Win Win Podcast

Highspot

Welcome to the Win Win podcast by Highspot. A short show where we dive into changing trends in the workplace and best practices to navigate them successfully.

  1. 3D AGO

    Episode 147: Winning in a Distributor-led Sales Environment

    According to research from Promotional Products Association International, the promotional products industry is digitizing, and it is digitizing fast. Last year, online sales represented 25% of total industry sales, which is a 19% increase year over year. As the industry shifts, promotional product organizations like Polyconcept North America are as well. So, how do you manage the change? 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 Nicole Zuniga, sales enablement manager, and Lanya Trypupenko, marketing lead acquisition specialist at PCNA. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’re really excited to have you here and to dig into all the wonderful work you’re doing at PCNA. Before we kick off, I’d love to learn a little bit about you both, your background, and your role.  Nicole, would you like to start us off? Nicole Zuniga: Sure. So I am sales enablement manager. I run our Highspot platform. I do have sales background experience, and I often go out to customer events and dive back into my sales role when we’re doing those.  But mainly when it comes to Highspot, I’m trying to create a lot of or limit a lot of that gray area between sales and marketing and make it really easy for not only our sales reps to be able to provide guidance and value to our customers, but then our customers take a lot of that same content and reuse it for working with their customers. RR: Wonderful. Well, we’re happy to have you here. Lanya, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Lanya Trypupenko: I am currently the marketing lead acquisition specialist, also known as the new account specialist. So I onboard the majority of our new accounts and just make sure they have all the information and everything they need to kinda get started and be successful with PCNA. And then my background, I’ve worked in marketing and account management for ten plus years, always with different types of products, such as jewelry, eyewear, telecommunications, and now promotional products. RR: Fantastic. Well, I am really looking forward to digging into all of that experience and how it shows up for you at PCNA. Before we get into the nitty-gritty details, Nicole, would you mind giving us a high-level overview of PCNA’s business, what you sell, who you sell it to, especially knowing that you guys have a little bit of a unique sales structure?  I’d love if you could walk us through it and kind of set that foundation for our listeners. NZ: Absolutely. So anybody who has received a piece of swag or some sort of giveaway, that is what we do. So we are a promotional product supplier. We import, design, and decorate promotional items, a 50 cent pen all the way up to a $300, um, leather tote bag or leather, uh, duffel bag. So we have quite an array of products that we offer. And we work with a distributor network, so it’s a very unique way that we do business. Instead of us working directly with the public, our distributors will then market to, could be marketing firms, it could be directly very large corporations, it could be small businesses. And so we are promoting to the promoter of our products. RR: I think folks listening in will probably be a little bit astonished by the scale that you’re dealing with. There are, you know, potentially thousands of products. They change seasonally. They just change depending upon the type of buyer that you’re targeting, the budget that you have, all sorts of factors. When you’re working at a scale like this and you’re working to enable at a scale like this, what starts to break down? What cracks do you see as you’re helping your teams take all of these products to market? NZ: You’re looking at, especially when you look at seasonality or even upcoming national days, their buying events coming, and that kind of takes out, like, that first layer of, “I don’t know where to start.” The hardest question or the hardest thing to get is, um, “Give me, like, five or 10 ideas for this price range,” but not knowing what is the use case, what is the theme, who is the audience. So, that’s what a lot of our resources are for, to whittle out some of those questions to then get down to the nitty-gritty of what is going to hit with the customer. Let’s talk about breast cancer awareness. It’s not necessarily going to be a one-for-one. It depends on what our distributors are working on with their customers. It could be maybe they just want a simple sport pack to be able to give out to their customers. It could be a plastic cup. It could also be a really nice piece of apparel. So we’re trying to provide a lot of those ideas. Typically, we have flyers of product ideas for those buying moments, and that’s mainly what’s housed in Highspot, to make it easier to just have a collection of ideas to inspire more of those discussions with our distributors and then also distributors with their customers. The Sales Plays have been very, very important to us. It’s like a single source of truth now, that with our training, it helps keep everybody on the same page. It’s like how we position it, where we win, competitive insights, how to talk about it. When I was on the sales team, it was like, “What did they say? Who said that?” And it was a game of telephone.  So, now we have a one-stop shop, one resource that has all of the things all weaved together—the what to know, what to do, what to say, what to show. When I developed our quarterly sales playbook, put it in the same exact format, so that way everybody’s used to that exact same format of all the resources that we provide, which is kind of like a big Sales Play for everyone for the quarter for messaging. RR: So it seems like the challenge is really less about navigating through an endless array of options, and more so about creating an efficient system for packaging and sharing out relevant materials that sellers can find and run with, depending upon the type of customer that they’re speaking with.  So with that little bit of frame of reference for the business about how PCNA operates, as well as what’s difficult about how it operates, Lanya, I’d love to hear from you about how some of these challenges show up in your work. LT: Yeah. I would say my initial challenges are really in making sure that, like, the customer has the information that they need from the beginning, that they understand PCNA, and then getting to the place where they’re kind of comfortable placing the order, that they can kind of self-service, you know, go look for product themselves. Of course, as the accounts do grow, it’s also important for me to be able to assist them based on their specific business and industry needs.  So, that’s kind of where the tools, like the Highspot tools that Nicole puts together, are super helpful because then I can go in and just grab something that’s maybe specific to, like, someone that has a healthcare client versus someone that has a corporate client. RR: So we’ve heard a few challenges here, I think ones that make a lot of sense for the environment you’re working in. One thing I’m curious about is that while some of these challenges sound familiar, one thing that might not be familiar to a lot of folks is that you work in a pretty unique environment. It’s still very hands-on.  Nicole, as you mentioned, you’re often at trade shows. You’re supporting events. You’re boots on the ground with the sales teams handling in-person selling right alongside them.  So, what led you to decide that it was time to take a more digital approach, and why did Highspot come into the picture? NZ: Going back to that gray area, we had resources. It was not easy to find. Our website is focused on finding and searching products, and even our own internal people have a hard time finding content on the website.  And the thing we really loved about Highspot is it reduces that searching time. People are able to find things really quickly. We can put them into certain spots within Highspot. We can tag them. And the filters—I always say to anybody that I work on with hands-on training—filters are your friend, and it makes it really easy to quickly find the things that you’re looking for. And then when we send out things, like it could be our new summer lookbook, there are so many products in there, but the insights that someone gets of like, “They told me they were really interested in bags, but they spent five minutes over here on this golf,” that is a great way of a little lead generation to then set up and further those conversations and figure out that maybe that’s really what they were looking for. Of course, using the, “Did you get my email first?” because you don’t wanna necessarily, oh, sound the alarms that you were looking at every single thing they were looking at. But that really helps us narrow down those options to then provide more value and get quickly to what the customer wants. RR: I can definitely see that making a lot of sense as you look across a changing industry and realize, maybe there are some things that we could do differently, especially, you know, as you said, having been through the ringer as a seller yourself. I also love that use case of engagement insights shaping your next steps, because to your point, you know, sometimes your customers come in with an idea of what they want, and then you share all sorts of wonderful, shiny options with them, and they go, “Well, hold on a minute. There’s a lot more I could get there.” So that’s really clever, and I like that a lot.  Lanya, I know that this kind of shows up a lot in your work. I

