In Case You Missed It: The Buzz from SiriusDecisions 2017 Summit

The jingle of slot machines has finally cleared our ears and we caught up on much-needed Z’s, but our brains are still full of knowledge and insights from the SiriusDecisions Summit in Las Vegas last week.  Here are a few highlights.

On Wednesday, SiriusDecisions revealed results of a survey that asked sales enablement leaders to rank their highest priorities over the next 12 months.  Sales talent is clearly a high priority, with improving sales skills (51 percent) and onboarding (49 percent) emerging as the top responses.  The rising importance of sales enablement within B2B organizations is also evident.  Twenty-six percent of respondents indicated that sales enablement reports directly to the CEO.  Among sales enablement teams that report to the CEO, a majority (61 percent) support organizations with more than $750 million in revenue, further indicating that the C-suite is increasingly focused on sales enablement.

Our customers share this focus on sales talent, which is where Allego comes in.  Red Hat presented a case study, Built to Scale: Creating a Consistent Value Message across a Global Sales Team, on Tuesday detailing how they use Allego’s mobile video platform to boost sales effectiveness.

During the session, we heard from Chelsea Peedin, program manager with Red Hat’s sales enablement and development team, whose mission is to improve sales competence, confidence and executive level selling skills.  These are the goals Red Hat set out to address with its implementation of Allego last year:

1)      Help improve message consistency globally – With 85 offices in 35 countries, and a product line that has grown well beyond its initial roots in Linux, message consistency posed a real challenge.  Red Hat’s leadership team knew that they’d get 10 different answers if they asked 10 different reps to relate the Red Hat story. They challenged Chelsea’s team to help raise the bar, and now with Allego both tenured and new reps can tell the Red Hat story consistently .

2)      Apply Learning – Allego provides Red Hat’s sales professionals with a safe place to practice their message delivery.  When given a new skill, practice can be uncomfortable.  Many reps practice in front of customers, which can result in lost sales.  Red Hat’s team uses the Allego platform to practice their pitch and get feedback from peers and managers.  While many reps initially thought video practice was uncomfortable and didn’t like how they looked or sounded, they were grateful when they got in front of the customer and felt better prepared and confident.

3)      Elevate coaching to a new level – Allego gives managers the ability to effectively coach by seeing what is being said in the field, and allows them to give effective feedback without always having to travel for face-to-face coaching.  It also broke down geographic boundaries, particularly in regions like Asia Pac, where managers can oversee reps across 8 different time zones.  Equally valuable, Allego offers coaching and feedback in their native language.

4)       Foster collaboration – As mentioned above, managers and reps are sometimes in different time zones, which makes giving feedback and sharing insights a challenge.  Allego provides a platform for teams to collaborate across departments and geographies.

Since September 2016, Red Hat has garnered almost 35,000 peer views on 2,600 videos shared.  The team has received 8,456 pieces of feedback provided on videos.

Red Hat continues to encourage bottoms-up, “groundswell” adoption across its global team. Next, Chelsea and her team plan to increase focus on messaging and coaching around in-region customer conversations, integrate Allego into Red Hat’s Learning Record Storage (LRS) and also into a new 90-day sales onboarding.

Finally, on Thursday, Chelsea’s boss David Somers, Red Hat’s director of sales enablement and development, accepted a SiriusDecisions Program of the Year award. During his presentation, he described how Red Hat set out to help its global sales team deliver a more consistent, compelling value proposition. Using tools, including Allego, Red Hat culled best practices from the field and created various examples from thought leaders articulating that value proposition.  The result was not just a pitch for sellers to memorize, but one they could tailor to their customers and to their own presentation style.

Do you share similar sales enablement challenges?  Contact Allego for a demo today and find out how we can help your team improve sales success.