According to research from Demandbase, 66% of respondents identified improving GTM alignment as a top priority to drive efficiency and growth. So, how can you align your go-to-market teams to empower success and optimize impact?
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 Betsy McCormick, the global head of GTM training and enablement at Qualtrics. Thank you for joining us, Betsy. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Betsy McCormick: Yeah, well I’m really excited to be here chatting with you today. So I have been at Qualtrics just over a year now, and I lead our go to market enablement team.
Before Qualtrics, I was in management consulting for a little bit, and then worked in various tech companies, leading account management teams for almost a decade. Actually, I came to Qualtric for a number of reasons. So I was interested in transitioning into more of a go-to-market strategy and operations role, and my family had just moved to Utah for personal reasons, and so it just seemed like a, a really good fit when the opportunity presented itself.
My team today, my enablement team today is about 25 people where we are located all over the globe, though most folks are in our Provo headquarters. Here in Utah. And so we serve all of our customer facing roles. So that means our reps, our sort of sales reps, sales frontline managers, our solutions engineers, our SDRs, our delivery teams, our customer support org, and our customer operations teams.
So all in all, it’s about 10 roles that we serve as an enablement team. And in addition to our internal roles, we’re also responsible for the enablement of our growing and super important partner network. So we do everything from onboarding to product enablement to sales plays, to role excellence. So we kind of do it all for all of our customer facing roles.
SS: Amazing. Now, given your extensive experience across GTM teams, as you mentioned, from consulting to customer success to operations, can you walk us through your journey to enablement and how does your unique background influence your enablement strategy?
BM: Yeah, I love this question. So. I went to business school a long time ago now. I spent a couple years in management consulting right after, and then transitioned into tech because I sort of realized that I wanted to be more, more operationally focused and found myself in account management roles. So I directly owned mostly enterprise accounts than I manage teams who manage those enterprise accounts.
I started out at a small startup, was then doing this at a publicly traded company. So I sort of saw the full gamut of what it means to like truly own customer relationships, and there are parts of it that I really loved, but I recognized that the parts that I loved the most were not actually the client facing parts.
It was the parts where I was supporting my team to have the knowledge and skills they needed to do their job. That was really what I was passionate about, is more of the strategic and operational alignment. Behind being the field facing person, not being the field facing person myself. And so, as I mentioned, we moved to Utah.
We’d been in the Bay Area for a long time, and I love the Bay Area, but we just had our first kid and it was getting hard to imagine continuing to build a life there. So came to Utah where we have a bunch of friends and I really wanted an in-person job and I wanted to move into go to market strategy.
And so Qualtrics, because it’s a very sort of large and successful tech company here in Utah, was an obvious target for me. And they were hiring for an enablement role. And at first, I admit, I was like, wait, what are you talking about? I’ve never done that before. And, and they kind of said like, exactly, we want someone who has been in the field who understands what it means to lead a renewal, to lead an upsell, to carry a book, like the true pressure of being a field facing person is real, and having someone, and they wanted someone who could support that and really understood that.
And for me, it tied perfectly into what I really cared about in those roles, which is how do you help your team succeed? So it just made perfect sense. And on top of that, I liked. I like the people. So it’s been a good fit.
SS: Sounds like it’s a perfect fit. And as the global head of GTM training and enablement, what are some of the key initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business this year? And how does your enablement tech stack help support these efforts?
BM: So there’s so much work to be done, but I’ll share just three of our sort of themes, I would say. So first is around repeatability. So how can we drive programming that people expect? And ultimately, we’re aiming to have a program where based on your role and your tenure, you know exactly what enablement has to offer you.
So for example, imagine you are a new sales rep. You will know that your first month you do onboarding, your next three months will be doing sort of a deep dive role certification. At that point, you’re exposed to regular, ongoing education. And that’s gonna feel really predictable too. So for example, you know, twice a year you get product innovation updates.
You know, every quarter you learn about sales plays and go to market strategy. And today, I think the program, if you asked your average sales rep, how does enablement feel? They would say, while there’s some organization to it, things come out of nowhere and that’s something we really need to stop is that said.
