content and implement and create adoption.
It’s crucial really that we work closely with our product management team and understand what’s essential for the sales team to know. Then we can create training that can be used daily and implemented in real time. We can also measure that progress based on how sellers did in that training and then coach accordingly.
SS: I love that you’re thinking about that layered approach. Another area where I think you’ve proven you are seeing a lot of success. In helping sales is with digital rooms, and you shared an example where they helped move stalled deals forward. Can you tell us more about your best practices for leveraging digital rooms and their impact on that initiative?
KK: We’ve used Digital Sales Rooms throughout our business. The sales life cycle as mentioned earlier, gives our clients a unique feel for how we deliver and tailor our solutions to their needs. What’s really great about these is that we can put all of our documents related to that client and throughout the deal stages into that digital sales room for them to go back to and have an ongoing relationship built where it’s a centralized place.
SS: I think that’s a fantastic way to up-level your buyer engagement and it gives you a lot of data. When it comes to data, what are some of your best practices for measuring the impact of your programs and how are you leveraging Highspot to help right now?
KK: Our sellers love seeing data on Highspot, seeing if their content is being viewed, and knowing what might be most important to their clients through this engagement. So this helps our sellers to better cater to their client’s needs and offer them the best solution possible through engagement metrics.
SS: Since implementing Highspot, I know that you have seen an increase in deal size, faster sales cycles, and even an increase in quota attainment. Can you tell us more about the impact you’ve achieved?
KK: We’ve tracked significant enterprise wins based on a customized approach using Digital Sales Rooms. Additionally, finding content quickly is critical. Having Highspot help us navigate this and automatically archive outdated content makes it easier for sellers to find what they need. This ability to see what a client is most interested in helps us create unique solutions based on their workforce needs.
SS: I have to say you are doing an amazing job there, Kathleen. Last question, looking ahead, how do you plan to continue to grow the impact of enablement on your strategic initiatives at ManpowerGroup?
KK: So we have a big push on my team to increase that Digital Sales Room usage. We do a great job right now utilizing it, but it can always be better. We’ve seen a real impact through Digital Sales Rooms and a goal is to increase Q4 for our sales teams. We are also looking at the pilot for Right Management, of learning and coaching.
And we want to understand how effective it will be and scale, potentially, once you see those results come through.
SS: Amazing. Like I said, fantastic work at ManpowerGroup, Kathleen, and thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today.
KK: Thank you for having me.
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.
