According to research from Gartner, It can take up to 18 calls to connect with a prospective buyer. And when dealing with enterprise sales, that number can become even higher. So how do you help set your team up for success when navigating complex enterprise sales?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am 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 Eric Nitschke, the VP of Commercial Enablement at Corporate Visions. Thank you for joining us, Eric. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Eric Nitschke: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. My role or my background is a mix of marketing and sales enablement and leadership. So I have a lot of different things behind there and I think it’s shaped the way I’ve approached driving results for sellers and customers. Really. My background has always been in sales enablement content.
So creating playbooks and websites or microsites, digital sales rooms, and different kinds of content that sellers would then use to educate themselves and be able to have better conversations. But the marketing background made me a little more aware of how content needs to be phased and directed at specific audiences.
And that seems pretty, you know, common if you’re thinking about a customer marketing campaign to be role-based and set the direction toward what customer needs to do. But I think the same thing happens on the seller side, where we need to know what the seller is really trying to achieve at that stage of the sale process.
So probably deeper than just my background, but I’ve been with Corporate Visions 12 years since my prior company was acquired. So I’ve actually kind of been with the two companies for actually 26 years.
SS: Amazing. Well, we’re excited to have you here. And I know that one of your areas of focus is helping your teams elevate commercial conversations. I’d love to learn from you. What are some of your best practices for developing effective messaging and sales content?
EN: Sure. That’s a great question. So I think a lot of companies, our clients, and lots of companies out there have a lot of great first conversations. And have trouble getting to the next one.
And part of that is they haven’t gotten to the true business needs of the client. They may recognize an opportunity at the technical or at the service delivery level and it makes sense there. But when you start competing with additional budget or other initiatives that may not be competitive, but we’re all fighting for the same budget there, I think a lot of sellers don’t get to the next step because they haven’t really thought about the business value they drive.
So when we talk about elevating the conversations, we always try to start and continue with where is the business value. It’s one thing to describe what your product is and what a client can do differently with it. But it really is about what it means to the company and how it’ll help them achieve business goals that really sets the hook and continues the conversation to the rest of the deciding journey.
I think it’s really the biggest piece is just focusing on delivering those insights, and showing the connection to. The client needs and really just come out with being able to prove the value that you said you could up front.
SS: Absolutely. Now, I know a key focus for Corporate Visions this year is enterprise selling. Can you share some of the challenges that reps can face during an enterprise sale and how you’re helping your teams kind of overcome those challenges?
EN: So we’re pretty much focused exclusively on enterprise companies, but it’s gotten much harder, right? In the past few years, buyers have gotten so much smarter in the way they can research. And we’ve all seen the numbers about Buyers are 75, 80 percent of the way through the deciding journey before they even start talking to a seller. So we really need to make sure that our sellers have the ability to have conversations with multiple stakeholders. So don’t just focus on the technical, but focus on the business value that you’ll have across all those different decision-makers.
Again, focusing on the economic buyers, make sure that we’re catching all the influencers and all the champions across the organization. And then the content that we develop is aligned again with where the seller is. So it’s not what we want to sell, it’s what the buyer needs to hear in order to make a decision.
So all of our content, everything we have in Highspot, in our digital sales rooms, in our content management section, are all aligned with what to say, what to show, what to know to do. At different stages of the buying journey, you’re helping that customer along that deciding journey.
SS: Absolutely. I love that. What would you say though, are maybe some of the key skills reps need to navigate, as you mentioned, sort of the complexities of an enterprise sale. And do you have best practices for helping to build and reinforce those amongst your reps?
EN: So a lot of our research has led to the eight most important skills that are actually predictive of seller success.
So having gone through more than 100, 000 buyer interviews and understanding why they bought, and why they didn’t buy. We can focus on those key eight competencies and eight skills that we know prove success. So being a creative negotiation planner, being able to articulate value, being able to align your solution with the value a customer really wants to see. These eight skills are the things that I focus most on when I create content, when I create learning courses, things we layer into the DSR to make sure that we’re at least displaying those things that a customer typically wants to see. And then when I create those things and bring them to market, again, it’s the learning, the digital sales room is so critical in being able to put the most important and most valuable content at the top. And then leave the more traditional or operational kinds of solution briefs and technical content at the bottom.
SS: Got it. I think that’s fantastic. I’d love to understand from your perspective. Obviously, I’m a little biased when it comes to enablement platforms, but in your opinion, what is the strategic advantage of an enablement platform for helping to drive successful enterprise sales?
EN: First is just basic integration, which sounds a little odd, but for me as the Highspot administrator, but also as the key enablement person, just being able to put things in a platform, Highspot, but having one platform for the learning, just the regular content access, and then take those messages to market through pitching or DSRs, Having it all in one place is incredibly helpful for me because I only have to upload it once and then use it many times. But also for the sellers because there’s never any doubt about where the right and new information lives. They always go to Highspot depending on the navigation or the spot overviews that we have. Very easy to find content and very simple to send it out. And then of course being able to monitor is just incredible for who looked at what and when all in one place so that I can gauge if is this the right content to be selling or are some things not working well enough and what I need to tweak. Again, it’s everything in one platform for all purposes. It’s just amazing for us.
SS: I love hearing that. And prior to Highspot, I know you guys had another enablement tool. What has been the impact so far as you aim to improve enterprise selling moving to Highspot?