So how can we create a repeatable, predictable program? And we’ve made really good progress here in the last couple of months. In particular, and this is where I think actually Highspot has been really critical for us as we’re building that repeatability, which is the field knows that everything important lives.
Highspot, like they should not be searching through Google Drive for hours on end. All of our resources are always linked on Highspot. Whether that’s a training recording or a sales play or like a negotiation preparation worksheet, that is where it lives. And so this is, this is really helping to instill in the field and frankly our partners too.
Because our partners also use Highspot that when they’re interacting with our program, this is what they can expect. So that’s one piece we’re driving to. The second big one is really meeting people where they are. So, and this goes back a little bit to adult learning theory, which I admit is something I am personally learning and becoming more familiar with.
But as adults, we don’t learn the way that we learned in high school or college. You don’t sit through course after course and then go home and read at night. That’s just not what adults do. And especially if you are a sales rep or you have this huge number, this quota that you are trying to achieve. The thought of doing anything that’s gonna take you away from that goal is really just not aligned to how sales reps are incentivized.
So how can we get enablement in the hands of people in the moment they need it? So, you know, imagine for example, there are tools that do this. We’re trying to figure out how to do it ourselves. But let’s say you’re in Salesforce, you had a good conversation, you wanna move someone from the prospecting stage in Salesforce to the delivery stage.
Okay, well how cool would it be if when you move them to the delivery stage, there’s some popup that’s like, hey, do you need a refresher on delivery best practices? You know, and this isn’t super complicated tech. It exists, but it’s not something that we’ve thought about historically as an enablement team.
So really trying to think about how can we use more short form content, more in app, in software content to really meet sellers when they need the content the most. So we’re playing, like I said, with more video notebook. LM is super cool. We’re starting to experiment with short form, like podcast moments.
I think there are some really incredible tools out there. There’s actually one called Move Works, which is like a rep concierge tool, and that is really a one-stop shop to provide sort of conversational assistance across all of our systems.
So we said, hey, if we are choosing a tool that’s gonna let reps search and do things across everything, every tool they need, Highspot has to be a part of that because so much of the core content they need is gonna come from Highspot. So that’s sort of how we’re starting to tackle that one. And then the last one I’ll share, and this is probably the one where we have the farthest to go, is how do you create work that is both scalable and personal?
Because those are in some ways opposites, especially in the enablement world. And as I mentioned earlier, we serve about 10 different functions and we also serve all of our partners. So how do you get meaningful bespoke content to that many different roles? It’s really hard. And you know, historically we did this by just not serving certain roles, which you can do for a very short period of time before it becomes really problematic.
And so I think this is where there’s some really emerging tech that’s gonna be super cool. So can for example, there are a couple tools that use AI to do to really to bring role plays to life. And I know that I’m seeing a world where you sort of feed all of the right content into that, and then you can do a role play with a rep or the AutoDocs feature that we’re talking with you all about.
You know, can you have someone really kind of pull together the exact things that that person needs based on their role for their customer without having to go to like 700 places to bring it together. So those are some of the themes that we’re working on, really kind of trying to bring the team aligned with the most up to date understanding of what a
high quality enablement team is
SS: very exciting, and I think you guys have built an amazing enablement tech stack. I know that you guys actually switched off a previous enablement platform and moved to Highspot. Can you tell us about some of the challenges that Highspot has helped to solve for the your team?
BM: Yeah. So that specific decision predated me, but I can share a bit about like yeah, why we chose Highspot. So it was a couple of things. So first was just the way that you all organized content and just the structure of the platform was like really appealing to us. And then also I’ll, I’ll share. Bit more detail about that, but also just the permission sets for governance really suited our needs and all of the different stakeholders we serve and how we think about our constituents.
So those were the core reasons. And then also just like the team has been so great and so supportive, he will shout out to Melissa and Austin who have kind of worked with us at every step of the way, but I’ve alluded to this before, but just having that central go-to spot. For like the source of truth, like everything that matters is kept in Highspot and so we’re, we wanna be sure that our field isn’t just searching endlessly for docs in different places.