  2. APR 28

    Episode 146: Connecting Rep Behavior to Proven Business Outcomes

    According to research by G2, organizations with a sales enablement strategy achieve, on average, a 49% higher win rate on forecasted deals. But to see these kinds of returns, you first need to get sellers, leaders, and the business itself bought into the value of enablement. So, how do you build confidence in the function’s value across stakeholders at every level of the business?  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 Mateo Perretta, senior director of revenue enablement, and Bety Garcia, sales enablement program manager at Loopio. Thank you both so much for joining us. I’m really excited to have you here and to learn a little bit from your expertise. Before we kick off, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role? Betty, maybe can we start with you? Bety Garcia: Yeah, no, thank you for having us. I’m a sales enablement program manager here at Loopio. I’ve been in enablement for a little bit under a decade at this point.  I’ve always been part of pretty small teams, so I’ve had to be pretty creative when it comes to, you know, how do we get a whole bunch of different initiatives done across the board. RR: The story of scrappy teams and figuring it out is one that a lot of folks in enablement know well, so I’m sure there will be a lot of similarities in what you have to share.  Matteo, would you mind telling us a little bit about your journey? Matteo Perretta: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having us today. You know, it’s interesting. I tell a story about, I  started my career in telemarketing. I was in sales support did sales myself. I became a sales leader. And then I stumbled into this thing called sales effectiveness, sales excellence, sales enablement. It’s changed over the years, but probably in 2010 when I stumbled across it. And what I’d like to say is I’ve moved from the game of quantity to quality. RR: From your perspective, having now stumbled into sales effectiveness, now sales enablement and led it at several different companies, how would you define what great enablement looks like, especially for growing GTM organizations like Loopio? MP: I’ve walked into sales organizations and the first feedback I get is, we’ve done way too much enablement. We really haven’t had any time to digest it. And that’s usually a symptom of teams being reactive.  What I mean by that is sales leaders and salespeople will come to you and tell you they need all this enablement and you just keep filling that funnel and you almost become a catch-all for everyone versus being proactive and really looking at, you know, data and insights to kind of figure out what do we need to do and how does that actually align to the KPIs or the results and what the organization’s ultimately trying to do?  And so for me, it’s really understanding: “What do we have, what are our assets, and how do we align them to our goals?” When you do that, you become a partner and you show them with insight what’s important versus just, you know, being this order taker and doing a lot of enablement that just isn’t resonating. RR: The other piece of the puzzle is giving enablement the agency to kind of direct course and build a strategy with sellers in mind, but also not built for every single thing that every single seller needs, because that is an endless hamster wheel that you will never escape. So I love that call out and I’m curious to hear how technology fits into that when it comes to building a great enablement strategy. Betty, you’ve been with Loopio through a couple of enablement tool changes, including when Loopio made the decision to step away from a previous tool and kind of run without one for six months. Can you walk us through what wasn’t working then and why for a little while maybe no tool was better than the wrong tool? BG: It wasn’t so much that we had issues with the tool itself, but more so what it had become at the time. Right? So like we have a ton of unorganized, outdated content in there. And the problem with something like this at the time is that users don’t tend to be loud about those issues. They tend to just find workarounds.  On one hand, you might have, you know, top performers starting to create all of their own content that maybe they share with a few individuals and those individuals might share with others. On the other, you have the opposite of that, where you have a whole bunch of outdated content out there that’s just circulating.  And so what this creates is a few different challenges for the team that doesn’t necessarily go noticed right away, which is that the messaging becomes completely random depending on, you know, who knows what, their experience level. That then translates to performance. So, now it’s not just an issue of, you know, do we have a good source of content for everybody to draw from? It’s, you know, how do we get everybody back to performing at the same level with the same level of knowledge and the same level of information?  So that was sort of like, you know, stepping back. That was the real challenge that we were looking to solve. And part of what, having that time in between not having a tool and then looking for a new solution to bring into Loopio was having the time to plan for that, right? If we’re gonna do this, how are we gonna do it? There was a lot of planning involved in that and really trying to make that decision and, and started to tie it to the real business challenges that we had there, which was how do we get everybody working at the same level once again? RR: Yeah. And I’m really excited to dig into how you rebuilt that trust, because that’s not easy. So, we’ll touch on that in a minute. I want to start with the decision over that six-month period to strategize how we’re gonna rebuild and then who we’re gonna rebuild with, and eventually that decision led you here to Highspot.  Bety, you mentioned that you’d launched Highspot at a previous company. What made you confident over this time as your planning, planning, planning, that this would be the right tool and you’d be able to build that trust in that confidence with your users with it? BG: I think it, I mean, I had a huge advantage, right? Because I had done it a few times, and I mean, had a great positive experience working with the team at Highspot, but also I knew that it was a really great tool, right? It sort of sells itself when it’s launched correctly, right? So instead of evaluating the tool itself, from that standpoint, it was like, great.How do we get strategic about doing a launch that’s gonna be really impactful.  And that looked like doing cross-functional partnerships. So working with marketing and product, it wasn’t just an enablement initiative anymore. We really did spend a lot of time doing a ton of content review across the board and reevaluating what it was that we wanted to arm the team with. And then in fact, actually starting to anchor some of our own enablement initiatives into the launch of the tool itself.  So when we did launch Highspot at, we actually also relaunched our onboarding program and we launched a whole new product to enablement program. Now, we were touching on the needs of marketing, the needs of product, the needs of our sales organization when it came to even just onboarding and starting to ramp up ours. And we could really start to show that impact very quickly across many different areas. RR: So from that moment, you’ve reached a pretty stable place with the platform and have built out a really robust environment that, just looking at the data, is well utilized by your teams. Matteo, from a leadership perspective, as someone who came in a little bit post-launch: When you joined Loopio and started looking at what you wanted the strategy to look like and the enablement approach to look like, how did Highspot start fitting into your vision as you were thinking about high priority initiatives, things like onboarding, things like, you know, Loopio’s, monthly product launch cadence? MP: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting when people say enablement or to define enablement, it’s what’s the modality? And I think a lot of times. People see enablement with a classroom and an instructor up all the time. And one of the things, you know, I kept saying was, you know, it can’t be Bety and me in a classroom every time doing this. And so really Highspot allows us to give them different modalities and look at ways of giving people what they need when they need it. And so I think that was part of the strategy. The other thing was, you know, I’ve spent some time with a Highspot team, like, how are we gonna measure this? How are we gonna prove ROI to our leaders so that we can get them to buy in? I know in speaking to other sales enablement leaders, one of the biggest challenges is actually getting people to complete the courses, and so we’ve gotta make it easy for them. So with Highspot, we can quickly pull reports, help people understand who’s completing, who’s not, but then take it one level deeper.  Some of the work that Bety’s done, we’re actually able to look at who are our top performers and how much time they are spending in Highspot versus those that aren’t top performers. There’s a correlation there. To me, that’s the most valuable thing, being able to go back to our leaders and saying: “This is working, this isn’t working. Here’s why we need to change and, and here’s the insight behind it.” RR: You mentioned something interesting there, which is the ability to, at a very granular individual level, s

