For those who this is their first time joining a OneGuide facilitated roundtable, by all means, welcome. For others, welcome back. You know, we partner with OneGuide to do events just like this and help introduce you guys to people just like Roz across a range of specific kind of sub- disciplines that we find highly relevant and informative for companies. With that, I’ll just I’ll kind of get out of the way. Like I said, and hand it over to Roz and let her introduce herself and start to jump into the content.

And I’d encourage you all to be pretty active in the conversation today and let the conversations spill out from here into one on ones or group sessions without us needing to be the middleman after this as well.

Thank you, Brian, and welcome, everybody. Thank you for taking the time on a Thursday morning, I’m assuming for a lot of you or maybe afternoon. To for this conversation, I get excited when we talk about things like this, when people who may have never done enablement and training for a company are really thinking about how we support the go to market function or for people that may have been doing it for a while, but want to make it more impactful and take it to the next level. So I’m geeky enough to get really excited about this.

I appreciate you all being here and I’m looking forward to the discussion. So today we are going to be focusing on how you design go to market trainings that are effective and that really will help to drive the productivity of the employees and the retention goals that you have. I come to the table with 15 years of experience doing go to market enablement for companies of all sizes. I worked at startups. I worked at Oracle, which is very much not a startup these days.

After Oracle, I moved on to Optimizely, where I established the go to market enablement function for the company and built it up for several years. And today I run a boutique enablement firm called Level 213. And we work with companies of all sizes, primarily in the mid market space, where they either are establishing enablement for the first time, need good go to market training or need additional bandwidth for their training.

So in that effort, we’re working with companies of all sizes, helping to make sure that any time that you are doing an enablement effort, you’re getting the impact that you want to get out of it. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today. And that’s kind of the frame of reference that I have coming in.

So as I mentioned, what we’re going to be talking about today is how do you design impactful, effective trainings, specifically for go to market and the go to market teams that I typically have in mind are SDRs or BDRs, who are very top of the funnel, AEs, account managers, customer success, customer support. So anybody who’s really dealing with facing the customers that you have. I do have a tremendous amount of experience in enablement. So if we have time at the end, I’m happy to answer questions on other topics as well. Listed a few of them here.

It probably SKO season is probably ending for most people at this point, unless you have a fiscal year. That’s not a typical, but obviously enablement involves a lot of things. And I’m happy to answer questions either now or reaching out to me afterwards on topics like that, that relate to making sure your go to market function is impactful.

So let’s talk about why is it worth investing in well- designed training, whether you have been doing training in the past and want to make sure it’s more impactful or are going to be starting to introduce training for the first time. So training is a component of enablement, of the enablement function. And I’ve been in the space long enough to where when I first started, we were called trainers. And now we’re called enablement because training is a part of the enablement function.

It’s a very important part of the enablement function, but it has other components to it as well. And it’s one of the functions that make a tremendous overall impact on the success and the efforts that your team needs to be able to go to market, sell and support your solution.

So the go to market enablement function exists for one reason, in my opinion, and that’s to help the teams drive revenue, which to me is probably one of the most important functions and is probably, for a go to market leader, probably the most strategic partner you could have because that’s the reason why the function exists.

And when you think about it, though, the people that we are training, building the training for, when they’re taking the training, when they’re doing those enablement activities, they are not doing their day job of driving revenue, right? We’re taking them away from driving the revenue to be able to get in the training, and it’s not their day job to take training.

However, therefore, it makes it so important that the training that you do, if you’re going to take them off the floor to do that training or whatever that is, whether it’s a live training or an asynchronous training, that at the end of it, when they go back to their desk, it gives you the return that you want to do. Then it’s worth it, right? But if we’re just taking them off the floor and we’re talking to them about topics that we’re not really thinking about how is it going to help them drive revenue, we’re really wasting time, right?

And we’re wasting revenue generating time, which is what we don’t want to do. That’s why it’s something that I take very seriously as a sales enablement professional, that any enablement effort we’re going to do, specifically training when we’re moving them away from their day jobs, that it really makes it worth it.

So how do you do that, right? And that’s what we’re really gonna focus on today. How do you make that become the 510X plus return on investment of the time and effort of the people who are being enabled to get out of it and really see the return and what you’re trying to drive from the productivity. So throughout the presentation, I’m gonna highlight methods that you could use in these kinds of events to really make sure that any of the enablement and the training that you design and deliver will give you that impact that you’re looking for.

