On this episode my guest is Meagan Davis, the Director of Sales Enablement at Hunters. Please join us as she shares her experiences and perspectives on not just enablement for sales teams, but for also marketing, customer success, and sales engineering teams.
She also introduces customer certification into the mix - a bridge that fosters empathy and shared experiences between the Go-to-Market teams, prospects and customers. Meagan underlines the significance of unearthing business outcomes, objectives, and the art of effectively passing sales notes to the customer success team.
Meagan is a lifelong learner, a believer in the potential of PEOPLE, a marathoner – and a little known fact is that she was raised in Montana!
She has hands-on experience: selling the business case for, building, leading, and optimizing Sales Enablement programs. She recently wrote and published, “How to Start a Sales Enablement Program,” a book for practitioners that codifies lessons learned through experience, and from the many exemplary leaders and mentors that she has had the privilege to work with.
Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.
On this episode my guest is Meagan Davis, the Director of Sales Enablement at Hunters. Please join us as she shares her experiences and perspectives on not just enablement for sales teams, but for also marketing, customer success, and sales engineering teams.
She also introduces customer certification into the mix - a bridge that fosters empathy and shared experiences between the Go-to-Market teams, prospects and customers. Meagan underlines the significance of unearthing business outcomes, objectives, and the art of effectively passing sales notes to the customer success team.
Meagan is a lifelong learner, a believer in the potential of PEOPLE, a marathoner – and a little known fact is that she was raised in Montana!
She has hands-on experience: selling the business case for, building, leading, and optimizing Sales Enablement programs. She recently wrote and published, “How to Start a Sales Enablement Program,” a book for practitioners that codifies lessons learned through experience, and from the many exemplary leaders and mentors that she has had the privilege to work with.
Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.
Welcome to the Sales Enablement Society Stories from the Trenches, where enablement practitioners share their real-world experiences. Get the scoop on what's happening inside Sales Enablement teams across the global SES member community. Each segment of Stories from the Trenches share the good, the bad and the ugly practices of corporate sales. Enablement initiatives learned what worked, what didn't work and how obstacles were eliminated by corporate teams and leadership. Get back, grab a cold one and join host Paul Butterfield for casual conversations about the wide and varied profession of sales enablement, where there is never a fits all solution.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Sales Enablement Society Podcast, stories from the Trenches the only for us bias podcast that I'm aware of where we bring practitioners from all over the world and we talk about things that we often encounter that are similar. In fact, it's interesting, even across different cultures. Enablement chases some very similar challenges. So we bring together these practitioners, we talk about what's working, we talk about innovative ways they're finding things and sometimes we even talk about face plants, because you can learn a lot from making a mistake and backing up and figuring it out. So I want to introduce you to today's guest. Her name is Megan Davis. Megan is the Director of Sales Enablement at Hunters and I'll let you fill in some more about yourself.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Yeah, thank you, paul, and thanks for having me on. Like you said, I'm the Director of Sales Enablement at Hunters, and Hunters for a quick sound bite is a cybersecurity software startup and we help security operations teams mitigate real threats faster and more reliably with other or than other SIM solutions. So my role within that is to equip and educate all of our customer-facing employees really to have valuable conversations with our prospects and sometimes customers, so they can all realize the value that our solution brings and ultimately to help grow and keep business.
Speaker 2:That's what we're here to do grow and keep business. Yes, especially focus on the grow. All right, well, thanks for spending some time with us today. I want to start off with well, it's my favorite question because I get to ask it every episode which is Jimmy Kimmel Challenge. So he steps down, retires and you're offered his show Number one I'd love to know how you got that. But number two, who is your very first guest and why did you bring them onto the show?
Speaker 3:Yes, so first I think I'd have to have a very sharp haircut. I feel like you have to have that look if you're going into that role. And after that, first guest, because I am obsessed with optimizing performance and how much capability or capacity we have to really learn and grow, and I think that that goes across different functions and different activities. So the person that I would interview is Elliot Kipchogi. He is the current marathon world record holder and I'm a runner myself, so he really is inspiring and in that aspect as well. But I'd ask him about his mindset, like what he went through, what mental hurdles that he overcame to break a record and do something that no human has ever done before. Right, I think that'd just be fascinating to learn about, and I also would want to ask him what he's planning to do next, right After you've already accomplished this. What's next on his agenda Exactly?
Speaker 2:Exactly what a Disneyland. Besides that, yeah, relax. Maybe, who knows, so do you have any imminent races that you're preparing for?