  3. APR 21

    Episode 145: Building Alignment With Intentional Infrastructure

    Research shows that sales professionals at aligned companies are more than twice as likely to exceed their goals than those misaligned companies. So, how do you build an aligned company that prepares marketing and sales teams to work together and win together? 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 is Holly Foxworth, vice President of Marketing and Communications at Axiom Medical. Thank you so much for joining us today, Holly. I’m super excited to dig into the work that you’re doing. Holly Foxworth: Thank you for having me, Riley. I’m really excited to be here. RR: For our audience, would you mind giving us a little bit of a line of sight into who you are, who Axiom is, your background, and the work you do today? HF: So as you had mentioned, my name is Holly Foxworth and I am the Vice President of Marketing and Communications here at Axiom. I’ve been at Axiom for 15 years now, which in marketing years, that probably sounds like eternity, but my background actually was in emergency and trauma medicine. That was what I did prior to marketing, but it’s been amazing how I’ve been able to bring those concepts from my nursing background into what it is that we do now. I take a lot of pride in saying that, you know, I used to treat injuries, but now I have the opportunity to really be able to prevent them before they ever occur. RR: I love that. And a very full circle moment, I can imagine.  I spoke with a guest a while back who introduced me to the concept of a squiggly career, which is you start somewhere and then it kind of takes you into a place you might not have expected and then you wind up, you know, I spent a decade as a medical professional, and now I’m here as a marketing leader.  So how did that journey lead to your current role, and then how does that clinical experience shape your work in marketing and communications as you’re, you know, working to prevent these injuries before they happen? HF: So it started obviously in the ER as I’ve mentioned, and then transferring into occupational health, and that’s what we do here at Axiom Medical. I always like to say that everything that I rely on in marketing all comes back to my foundation from the ER because nobody has time for fluff there.  That’s an environment where you have to be very alert to what’s going on. You need to pay attention and you need to be able to. Communicate quickly, very quickly, very clearly. And so that is also one of the same concepts that we need to have in marketing as well. RR: One thing that I do imagine is probably pretty unique about the kind of marketing that you do is the environment that you’re working in. Axiom is there for people during very sensitive, complicated human moments in the workplace. So how does that complicate the kind of communication you’re trying to do and the way you’re trying to go to market? HF: It definitely is a different approach because most people are selling aspirations and we are selling intervention, and when I say intervention, I am referring to human lives that are being impacted there. The way our business works is that when an employee is injured, then they would contact us, they’d speak with one of our nurses, and then we would go from there to help them with some first aid measures and things like that.  Those were really sensitive moments, so that may be when someone’s having a physical crisis. It could also be a mental health type of challenge as well. It’s not solely just physical, so you have to be really sensitive to the audience that you’re speaking to and make for sure that that tone of empathy comes through very, very clearly.  From a business perspective, you have to learn how to speak to your buyers, which, you know, my buyer is not actually the employees that are injured. My buyers are my HR people, my safety managers, CFOs, risk managers, things like that. So you have to be able to translate that language into something that they can understand. RR: So it is really kind of a fine line to walk between how I communicate the business value of this and then how I communicate: “This will be valuable to you” to an end user. That’s really interesting and probably requires quite a bit of nuance. And more than that, the ability to communicate that nuance to your sales team so they can deliver that.  And I know beyond industry, beyond company, a challenge that pretty much everyone tends to encounter is the challenge of aligning marketing and sales. So, how have you built that partnership at Axiom? HF: I love this question because you know, most organizations, whenever you look at sales and marketing, sometimes they talk about alignment, but very few actually make it to that place where you can align, and we’ve made some real progress in that area.  At Axiom, we have a very close marketing and sales team, and part of that alignment came from technology, so it was technology-driven. Whenever you talk about alignment, everyone thinks that. It’s an issue that comes up between people or that it’s a problem with what your processes are now. This is an infrastructure issue. You need to all be on the same page and be able to access the same type of information so that we’re all speaking the same language. So, that’s really, really been helpful in terms of strategy, especially for go-to-market, to rely on that technology. RR: I think sometimes when you talk about alignment, it feels like this kind of abstract, spooky thing where you can say you’re doing it, but you’re not actually doing it. You know, we are aligned, but nobody really feels it. So, I’d love to double click a little bit more into that technology piece, how it’s helping you, and more than that, how you found the right tool for the job. HF: Like, I’m sure every other business, we’ve been through the stages, we’ve been through the mess where, you know, it’s like you don’t need a new file cabinet. The new file cabinet is not the solution here.  So having that technology not only has helped with the alignment, but it’s also helped with our brand strategy. It helps that they can speak the same language that we are and whenever we went from that first step from just being in, in files that we kept, we went to a little bit of a smaller vendor and, and that worked for a while. As we matured as an organization, we knew that we needed a partner that was gonna be able to scale with us and scale their technology. That’s why we brought in Highspot.  I wouldn’t say it just saves time for our sales individuals, but from a marketing standpoint, it’s gold because we can actually measure things. Now, I, for one, am excited to go, you know, next week I go in the boardroom and I’m excited to be able to go in and say that, you know, marketing contributed half a million dollars to, to pipeline for the quarter, you know, or whatever that may be. That’s the real difference in what we previously had and what we have now. RR: I, I would be very interested in kind of a high-level view of, you know, we’re hearing time savings for sellers, more visibility for marketers. What are some of the ways that the platform really comes into play in the day-to-day? Like what are those levers you’re pulling when you’re saying, you know, this is actually driving alignment? HF: So what we’ve relied on a lot, and I’ll get into Digital Rooms in just a bit, but one of the other things that’s been really helpful are the Sales Plays. Being able to go to market with one Sales Play that everyone has access to is gold. It means the difference between success and failure. And so we now have that opportunity not only on the new logo side, but also on the account management side, so that they know what to show at what stage in the customer life cycle. RR: I love that post-sales use case too. I think a lot of times when you talk about a Sales Play, it feels very pre-sales, but to have that supporting customer success is amazing as well. You mentioned the Digital Room piece. I would be curious, how are you using them today? HF: So, we were a Highspot customer right before they came out with additional rooms. So we had the pleasure of being, you know, some of the first to utilize those. And so at that point it was like: “Wait a minute, we’re doing this all wrong.” There’s no reason why we should be sending 95,000 emails with all these attachments and nobody’s keeping up with that and nobody’s viewing it, and we have no insight into whether it’s working or not. That was the biggest change for us.  Now, whenever there’s an opportunity that’s created, we create a Digital Room, and that Digital Room follows that client throughout their entire lifecycle. So it goes from new logo sales where they’ll load in all the information they’ve spoken about. The customer has access to all of those resources. Everything from wallet cards to posters, you know, all of our collateral and how it is that their employees need to get in touch with us, to sending them over then to implementation. And having the Digital Room has made that so much easier because we can keep everything in one place. And that customer is already familiar with that Digital Room because they started it in the very beginning with our sales reps, so they continue that through with the implementation. They’re no longer sending out these long spreadsheets for people to fill out and send back to them. Everything’s in one centralized location, and then as that account is handed off to either client success or IT designated account representative, then they take the owne