That was really critical to have a source of truth that we trusted. And then the search function, it sounds so basic, but it really matters. Like sellers aren’t gonna go in and like click 10 different links to follow a path. They’re just not, they’re gonna click the high spot button or navigate to the website and then they’re gonna search.
And so that search has to be. Really effective. We also love that we can use Highspot for our partners. This is something that we’ve just launched this year, and I’m really excited about it because it means we’re gonna be able to better serve our partners. Before we had to do everything twice, like we can’t do everything twice, and it also means we’re able to give them the same really high quality.
Software that they need to be able to do their jobs. And then there’s also this flexibility in the platform that we really love and something that we’re working on is how do you bring a different experience to a different function? So if I’m a seller, my experience logging in is gonna be different than if I’m a partner than if I am in cs.
So we haven’t gotten there yet, but that’s something we’re building because we want it to really feel is another way where we can do something that is personalized, but it’s also pretty. Scalable, you know, you can create that like handful of personas in those sites and, but then it’s a much better experience for sellers.
So those are a couple of the things that we really appreciate. And then the data element too has been helpful as we’ve tried to. Be really thoughtful about using the analytics capabilities to understand how are people engaging, how are they using it? Is it working? And so that we’ve had some great partnership on that too, and I think there’s also just a lot more to come.
I know you guys are innovating on a ton of stuff too, and so excited as we can forge that together.
SS: Yes, it is exciting times. Now I wanna go back to the initiative that you were talking about earlier, because I know helping reps overcome challenges is something that you’re really focused on and, and you’re working to define the skills that reps need to be successful.
I’d love to learn a little bit more about this initiative and how you’re bringing it to life through your enablement programs.
BM: Yeah, so I’ll share, I promise only a tiny bit of history here because I think it’s relevant. So about two years ago, Qualtrics was purchased by a private equity firm, and as a result, there has been a lot of change in the company, and that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen, right? Like you recognize the potential and you think through how can you just operate better and more effectively. But change is really hard for the field, especially when there has been so much of it in recent years. So, for example, we’ve made a ton of innovation to our own product, especially on the AI fronts.
We changed our pricing and packaging model, we. Are totally overhauling our sales process for how, what are the tools and systems that sellers use to progress a deal? Just so much change. And so as a result, my first year at the company, all we were really doing for the most part was change management. It was, hey, this policy has changed.
This is a new product. Here’s a new way to engage with Salesforce. And that stuff is critical, like you have to do it. So I don’t think we should have done anything differently, but. There’s only so much attention span that you have and that you can capture. And so a lot of the really core role excellence initiatives kind of fell by the wayside.
And so this year we’re really trying to make up for that. And so really two key initiatives. One is our rep playbook and then a leadership summit. And so the rep playbook is something that I’m really proud of. We’re releasing it hopefully a week from Friday, so it’s coming up soon. And the idea is how do we help our reps at every stage of the sales process?
So, hey, you wanna get really good at prospecting? Here’s some general knowledge about what good prospecting looks like, but more importantly, here’s how to do that at Qualtrics and do that well within the Qualtrics. Context. And so doing that for every stage of the journey. The program itself lives in a tool called Coda, but it’s really filled with tons of links.
Again, everything that we link out goes back to Highspot, and we’re working on building a live programming session so that every quarter, if you’re like, you know what, I need to brush up on my discovery skills or my negotiation skills. If there’s a training that you can go to, or if you’re a new rep or a new employee, and then that playbook is the leave behind with, of course, again, all those links and resources contained within it.
So we’re really excited about that initiative. We’ve built it sort of hand in hand with sales, so expect to really see some meaningful engagement there and and hopefully see that reflected ultimately in our business results. And then briefly, I’ll say we’re hosting a leadership summit this summer. It’s the second.
One we’ve done, at least since I’ve been at the company, though I think some version of this predated me, um, where we bring all of our sales leaders together, we do three of them. We, we serve four different regions. So we’ll do one in Dublin, we’ll do one in Provo, and bring our Latin America team up to Provo, and then we’ll do one in Sydney for our a PJ team.