Speaker 3:I am actually. I'm running a half marathon over in Martha's Vineyard in a couple months.
Speaker 2:That sounds really pretty. Yeah, it should be All right. Good luck with that. So there's a lot of debate conversation going on around who is the target audience for sales enablement. So when you say the term sales enablement, that maybe limits it a little bit, and so there's some other terms that you're starting to hear people throw around. But what's your take on it?
Speaker 3:My take on this, and I think this really goes back to kind of the root of sales enablement and it being a program and not a series of activities or kind of random asks of different departments. And I think traditionally your audience is sales, so account executives, different levels of sellers from BDRs, sdrs to managers, etc. Can experience. That gets broadened, which is a good thing, but we're thinking about so that can include the go to market team or all your customer facing employees, so marketing, customer success, sales engineers that can also be broader. In some cases I've had trainings that all employees at the company took. Right, if it's your elevator pitch for your company that everyone should know or something.
Speaker 2:I wish all companies believed that. Sorry, Because my experience they don't. People think the elevator pitch is just for sales. But you're so right. Everybody really should be able to understand and talk about it, because you never know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's, I completely agree, and everyone at your company could bump into one of your prospects at in line for lunch or at the car wash, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:I kind of have to go on vacation.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Like not even in the same country. Right Is normal and run into customers. So yep, you never know.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. But yeah, I think that's a you know, thinking about who at your company you should be enabling, and thinking about that while you're designing your program or your curriculum, really sets you up for success and even going beyond that, which is something I've been thinking about lately, and maybe that's a product of being at a startup where I have kind of more lateral, you know, flexibility in terms of what my role is. But what about your customers? Right, because your customers, who become champions, really do that by being able to articulate the value of your solution and you know how it's bringing them success of their role. So I think it's an interesting topic to kind of open up and learn what enablers are experiencing, who they're actually enabling and their day to day.
Speaker 2:When you're trying to because I like what you said about you know decide who your target is or who you're. Who's in your charter, you know, before designing your program, so that you're thinking about everyone. They don't all need the exact same kind of enablement. You need to allow for that. Who have you found the right stakeholders to be to help an enablement leader figure that out? If it's, you know, because if the conversation's beyond sales which is what a lot of people are hired for, right, who should they be talking to? Or how do they start that conversation?
Speaker 3:Good question, and I think I'll preface that by saying it's still a journey Like don't forget your core audience, you know, make sure you have your, your building blocks in place and your, your sellers, are enabled.
Speaker 3:I think, beyond that, though, you know if you're doing your job well, other departments will reach out to you and ask what you're doing right or ask for access for your team, so you can use that as kind of a hint about you know which team you should ask and and talk to you next. So I think, kind of listening to those requests and really being proactive, about talking to very different teams when they reach out. As key, and two teams that I found maybe could use more love sometimes from enablement and it's not always built in from the start are like the HR team and your customer success team. Hr, because it's very closely tied into onboarding, and customer success because it's not just a. If you're just enabling your sales team to sell and close the deal and not thinking about how it impacts the entire, you know, life cycle of your customer, then that's a mistake. So I think going in learning from your customer success team about you know what their understanding of your solution is and how our customers are experiencing. It is really important.
Speaker 2:The challenge might be for someone in enablement to really. I mean, there's no natural way that they typically talk to customers. Maybe it's the user conference, if there's like an A user conference. But do you have any recommendations or just ideas that have worked for you? How does an enablement person get that voice of the customer?
Speaker 3:In my experience I took kind of the approach I outlined and ended up talking a lot with our customer experience team and what the conversation kind of gravitated to was our customer onboarding and I learned what the current state for that was, how it was being done and you know, being a startup, you're always kind of building the plane while you're flying it per se, and so I got the opportunity to work with the customer success team and create a customer certification. So I think a lot of benefits that will derive from that. But that's how you know we get that customer access because we'll have beta customers go through it right, they want to onboard faster and get feedback from those early customers and so on. So that's just one way that I've had success doing that.
Speaker 2:That's ideal, I would think right, because then you have that you can interact, you can ask follow up questions and you know it's just better to have a live conversation. But I'll also mention because I'm sure some of the folks that are listening right now have chorus or gong or you know there's more and more of them coming on all line all the time and one of the things that I found at Instructure was our product teams and our demand gen teams and others were so hungry for access to those sales call recordings, not because they wanted to inspect how good the sales person was, they wanted to hear how customers react to our, you know, when they're talking about product and they want to see that physical, they want to hear, and so that was another potential. You know, if anyone listening has that kind of tech, you probably have a whole bunch of customer conversations that you can go and search and find just what sort of conversation you're interested in hearing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great point, that's a great point.