  4. APR 3

    Episode 142: Measuring Marketing Performance in B2B Manufacturing

    According to research by Forrester, when brand experience and customer experience are improved together, companies can achieve up to 3.5x revenue growth. So how do you build a trusted brand all while consistently delivering high quality customer experiences?  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 is Jessica George, Director of Marketing Communications at Avery Dennison.  Thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica! I’m super excited to dig into all of the experience you bring to the table. Just for our listeners, can you kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role? Jessica George: Just a little about me: I have been working in brand marketing communications for—I almost don’t wanna say because it absolutely dates me—but it’s been 24 years now. This is my first role in B2B or B2B manufacturing. So I’ve been with Avery Dennison for about eight years. Before that, I was doing all direct-to-consumer and brand marketing. So kind of both sides, I would say, of the sort of marketing spectrum there. And there are some really unique challenges in manufacturing, but for the most part, what you find is that marketing challenges are the same in both B2B and B2C. So it’s been a really fun journey and there’s just a lot more to keep learning. RR: Well, just looking at your background, it’s safe to say that you’ve been in some really cool roles, marketing some really interesting products.  As someone kind of in the tech world, I’m always so fascinated by—and kind of a little bit jealous of—folks who can point to very tangible things and say “I brought that to life” or “My team did that.”  I know you’ve developed a philosophy around brand awareness and performance excellence, both of which are very central to your work.  Can you talk us through why brand matters so much, and how a strong brand translates into business impacts, like we heard in that introduction? JG: Yeah, absolutely. I would say this is probably an area where you do see some differences between direct-to-consumer and sort of B2B.  In direct-to-consumer from almost a psychology standpoint, you’re going to see faster, more tangible impacts with regards to things like media and marketing psychology, so how people react to ads, how often you need to show someone something. You see, as a consumer yourself, sort of the impacts of all of that. Why do you buy the things that you buy? Why do you gravitate towards the brands you gravitate towards?  In B2B manufacturing, it’s definitely different. You are trying to build that same brand presence, that same brand consistency, and that same brand equity, but your audience is often a lot more narrow. It’s focused on a particular segment or industry or trade application, but still your brand integrity remains important no matter who your audience is.  And so that’s one of the common things between B2C and B2B. Avery Dennison operates in an industry that we invented by a technology we invented 91 years ago, so our brand has grown somewhat organically from that singular invention and sort of expanded from the center there.  We’ve also grown by acquisition. We’ve gone into adjacent categories and technologies, and now we’re massive. So now we’re, you know, $9 billion globally and 35,000+ employees. So, it’s really a completely different ball game.  Managing and protecting that brand as you grow from the center and grow out and kind of pull things in and pull in, that equity becomes a real challenge. And so the consistency of what you look like and what you sound like and how you talk about your business is really critical as your name kind of moves farther and farther away from you. So it’s just absolutely critically important that you maintain control of how you show up in front of those audiences. RR: That leads us very well into kind of my next question, which is: When you’re tackling marketing and brand building at large, multi-portfolio organizations like you have, what’s kind of surprising about dealing with brand at this scale and what lessons have you kind of taken away from this time now at Avery Dennison? JG: I think what becomes interesting is that brand in the direct-to-consumer sense or in the B2C sense is really something that the person who’s using your product at the end of the day identifies with.  So within manufacturing, Avery Dennison is the brand, but within that brand we have so many different solutions that kind of ladder up to who we are as a company. And they all support our overall strategic vision, but they also mean different things to different people based on how they’re interacting with them. And so I think what my biggest learning was, if you’re marketing brands like JIF and Smuckers, your frame of reference for who your audience is is a little bit different. They have a different understanding because they’re interacting with you.  Whereas if you go out into the manufacturing space, they’re likely interacting not necessarily with your brand name or what they consider to be Avery Dennison, but with a specific product subset. So for me, the biggest shift when coming into this space was: Yes, Avery Dennison is critical to maintain as a brand, but equally as important are all of the attributes and value propositions for the products underneath that Avery Dennison makes. And so when you operate in so many different regions and so many different verticals and industries, it’s really your product integrity. And the equity of those products, that becomes really critical. And so that’s a shift for sure, and I think it makes you think about your brand integrity a little bit differently, but also how important it is to make sure that every product has its own concise and clear value proposition.  And that’s really the biggest difference: If you go to market as Jif, everybody already understands a whole bunch of things about JIF. They already understand a whole bunch of things about Nike, so a lot of that legwork is done. What we try to do in B2B manufacturing is make sure that the Avery Dennison name stands for quality. It stands for innovation. It stands for solving some of the world’s most complex challenges.  We want to make sure that we consistently know we’re standing for that. We then have another added responsibility to make sure that all of our products then stand for what they need to stand for and perform as intended, no matter who’s using them. RR: Thinking about this shift from direct to consumer to where you are now, what was hardest when you were making that transition? What did you really have to learn, and what was most difficult when you were learning those lessons? JG: The hardest thing to grapple with is the lack of data that exists in the B2B space. In direct-to-consumer marketing and brand marketing, you’ve got access to IRI data. You’ve got access to Nielsen data, you’ve got all of your digital media and marketing data, and you can then check sort of your velocities and IRI and say: “Hey, you know, we turned on this campaign, we added this many GRPs to a TV.” You look at the impact of that and you see it five days later. You see it 10 days later represented in your actual business metrics and IRI. The ability to do that was something that I took for granted. And so when I came to manufacturing, you have to think a lot differently about how you’re determining what success looks like for things like your marketing campaigns. First of all, you’ve got a longer purchase lead time, so it takes longer for a customer to make a decision usually on what product from Avery Dennison they’re gonna buy, or if they’re gonna switch from a competitive product to Avery Dennison. That decision, in essence, takes longer, so your sales cycle is longer, your negotiation cycle is longer. When you are kind of doing all of these marketing things that you would’ve done in the direct-to-consumer space—turning on digital campaigns, reaching out in social, doing events and things like that—you don’t see the impact of that marketing right away, and so you don’t have the ability to make as many fast, data-driven marketing decisions.  So that’s the hardest for me: the data.  What we had as a major outage, I would say we maintain 250 pieces of collateral. Are all of those collateral pieces doing something for us? Are they all being accessed? Are they all being used? Are they all in the right condition? Are they actually being used to influence purchase decisions for our customers? It’s not necessarily a learning curve, but it definitely is something that you have to get used to and you have to learn how to pivot differently and react off different pieces of information and different levels of information, often an incomplete picture to make informed decisions moving forward. RR: It’s really funny. I feel like I talk to a lot of folks that have come up in the B2B space, so they’ve never had this influx of data where it’s like: “I know I can directly attribute.” It’s always just: “Okay, I’m puzzle piecing together what I have. I’m finding tools that can help me do better.” It’s very interesting to hear that kind of directional shift looking back kind of when you’re seeing these gaps and seeing, okay, I’m having a hard time measuring these things. I’m trying to maintain 250 pieces of collateral and make sure that they’re all valuable.  Thinking of this, what signals told you it’s time to look for a platform? What problems beyond these—or just these—were you trying to solve? JG: There we