And the theme this year is coaching, similar to how I was speaking out, reps being inundated with change, like managers were too. And so it gets really hard to do the basics of your job as a manager. How do you coach? How do you reflect on your own manager capabilities and skillset? You know, we’re. You’re getting pulled into this deal or, hey, look at this forecast data or pipeline data, but really honing that skill of like, how do I just sit with my reps and help them get better at their job?
So that’s the focus of that summit. And they have their corresponding kind of manager playbook too, that’s organized in a really similar,
SS: if I could double click, what are your best practices for aligning the GTM teams and, and securing buy-in specifically on the skills that reps need to be successful, especially on a global scale.
BM: Yeah. The global piece makes it extra hard, and I think especially last year when we just frankly didn’t have the people we needed to build those genuine relationships because obviously you need to actually know the people you’re serving, like full stop. End of the day. If you don’t understand them, what they care about in their teams, you’re never gonna build content that like fully resonates.
And support their needs. So we’ve tried to do this, actually, we’ve experimented with a lot of different ways of doing this. So sitting in on meetings, one-on-ones being really thoughtful about not tack, like asking the same people every single time. So kind of spreading out the conversation, supposed to like alleviate the amount of time that those stakeholders invest, but also just getting different perspectives. So we even reorged the team this year to be much more stakeholder aligned than we were. So I now have someone who leads sales enablement specifically, and she sits in on all of those leaders. She knows all of those leaders. She goes to those core meetings every week.
And so you really start with that like foundation of knowledge and then doing the homework, right? Like sales capabilities and skill sets. There’s a ton of data out there, and so if you can collect kind of best in class from what’s going on outside of Qualtrics, combined with the specific needs of Qualtrics, and then I think you can come up with something that your first draft is frankly pretty good.
And so we try to be really hypothesis driven when we bring work to leaders. And it’s of course, based on everything we’ve learned from them and their team, but. Like it’s our job to do the work. And so we then have like an iterative process. So for example, with this leadership summit, we did a lot of interviews, did a lot of research, talked to a bunch of vendors, and now next week we’re gonna go present our proposal for a.
How to run that two day summit and get feedback from our most senior sales leaders. And I think what they’re gonna see in that proposal is like, Hey, this team has listened to us, but they’ve also incorporated sort of best in class practices from outside. And so that opportunity will both be a moment to show them.
Reflect back on them, what we’ve heard, but also really explicitly ask for their sign off and their buy-in and say, hey, does this work for you? Did we miss the mark somewhere? And I think in that case, honestly, also just being humble, like being hypothesis driven, doing the work, but then saying like, are we missing something?
Because even though I was in the field for a long time, it’s been years now since I directly manage a book. So always making sure you’re checking. So that’s one thing we try to do. Also just like doing the work. So I’ll share a brief example from our CS org actually. ’cause we serve them. I know we mostly talked about sales, but customer success is also a huge part of what we do.
And toward the end of my first year, we were prepping for sales kickoff and our head of customer success came to me and said, hey, I need this 90 minute technical session for my team at sales kickoff. And. It was Thanksgiving sales kickoff was in six weeks with many, many holidays in between. And I had never really worked with this org in a deep way, which we are now.
But at that point, I barely knew the org. The org was radically restructuring, so I wasn’t even responding to the current state of the org. It was the future state and it was a highly technical training, which I had not engaged in our products in a technical way before. So the idea like scared me and all of my team was busy already preparing for sales kickoff, but I knew I.
It was important for the company and for this leader to do it. So I was like, you know what? I’ll do it. I’ll pull together this training and like it almost killed me. But what we pulled off I think was pretty great and it did a lot of really important things. One is it got our team a ton of credibility with a very important stakeholder.
But two, I like understood it. I got it. I was in the role of the people on my team doing these trainings. I was in the head space of the role on customer success as a technical success manager. I was in the head of that role and it fundamentally changed how I viewed supporting that leader going forward.