Speaker 2:How does this approach address some of the common sales and nailman problems in your experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so one that I kind of alluded to earlier is the buyer journey or the revenue cycle, kind of however you want to refer to it.
Speaker 3:And I think one kind of example of a problematic approach to that again, like I referred to earlier, is that you know your sales team may be maybe over promising.
Speaker 3:The customer success team is kind of saddled with delivering what you've promised right and maybe struggling with that if there isn't good alignment. And then worst case is your customers aren't happy and they churn right. That's what you don't want to happen, and I think you know plugging in something like a customer certification not going to, you know, solve all problems in the world but I think it does help by building empathy on your go-to-market team, because you know what we're doing is having our whole go-to-market team, as well as some beta customers, go through this certification, which I think will bring a lot of clarity to our sales team about. You know we're not just telling them what the ROI that our customers will experience will be, they're kind of experiencing it right by going through this. So creating that empathy, that shared experience. And then you know the direct end customer, your actual customers, are getting the value of getting up to speed faster by having a program in place.
Speaker 2:Something else that I've seen when, when you're doing that with a good methodology and you know we can have a whole episode on what the right things are in a good sales methodology, but one of the things that I have seen is any any of them should have the teaching or enabling the sales people to uncover Business outcomes and object you know things they can't do.
Speaker 2:Now, right, so nobody talks to sales people for a hobby nobody, I know at least, and so if they're, if they're choosing to talk to a sales person, there's something, something's broken, there's something that they can't do, so it's up to the sales person to figure that out, but in the process of collecting what are the outcomes and the things that you're looking for, I don't have sales people realize this, but they're also collecting success metrics. It's just two sides of the same coin, but how often does, though, do those notes get transferred over to the CS team? That's just. Another thing I've seen is, if you know, look at when people are looking at their sales methodology and making sure that that those that, whatever you're teaching your reps make sure they're collecting those kinds of business case inputs, and then how are you going to get those over to CS as metrics so they can measure and know if a customer is is getting what they wanted out of it.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:There's I want to pivot to to another topic here. Is anything else on in that area that that you wanted to to discuss before we change topic a little bit?
Speaker 3:I think that covered it. I love what you added to about that. I kind of taking those pain points and using that to. I've experienced that as a customer right when I've had a great customer success rep take my, my pain points verbatim and then each quarter in our quarterly meetings and ongoing, we're kind of checking the boxes and I'm seeing the value I'm getting from the product. So yeah, I love how you added that.
Speaker 2:I think that there's also a lot of talk right now and I suspect by the time this airs it'll still be going on About companies in the current economic environment feeling like that they just can't afford budget for enablement. We've just been talking about some more comprehensive types of enablement. How would that apply in this challenge that some teams, or a lot of teams, are having, which is showing that it's not a cost center, that it's an investment? The money for the enablement is what I meant. Yeah, how can they be better at addressing that with this model?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think it's, it's one more kind of tool in the toolkit or one more story that you can use and it's there's a really clear tie to your ROI. So in the case of like customer onboarding or customer service, you have that very clear leading indicator that you have with most training right of you know the customers that are going through it, the percent completion of training. You know if you have well worded or hands on kind of exam questions you get insights on. You know what what customers are doing well in your platform and maybe some challenge areas. But beyond that, this would be specific to whatever company you're at, but it's your your net promoter score.
Speaker 3:Right, if your customers are more satisfied, hopefully after after going through this training, because they're getting more value out of your product, that's a really clear metric that you can deliver to the business. And same with you know it's a really clear metric that you can deliver to the business and same with you know if you're having customers churn or maybe customers that are requiring a lot of hand holding by your customer success team. Both of those have different you know operational efficiency metrics and ROI metrics if you're. If it's a difference between keeping or losing a customer. That's huge. Yeah, I think it just opens up like a lot of new stories that you can you can deliver to the business about the value of enablement.
