Episode 117: Breaking Down Silos To Drive GTM Success

Speakers

Shawnna Sumaoang
Shawnna Sumaoang
Vice President, Marketing - Customer & Community, Highspot
Andrea Bras
Andrea Bras
VP of Product Marketing, Viant Technologies
Podcast Transcript

According to research from the CMO Council, 63% of marketers say they are under extreme pressure to deliver improved revenue outcomes. So how can you leverage your tech stack to enhance collaboration across GTM teams and drive impactful results?

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 Andrea Bras, VP of product marketing at Viant Technology. Thanks for joining, Andrea! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. 

Andrea Bras: Wonderful. Well, thank you Shawnna for having me. I’m excited to talk about my journey at Viant and as we’ve continued our partnership with Highspot.

So, as you mentioned, I’m vice president of product marketing at Viant Technology. We are an AI powered DSP or demand side platform built for CTV or Connected Television. What we do is we help marketers to connect with their consumers. Through planning, through execution, through measurement of their advertising media in the most engaging ways using our technology.

So I’m actually coming up on my tenure anniversary, so it’s just, wow, it’s almost mind blowing. It’s been such an amazing journey here. VT is such a pioneering, innovative company and we’re never left bored or wondering what’s next, right? So prior to joining VT, I’ve actually been in digital marketing for, geez, almost 25 years now.

Actually, I joined when it was actually still known as online marketing. If anyone in your audience can remember that. But what I’ve been fortunate enough along my journey is to really wear a lot of hats and be exposed to a lot of different types of companies. So I’ve worked with the small startups, local retail, all the way up to big global corporations.

I’ve also worn a lot of hats. So I’ve sold advertising. I have bought advertising. I’ve developed partnerships, thinking about the consumer in mind, and it’s really positioned me very well in what I believe. Is a perfect mixture of all of that background to bring me to my best results as a product marketer.

And so our role here in product marketing at Viat is we really sit at the intersection of all of the orgs in the company. We provide support to all of them, but primarily sales and product. We sit within the marketing team and it’s our job to really look for the best things that all these teams are working on in order to craft.

Really amazing and compelling positioning and messaging. We developed the go-to-market solutions and the content. We support the product launches, and of course we manage and work through all the sales enablement technology. We, of course, have chosen Highspot, which we love. And that brings me here today, and I’m excited to discuss more with you, Shawnna.

SS: Likewise, we are lucky to have you on this podcast. Given that you are a seasoned marketing leader, I’d love to understand what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business this year, and how does your enablement tech stack help support these efforts? 

AB: Well, that’s a great question. And you know, given where we sit in the org, we have our hands in pretty much everything, but we really do have some very key go-to-market initiatives. We’re highly focused on, as I mentioned in my intro. Connected television is something that is our most important focus and for good reason. I mean, when you think about the power of TV and what that does for advertising, and you’re converging it with the power of digital and the ability to understand and message the performance of your advertising.

It’s such an exciting thing and we’re doing a great job of really building the technology to support that in the best ways, as well as the partnerships. I mean, we’re getting to work with some of these greatest streaming platforms. Think Disney, think Paramount. And so we’re working really hard on how do we showcase how easy it is to build these upper and lower funnel opportunity that CTV brings based on campaign objectives.

So there’s a lot of education that comes in mind, or that we have to work with our consumers and our clients just so they can really understand the huge opportunity in front of ’em. So that keeps us very busy. The other thing that really is related to CTV, but it’s our recent Iris TV acquisition. So for those of you who may not be familiar, Iris TV has really built their tech.

To standardize contextual, the opportunity to present ads contextually AC interoperable across all of these various streaming platforms. So think cooking shows and what that could mean across not just one cooking show, but all of the great content cooking shows across numerous streaming platforms. And that really brings such value because now you’re layering in the ability to capture the consumer in the right mindset.

So that just, you know, it’s an organic content experience and we’re really excited about that. And then of course there’s Viant AI. So we launched Viant AI. It was hugely successful last part of last year. And man, it’s just so exciting ’cause we have on this hand, CTV and all the great things coming there, part of our direct access program.

But then over here we’ve got this whole new realm of innovation with AI. I know you guys lean in really heavily, which we’re excited about. So we’re just really. Keeping close to our technology teams and watching the innovation develop and keeping track of that. Of course, to make these launches successful and keep our go-to market as top-notch as possible, you need a unified go-to-market alignment as your company’s very familiar with, and that’s where Highspot has just been an absolute game changer for us.

