According to the State of Sales Enablement 2024, 31% of industry leaders see consistent pipeline generation as a key priority. So how can you effectively leverage your tech stack to drive pipeline growth and maximize revenue generation?
Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Here to discuss this topic is Alyssa Sigafus, sales enablement and host B2B marketing manager at Lifetouch. Thank you so much for joining us, Alyssa. As we get started, I’d love if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Lifetouch today.
Alyssa Sigafus: Sounds good. Thanks Riley. Super excited to be here. So my name’s Alyssa Fuss. I’ve been at Lifetouch for the past three years as our sales enablement marketing manager focusing on the host side, which is like our schools and B2B side of the business. Personally, I have one daughter, two dogs, my husband and I, we live in central, Northern Minnesota.
So we love the winter in the cold. Something I like to do in my free time, I make a lot of sourdough bread. But I’ve been in sales enablement for the past little over a decade now, and sales support is kind of the thing that I just really have loved and have loved working with all of the tools and things like that, and just seeing teams succeed from support.
RR: Amazing. Well, we are so excited to have you today because of that experience and because of that passion for just helping people succeed, we wanna know how you’re doing it. So we’ve got a lot to talk about starting maybe with some of the priorities that are top of mind for you today. So in your work at Lifetouch, what are some of those key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business?
AS: Awesome. Yeah. At Lifetouch, some of my go-to market focus is all about driving growth and equipping our sales team to essentially, you know, win. This means arming sellers with right tools, messaging, and using data to fine tune our approach, keeping our sales, marketing and operations like tightly aligned and pulled together.
This has really helped us build that go to market motion that’s really fast focus and most importantly, customer driven.
RR: Awesome. I think, you know, you ask anyone in a go-to-market role about their priorities and things like growth, pipeline revenue, those are the things that are gonna come up. It’s inevitable.
They’re core to the business and they’re what’s gonna be top of mind for you. So knowing that, of course those are top of mind for you, what are maybe some of those common recurring challenges that organizations like yours maybe face when trying to achieve those goals?
AS: Good question. I think the real challenge isn’t necessarily generating leads.
It’s consistently attracting the right ones and moving them to close quickly. So building on this, for our business, specifically Lifetouch school photography, we have a defined set of leads. For example, there are only so many schools in US and Canada, so we have focused on creating like email templates, content that help sellers identify what content the leads are interested in that help that move quickly through their sales cycle and to close.
RR: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting knowing that you’re, you know, you’re kind of constrained in a way that some businesses aren’t, so you need to work a little bit more strategically and a little bit smarter to find those right candidates, essentially. From your experience, what are some of the tactics that you’ve seen work to overcome those challenges and enable reps to create more opportunities and achieve those goals that, you know, everyone is thinking about?
AS: Hmm, yeah, to help reps create more of those opportunities and then boost those conversion rates. I really focus on a few key practices. The first one’s targeted collateral. We really try to ensure that our reps have UpToDate marketing aligned materials that support their conversations by persona, by industry and stage of the funnel.
For us, it’s truly just, you know, education schools, that kind of thing. The second is peer learning. I’ve kind of call it our monthly level up that we do every month with our sellers. And we kind of share best practices. We talk about what’s working, we share what tools have come out or pieces of collateral that have come out in the last month, what we’re looking forward to.
Um, sometimes we bring other operations members or other marketing members in to talk about some of the things that are continuing to help support them. And then the last part I really focus on is content alignment. So we regularly audit. Update our sales content to ensure consistency with current messaging and our campaign priorities.
RR: Well, it seems like you guys are kind of checking the box on all of the key things to build that really functional engine. We try. It’s always a process and it’s always that never feel like we’re doing enough, but we have heard that you guys are doing some really cool things and we are gonna dig into that in a second, but one thing I did wanna touch on is something that you mentioned earlier of one of the things that drew you to enablement and that you enjoy is the tooling and figuring out what works. So on the subject of enablement technology, what would you say is that strategic advantage of a unified platform in all of the work that you just talked us through?
AS: Unified enablement platform accelerates revenue by putting the right content, tools and insights in the rep’s hands when they need them. So really equipping them at the right times, at the right materials. It ensures like consistent messaging, driving that efficiency and gives teams the data, which is something that a lot of people miss, uh, the highest value opportunities that they have.
It also gives us a consistent way to measure their success that reps have. The content that we’re using to best share those practices amongst the leaders in the areas so everyone can benefit.
RR: I think that all sounds great. I know one thing that you are doing specifically is using digital rooms to scale your outreach.
We’ve heard that your reps have, and these are some kind of crazy numbers, just to preface for our listeners, we’ve heard that your reps have created over 2, 600 digital rooms and seen over a hundred thousand external views. Two things there that I’d love to know. How has this strategy kind of impacted your outreach and then for those who would wanna replicate it, how did you do it?
How’d you make that happen?
AS: Oh, well, using digital rooms have scaled our personalized outreach, driving that higher engagement and faster pipeline movement. Key best practices for us include that tailoring content, keeping our messaging clear, and using analytics to boost results and guide the sellers conversations and timing of their outreach.
For an example, we found some of our sellers. Will share a digital room before they have a presentation with a customer, and then the seller will look to see the content that’s being viewed, and then they can tailor their presentation to see what that customer has been looking at. Mostly to make sure in their presentation that they are talking about those points that they’re really digging into.