And if you take away anything from my presentation today, this is the biggest thing that I want you to take away. You wanna train for what a person has to be able to do. And we’ll talk about this more, but what does the AE have to be able to do? And is it the same or different than what CSM might have to be able to do? Because ultimately we want them to take the knowledge that we’re giving them and do something with it. So we don’t wanna necessarily just give them what they need to know, but why do they need to know it?

And what are they gonna do with that knowledge? So, and I’m gonna harp on this a lot, but that’s where you kind of make it very, very worth their time versus not worth their time at all. So when you do trainings, you really wanna be thinking of the person that I’m training, I’m gonna call them a learner to include everybody. The person that I’m training, what do they have to be able to do with this knowledge or this information that we’re giving them and make sure that your training is taking that into account the entire time.

And that way, my mouse is getting a little happy here. That way you’ll make it worth our time. So let’s talk about how we do that, right? So there’s a couple of things that you really wanna be thoughtful about when you’re designing your training. And I’m gonna say this a lot, so I’m gonna say it again. You’re gonna always ask the question. The first question you’re gonna ask when there’s a discussion around we’re gonna do this training or we’re gonna design this training is what does the learner have to be able to do with this information?

And that becomes kind of the North star of what gets included in the training, how we assess the training, are they able to do it? What is left out is even more important, right? Because if you, again, take them off the floor and take them away from driving revenue and you’re wasting their time talking about something that they’re never gonna need, you’re really just wasting everybody’s time. And that if you keep asking yourself, what does the person have to be able to do with this information?

And you see that something popped into the training that they don’t have to do anything with and you can leave it out. You could save the time. You can make it more impactful and you could just make sure that they’re getting what they really need. So let me give you an example. For somebody who is learning how to drive a car, they don’t have to know how the engine works. I have been driving since I’m 16. I couldn’t tell you how an engine worked. I don’t have to know.

I know where to go to if I have issues with my engine, but personally for myself, I don’t have to know how the engine works. However, if I was a mechanic or somebody is a mechanic, they do have to know how an engine works. So if I was teaching someone about cars, I would ask, what are they gonna be doing with this car? Are they be driving the car? Are they gonna be servicing the car? And with that, I’m gonna design trainings accordingly.

And this is very impactful when you think about a whole go- to- market function because we have different roles that might have to have different amounts of information on a similar topic, right? So an example of that might be if we’re training somebody on a product, right? What do they have to do with this information? Well, an SDR has to use it to drive a top of the funnel demand. So they have to have maybe elevator pitches and some messaging, but they don’t have to necessarily know the ins and outs of the technicalities.

But then you talk about a CSM or a support agent, they do have to have the technicalities. So there may be some things that I’m gonna go deeper with the CSM and a support agent that I wouldn’t do with an SDR because again, they might not need that information. So really being thoughtful about what it is that the person has to be able to do will make sure that what you’re giving them is very impactful. And yes, it’s helpful for you and saving time, but it’s also the way adults learn.

So what I want you to think about is how do we as adults learn differently than if we were students in school, right? When someone’s a student at school and even an adult in school a little bit, then school is your job, right? You’re there to learn. But when your job is to drive revenue, your job is not to learn. And so you’re gonna look at learning in a little bit of a different way. And what adults do in these kinds of situations is they really pay attention to the content that’s gonna impact them in the near term.

If we talk to somebody about something that’s gonna change in the company in six months, it’s too far away for them to need it right now. And therefore they’re not gonna really pay attention to it. An example of this that I see a lot is in product training.

for example, right? So if let’s say somebody is gonna be going GA on a new product in six months, don’t train them today on it because you’re gonna have to do it again anyway, right? First of all, products probably gonna evolve in the next six months through the beta, and feedback from customers. And as a rep, I don’t need it right now. I need to close deals today. I’m not closing deals in six months. I’m not gonna pay that much attention to it. However, if I’m gonna be the person supporting a beta, then I do need it to have it now.

So you really wanna be thoughtful about giving it to them in enough time for it to be relevant and for them to kind of practice. So if I go back and be ready for when you go GA, I’m really being thoughtful about the timing because an adult is going to say, is it gonna help me today do my job, right? And so I’m gonna talk a little bit more about product training as we go through it, but I’ll finish out the example. If let’s say someone’s going GA on a product, I would probably time the training about a month out for an AE, for example. Why?