So that to me was like a really meaningful experience of just like do the work and your global point. I wanna touch on that really briefly. It’s really hard. I don’t, there’s no magic bullet here. You just have to find the champions in those regions and understand and do your best to. Globalize or really like personalize where you can and then just be really transparent where you can’t.
We also, that our team structure here, we thought about too as a support here, so we do have a small regional team is one of the four teams that makes up our broader enablement team. So that sales team, and then we have a services team. We have a systems and tools team. We call our scale team, and then we have a regional team where we have a bunch of people in region that are actually responsible for saying, hey, like this, we need to rethink this for this region, or this region really needs X.
I’m gonna go run and do this particular training because it’s especially relevant there. So we’re trying to tackle it, but it’s hard to do everything. But I do think our new team structure and just like spending the time has, we’ve made a lot of progress there.
SS: Amazing. Well, I think you’re doing phenomenal and I also know that you take a very data-driven approach to enablement, so I’d love to understand, uh, how do you leverage data to identify, replicate, and reinforce the skills that lead to success amongst the go-to-market teams that you support?
BM: Yeah, so the gold standard for data and measurement in enablement is something called the Kirkpatrick model. And if you’re talking to an enablement practitioner, you’ll like see their eyes get big when you talk about the Kirkpatrick model. And so it’s really something that most of us are trying to achieve.
It’s also really hard to do well, a colleague went to a conference and he reported back. He was in, um, some session and the moderator said the fact that only about 2% of enablement teams are actually executing this fully and well. So it is not easy to do, but I think if you can do it, it really supports that data-driven model.
And, and I’ll share a little bit about what it is and how we’re approaching it. So there are really four different levels of how you evaluate your program and how you’re doing on each level kind of becomes the key to where you need to improve your work and go deeper on on those skillsets.
So first is reaction. So it’s in our case, do people show up, do they even attend your enablement? And then how do they receive the content? Attendance is something that’s actually a pretty big theme for us. Historically, different teams have had really different relationships with enablement and learning, and now what we’re trying to do is set a global standard and a global culture around enablement.
For our part, we’re trying to produce really high quality, repeatable content. That’s sort of our end of the bargain, but then we need leaders to show up and take it seriously. So that’s certainly a muscle that we’re building. And so, yeah, did you show up is the most basic level, and we combine that with.
What did you think of it? So we’ll do a CSAT and then ask two really critical questions, which is, first, I learned something valuable from this training, and second, I can apply what I’ve learned on the job. We’ve done a lot of research internally and have found that CSAT plus those two questions are actually really strong indicators of.
How positive was the reaction to this training and sometimes we’ll, a confident score before and after. How confident are you on this topic before? How confident are you after the second level’s learning? This one’s fairly straightforward that you can get creative here. Of course, it’s quizzes, knowledge checks, like could you pass a test on this topic if you took it?
The third one is where it gets really interesting and really hard, and this is behavior. So are you actually seeing behavioral changes in the field that you expect to see? So as we are implementing our Kirkpatrick model, we’re pretty good at the first two or we’re getting close. It’s really the behavior one that we’re being thoughtful about, what do we implement?
And Qualtrics as well as, um, a number of other companies that I’ve talked to. Are really leaning toward using call recording software like Chorus or Kaya or Gong to evaluate a rep call so you can actually see, let’s say we did an an e-learning on a new pitch for a new product. Did you show up? Did you like the e-learning?
I. Did you pass the test on it? The real test is when you’re in front of a customer, are you saying and doing the right things? Has your behavior actually changed as a result of everything we’ve done? And so that’s where the call recording software comes in. You can do always like mock pitches, it’s just not.
Quite as telling as the real thing and a good enablement team, which we are of course driving to be, will really cut its teeth. On this third layer, this behavioral layer, can you actually show that reps are doing something better? And the fourth one, just to sort of bring it home, is results. So what, this is the core company data that you’re tracking.