  5. FEB 27

    Episode 142: Designing Enablement for Scale in Healthcare

    According to research from the State of Sales Enablement Report 2025, businesses with well-integrated enablement tech stacks are 42% more likely to increase sales productivity. So, how do you go about building an effective, well integrated tech stack? 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 Nicole Cost, director of enablement and operations, and Becky Garcia, enablement operations manager, at Lantern.  Thank you both so much for joining us; it’s so exciting to have you here. I think there’s probably a really wonderful conversation to be had, and I’m excited to jump into it. I’d love to start by learning a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role.  Nicole, would you mind kicking us off? Nicole Cost: My name is Nicole Cost. I’m the Director of Commercial Enablement and Operations at Lantern. At Lantern, our department’s primarily responsible for supporting our commercial new hires with their onboarding experience, process strategy, collaboration, and communications, and then in-person meeting operations and logistics. I’m based in New York. I’ve been in this space for about four years, but prior to working at Lantern, I was at Carrot Fertility and I worked in a totally different industry in sport and entertainment; I was a teacher and worked on the business side in a very different world. RR: Becky, would you care to tell us a little bit about yourself? Becky Garcia: Yeah, definitely. So, I’ve been in the industry now, I’d say I’m going on my seventh year in the health services and health tech space. I’ve been kind of all over in terms of my background, but in the last seven years I’ve really been in an operations role.  Part of what I love doing here at Lantern is helping companies grow and scale. That’s really what I love to do. RR: It sounds like you guys have been here before. This isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve spent the time not only in the industry, but also specifically in healthcare spaces, both at Lantern and in previous roles. I’d be kind of curious to dive into those previous roles and how they kind of affect today before we jump into your work at Lantern. So, Nicole, what challenges have you noticed pop up that people in other industries might not expect? NC: What I loved about this question to kick us off was because I was actually, like I mentioned, one of those people in another industry for about 10 years before pivoting to healthcare, and I will never forget my first manager asking me: “How much do you know about healthcare?” And I responded—I remember it vividly—I responded with: “I know I have great benefits.” I quickly learned that great benefits were not a normal thing, and that is why so many companies either are being created or evolving to provide healthcare benefits that most people in the United States do not have access to. And usually these gaps are incredibly expensive. They’re very emotional, and they’re non-linear in their journeys if everything is just very complex. So one could say that selling in healthcare is more difficult than many other industries. But when we ask our new hires—we ask: “Why did you choose Lantern?” And I would say almost 100% of them say they wanted to be part of a mission-driven company because the work is meaningful. It might be more complex, longer cycles, everything’s a little bit more difficult and nuanced, but it is mission-driven and really meaningful.  All of this to is say that our enablement approach at Lantern focuses on collaborating with our friends in learning and development and our cross-functional partners to arm our internal team with tools that they need to succeed. RR: I like what you said there about nuance. I feel like a lot of the time when we talk about difficult selling environments like healthcare, challenging, obstacles, difficulty—this is all kind of what pops up. Those are the words that we use, but I love that reframe of like, “It just is what it is. This is normal and we’re doing our best to help people.” It’s nuanced, it’s not challenging. I love that reframe. As we talk this through, from your perspective, Becky, I know you’re coming in with a background in operations, which likely gives you a bit of a different perspective. Can you walk us through what it means to drive operational excellence in the healthcare space and, again, maybe how that differs from other roles you’ve held? BG: Definitely. From an operations perspective, I think driving excellence in healthcare really means building reliability into a very complex system. So as Nicole mentioned, healthcare isn’t linear and there are many moving parts. There’s handoffs, regulations, nuance, and a lot of emotion for people that are going through it. So excellence really isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about making sure that the right thing happens consistently, even as you are scaling. Operational excellence is also what ensures that we can deliver on process, discipline, documentation, reporting. And if that’s not strong enough, that’s really where scale breaks down. That’s where enablement comes in. And tools like Highspot really help us turn our best practices into the standard of work, and they help us give our teams confidence that what they’re saying in the market really matches what the organization is expecting. At the end of the day, operational excellence is really how you make impact repeatable, and that’s gonna be for patients, it’s gonna be for customers, and it’s also going to be for our teams who are doing the work. RR: That’s a great answer and I like how you look across excellence to understand how you build the systems to support it. And for whatever environment you’re in, that’s the goal. How you get there maybe differs a little bit— and it probably differs a lot when you’re dealing with, like you said, highly emotional, highly impactful scenarios—but at the end of the day, you’re still driving toward the same things.  I’m excited to hear how you’re driving towards those, especially knowing that just a little bit ago, Lantern hit a period of extremely rapid growth. What kind of challenges did that create for the team? NC: Growth is exciting. It’s a privilege. We’re excited to be part of that. And what was great is we already had the building blocks in place for our new hire onboarding experience. They were in place, and we were welcoming new hires on a weekly basis with custom 30, 60, 90 day plans. But we learned quickly that that just was not sustainable for our small team to maintain a level of excellence that we pride ourselves in Just. Wasn’t gonna work because our new hire numbers continued to grow and our team is still the same: It’s Becky and I. So the biggest challenges that we faced, I would break into probably three categories: process lag, quality control, and then updated content and assets. So, we continue to bring in the best talent and the industry, but it was incredibly important to us that we recognize these challenges as opportunities to redesign how the work gets done. So this is when we started to evaluate tools like Highspot. And even as recently, like our colleagues in marketing sing Highspot praises because it helps make their content more discoverable. RR: Becky, can you talk to us from an operations perspective, you know, hearing some of these challenges, how did they influence the decision to invest in a platform and, and why was Highspot kind of the right answer for you guys? BG: From my perspective, I think the biggest impact of rapid growth was really fragmentation. We were scaling headcount, products and processes all at once. Information started to live in too many places. There were decks here, documentation there, and there was really a lot of knowledge in people’s heads. The lack of consistency really created friction fast. It resulted in people not being confident about what the latest and greatest was. At the same time, like taking a step back, we were also going through a rebrand of the company, which actually made it a perfect inflection point. So we had an opportunity to really step back, refresh our message, and our resources all at the same time. And we really got to be intentional about how we showed up both internally and externally. So rather than just updating assets that were in place, we wanted to start with a fresh source of truth. And that’s ultimately what helped us drive the decision to invest in Highspot as we discussed. Like we’re growing so significantly, we’ve doubled in size from our commercial team, and so we needed to onboard a lot of people with very unique roles and then also operationalize best practices as we grew.  RR: I knew a little bit about those early days. You’d mentioned hypergrowth and things like that, but knowing that you had doubled headcount, you were going through a rebrand, and you were implementing a new platform and evaluating a new platform at the same time, and it’s the two of you doing all of that. I think there’s probably a lot of people that will listen in and be like: “How?”  Because that sounds like quite a lot. We’ve heard about all of the work that was being done, all of those initiatives that were kind of coming together to prioritize the need for a platform, the need to get reps up to speed quickly. So, what did onboarding look like before and why was it kind of time to make a change? NC: So as I mentioned from just the beginning, but our commercial onboarding experience has always had a formalized program, and we’ve always had our building blocks that work really well to