I wanna give them the messaging. I wanna give them how you demo it. And then I wanna give them time to practice, right? So if we wait too long, they might not have time to maybe update their pitch or update their demo. But if I do it six months out, it’s too long, right? So really being thoughtful about something that’s gonna impact them in the near term, that it makes sense for them to pay attention and start implementing it into their workflow.

The other thing that you really wanna think about is when you have go- to- market reps with people that live and die by a quota, and there’s a certain rhythm to the quota, when are you out doing this training? I stay away from trainings in Q4 when at all possible, because in Q4, they should just be selling, and they should just be closing. Really come to the end of a quarter. With a lot of the clients that I work with right now, we’re just about hitting the end of the quarter. We’re coming to the second half of the month.

We’re not gonna do any enablement efforts to the teams in the next two weeks, because again, they should just be focusing on training. I might be designing things for when we hit the beginning of the next quarter, but I’m not taking them off the floor.

So I’m really being mindful of, am I allowing them to do their job and not getting in the way of them doing their job and giving it to them, giving them the training that they need when they need it without making it so that they can’t really focus on why they’re here with us and why we’ve employed them to begin with. So who designs training, right? Some people have instructional designs of staff on their team. Some don’t, right? And that’s okay. A lot of companies don’t, especially when they’re first starting out. So who should design the training?

And I kind of see that there are several people that are gonna come into play when you’re designing training. So probably the most important people in the equation is the subject matter expert, right? I design a lot of trainings. I’m not a subject matter expert on a lot of things. And I gave an example earlier about product training, and I understand we might have some product people on this call, and I love that.

The product people are the subject matter experts on a lot of things that a go- to- market team is going to need to know in order to be able to sell and support the product. They typically understand the challenges in the space very, very well. They typically understand, they obviously know how the product works, and they might be very knowledgeable on the competition product marketing, very, very big partner to enablement as a subject matter expert. Again, understand the personas, understand the needs of the market, the direction of the market.

So when I’m designing training or somebody who might not be a subject matter expert is designing training, we will work very closely with the subject matter expert. And the key is to ask the questions of the subject matter expert to get with the point of view of what does my learner have to be able to do with the knowledge that the subject matter expert has, because the subject matter expert is gonna have a way more knowledge than a go- to- market person’s gonna need. So if I come to them and I say, well, what does a learner have to be able to do?

And then it helps guide the subject matter expert with what information they need to give us in order to be able to train the employee accordingly. That’s where I think subject matter experts get the most support from somebody who can guide them. And to me, anybody can do this. It’s really discovery. It’s asking the questions that will help you understand what is it that we need to understand about this topic from the subject matter expert.

I remember working with somebody who had literally, he was a data engineer and he literally wrote the book on agile development for a lot of people.

Developers and we were training the reps on how to sell to developers an agile product, and the problem was a subject matter expert wrote the book. He had so much information in his brain and couldn’t figure out what it was that we really needed, and it was giving him a lot of anxiety. And then I sat down with him and I and I asked him a lot of questions and I came to it.

And if you’re, if you’re not- the subject matter expert, you could come to it from the very beginners mind, right, which means that you may be very much like the buyer and you may be very much like the your end learner and just was really super curious about what is it that he knows that that we may be able to plug into what you want the learner to be able to do, and at the end he’s like that’s all you need. And I’m like that’s all I need. He’s like, oh, okay, well, that wasn’t that bad right.

So it really gave him a sense of like I could actually help you, right, because it wasn’t very overwhelming to them. And then obviously, sales leaders go to market leaders, revenue leaders, even reps itself- people that are talking to your customers every single day. They have a lot of information often, whether it’s on a process, whether it’s on feedback from from what they’re hearing in the market, whether it might be some challenges that they’re that they might be having.

Very often they are subject matter experts or people that can really give you information that you need in order to ensure that what you’re giving the teams is resonating with the teams. I’m always very careful not to give them things that they’re gonna be like that this would never happen in the real world. Right, and the only way I would know that it’s by talking to reps or listening to calls from reps and really understanding what, what is the reality of the life that they’re having.