When I think about where we were before, I mean, we had really legacy tech and we did our best, but you can only do so much. Right? I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of stories from your clients. When we brought on Highspot, a couple of really magical things happened for us. One, we had to sit and think about our content strategy, right?

You know, before we would organize it, but we didn’t really think about what it was. And you know, due to how you build and develop the platform, it’s really exciting because. You’re thinking, okay, what are our buckets of content, right? So we had to think, okay, well there’s storytelling content. And then it’s like, well, we also have all these different product releases that come.

So you have product overview, right? And you know, verticals, channels, you name it. So we had to take the time and effort to really build this out. And then we wanted to also put it around a wonderful launch, give it a big stage. So put us a little bit under a time crunch, which was probably a blessing in disguise because we had to work.

In fact, our Highspot onboarding rep, who was amazing, he told us we were one of the fastest launches. So I don’t know if that still holds true, but from contract signing, I think we signed the contract in late October, and then we had this up and running in January. So for all of you who either are planning a launch or thinking about launching or maybe haven’t signed up yet, there’s a lot you can do to get up in front of it.

For us, it was a combination of having a pilot team as we were building, getting their feedback along the way. Then we did a soft launch just to get the logistics outta the way, get people using it so that when we did our big launch at our annual Viant Con, where we dedicated two hours and actually. Flew the Highspot rep out to help us launch this.

We had a such a meaningful two hour session. Honestly, we still hear great feedback about that launch. It really helped us get started with Highspot in a big way. 

SS: I love that. And you, you touched on the importance and the critical nature of alignment. What are some of the common pitfalls that organizations might encounter when aligning go-to-market teams to execute these key initiatives and, and how can they avoid them?

AB: Yes, that is absolutely critical and we have really face several and overcome. And of course, Highspot has been a great tool in helping us do so. You know, when we first started, when I first started Viant, we were a smaller corporation. It was pretty easy to stay on top of your priorities and kind of know how to manage your workload.

But as you’re rapidly growing or expanding or adding teams. The more support you’re providing and the more awareness that the functions across the org understand about what you can bring, that starts to change. You start to get all of these demands, and the lack of prioritization isn’t because there’s no priority.

It’s that idea that if everything’s high priority, then there’s no high priority, right? So. That helped us realize, okay, we’ve gotta do a better job. And luckily we, our Chief Product Officer, he came from a very big tech company and you know, they were very used to juggling prioritization of high needs across the org.

So he shared the tips and tricks that he’s done and I was able to add on the marketing lens. And so the end result is we meet monthly with the C-Suite across every function. They have a chance to see transparently all of our projects. They can prioritize their departments, so they get to own that, and then they also see where their priorities fall in our holistic view.

So it’s been a game changer and it’s really helped us. So, you know, everybody will probably look a little different, but it’s been hugely valuable. And I’d say the other things to keep an eye out for is whenever you introduce anything new you’re gonna have change management. There’s always challenges with that.

So really just, you know, the Highspot team was great helping us understand the win-win value for our sellers and other stakeholders. So just getting ahead of that, working through those, of course, defining SWIN lanes, if there’s any blurred lines or confusion, you’re gonna have people stepping on each other’s toes.

Just really getting in front of all that business. So, and then I’d say the last thing, and you guys are great for this, is really having technology partners that have support teams. Because what’s great about Highspot is we have that ongoing support. So we’re always working as treating you as a partner, but then we’re also, we have the ability to tap and, you know, level up the support as needed.

And that’s come in handy several times. So these are just some of the things that can help you get in front of some of the challenges with alignment. 

SS: I think those are, that’s phenomenal advice for our audience. And you actually also recently established multiple committees to support your go-to-market engine. Can you share more about that journey and the impact that it’s had so far? 

AB: Thank you for asking. That’s a great question. We have put a lot of work, so yes, we have launched or about to launch, actually three distinct committees started out as one, but we landed on three. And I’ll tell you why. Rewinding back last year as we launched last January, I forgot to mention, of 2024.

And so, you know, as you’re ramping up, you’re kind of learning the process, you’re getting best practices, you’re building out the platform, all the things you’re doing in the first year. And one thing I also forgot to mention, which I will touch on in our discussion is engagement metrics. So you’re kind of getting your feet wet there. That has been another game changing element with the Highspot platform. What is really critical, and I can’t stress this enough, to your audience, is getting that co-ownership across your key stakeholders. Especially, you know, think sales leadership, right? You need that co-sponsorship. So while we have support, sales leadership is busy, they’ve got big goals to crush, right?

