Episode 138: Developing a Reliable, Repeatable Launch Process

According to Forbes, sales reps spend 35.2% of their time selling and 65% of their time on literally everything else. So how can organizations cut through the noise and focus reps on the activities that matter most?

Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. 

Here to discuss this topic are Yvette Boucher, Director of Sales Enablement at CentralReach, and Chelsea Louro, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at CentralReach. Thank you so much for joining us, both. Just to kick us off, I’d love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.

Yvette, would you like to kick us off? 

Yvette Boucher:  Yeah, thanks for having us. I’m Yvette. I’ve been with Central Reach for about six years now, building out our enablement programs. We’re an AI-powered platform for autism and IDD care providers. Our end-to-end software and learning solutions help organizations deliver quality outcomes to help every client succeed.

I’ll pass it over to Chelsea.

Chelsea Louro: Thank you. I’m Chelsea Louro, senior manager of sales enablement. I’m also approaching six years here at CentralReach. And then prior to coming to CentralReach, I was a teacher for a little over a decade. I also did teacher training and recruitment and then education sales, then that brought me here where I was in SDR, an account executive, and then also now in enablement the last three and a half years.

RR: Amazing. Well, we’re super excited to have you here, especially knowing that you guys were both up for a Spark Award this year. So you are doing some really wonderful work that I’m really looking forward to digging into as we kick off.

I’d love to start with you, Yvette. 

Let’s open with what’s difficult, what you’re up against lately. So, what are some of the core challenges to GTM success that you’re seeing, and how have those challenges kind of evolved throughout your enablement career?

YB: One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen recently is just how short the timelines have become between a product announcement and when reps are expected to start selling it.

We’re moving faster than ever, especially with our new AI products. 

That means enablement has to get the reps the right information, the right messaging, and the right training almost immediately. It’s been a constant balancing act between speed and depth. We want reps to feel confident and well prepared, but we also need to deliver that enablement in a really agile way, so they’re ready to have meaningful conversations from day one.

So the pressure to move fast has definitely shaped how enablement operates today. For us, it’s not just about building training, it’s about building our systems and processes that can scale and flex with the business.

RR: I think you’re certainly not alone in some of those challenges. Organizations across the board are struggling with similar things, and everyone’s kind of looking for that silver bullet.

Chelsea, I wonder if you can maybe help us kind of build on this. So, from your perspective, how does an enablement platform support you and the team in addressing these challenges and helping reps focus on selling?

CL: Yeah, so I’ve been in roles at other companies where there wasn’t much organization. There was no enablement platform at all.

Both as a seller and a leader, I spent a lot of time trying to find the resources that I needed, and sometimes just—out of pure frustration—had to create my own. I know a lot of sales reps come across that as well. 

So, having a platform like Highspot gives us kind of that single source of truth so we can get all of our content guidance training all together in one platform, one workflow.

Our reps aren’t spending time trying to find things and they can focus on what they really need to do, which is sell. It also helps us deliver insights back to our leadership, um, and lets us see what content and sales plays are actually driving our sales. 

That visibility allows us to continually refine and to make sure that the reps are supported and then focused on selling.

RR: Kind of moving forward, I would love to maybe focus on some of the ways that you’re using an enablement tool.

I’ve heard that you and the team are doing some really wonderful things with Sales Plays, and that’s kind of part of what earned you that Spark Award nomination. 

Yvette, knowing that Sales Plays are playing such a critical role in supporting some of your AI-centric product launches this year, I’d love to learn a little bit from you about what that strategy is, and how you’re using plays to streamline rep workflows.

YB: We’ve really built our Plays with simplicity and speed in mind. So, the idea is that we get the right information in our reps hands as quickly as possible with who to target, what to say, and what resources they can use so they can jump straight into the action instead of digging through multiple tools or decks.

When we launched our AI solutions last year, the Plays became a living guide for the team. And because the plays live right in Highspot, reps can easily pull them up in the moment. So as our products continue to evolve, the Plays evolve too. So they’ve become a go-to reference point that helps stay, keep everyone aligned and stay confident in how they’re positioning our solutions.

RR: It’s funny because you know, a Sales Play is such a humble thing, but it can be so powerful if you use it right. It’s not just the strategy that I think is really impressive with what you guys are doing. 

Chelsea, I’ve heard that you and the team have driven a really incredible 99 again, 99% adoption rate of your Plays. So can you walk us through how you maintain such high sales play adoption?

CL: I think a lot of it is just constant repetition and reinforcement. Our teams have kind of become used to our enablement and go-to-market communications, so adding in Sales Plays was just a nice easy process. 

Every time we roll out a new Sales Play, we emphasize the importance to them. We let the team know that any changes or updates will be made in that Sales Play. So that’s where they need to go to find their source of truth. 

I put out a weekly newsletter called the CR Morning Brew every Monday, and in the Brew we share new marketing content, any updates to those Sales Plays, any initiatives, things that they need to know.

Then we have a live sales meeting on Tuesdays where everything that was shared in the Brew is reinforced. So again, the reps are reading it, they’re getting it in sales team channels—because I share out that Brew in every single sales team channel—and then that live, vocal repetition and just making sure that they’re paying attention and, and they know what’s happening.

RR: I think one thing that’s really important that you called out there is that yes, you’ve driven really high adoption, but you also built the foundation of communication beforehand. So you had these levers in place that you could pull and be like: “You trust us. You know where we’re coming from, and now I can send you to the right places.” 

So, you’ve built a strategy. You’ve seen near unanimous engagement with it, but it goes further than that. 

Yvette, you shared that using Sales Plays during a recent product launch led you to influence over 900 opportunities. Could you walk us through how you drove those results and then how that impacted the launch outcomes?

YB: I think it really came down to how we set up the Plays to begin with. Like it came down with that alignment and teamwork. So prior to the launch we worked cross-functionally with product marketing, sales leaderships and our SMEs to make sure the reps had everything they needed for messaging, positioning, and the hands-on product support, which I think was key there.

They needed someone that knew that product. We also knew we would be learning in real time. So every team at CR leaned in to help them, everyone. By the time the Play that went live, we were already making edits and updates based on early feedback. Every update and change was communicated in our Morning Brew. sales team meetings, and individual team meetings, and we continued that communication and support from our SMEs, and that’s really what helped us influence those opportunities.

It’s also great that it was a great product for people to have.

RR: That is the kicker—it’s hard to sell when you don’t have something exciting. So I’m glad that both cylinders were firing there. You guys were doing the right things and so was the product. 

Now, I feel like we could probably continue digging into Sales Plays, there’s a lot there. Again, like I said, they’re one thing that gets overlooked, but they can be really, really high impact. 

I would like to maybe switch gears to another win that you’ve shared with us. Chelsea, you leveraged Highspot to redesign your onboarding program, achieving a really impressive one hundred percent adoption of required training and reducing ramp time by one to two weeks.

Can you walk me through what you were thinking about as you were improving this program? What impact has that has ha