Is quota improved? Is rep productivity improved? And that’s really the bow on it though, of course that will always be a correlation. We will never be able to say we are a hundred percent positive because of the series of trainings quota improved. But if you see those first three levels around reaction, learning and behavior, all looking really positive, then you can say with some certainty, Hey, we believe we made an impact on the company results.
And so. The reinforcement really comes when you start looking across all of these and where are you doing well, and where are you doing less well? So, you know, if the problem is that people aren’t attending, that’s very frustrating, but is in some ways an easy solve. Or maybe the challenge is that people just don’t like the content.
They’re saying, Hey, this wasn’t relevant to me. That means you messed something up earlier when, you know, when we were talking about how do you build meaningful connections with stakeholders and create the right content for them. Well, that’s what you gotta go look into. Maybe they’re doing great on those two, but then the actual pitch is not going great.
Okay. That could be a true skillset issue. Maybe we need to teach them how to do better objection handling. And so that’s where you can really start to look at these elements, what’s working, what’s not, and then hone your program as a result.
SS: I love that you’ve touched on how enablement is also supportive of your partner ecosystem, and I know that that is a big area of focus for a lot of organizations as they try to scale out their sales teams through their partner ecosystems.
Would you mind if I ask sort of a general question around the role that enablement is playing in equipping partners? Do you have a story that you could share on that front?
BM: I love to talk about partners. This is a muscle we’re building in our new form. In a sort of prior to me joining the team, we did have a partner specific enablement team, just as we had a CS specific and sales specific, and then those were all condensed into one and we had many fewer people.
And this was that year of change I was talking about where we were doing. All we could do just to get like the most basic content out the door. And there was a recognition at the end of last year that that was just not sufficient. And if we as a company wanted to take enablement seriously and wanted to take our partner network seriously, then we had a structural problem.
And so that has led to actually our team getting a lot of new headcount this year, which is really exciting to figure out how do we truly, genuinely. Serve partners, and we had a lot of debate about, do you have a partner? Do you go back to having a partner specific enablement team or not? And we actually decided not to for two reasons.
One is we believe strongly that any internal content needs to be delivered to partners with very few exceptions. If our internal team needs it, our partners need it. And so if you have a separate partner team, then you’re, it’s like two different teams creating the same content. It was just kind of messy.
The other reason we didn’t wanna do a partner specific team is because the entire team is partner serving. If you are creating a training, the standard on the team is you are doing it for internal and partner. There is no such thing as an internal only training. And so really the whole team is a partner team in that sense.
And then our regional team really meets those bespoke partner needs that won’t be covered by the core curriculum. So we have some language challenges that we’re dealing with because we’re global. So, for example, how do you deliver a partner training in Japanese? We don’t have the capacity today to do that, so we’re gonna hire someone who’s gonna go do a lot of.
Trainings in Japanese, or some products are really more resonant with certain markets, and so some partners are really pitching and implementing certain products in a way that is maybe unique. And so again, how do we go and hit that specifically? So that’s really what our regional partner teams are doing.
But the idea is that the core curriculum is for everyone. I don’t care if you’re internal, I don’t care if you’re a partner, you’re getting access to it. So, for example, we had our AE onboarding program that’s been live for about a year and we’ve, we’ve gotten pretty positive feedback on that. And actually next week or in two weeks, we are finally launching that onboarding program to partners to say, hey, if you wanna sell on our behalf, better late than ever, here is our onboarding program.
So you can truly learn about the category, learn about our products. And so it’s really setting, it’s, that’s a mindset which is. There’s no distinction. That’s a little bit dramatic. There are of course some operational and a handful of content distinctions, but generally speaking that is the mindset, and again, this is where I’m so excited that we’ve got our partners on Highspot.
Like I don’t want our team to have to go learn two different systems and have two different like taxonomies for how we present content. Like that’s crazy. I don’t have time for that. It’s gotta be the same.
SS: And it ensures a consistent customer experience, whether they’re working directly with Qualtrics or your partner ecosystem.
So I love that.
BM: Such a great point. You’re a hundred percent right on that.
SS: So since launching Highspot, what results have you seen and are there any key wins that you can share?