We were thinking, how do we get in front of them? How do we really show them how much opportunity there is for them to really move the needle using this technology and get them closer to it? So the other thing obviously is the feedback loop. We really wanted a good feedback loop. So we’re like, how do we do it in an organized way, make good use of their time?

And so when we started to build a list, it became very big. And then we had all these objectives. So that’s why we broke it into three. And so at first we had the executive, and that’s really pointing back to that co-ownership. Getting them bought in. Um, we are creating compelling metrics that I know will raise their eyebrows, so I’m getting that ready, leading into our executive committee.

And so really just letting them know the awareness, showing them some things to get them excited and asking for their hand and driving adoption with their teams. Then we’ll have the, what we’re calling the steering committee. And this is really your kind of more short term strategy. Your operational managers that, you know, they can help us really drive that lower funnel strategies and behaviors from their teams.

And then of course, the cross functional stakeholders think Salesforce, rev ops training, having really valuable discussions. And then of course, the action committee, which is gonna be our day-to-day users. So that allows us to capture what’s working, what’s not, and just your general feedback of what’s going well.

And of course we’ll do this quarterly. We don’t wanna take up too much time and use kind of a waterfall effect. So we’re really excited. And I know my boss, our chief marketing officer, he’s leaned in totally, which is gonna be tremendously successful, and he’s gonna help co-run the agenda with me for the executive. So more to come. Exciting stuff. 

SS: I absolutely love it. And I think, you know, for our audience listening, it’s a really great strategy to deploy within your organization if it makes sense for you. But I think it’s a great initiative. 

AB: And one thing I’ll add on to that really quick, I would say really what we wanna do with this is ensure we’re coming in loaded with a heavy agenda. Of meaningful content. So prep, prep, prep, that’s, and so, you know, whoever you can pull in to help you make the best use of the time, I highly encourage that. 

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’ll be extremely valuable on both sides, so that’s fantastic. Now, you’ve touched on this. I. Actually quite a bit throughout our conversation already, but I’d love to hear your perspective on what would you say is the unique value of a unified platform when it comes to maximizing go-to-market effectiveness and, and really improving collaboration.

AB: You know, I can’t saying praises enough at Highspot. It has really elevated us in that way, which was beyond my wildest dreams. Like I saw the opportunity and just seeing it play out has been just a wonderful experience. Starting for foremost with just product marketing’s needs. The consistency that we’re able to.

Foster across teams now in this unified platform is when I think about what we used to have to do when we had a logo change or we had, you know, some sort of, we had to manually do all of these things and now we can just do bulk updates or folks would share decks, you know, that they had out market. And I’d see just content with old branding or just really, really just.

Horrible things, you know, make you cringe. I don’t see that anymore. You know, it’s so exciting because now they know that the best content’s there and so there’s no dependency on these old things or an inability to find the stuff they need. So it’s very rare that I find anything that’s off brand, if at all.

So that consistency and governance is huge. Obviously, probably more importantly is what it’s doing for our sellers. I mean, when you think about the time they save now, they’re in there, they’re in and out, they’re experts, you know, they love it. We hear nothing but great feedback. The amount of time it takes ’em to build compelling content, find what they’re looking for, and all of that has been second to none.

And then the ease of pitching it out. Really the ones, we wanna get more adoption of this looking ahead, but the ones that are even leaning into client metrics and things like that, I mean, it’s just been a phenomenal result. Again, that brings me to engagement metrics that’s really closing the loop and having that single source of truth really just makes a huge, huge difference.

So what we’re seeing is we’re breaking down silos. We’re having really meaningful conversations, unlike we used to with our partner teams. Everybody’s able to use it in different ways, so it’s really just driving faster, smarter, go-to-market execution, and we love it. 

SS: Well, I love that. Now, you’ve talked about the partnership that you’ve had with Highspot, and I know that VT recently partnered with our professional services team on an initiative to begin leveraging Highspot AutoDocs. Can you share a little bit about how you’re utilizing AutoDocs to streamline workflows and improve effectiveness?

AB: I’m really glad you asked about that, Shawnna, because this is one of our most recent and most exciting efforts leveraging Highspot technology. So we call our version of AutoDocs Pitch Builder just to create some, you know, fun for the sales reps, make it easy for them to understand what it does, and it really has helped us.