  6. FEB 12

    Episode 141: Designing Curated Enablement Experiences

    According to research on organizational alignment led by LSA Global highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable than misaligned companies. So how can you cultivate an aligned culture ready to drive improved outcomes?  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 is Julia Juliano, manager of sales enablement at Cencora.  Thank you so much for joining us, Julia! I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Julia Juliano: Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here today. My name is Julia Juliano. I live in the Philadelphia area with my husband, daughter, and two dogs.  I’m actually coming up on my seventh year with Cencora. I’m now a sales enablement manager, and I started with the company in generic sales within the New York Metro Territory, where I was a top performing rep. That experience really ignited my passion for empowering sales teams to succeed, which ultimately led me to transition into sales enablement. I entered the enablement world as a specialist about four years ago, and worked my way into my current role as a manager. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of supporting both community retail pharmacies and more recently our specialty distribution business. These experiences have given me a comprehensive understanding of the challenges our teams face and the tools and strategies they need to excel in such a competitive and highly regulated environment. RR: Well, we’re super excited to have you here and to dig into a couple of those things you’ve mentioned—transitioning into that sales enablement role from your desire to help sales teams win, navigating competition. So excited to dig into all of that. I want to start with one of the first things you mentioned, which is that you’ve run the gamut from sales to sales enablement. So, can you take us back to your time as a pharmaceutical sales rep at Cencora? What challenges did you experience that shaped how you enable today? JJ: Yeah, you know, it’s a really unique experience to be able to go from sales to sales enablement. As a pharmaceutical sales rep, I experienced firsthand the challenges of accessing the right resources at the right time.  Whether that was finding compliant marketing materials, navigating product specific information, or understanding how to position solutions for different customer needs, there was often a disconnect between the tools available and the realities of working in the field and the conversations that I was having with those customers.  That experience really allows me to approach enablement from the rep perspective, knowing that every minute they spend searching for content or trying to interpret complex messaging is a minute that they’re not spending with their customers. My goal is to streamline their workflows, ensure they have what they need at their fingertips, and create alignment between the tools we provide and the outcomes that they’re driving in the field. RR: I think that’s such an important call out: Every minute that you’re distracted with non-essential tasks takes you away from the work that really matters both to you and to our business. I think bringing that kind of lived experience and empathy that comes with it to the table is so huge and helps you kind of build the programs and support arms that you’re like: “I wish I’d had that.”  And I know it probably can’t be easy to build those programs because Cencora unites six distinct business units under a single brand. So, from an enablement perspective, what kind of complexity does that create for you? JJ: Yeah, so the complexity really lies in balancing the enterprise wide alignment with the unique needs of each of those six business units. So, the six business units are specialty, GPO, community, retail health systems, animal health, and corporate partnerships. They each serve distinct segments of the healthcare ecosystem; their customers, products, and sales strategies vary significantly, which means that their enablement needs are equally diverse. At the same time as one unified brand, we have to maintain consistency and messaging, compliance and governance across the organization. So from an enablement perspective, this requires a strategic and thoughtful approach to content structure, governance, and collaboration to ensure that we’re effectively addressing both the enterprise and each individual business unit’s priorities. RR: When you’re looking across these priorities and trying to stitch everything together into a clear strategy and message, it’s obvious that alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a very intentional, thoughtful thing that you have to cultivate. So how do you use Highspot to break down those silos that could potentially appear, and then make sure that everybody’s running to the same drum beat at the same pace? JJ: We’ve accomplished this by building a centralized Spot architecture that balances enterprise-level consistency with business unit-specific relevance. So at the enterprise level, we house shared resources like compliance guides, org charts, corporate initiatives—things like that. At the business unit level, we provide more tailored content and tools designed to meet those unique needs of each team for their specific solutions.  Highspot Analytics further enables us to identify content gaps and redundancies, which allows us to continuously refine and optimize our approach By centralizing any efforts on Highspot, we’ve established a single source of truth that fosters alignment while maintaining the flexibility needed to meet those diverse needs across our customer segments. RR: There’s so much in what you said that I really want to dig into in just a second. You know, about how you structured those Spots, how you determine what gets a Spot, what doesn’t, alongside the kind of specific, tailored tools that you’re building for solutions. But I want to start with the foundation, the baseline for all of this, which is that as part of your work, you led the creation of a formal structured governance plan. Why did you see governance as foundational for driving alignment and helping Cencora drive a shared strategy? JJ: Governance is truly the backbone of any successful enablement strategy, especially in a complex organization like Cencora. Without it, you risk content duplication, outdated materials, and a lack of visibility into what’s working and what isn’t. When I joined the team, we had a ton of great content, but it wasn’t always easy for reps to find or trust that they were using the most current and up-to-date version. By implementing a formal governance plan, we established a clear process for content creation, approval, and maintenance. And this not only improved findability and adoption, but also ensured that everything we provide to our teams is compliant, up to date, and aligned with our strategic goals, RR: So, you knew what it could achieve for you, and you’re starting to see those outcomes. Specifically you’re seeing that in the data. You know, as a result of this governance strategy, you’ve seen meaningful improvements in content views, downloads, findability, and even platform adoption. So, what actions or parts of this strategy do you think made the biggest difference in achieving the results that you’ve named? JJ: We implemented a consistent taxonomy or naming convention across all the different business units, which made it easier for reps to navigate and find what they need. We also introduced regular content audits on a quarterly basis to ensure that everything in Highspot is relevant and up to date. Another key action was also leveraging Highspot analytics to identify gaps in content or areas where reps were struggling to find resources. And by addressing those gaps and continuously refining our approach, we saw significant improvements in engagement metrics, like you mentioned, the content views, downloads, and overall adoption of the tool. RR: How did you identify those gaps in content that reps couldn’t find? JJ: So, we created sales surveys and worked with our marketing partners and our solution owners to identify which solutions were being most searched for by reps, what materials they needed to aid in the customer conversations that they were having. Then, you know, in the surveys we addressed: “What would you like to learn more about? What type of content are you unable to find that would be helpful in your day-to-day role?”  And so we took those surveys, partnered with marketing and those solution owners, like I mentioned, and were able to create those resources to better drive, you know, adoption and findability within the platform. RR: Okay, amazing. I think that’s such an important approach where you’re building from the perspective of your users. It’s not just: “Here’s what we think works.” It’s: “Okay, what does this actually look like in your day to day and how can we make it better?” And actually that kind of leads me to that Spot architecture that you touched on, which includes enterprise-level and then business-unit specific spots. So, how did you create this structure and then how does it help you create consistency like we talked about, but also keep things relevant to reps’ day to day? JJ: Yeah, so we started by clearly defining what belongs at the enterprise level versus the business unit level.  Enterprise level Spots include resources that apply across the entire organization—this is our compliance guidelines, corpor