EN: So again, I think the biggest change for us was that full integration as opposed to a great content management platform where you know where stuff is different from knowing where it is, knowing what to do with it, and being able to act on it immediately. There are plenty of content management drives and sites and platforms, but having it totally actionable and monitorable, I’m just going to make up a word, having it all in one place is the biggest thing that I’ve gotten out of our switch to Highspot.
SS: Amazing. Now, you touched on digital rooms earlier as being kind of a key component to your enablement strategy, and your team has already achieved an impressive 59 percent adoption rate of sharing digital rooms with Highspot. Could you share more about how you’re using digital rooms to support enterprise selling?
EN: We apply some of our other training and content that we have, and I would apply this to creating more memorable digital sales rooms. And there’s an entire process around being memorable. People will forget and just not even consider up to 90 percent of what you say or present to them. So finding the right 10 percent that you want them to remember is super key.
And you do that through a couple different ways in digital sales rooms. One, you’ve got to remember that every buyer is in a different part of their journey. It needs to align with them to the point where even, are you trying to acquire a new logo. Or are you trying to expand an existing customer? Those are completely different motions that require totally different stories and skills, and they really need a different DSR to be able to just attach to those specific needs of the customer.
Because if you use the wrong message, you actually push the existing client away. Another one is, again, when we talk about leaning into the biggest business value, we always put that above the scroll. They own a newspaper and put the biggest headline above the fold. We always want to make sure that when executives come to a DSR, they are instantly reminded of what value we are introducing and developing in their business and helping them achieve those large business goals.
There’s also a whole set of design and imaging that I think makes things more memorable, and the Highspot DSRs are just amazing at doing that. Being able to quickly create templates that do that. So mostly when I create templates, they’re probably 80 some percent done, but they’re very purposely built so a seller can quickly come in and find the template that they want that best meets what they’re trying to do with it And it’s very quick for them to go ahead and customize that with their own client content and get it out the door In fact one DSRs we had sent out we found out that there were eight times more stakeholders involved in that deal than we realized. And it was a big RFP in this case, but we’ve used DSRs for RFPs for just one-off deals and our client success and our customers and ourselves, people are using the DSRs just to develop the business relationship over time.
SS: Well, I love to hear that. So I know that partner enablement is also a huge focus for your team, especially, you know, as you’re navigating complex sales scenarios. Can you share more about your strategies for enabling and empowering your partners?
EN: Sure, so we have several different partnership layers. So we have an affiliate program where independent contractors and consultants are out. Presenting CVI skills and CVI services. They basically get the same level of information our in-house sales team does because they need to have similar stories.
They may not have to take the sale as deep into the designing journey as our in-house sellers might, but I still want them to have the context, the information, and know how to have those conversations so they can tee it up for one of us to come in and help them close it. We also have a number of alliance partners and marketing partners that We’re co-selling or cross selling and each looking into each other’s sets of business, whether prospects or existing customers.
So we want to make sure that both sets of reps know the joint value conversation and we appear to be going to market together. Obviously we, you know, it’s our client and someone else’s prospect, so we’re helping with that. We want to show how seamlessly we work with their platforms, with their solutions, and then go to market together.
And again, we make all that content available to our partners through Highspot. Maybe not to the level that our reseller partners would, but we want to be able to make sure that those partners are able to do business as if we were selling ourselves.
SS: Absolutely. Last question, Eric. As you look ahead to 2025, how will your enablement strategy continue to evolve and how will Highspot help support you in that journey?
EN: Wow. Great question. One of the big pieces of research we did a few years ago was what level of personalization is creepy. And it turns out, you know, we’ve all gotten the emails where. They just seem a little too familiar to me, and I’m sure they datamined my LinkedIn profile, but that’s creepy. So the right level of personalization is really at the industry level, where you have conversations about companies like yours that we work with, have these similar challenges in your industry, and here’s how we’ve been able to help solve them, let’s have a conversation.
So, we pre-rate the content. Put them into pitch templates, put them into DSRs, and make it really easy for our sellers to then start pitch campaigns right within Highspot so that We know the messaging is right, and we know that the level of personalization isn’t creepy, because you really don’t want to come off creepy.
And then, really going forward, we’re really looking deeper into, to more in learning development. So, building more custom courses internally. And also, those are broader, but also super, almost micro courses. Where everything I said about Digital Sales Room, I’m actually creating courses on how to do that.
Industry plays. We usually go to market by industry, but let’s face it. Every industry has a different set of needs and business values. So we want to at least align with those things. So we’re creating all that custom content for our sellers. To then put into pitch campaigns. And then we’ll continue to monitor the scorecards and all the analytics functions that are in Highspot really helped me and help the rest of the product marketing team say, all right, that, that asset didn’t do what we thought it was going to do.
It’s not being used. Do we need to promote it better? Do we need to rethink it? I’m getting insights that I never really had before. So we’ll continue to do that. The more data you get, right? The more insight you’ll get. We need to get our sellers continually to pitch. Fortunately, they’ve picked up on pitching and DSRs a whole lot. So we’re getting really good data that we can make the decisions on.
SS: Love that, Eric. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you sharing your journey.
EN: Absolutely. Happy to. We love Highspot here.
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.