So it’s, it’s definitely a collaborative effort, and you can see that there are people from all around the organization not only go to market, but go to market specifically as well. That will impact who should be involved in designing training. So what are some of the key subjects that you may want to train your teams on in with a go- to- market team? There’s a lot of things that that could be relevant and I’m just gonna mention a few and we’ll talk a little bit about, maybe, the order of it. If you, if you have never done any training.

You’re gonna want to make sure that you’re prioritizing the most important things first, so things that are gonna have the most impactful information. So anyone who’s going to be selling in the go- to- market side is going to need to have industry knowledge. You might not have to have it as deep as you know, depending on their role. But what space are you in? What problems are you solving? How do other people solve this problem? What exists in the market today? It doesn’t exist in the market today. It’s really understanding the space that you’re in.

And then the product knowledge: what does the product do? How does the product solve the challenges of the industry? And then the depth of their product knowledge is going to vary based on their role.

I’ve said this a few times now, but an FDR probably doesn’t have to have as deep of a knowledge- and AE sometimes doesn’t even have to have as deep of a knowledge as somebody who might be a sales engineer or a solutions consultant or an onboarding manager- who are, or what- have- you- but doesn’t have to have some basis of what your product does and how it does it. And then internal processes: how do we function as a go- to- market function? What are our rules of engagement, what is our sales stages? What is the methodology that we follow?

Those are important things that sales team needs to- or go- to- market team needs to understand in order to be able to actually do their job. And then there’s skill development, and this is going to be something that is going to continue to evolve as they evolve with you and depending on your hiring profile. Do you hire people that are the first time into sales jobs or you’re hiring people that have been selling for 30 years?

There’s different things that they will need training on and making sure that you’re giving them the skill that will help them to to continue to do their jobs, depending on their role and their tenure with the company. So I do want to stress that you want to be very thoughtful about how much you throw out at an employee, at a go- to- market employee- because, again, it’s not their day job to take training. The training has to help them do their day job.

So, and you, as a go- to- market leader or somebody who was put in charge of getting training out to a team, you see a million things that the team needs to do or to know and you start just throwing a ton of training at them. It just becomes a firehose and they end up getting really nothing out of it.

And so, if you are newer and to offering trainings to your teams, I would be really thoughtful about what is the foundation that we have to build upon to get to a point where they’ll be able to do everything and you- there may be some things you just won’t address right away, but you, that makes sense because if they don’t have the foundation that they need- and another thing that I said earlier that we talked about it: how adults learn- adults learn by building on knowledge that they have.

So, if we are thoughtful about the order in which we we offer them training, what’s going to be the most important things right now? That is going to move the needle.

Today and is there something happening, a compelling event in the company, happening in the company, that we have to do it?

For example, a product releases a compelling event, they have to be trained before the product goes to, goes to market, and so maybe I’ll prioritize product training then over discovery skills, even though discovery skills is so incredibly important and there may think, be things that you have to just kind of put aside for a minute and wait until you actually build the, the foundation for the reps to be able to get there, because there’s, if you’re, if you’re starting out- and I understand a lot of people on this line here might be starting out- there’s gonna be a million things that you want to get to, but you have to be thoughtful of how you get this so it’s a manageable for you but also manageable for your learner.

So I’ll give you an example of that.

When I was an optimizer, we were all. One of the very first things I did was rolled out a sales process and methodology because we had people. It was like the Wild Wild West: everybody was doing their own sales process, everybody was doing their own. We didn’t have a common language amongst the go- to- market organization, and so we were really thinking about what is the sales process and where the activities within the sales process and that give.

That opens up the need for a lot of skills that you have to be able to to train on in order for them to establish the sales process.

But if we didn’t train them on the sales process yet, it didn’t make as much sense to train them on some of the skills within the sales process because they didn’t even know when they were using it.

So, for example, we had a very big focus on selling through partners and understanding that selling through partners could be a very impactful way to drive pipeline and to make your product sticky.

And the partnership team kept asking to do a training on how you sell the partners and I kept saying we will do that. But once we understand we’re in the sales process, we bring in the partner.

Because until if the rep doesn’t know when to bring in a partner, they’re not going to use that information of how to how to sell with a partner. So the first step was make sure they understand the sales process, make sure they know where partners might come into the sales process, and now we train them on the sales process.