  7. JAN 8

    Episode 140: Creating Clarity in a Complex Sales Environment

    According to the State of Sales Enablement 2025 Report, 20% of organizations see the sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you optimize your sales process and drive higher win rates for your team? 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 is Aaliyah Patel, senior specialist, customer marketing at Ansell. Thank you so much for joining us. Aaliyah. I’d love if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Aaliyah Patel: Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. My name is Aaliyah Patel. I’m a senior customer marketing specialist here at Ansell, where I’m a part of the customer marketing team. My role really centers on leading our sales enablement in digital MarTech operations, so ensuring that our systems, processes, and data flows that support our go-to market motion are aligned, connected, and easy for our teams to use.  A large part of that includes overseeing the digital tools like Highspot in our tech stack, supporting content governance and building scalable frameworks that help reps access the right insights, messaging, and assets across the buyer journey. The goal is to ultimately empower sellers and partners with the clarity tools and visibility they need to drive growth and deliver consistent customer experiences. RR: Just from what you mentioned there, it sounds like we have quite a lot of ground cover  in terms of your experience, your background, and then the work that you do with Highspot. Before we kind of jump too far into the deep end there, I always kinda like to start by getting a sense of the environment that you’re working in. So I know that Ansell manufactures and distributes a really wide range of products.  What are some of the unique challenges that go-to-market teams face when selling in this environment? AP: Absolutely. So, Ansell serves an extremely diverse markets, so anything from industrial safety to scientific to healthcare. And each customer group has different expectations, buying cycles and safety requirements.  Reps often need to shift between very different conversations throughout the day. And the challenge isn’t necessarily complexity, it’s clarity. Reps need to quickly position the right solution, especially when our portfolio is broad and customers span multiple industries with unique needs.  There’s also the constant need to stay current on new product developments and differentiators across categories; our priority has been making sure that our teams have a unified way to access information, understand messaging, and communicate competently no matter what business they’re supporting. RR: I love the shift that you mentioned there: it’s not necessarily complex, instead the challenge is making things clear and easy to navigate because yes, there’s a lot going on. You can’t change that, but you can pull certain levers to make it a little bit easier for your teams. Knowing that’s kind of where you’re at, I’d like to turn towards some of the actions that you and the team are taking. So, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’re focused on? And then how are you enabling reps to find clarity in Ansell’s sales environment. AP: A major focus for us has been simplifying how our teams access and leverage content to drive more consistent, confident customer conversations. We’ve strengthened our content governance, we’ve centralized materials, and we’ve made it much easier to connect the right message to the right audience.  We’re also aligning more closely with sales to ensure that our go-to market initiatives are really grounded in real customer challenges. Whether through targeted campaigns, sharper product positioning, or ongoing training and enablement, everything that we do is centered on helping our teams articulate our value across the diverse markets and products that we sell in.  We’re seeing the impact of that work in real time: We’ve had over a hundred thousand content views with almost a 90% reoccurring usage rate, which tells us that the structure we’ve put into place is resonating and helping our teams move faster and stay aligned. RR: I love that you came in with the data to back it up—actually, not just the data to back it up but great data to back it up. That’s super impressive, especially knowing that you guys are a little bit early in your journey, that you’re already finding that significant success.  One of the things that we’ve heard is that a key focus is the sales process. So in your experience, what are some of the essential building blocks for creating a sales process that’s driving these business results that you’re seeing? AP: For us, the foundation comes down to three things, so it’s simplicity, alignment, and insights.  When you bring clarity, consistency, and real data together, you create a process that’s scalable, repeatable, and tied to business outcomes, and it allows teams to adapt their approach, depending on the customer segment that they’re working with that day. RR: I think you touched on some really compelling aspects there, and I think I’d be curious to double click into a little bit more of what you said and about how you’re bringing some of those building blocks to life, especially with a platform like Highspot.  So, can you talk about the role that an enablement platform plays in helping you streamline that sales process? AP: So the value is truly structure and connection. An enablement platform brings content, people, and insights together, and it gives everyone one place to operate from. It reduces the time the seller spends searching for materials; it makes sure that our messaging is aligned across our campaigns and launches, and it also creates visibility into what resonates in the field. So, it’s truly become the backbone of how we support consistent execution across the buyer journey. RR: I always love to hear that consistency is kind of what’s coming out of your usage of an enablement platform. I think that’s really the goal, right, to help standardize your messaging and bring consistency to your teams. I would love to dig a little bit deeper into that and kind of the benefit that you see of partnering with Highspot. How does this partnership help you drive some of those core initiatives? You touched on this a little bit already. AP: Partnering with Highspot has been incredibly valuable because it gives us a partner who truly understands the complexity of a modern go-to market environment that helps us operationalize our strategy in a really scalable way. For us, the benefit is twofold. First, Highspot provides the structure we need to centralize our content, our launches, our campaigns, and our customer facing materials, so our field teams can execute with confidence. It creates alignment across marketing and sales, which is essential when you’re supporting multiple markets and product categories. Second, the partnership helps us accelerate our core initiatives. Whether we’re rolling out new product messaging or enabling our teams on evolving customer needs or programs, Highspot gives us the platform, analytics, and support to execute and quickly measure the impact. We’re not just using the platform, but we’re truly maximizing it, and the collaboration has helped us build stronger governance, improve adoption, and really tie our go-to market strategy back to real behavior and engagement. It allows us to deliver a more consistent story, support our reps with clarity, and really create a unified experience across every touchpoint.  RR: That certainly makes me, and I think all of our teams happy to hear. One of the things that’s really interesting about what you said is that earlier you gave us the data to kind of back it up and say that yes, we’re seeing these things anecdotally, but we’re also seeing them empirically.  Thinking of that data, I know that it kind of speaks for itself when it comes to the work that you and the team are doing, but we’ve heard that Digital Rooms have been a key driver in your enablement strategy and in your strategy with Highspot. In just 90 days you’ve generated like 3,000 views with your Rooms. How have you and your teams been leveraging Digital Rooms? Can you talk to us about what impact you’ve been seeing so far? AP: Digital Rooms have become a core part of how we help our teams go to market. We use them to create curated experiences that package our messaging assets and resources into a structured, easy-to-navigate format that aligns with the story we want to deliver so reps can use them to deliver a clear and consistent narrative and everything they need is in one place.  This helps our teams guide customers and partners through a cohesive experience. That visibility supports stronger account planning, more intentional communication, and better alignment with customer needs. The engagement has been strong. We’ve created over 500 Digital Rooms with an average of 30 minutes of viewing time per Room. Some have accumulated between 20–60 total hours of engagement, and several have been shared externally more than 40 times, which shows us that our customers and partners are engaging with the content in meaningful ways. RR: I love to hear how you’re using that Digital Room scorecard to keep a pulse on how they’re performing out in the wild. When you are supplying go-to-market teams with these Digital Rooms, is it the marketing team that’s building them? And if so, what kind of use cases are you building for? AP: It’s in partnership with both marketing and sales, so we can help them