RR: Amazing. I would just love to know, how did you build that high adoption? How did you get reps bought in? I know it’s never easy to drive that behavior change, but how did you get them seeing the value of this?
AS: I think honestly the way that we did training is we really built those steps of starting at pitching, moving to some of those other higher like video recording and talking about that really personalized approach.
And then we kind of ended with the training part of digital rooms as like the crown jewel of the things that they have access to and they really got excited about it having those months. Like connections, really taking the time to meet with them regularly. When we first implemented this to our entire sales team, we met with them every single week for, you know, an hour with each chin of the us, which we split it into three.
So they got an hour with the enablement team every single week, and then continued to meet, we still continued to meet monthly with all of the teams, um, and showing those things. But the digital rooms, they were so excited about. It’s personal. They can, you know. Co-brand them with the school and have those logos on there and auto enable feature that you have where if we update a piece of content, it’ll automatically just push through as we update the version.
It’s been such a game changer for them. They love it.
RR: Well, it sounds like you’ve really done a good job then of. Building that confidence. They saw the value, but you’ve taught them to use it well, and you’ve put a lot of work into doing so, and you’re seeing that kind of impact now. And that kind of feeds into the next question I had for you, which is that something that underlies successful buyer engagement is rep confidence.
And you’ve shared that you’ve seen a. 77% increase in rep confidence after leveraging Highspot. So could you walk us through how you achieved that and then maybe how that boost in confidence is helping reps perform better when they’re having these conversations with schools.
AS: So by giving them that instant access to the right content and guidance through Highspot, this is really just.
Resulted in more of that effective buyer interactions, that faster pipeline progression, and which moves to the higher conversion rates. When they see that someone has opened their email and they’re already looking at that content with that pitch, or they’ve already gone into that digital room, it really just makes them excited.
So they’re just more eager to continue to jump in. They can instantly have that instant gratification and you know. Excited about and keep going.
RR: Awesome. Well, I think that’s one of those things that tends to work right for your sales folks is you’re doing the right thing. It’s helping you achieve what you want to, and now you know that you can go run and continue pursuing it. And they see it.
AS: They see it in action. It’s been really fun.
RR: Yeah. I mean, I know when I share my digital rooms, you get that ping and you’re like, ah, I can go do the thing. It’s amazing, right? I think that, you know, more confident reps is kind of what everybody is trying to achieve. Better buyer engagement.
They’re all key goals. It seems like you guys are making progress against those goals, but I’d be curious to know how you’re using data insights, all of the things that Highspot allows you to do to inform and maybe improve these programs that you’re leading.
AS: The insights have led us track engagement, optimize our messaging and focus reps on the opportunities that matter the most, turning data into faster pipeline growth and higher conversions.
So we had said, I said earlier, we do those monthly level ups. So not only do we connect on the content and pieces that are, you know, working and not working, we also connect on the data and work with our sales team to make sure everyone understands their performance. How the content is performing, what’s working, what’s not, and then additionally seeing the things that are not working to help tailor their approach and help improve and shape the way that they’re using their Digital Rooms and just pitching in general with the content that we provide.
RR: Okay, so thinking then of, of. Data and these monthly syncs that you do to kind of check, Hey, what are we doing well? What do we need to kind of pull back on? I’d love to know, since implementing Highspot and as you’ve been doing these continual gut checks, what results have you seen? What successes have you encountered and maybe any wins you could share or achievements that you’re particularly proud of?
AS: So there’s a couple of sides to this. So there’s obviously the physical data side, right? And then the emotional side of it for our sellers, the first one we’ve really been digging into our sales force and kind of comparing and trying to get some more deeper data. Highspot has really helped with some of those pieces.
The number one thing I think has been most exciting is seeing that sales cycle shorten, cut it in half is the most common that we’ve seen, but. There’s been times it’s gone down to even from start to finish within 48 hours, and that’s not every single sales, but I’ve actually watched it gone out and done my own ride-alongs and seen they’ve sent the digital room in the pitch and it goes to like, we’re talking about this and we’ve got a contract in your hand.
So it’s been really exciting for them to have that. Sales cycle, shorten, they can use their time more effectively and things like that. And then the emotional side, you just really see them, the morale of it, the improved morale. It’s helping them feel supported by their operations, marketing, sales enablement teams, and, and it just really helps us be really great teamwork together and move forward faster.
RR: I love that kind of twofold breakdown of what are we actually seeing and then how are we feeling with it? I’m so happy to hear that both sides are positive. The data’s helping you track up and everybody’s feeling a little bit more confident in their work. So for other enablement and marketing leaders that are looking to use digital rooms in the way that life touches, to streamline that outreach, create more opportunities, drive better pipeline growth, what is one, two pieces of advice you’d give them to really help them be successful?
AS: My advice is to really take the time to fully explore the platform, support your team throughout the rollout, and then thoughtful deployment and building user confidence will drive adoption and impact regular check-ins. Sharing best practices will lead to that long-term success.
RR: Amazing advice. Tidy, short, to the point. Be thoughtful, be intentional. It’s gonna lead you to success every time. Well, I have to, before we close this out, just again say thank you so much for joining us. This is a really great conversation. You guys are doing such incredible work and I’m really happy we got to dig into it a little bit.
AS: Well, thank you, Riley, we have been so excited to have Highspot and it’s been really a game changer for us. So thank you guys.
RR: Incredible. To our audience, thank you so much 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.