So it might have been two or three months later and it ultimately made it much more impactful and was more beneficial to everybody involved, including the stakeholders.

The partnership team came back and said: yeah, we made the right decision. While at first they were very eager to get the training done, they realized that at the end of the day it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t have helped anybody if we had we done it before the reps really understood when they would actually use it.

Great, hey, Ross, oh, we had a question in the chat. Yeah, so Chris was curious. Oh, there’s another one as well. Sorry, chris is curious: what size of company should be before? Should we be before building out a dedicated training slash enablement team?

That that’s an interesting question, Chris, and I think it’s gonna depend on other factors other than just the size, like: are you a remote function company versus are people in the same room together?

Right, because if you’re, if you’re all remote and essentially you have people in offices all over the world, technically their homes are their offices, but they can’t necessarily ask the question to the person sitting next to them or absorb from people next to them or their managers not working around walking around to. You would probably want an enablement function sooner than if you were all sitting in the same room together.

Do you have multiple offices?

Do you sell multiple products?

So those are the questions that I would ask. But usually what I would say is, when you get to a point where the tribal knowledge of your initial team cannot anymore be disseminated by the few people that have been there for a while, you need an enablement function to kind of pull it all together. When we it used to be like a, 35 people go to market team, 35 to 50. It’s actually gotten a little bit smaller when back four years ago when everyone went to the remote, and now a lot of companies remain remote.

So I would say to me, I would think about when that tribal knowledge is not easily disseminated and or the you’re, there’s some sort of a factor, you’re moving up market, you’re opening new offices, that you need to have a streamlined process and language for the end for everybody. Did that answer the question?

Yes, thanks, that’s great, there is a. I think there’s a related question someone else had. Yeah, if you don’t have good. Oh, sorry, Chris, I didn’t mean interrupt, but yeah. So Heather asked when you don’t have a dedicated sales enablement team who typically owns this work? Yeah, that’s a.

That’s a really good question. I think it could depend on it could be somebody who owns it in general, like someone in operations or product marketing very often. So, if you think about it, there are components of enablement that show up in many different models, like if you look at the job description of a manager, you’ll see the word enablement there.

If you look at the job description of a product marketer, you’ll see the word enablement there for different things but but operations- very often revenue operations- might have the job of a portion of the enablement and often, if there’s somebody, if there is no official enablement function, which most companies will start out with, somebody in those roles will cover either all or some of the different components, like, for example, onboarding might be taken on by someone in operations, whereas competitive Intel and product Intel might be taken on by somebody in product marketing, and so you might see or and or the revenue leader right, or the manager, because the end of the day, the revenue leader, the manager, needs to have the teams to be productive and therefore they need and driving revenue and they need to have some of this information.

So typically you’ll see it in a combination of all of those three together, or they might break it up like different, different initiatives, or if and and.

If not, it will probably be someone in operations or somebody in product marketing.

Cool.

Thanks, Rez.

Dave, did you want to pop in and share what your company was doing?

Or if anyone has something to share?

Sure. So Parnt has been around for a little over a dozen years, but we did not have a formal go- to- market motion until about a year ago. We had one channel, and that was Dell. So Dell was selling storage, and we were basically appended to that storage as a software that allowed them to back up and recover. So when RTP got into the picture, one of the initiatives was, OK, you’ve got a product that works for storage. Dell’s not the only storage game in town. You’ve got all these other players out there.

Let’s see what we can do to expand the market motion. And so that’s what we’ve been doing. And of course, because there was no need for formal enablement with Dell, because we were basically captive for a dozen years, now we find ourselves in a position of having to educate these other channels about what we do, how we do it, and how they need to interact with us. So it’s only been in the past four months that we’ve been trying to kickstart this process. And like I said in the chat, it’s fallen to the product managers and the product marketers.

We have a small marketing team. It’s me and another fellow. So it’s not like we’ve got this huge bandwidth. We’ve brought in some contractors to help with some of the content prep. But at the end of the day, it’s a little learning process for us to better understand what’s the minimum threshold of acceptability for these new platforms that we’re bringing on. So far, we’ve brought on Vast Data and Cumulo. We’re looking to bring on others.