Speaker 2:When you came into your role or maybe it was even in a previous role was, was the mandate always to be looking across customer success and the other PS teams and customers, or is that an expansion that you identified? I think people kind of be helpful if they kind of knew your journey to where you're, you know got to what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So no is the answer. You know, my first pride been at this company at Hunters for just over a year and the first initiative was sales onboarding, content repository and ongoing sales training. Sounds like, yeah, the whole novel programs, right, yeah, but no, I started there. But I think that how I got to this customer certification project was by going back to doing a really good current state analysis right of and I started by doing that for which led to the sales onboarding program and the content repository and etc. But I think when you really kind of zoom out and you think about that full you know buying journey and revenue cycle we talked about earlier and you talk to more teams and get a clearer picture, then you can pinpoint. You know you're looking at your company internally for different pain points where you can improve right. So by really zooming out and taking a lot of time on the current state analysis is how I landed at the customer certification.
Speaker 2:So what recommendations do you have for somebody that thinks they should be exploring that same thing for their company or their teams?
Speaker 3:I would think about the skillset you have in sales enablement first right, because it's called sales enablement, but you know things like the onboarding program, effective content management. Those can be applied in areas broader than just sales enablement. So really kind of think through the broader value of what you're delivering and then, like we talked about I would you know, talk to and get time on the calendar with members of your customer success team that are having conversations with your customers and ask them about the things you know, like onboarding, for example. What is the customer onboarding experience like? You know, how much time are you spending with these customers, what are they asking you? What are some of the challenge areas that we're having? So it's kind of doing the same thing that you would do in setting up your sales enablement program, but with your customer success team.
Speaker 2:How was your idea, you know, received when you first started to socialize it with some of the other leaders that probably weren't thinking about what you do that much?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I will say it was a very clear need and kind of shared pain point with the customer experience team. And it's kind of a good problem to have, right If you're growing and you're scaling and you need something like this for the customers. So that piece was in place and then I had to kind of get the green light from our management team right, the executive management team. So, really thinking through, you know what were the operational benefits for the company? How does this apply to like, why me, why should someone in sales enablement take on this training? And then how are you going to deliver it?
Speaker 3:And it wasn't a like a quick win by any means. We went through a lot of iterations of what the actual training curriculum should look like like, what the content level is. You know how our customers are actually going to be getting value from it, from the modules, so it really was a full you know, presenting multiple versions of what this final outcome would be before landing on it. So I guess that's my number two tip would be, after you do have an idea about something, to make sure the pain point is clear and understood and if that is a true pain to the business, be agile with how you're prescribing your solution, because it's, you know, in this case it was probably the third solution that we landed on, so don't be afraid to kind of go back to the drawing board.
Speaker 2:And I would think that when a byproduct of you having those conversations and initiating them was that you were starting to be seen as more of a strategy player rather than just a provider of training, Because you know you'd be bringing like some thought leadership that perhaps no one had really put two and two together, like you know before, and now you're thinking of some of these things, so I would think that would help to elevate your whole program.
Speaker 3:I hope so it's still. I'll come back on and I'll let you know how that one goes.
Speaker 2:Let's know how it goes. Okay, All right. Well, before we let you go, I would love to have you just drop a little more knowledge on everybody. And it's the time travel scenario. Right? You're given the gift of going back and having a one on one with any younger version of yourself, but you can only cover one topic. What's that big thing that you wish you'd understood earlier?
Speaker 3:When I was thinking about this question my brain was in business mode and enablement mode. So I kind of answered with respect to career path and kind of what choices I would make with respect to that. And for me I thinking back to when I was graduating high school. I stressed out so much about which college I would go, to which degree, what I would major in all these decisions that in hindsight they're just choices. You make a million of them and you're not defined by any. You're really not defined by any one choice. It's kind of a series of opportunities that you get to experience. So I guess that was my advice is just keep going and experimenting and trying new things and you'll get into a sales enablement role that you really enjoy.
Speaker 2:All right. Thank you, appreciate that, and thanks for spending time with us today. You're busy. We really appreciate the time you put into preparing and recording. So, once you know, we appreciate that and I'm sure everybody listening does as well. I also want to say thank you to everybody who just listened to our conversation. If people are curious about any of these topics that we've been talking about is the best way to reach and connect with you LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Yes, I'm usually on top of my LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out and I'm always happy to make time to chat.
Speaker 2:All right, so thanks. So there you go. If you know, as you've been listening, you want to continue the conversation. Megan would love to hear from you. So thank you again for investing your time and I hope you'll be back here in two weeks, when we'll have a new guest and a new topic.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining this episode of Stories from the Trenches. For more sales enablement resources, be sure to join the Sales Enablement Society at sesocietyorg. Let's sesocietyorg.