Where we elevated with the one unified repository, it’s helped us take it even further. And what I mean by that is due to the nature of our clients and the businesses we serve. The content we build serves different purposes. You know, if you think about advertising, everybody needs to advertise their business.

So I think automotive companies, retail companies, travel and tourism, pharma, you know, so we build content that way. We have vertical, we have channels, we have measurement. There’s a whole vast array. And you know, the reps are really good at building these custom stories, but feedback we were getting is, you know, I’m still struggling even in the remix experience to know where to go to find the best content and all these things.

So. Pointing to your Highspot Spark conference. I like to get as much of my team up there as possible. You guys do a fantastic job with that. So last October we were there and I had a member of my team and he’s like, Hey, you know, he sat in one of the focused AutoDoc sessions and he says, I really think that we were getting ready to launch our new general presentations and we were taking a new approach this year.

And he is like, I think that what Highspot has with AutoDocs would really help sales team with this. You know, in my head I’m thinking, oh my gosh, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to launch that, you know, by the time we need to roll this out in a month, you know? And he’s like, no, no, no. I think he’s like, let me talk to the team.

I really think we can. So I’m like, okay. But in my mind I’m thinking, oh, it’ll be summer. You know? There’s no way. Long story short, he worked with our ongoing support team and they connected him with the professional services you guys provided. Put together a case and I was blown away. We were able to deploy through the help of your team.

You know, we could have built it ourselves, but it would’ve taken a long time. We never would’ve met our deadline. And it was just such great work. And what this does now is it creates this really easy pathway for sellers to, you know, pull in the problem statements from a choice of things that, a choice of problem statements based on where their discovery questions, take them with their clients, and then choose, you know, the right core messaging.

Choose the right verticals, choose the channels, all within this visible, easy. And you, you have this structured framework. So think about it as a new seller, you can go in there and it. Immediately, that’s valuable trust. You can trust you’re building a deck that matches the company positioning. And then on top of that, the loose feedback I can give you was what I have heard is it used to take our sellers at least 30 minutes, probably an hour to build a reasonable deck.

And those are probably our season one, probably up to ours. We just ran the numbers leading up to this podcast. On average, our sellers that use Pitch Builder are building their decks in 3.2 minutes. 

SS: That’s amazing. 

AB: Right? That’s what we said. So the combined learning of the Highspot Spark Conference and understanding new releases you guys had coming, having my team there, understanding, bringing that idea to it, and then leveraging a professional services, they did a superb job, just was a perfect blend.

SS: Amazing. Well, I’ll be sure to pass that along to our professional services team. I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear that. Now as we talk about improving effectiveness, another way a lot of businesses are starting to think about optimizing effectiveness is through ai, and I know Viant actually recently won in AI Excellence Award, so congratulations on that.

What are some of the key ways that you’re leveraging AI to support your go-to-market teams? 

AB: That’s a wonderful question, and thank you. We’re truly honored to have received that recognition for AI excellence and kudos to the team here at Viant across the board. It’s just been such a wild ride. We are leaning heavily into AI, as I know Highspot is, and so what we’re trying to really do is focus on all the wonderful feedback we’re getting from our clients.

From our Viant AI solution, how easy it’s, you know, done for them and really capture the wins there and understand how do we transition that into internal wins within our org. And we’re doing it across the board, but specifically for product marketing. I’m leaning in heavily with any tools and resources we have that can help us do better quality work, do it faster, just make it easier, all those things that AI brings.

And so I’ve tasked my team, we’re kind of on the forefront of this. We’re already, we’re using ChatGPT on the regular. We’re using our own by AI on the regular, but we wanna get better and we wanna continue to explore that. So I’ve tasked my team with leaning into things like co-pilot with Highspot.

Okay, how do we tap that? How do we do more with that? Another thing that we’re leaning in on, and I have another person on my team who really, I am very lucky here, very specializes in billing the bots and things so. When due to how technical our products are, obviously we have our initial storytelling and the benefits and all the buzzy stuff, but as you build relationships with clients, as you probably well know, you get those deeper questions about technology.

And so we have a lot of just kind of fragmented FAQs, docs that support launches. So he had the idea of saying, Hey, we should probably get those FAQs into a chat bot so sellers can just get in there and ask questions and not have to search for these random docs. Kind of scattered throughout. And then we’re like, how do we get that where our sellers go in the Highspot platform or leverage something like copilot.