And so we’ve worked collaboratively with them in order to find out what’s the minimum daily requirement, as it were, for enabling their people. And it’s been an iterative process. And I think we’ve gotten it down. And now the challenge that we’re finding is how to manage distribution of things like enablement decks and customer- facing decks and solution briefs and whatnot. And so that’s kind of where we are now. But it’s collaborative.

Product managers, product markers, a little bit on the IT and operations side to help us spin up some sort of a SaaS offering that can help us manage the documentation and whatnot. And more to come, I’m sure.

Yeah, and so you’re right on that it is collaborative. And it will always be collaborative. And I appreciate you bringing up enabling channel partners, because I didn’t even address that. And yes, if you’re selling through them, then they need to be enabled as well. And yeah, the roles that you mentioned will always be involved, right? And they’re going to maybe come from a little bit of a different perspective.

And what I hope, Dave, you get out of today, because I’m going to get into it in a few minutes, is just kind of really giving you a framework to follow so that you can do what I’ll call agile enablement, right? And I’m a firm believer that agile enablement is you want to give them good enough. It doesn’t mean you give them, and what they need to be able to do their job. It doesn’t mean that you give them garbage, because training on garbage doesn’t help anybody. It’s just a complete waste of time. But it’s a way to do it iteratively, right?

And actually, sometimes it’s more effective and more impactful. But what I will give you here today, and I understand I’ll share the step with you afterwards, is a framework to follow. Again, first of all, go into the question of what do they have to be able to do? You’ll be surprised at how much that’s going to cut out of what you were asked, right? If they ask you, we need this resource, what are you going to do with this resource, right? How do you plan to use it?

And that should really help you, A, on your bandwidth side, and also B, in making sure that it’s impactful. But then also a framework of how do you design it in a way that the go- to- market could actually do something with. So I’m going to get to that, and hopefully that could be really helpful. And the framework that I’m going to talk about, I put together for this use case, right? For somebody that anybody can partner together to build effective training.

Because at the end of the day, even as an enablement professional, I work with the subject matter experts that you mentioned all the time, because I’m not going to be a subject matter expert on everything. So you always have to have that view, and this framework should really help you with that, I hope.

So before we get into that, let’s think about who might need to be trained, right? And so we’ll say channel partners, which is not on my slide, but I’m gonna include them as well, cause that’s an important function. You know, we talk about the top of the funnel, the SDRs, AEBDRs, whatever you might be calling them. Sometimes you might be working with an outside agency for this side of things, where you might have them doing an early demand gen and they’re gonna need to be enabled.

AEs, which I would cover, if anybody’s doing a moving selling promotion, which in some cases, it sounds like it’s also, it could be a third party. Solutions engineers are people that, if you have a more technical products, people that need much more deeper product knowledge and technical knowledge. And also I think solution engineers really have to know how to drive the value of what the product could do. And then the people that support on the once you’ve closed the business. To me, a lot of companies are later to support the CSM function.

And I’m gonna argue that that’s a big mistake. And especially in a little bit of a tougher economy that we’re coming out of, we have to retain the customers that we have. And it’s really through making sure that the CSM, or you might call them account managers. They really understand A, how to, the value that the products or service provides the market, and also specifically how your product does it. And then support agents. A lot of times we forget to train the support agents. A, they’re talking to your customers when there’s a problem often.

And so really making sure that they have the skills and the knowledge to help them with that. Another thing that we find often is that support gets pinged when the customer wants a product to do something that either can’t do yet, and it could be a tremendous input back to product need. And, or they haven’t purchased, if you have levels of your product, they might end up purchase that level of a product. And often they could be eyes and ears for expansion and upsell.

And so you really want to make sure, not that we’re expecting them to be the sales people, because that’s not their skillset, but expecting them to recognize when there’s a sales opportunity, and they could let a CSM, an account manager, or an AE know. So really thinking about who are the roles of the customer facing function, and what do you want to train them on? As you can see, we have several different roles here, and it’s a little bit of a different focus for each of them, because that’s what they’re gonna need to be able to do their jobs.

So I promised you all a framework to design good training. So I’m gonna keep my promise now. So what is a good framework for designing effective training? And I have found this, I have never found an instance where this didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to work. So whatever stage you’re in, whether it’s you’re doing your first training, or you had a product and you’ve been tagged to help train the reps on this, or you have a very robust team and you’re doing it for a while, this is what works.