BM: Yeah, so operationally, HighSpot has been really huge for us. So this sounds so simple, but. Just having all of our operating teams agree that like documents live in one place is really different than how we used to operate, and it matters a lot.
It cuts out so much churn, so much confusion, so many hours of searching for things, and a massive focus area for Qualtrics has been operational rigor and operational efficiency. Qualtrics just grew so, so, so, so, so, so fast that. The company in some ways never had to worry about what is best in class operations look like.
And now we’ve gotten so big that we cannot ignore that question. And so that has like really helped us transform in an important way, part of our whole operating model. And I think that matters for the field too. Kind of what I was saying before is around. Just saving them time, making it easier using that time for customer facing efforts.
The other thing that’s exciting when I look at Highspot is we’ve seen about 80% recurring usage on our Highspot assets. So that to me, signals that this is working, like reps are getting the message that this is the place to go. And we’re also seeing increasing uptick in our digital rooms, which I really love because it means that reps are applying the same standard to their customers, saying, look, everything that matters and is important, you’re gonna find in this one central place.
So it makes the whole thing just much more efficient. And then, of course, partners, which we’ve touched on a number of times, really like it helps us answer this question of like, how do we operate at scale? Like we can’t. Get away with what we got away with when Qualtrics was smaller. Absolutely.
SS: Now, I know AI plays a key role at Qualtrics, uh, being a Qualtrics customer myself. But how do you envision leveraging technology innovations like AI to further elevate your enablement efforts?
BM: There’s just so much potential. I think about this all the time. I probably think about this more than. Any other thing I think about related to my job also in my personal life, my husband’s an AI engineer, so we have like really nerdy dinner conversations.
It’s actually very helpful for me as I think about our team strategy. But I, uh, so what maybe a quick anecdote. When I was presenting our strategic plan to our CEO and our COO in, um, I think it was December, 2024, our CEO Zig said to me, he is like, Betsy, this looks great. The one thing I’m gonna push you on is how do we make sure that we’re.
Adequately incorporating AI into our tech stack. Because when you think about enablement, it is the perfect fit for AI. It is content. Anything that is content creation, you should immediately be thinking about AI. And what I say to our instructional designers all the time, these are the, the people who build the content is like, your job used to be creating content.
Now your job is figuring out how do you use these tools to create better, faster, more personalized content. Right now your job is not going away right now, but you need to figure out how to use these tools ’cause that will become your job. And so the first thing we’re doing in terms of our own tech stack is really making sure that we’re actually leveraging our current tools.
So there’s a ton I know that you all are doing, we’re in really active conversations with your teams. We actually just renewed our contract for a number of years and part of the reason is because we’re excited about those. So whether it’s like the auto docs feature to help reps go in and kind of build their own decks.
Really just ensuring that we’re doing everything we can with our current tech stack. Our LMS has some capabilities too that we need to better take advantage of. So for example, thought industries is our partner facing LMS. They have a pretty incredible translation tool where we can take an e-learning and then translate it to Japanese.
That’s the main language we translate into. It’s pretty good. It’s like 90% of the way there versus other translation tools. Our teams would basically retranslate everything, and so it’s like, why are we even using technology? But we’re seeing some pretty incredible pieces there. We are fundamentally rethinking that content piece that I spoke about.
So how can we stop our teams from doing the core content creation? How can you have AI build the bones? Of course and then leverage the expertise of our ideas to make that really next level. So a couple of the tools there actually that we’re using a bunch of our LMSs do some things there. Canvas pretty awesome too in creating, um, content and really beautiful images using AI.
So we’re trying to really up our design game too. And Canva’s been a really great tool there. Our lead instructional designer, his main project for this quarter is actually, he has this like AI scorecard where he is looking at all of these tools and saying what could work for us? Oh, one that I forgot, uh, simulation based tools.
So can you feed some program everything about your sales pitches and your product and then, then put them in a live situation where they’re fake pitching to to customers. That’s what I’m really excited about. So a lot of this we have in our tech stack. Some of it we’re using, some of it we will be using in coming months.