So we’re just kind of dipping our tone, a lot of waters, but we’re excited. We’re thinking about calling it pitch aid just to kind of go with the theme, and we’ll probably take it even above and beyond. We’re building out personas, so we’re trying to think about. All the ways that we want to create this value that our sellers can tap when they’re making their pitches and make it very easy for them to just do a q and a chat style function.

So, you know, we look forward to partnering closer with you in our AI journey. 

SS: I love that. I think that’ll be amazing for your reps and your sellers. Now, to shift gears a little bit, what are some of your best practices for measuring the impact of your programs on your go-to-market performance? 

AB: That is probably one of my favorite questions because it’s a combination of solving a huge need that I didn’t ever think would get solved, as well as just a journey that’s new for me.

So it’s exciting in its own right. So we are leaning really heavy into, okay, how do we really make sense of this gold data we’re getting from you? Engagement data, right? So I like to quote my boss, he always says, okay, don’t boil the ocean. You just gotta get started, right? So that’s what we’ve done through the last year.

We were kind of, you get these really fun insights. You’re like, oh, that’s such a cool insight. And you’re like, okay, well what do we do with it? Right? So you’re, you go through this journey. But we really started to nail down how do we need to think about this? And so. We started to realize it’s like, okay, we have the sales engagement data and then we have our client engagement data, so how do we wanna start thinking about that?

And then there’s really kind of the two big buckets of how we apply those layers is one for product marketing. Direct control is governance, right? And content management. So, okay, based on our sales and our clients are engaging pitches, digital rooms, you know, views, downloads, et cetera. And then, you know, what does that tell us about our content and how we should be managing it?

And one thing that’s so exciting that I’ll share our most recent learnings from this effort, you know, we’re used to working through our roadmap. We get these initiatives, requests, you know, executive asks all of those things. We’re now really shifting how we make and build our roadmap. We’re still gonna do all that, of course.

But now we have this new opportunity with this kind of engagement data to say, hey, there’s these materials that get used all the time. So we do a monthly report to our executive team, just of the high level metrics I just mentioned. And we started seeing this one brochure we built. It’s our differentiators brochure, which, you know, it’s a good piece.

But we originally built it two or three years ago and we’ve refreshed it once. We were seeing that thing in the top five every month and often the top position every month with both sales and client engagement data. And we’re like, holy moly, this thing is on fire. Right? So what we’re doing now is it is now part of our ongoing strategy and we’re gonna look to the top 20%, right?

Driving all engagement data. To make it a proactive part of refreshing and keeping it the best capable content on an ongoing basis, whether that’s monthly or quarterly. So that’s how we’re changing and shifting based on governance. The other side of the hat is really the behaviors, right? And we don’t directly control that, but what we’re trying to do is leverage data in a way.

Now we can really showcase how this data can drive the behaviors we want from the team and then inspire our sales leaders and executive team to embrace that and leverage it, right? So we’re, we’re building out that platform. So more on that, but it’s really so exciting because, you know, we used to have to rely solely on maybe an annual survey we would send to sales, hey, you like what we’re doing right?

And maybe you get 10%, 20% responding or just kind of ad hoc, scattered feedback. And now we really just have this objective, trustworthy data we can work off of. 

SS: I love that. Since launching Highspot, what results have you seen on that front and are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share?

AB: So as part of leaning in more, like I said, we’ve already learned so much, and then now also in preparation to make these committee our kickoff sessions as valuable as possible and really go out with a banging. I had this hypothesis and I said, and I felt pretty good about it. Because you see the names of the people driving new business and you recognize those names from users in Highspot.

And I started thinking, I said, I really think Highspot drives new business. So I tasked my systems and analytics team. I’m very fortunate. And product marketing, if you were in a product marketing team, if you can have an analytics team, it’s really valuable. So I test ’em to say, okay, how do we drive the correlation between Highspot engagement?

And revenue outcomes. And we started with kind of looking at a quadrant. We said, okay, let’s look and do the old quadrant on Highspot engagement, users usage to revenue outcomes, and kind of map out those so we can think through different use cases there to start and then really start to see the correlations.