So the first question is, what is the objective of the training? And that kind of goes back to, what does the person have to be able to do based on the content that we are designing here? And there may be several things that they have to be able to do. And we’re thinking about those different objectives. I’m gonna go a little bit further and ask, if we’re gonna be training several roles, what are the different roles have to be able to do and making sure there’s gonna be some things that’s gonna be applicable for everybody.

And then there might be some things that we break out for different roles and what they have to be able to do to know. So what is the objective? What are we trying to accomplish? And then is there anything that we need to define? We wanna make sure that if we’re gonna be using language that throughout the training, that people know what it is that we’re actually talking about and the language makes sense. So for example, I was recently working on a training around the sales process. We were rolling out a new sales process for our client.

And we realized that one of the steps in the sales process was that they should cultivate a champion, right? Now, I know we have revenue leaders on their line. There are many different definitions of champions out there. And some people might confuse a champion with a coach or what have you, right? So very early on, we had to establish, this is when we say champion, this is what we mean. Because that kind of brings everybody to a equal level in the common language to understand how now they can understand how to go and cultivate a champion.

So ask yourself, what do we need to define to make sure that we have a common knowledge? And then what is the prescription? What is the knowledge? What is the content? This is the core component of the content. This is where most people run to right away before thinking about the objectives and any definitions. But what is it that I want? What are they actually doing? What is the content? And this is probably the need of what you’re gonna be focusing on. And then.

thinking about the way adults learn, you always want to use examples. You may notice I’m using a lot of examples in my talk today and that’s very on purpose. Because if I give you an example, you can maybe start to see what I mean. It goes from a fact to, oh, I can picture this in my world, or I can picture this in my company, or maybe in the future of my company. Because adults learn by connecting the data knowledge that they have, and connect entire concepts to a world view that they already have.

So including examples, specifically in how they would use it in their daily life, can really make something from an abstract concept to, I will know how to do something with this information when I actually use it. Then making sure that they can apply it. This is again where I think a lot of people forget this step, or we could do a great training and get a lot of information. But if they don’t have a way to make sure that they can actually do it themselves, then this could be some sort of an activity.

It could be in the training or it could be post- training. But it might be, for example, we just worked with a client to update their positioning. So we did a training where we had a rep do an example of the pitch. So they heard the pitch, is a really good example. Then we went through each slide and explained to them what they’re going to be doing with the slides, how they might use it, what are the main points of it. Then we gave them a scenario that is typical to their segment and their role. We asked them post the training to make it their own.

You may have done that live. In one circumstance in here, we did that asynchronously, but it gave them all a chance to take the new pitch, to apply it to the scenario. Then with the goal of, this is going to be a typical call that they might have. This is a typical way they might be using this pitch. They can now practice it. It was a very different scenario for a CSM, for example, who might be using it in a QDR versus an AE that might be using it early in a call cycle with a customer.

So giving them a chance to apply it in the way they will use it, is where it becomes sticky. Often if you skip that step, that you actually don’t see the impact that you want. Then how will you assess if they’re able to do what it is that you set out to do? Are they using the pitch in the real world? Are we seeing the impact of the new positioning on the funnel? Do we have additional people coming into pipeline and people moving through the process the way you want it or not? Are they getting stuck and maybe we have to go back and reinforce something.

So here’s your framework. It’s simple, it’s six steps. You may repeat it. If there are several objectives, I may go through one objective at a time or I may do all objectives in one flow depending on the content. I may be defining things early on in the process, in the training, or I may define it throughout the course. But if you are following this framework and thinking about these things, you’re going to be able to design content that is relevant, that resonates, and that becomes used, and also let you know where you might need to reinforce a post.

We can get into it later if some of you want, but Dave said something that I’ve been thinking about is, do you have the technology and do you maybe need some technology? Is it worth investing in some technology to make this more scalable for you? For example, learning management system, a content management system, some enablement tool. There are tons of tools out there.

I’m not going to tell you to go out and buy one, but I don’t know if we’re working with channel partners, do we have a platform that we can easily train them without having to be in all the different places. That’s something that you might want to think about. We’re going to cover new hire training a little bit, and then we’ll talk about ongoing training.

I like to think of new hire training in a 90- day ramp, and I know that some companies are going to ramp slower or faster, but it’s going to take at least 90 days for a go- to- market rep typically to really be able to hit the ground running. That doesn’t mean that they can’t start selling sooner than that, but at least absorb everything that they need.