And then also thinking about what are kind of the missing vendors that maybe one or two missing vendors to really pull together the whole picture. So we’re really excited about this and I hope if you were to ask me in a year, tell me about your tech stack. It would look, I. In some ways the same, but in some ways pretty different from what we have today.
SS: I’ll be sure to check back in about a year so we can do an update on how you all are doing. So Betsy, last question for you actually on that front. Having been in your role as a global enablement leader for a year and already making strong impact, what advice would you offer to someone maybe who’s new to enablement, who wants to make an impact from the start?
BM: The first one we’ve already spoken about, so I won’t go into attentive detail, but like your stakeholders are everything. If you don’t understand what they care about and how they operate, you will never produce programming that will resonate with them, and that’s the whole point of your job, right? Make sure that who, whoever you’re serving is learning what they need to learn.
The second one is like prioritization. Is really important and it will like crush you if you don’t have a good system for figuring out what highest priority is. And what’s especially hard in our case is I serve like 10 different pretty senior leaders. And sometimes they want the same thing and usually they do not.
And so how do you, how do you weigh one senior leader’s asked against another? Senior leaders ask, and a lot of enablement professionals will say, oh, we’ll just say no. Maybe it’s ’cause I’m like a people pleaser, but I don’t think you can just say no to a senior stakeholder when they want something that is critical to their business.
I’ve never gotten an ask where I’m like, no, that’s a bad idea. Every enablement ask I get. I’m like, yeah, I get that. That’s a really good idea. And so, you know, maybe you can say no, but maybe it’s not yet. Or maybe it’s what if instead or is enablement really the best way to do this? Have you thought about.
Maybe the manager, maybe this is a manager initiative, for example, and so we have a prioritization framework. This is fairly typical. I think a lot of companies do something similar around impact and urgency and how much work it is, and then we actually plot everything we’re being asked to do on this impact and urgency curve and say, okay, these are the things we absolutely have to do.
It’s gonna take X percent of the team’s time. That means we have Y percent of the team’s time to pick and choose a couple of other things. And I think the way you pick and choose those other things is by really understanding what matters for the business. If you understand what matters for the business, then you can actually go have those prioritization conversations in a really effective way.
So for example, this year, I think I mentioned, we have a services enablement team. We serve three really big stakeholders. One of them customer success undergoing this massive role change. And I went to the other two leaders and I said, hey, I know we’re supposed to help you. I’m doing this other thing with this other team so that we can hit these company goals around product maturity and consumption and product usage essentially.
And they said, good luck, we get it. That’s really important for the business. We come back to us in H two. So, so really knowing what matters for leaders and how do you prioritize and then do you have really strategically have those conversations when you can’t do everything? ’cause you won’t be able to do everything.
I’ll leave you with two more quickly. Really being impact driven. I shared a bit about Kirkpatrick and this is a muscle we’re still building, but how do you. Before every project say, what change am I hoping to see in the business? What is this in service of? And I think in my first year we were just like, oh my gosh, content, get it out the door.
So much is changing. And we had, again, we had to do that. But now I think we’re in this place where we can say, okay, what are we actually trying to move in the business? And being really, I think, dogmatic about sticking to that line, like knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing and what change you hope to see.
And then the last one we’ve talked a ton about is understanding the tooling. Like my mind has been blown in the last couple months as I’ve started to dig into this world of how can we have our tech stack support us, like enablement in tech stack is synonymous. I met with a, a mentor of mine and she said this, and it like, eally fundamentally flipped. This is early in my time in enablement, really fundamentally flipped how I saw the function. And we are, I think now in this really great spot where we’re truly running at that and being really thoughtful about like, okay, if that’s true, what does that mean? How do we support our stakeholders?
How do we support adult learning theory? How do we measure the impact? And how do we do that in a way that just like feels good for the field? And all of that comes back to tech stack.
SS: Amazing advice. Betsy, thank you again so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
BM: Of course. It was so fun to chat with you about all of this stuff.
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.