So the big great things is you start to see these stories emerge naturally. And they dug in and there’s another persona team who came from another big tech and has regression analysis and all this. So lucky me, they were able to drive that. When you take a user of Highspot or a non-user, I would say someone like one of our sellers that’s not really using Highspot, and you layer on the best Highspot engagement activities, you have an opportunity to enhance their new business by 29%. And now I’m sure there’s other variables. You know, I’m sure the Highspot users that are active, Highspot users probably are good at going after new business. But the bigger picture there is, is think about that. If we even get 10%, 15% of the movable middle and the bell curve, just doing the things that are right, think about how you can move the needle.

So we took that same lens, or we put it across total revenue, connected to engagement, and then also incremental increases with existing business. And every single one had really remarkable results. New business being the top. So. Just huge insights. We’re gonna definitely debut that to our executive team and get them excited and, and then lean in, hear their questions, and work with our sales enablement and training teams to say, okay, here’s those behaviors that we should start to reinforce.

SS: Amazing results, though. Amazing results now. I appreciate you joining this podcast so much. I’ve learned so much from you already, and it is amazing to be able to talk to another strong female marketing leader. So I really appreciate your time and I noticed that you were recognized for the Los Angeles Times Inspirational Women’s List in 2024.

So I have to say, this might be one of my favorite questions of the entire podcast, but what is one piece of advice that you would share? With other women looking to develop as leaders to drive impact for their organization. 

AB: Well, thank you so much for that question. I will tell you it was such an honor. I mean, I was so humbled and grateful to the LA Times Studio for that recognition. And it was such a journey and just so wonderful. But you know, back to your question, you know, as you go through your career journey, you see different types of leaders and you see what works and what doesn’t work. What inspires you individually?

What inspires teams? And some of the takeaways that I’ve kind of compiled and really showcased as part of panel I got to participate on last November was how you need to lead authentically. And what I mean by that is. You can’t adopt someone else’s leadership style exactly, because it may not fit you.

You have to understand your natural way of inspiring people because you get more as a leader by inspiring people than mandating them to do things, right? Not saying mandates don’t have their place where they’re needed, but when you’re inspiring people and getting them excited about the work they do, it’s gonna have such an impact, and you can’t do that unless you’re your authentic self.

It’s kind of hard and as a woman, you probably know this, it can even be harder sometimes because the, the standard kind of tried and true leadership that have been staples don’t always come off authentically when you’re a woman leader. So, you know, we know the age old challenges that come with that. So how do you, I’ve really studied and done a lot of psychology reading and stuff like how do I foster the best.

Kind of leverage my quality traits. And that leads me to the second part that’s really important. I was lucky enough in my earlier I was, when I was working at one of the larger corporations, they put us through this exercise, and if you can do this anyway, if you haven’t already, we did strengths finders, which I thought was so great, but I’m sure there’s lots of tools out there.

And you kind of learn about your own unique strengths. And it’s kind of eye-opening ’cause you know, but you don’t. But when you see ’em in front of you and then you start to read what they are, you think they nailed it, right? And so when you can understand those things about yourself, you start to position yourself to be where you do well, right?

Because you know that about yourself. And then you can kind of channel those and then work on the areas where maybe aren’t as easy. That’s also really helpful as a leader when you’re building teams, you know, it’s not getting the same cookie cutter employee. You have to build these energies together.

Right. And it’s really a combination of different types. Of strengths. And so when I have a position to fill, I’ll look at the current team and I’ll say, okay, what, what are my strengths on there? What’s missing? What can I do better? And I will design the whole process around that. When I’m looking for a candidate, I’ll say, you know, I’ll design the interview questions, I’ll design the job role, all of it.

And that’s how you get kind of a well-oiled machine. So that’s a big thing. And then of course, just in mentorship, you know, embrace mentorship. It’s so important to build future leaders. Help them understand the grace in getting out of a job they hate, you know, and finding that place where, you know, we’re always gonna have projects that aren’t fun, but if you really hate your job every day, it’s, you know, I always advise young people coming up like, don’t be afraid to make a move.

It’s okay, whether it’s another department or another company, you know, you’re only gonna do yourself justice by getting yourself where you belong. So, yeah, it’s really. Tailoring your support for the unique mentorees that you have. We have a regular intern program, so I get interns every year and it’s really great.

I learn and get a lot of great feedback. So, you know, I guess I’ll say, you know, to sum it all up, lead with authentic behavior and purpose and clarity, and you’ll drive impact and really focus on driving the young future leaders of America. 

SS: I love that advice and it resonates a lot with me, so I really appreciate this, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast today. 

AB: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. 

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.

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