When you think about designing a new hire training program, you want to think about the first 30 days is really where they do the core of their learning, where they’re going to be maybe sitting in trainings or sitting with subject matter experts or consuming training through a learning management system.

But if they don’t take, especially for your high revenue generating employees like your AEs or CSMs, if they don’t take the time in the first 30 days to learn the core knowledge that they need, they’re never going to do it, and it’s going to impact their ability to really support and sell your product accordingly. Really making sure that you’re giving them and that the management team is giving them the time and space to really dedicate their first 30 days to understanding.

The foundations of the industry: the product, the processes and so on. And I’m not suggesting that they don’t do other things, but the main thing, the main focus of their first 30 days, should be training. Second month is really their practicing right, they’re using, they’re taking some of the stuff that they learned and they’re starting to implement it. They might be, they might be talking to customers directly, they might be demoing their product, they might be onboarding customers.

They’re really putting into practice and typically probably somebody’s still sitting with them or or that they have a lifeline that they could call and if they need it, but really being able to ensure that they have a chance to practice it. And then by by the third month, it’s they’re kind of going out on their own, but it’s, but you’re keeping in a close eye, or somebody’s keeping a close eye that they’re effectively being able to run it on their own.

And what I like to think about with the new hires are not a lot of times somebody would say, well, that was good enough for a new hire, that’s not good enough, right? Is it good enough where I would feel comfortable leaving them alone with the customer, like that’s the barometer, right?

They’re there to help us to fail or to support the customer and by the end of 90 days, if you follow kind of like this kind of a of a of a framework, you should get to a point where you feel confident that, yeah, they could be out with the customer and and they’ll be okay and and we won’t be sending them to the walls and and and or concerned about what might be happening post that.

And then for ongoing employees, there’s always going to be things right that that you’re gonna need to to focus on a there could be a compelling event where something is changing in your business and therefore we have to do a training, or there’s a market conditions are impacting that you have to do a training and or the skill gaps right. You’re gonna notice that there we do really, really well with prospecting, but our discovery skills aren’t as good as it could be.

Or we do very, very well selling to use your practitioner, but we’re not as good selling to an executive or supporting the executive function. So, really, looking at what are what’s been going on in your business, both from a company changes, mark and condition changes- and also addressing skills that that your go- to- market team might have, that they need to be able to support your product. And this is where, again, we go to. Let’s prioritize, right, what’s going to drive the biggest impact for our business long- term.

So some of the things might that might impact you having to do additional continue, what I’m going to call continued learning. Is you’re we’re moving up market or we’re distraught, destructive technology versus we’ve been in the market for a very long time or our product or service has been in the market for a very long time and the way we’re doing it is a little bit differently. I’m going to think about, well, how our training might be impacted by that. Are you selling to SMB versus mid- market versus enterprise?

Will we always at mid market and now we want to move up market? Are we, are we enterprise and and and moving down and also wanting to open it up to SMB? Are we a PLG or are we or do we want to move from PLG to a true enterprise? So do you want to have both right? So there’s gonna be different things that we’re gonna train on or different people that you might train on. And then what are some of the? The global considerations? Right?

For example, a lot of companies if you’re doing business in in Southeast Asia, you might be selling to partners more than if you were in the United States, right, and so who might need to be trained and what might need to be trained on are different things that might influence the kind of trainings that you offer.

So that’s what I had prepared.

I don’t know if there’s any more questions or comments that I’ll open up.

Thanks, I appreciate it. We’ll give everyone a couple of minutes to see if you guys had any questions about the presentation or these topics. I’ll also go ahead and launch the poll as well.

Take a peek into the chat, because I’ve been purposely not looking at it until now so I can stay focused. I think I covered how does product marketing contribute to go to market enablement?

Does anybody have more questions?

Okay, yeah, I think that that question you did. You did cover great. Well, if there’s no questions, we’d love to get your feedback on the event. I just launched the poll. Additionally, we will send out the recording of these events and the slides, as well as a way to contact Roz if you guys have any further follow- up questions or you’d like to work with her. We’ll hang out on the line for a couple more minutes. In case anyone had, you know, personal questions or targeted questions. They wanted to ask, Roz, if not, have a great rest of your day.