  8. 12/12/2025

    Episode 139: Strengthening Agency Partnerships Through Enablement

    According to the State of Sales Enablement Report, 2025, 29% of companies still rely on multiple disconnected GTM tools. So how can organizations leverage a unified platform to scale sales readiness and achieve GTM success? 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 is Heather Hubner, advisor distribution and agent relations at Priority Health. Thank you so much for joining us, Heather! I’d love it if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Heather Hubner: Thanks for having me, Riley. Again, my name is Heather Hubner, and my role is a somewhat newer role in our company, but I came from the employee benefits side of the industry and then moved into sales. So I was a sales rep for several years for priority Health and that has evolved into the distribution side. Really my role is to ensure that our agent partners have a very aligned message as far as our products go, and just ensure that we are giving them the tools they need to represent our product in the field appropriately. RR: I kind of wanna double click into something you mentioned, which is that you started on the sales side of the house at Priority Health. So with that background in mind, can you walk us through some of the unique challenges that reps in the healthcare industry face, and then maybe a little bit about how enablement can help them overcome those things? HH: Yes, and I love this question. Being a sales rep in this industry—I think anyone who has worked in it understands the complexity—-is complex, it is fast paced, it’s somewhat seasonal, but we’re also learning that those seasons are no longer such. It’s just a high pace all year round.  As a rep, one thing that I really learned was we have time wasters: we’re looking for a certain material that an agent wants, we’re reeducating ourselves on a product because maybe it’s something that we don’t delve into on a regular basis, we just need to reeducate ourselves as a rep.  Before Highspot, so much time was spent digging around for that information and therefore less time was spent selling and building relationships and building trust with the agents. That was, that was very challenging. You know, I always thought: “Goodness, if I had everything at my fingertips, frankly, I could sell more for our company because I would be spending my time in a valuable way.” So I would say about four years ago, that’s when we first started using Highspot and it was an absolute game changer. I mean, it changed our world. We could get everything in one spot, and there was a lot of emphasis on making sure we had a source of truth.  Reps know they know to go to Highspot, they can grab what they need when they need it, send it to an agent, reeducate themselves, and there isn’t any more guessing about where to look at our system, which drive, how do we find out who has the most up-to-date information. It really has been an amazing alignment tool. RR: I love that you’ve walked the walk so much so that you’re like: “I know what was hard, and I can now have the agency and also the tooling to go in and fix it.” I think that’s wonderful. And I think that’s always the goal of enablement, right? But when you have that background, you’re so much more in touch with what your reps need. So now that you’ve kind of made your way into this new role, I’d like to dig into what you’re working on now. So, what are some of those key initiatives that you’re focused on driving for the business this year? How are you hoping to decrease complexity like we just talked about for Priority Health’s reps and agency partners? HH: To give you an idea of our journey so far, we started using Highspot for our reps and really went hard this year on ensuring that we had similar tools for our agents creating pages, specifically for our agents by market segment. We have created digital pages, so to speak. We call them engagement pages from an externally facing standpoint, and we have tailored the tools that those agents specifically need. This is important because, you know, if you are a small group agent, you generally don’t have all the complexities that large groups have, and therefore you don’t wanna weed through all those materials.  So it really is the same principle applies, right? It’s giving them the tools they need when they need it, without having to sift through a lot of things that they don’t need. So creating very tailored pages for them has been really important.  We’re going to take it a step further this year. So, to get to your actual question, we’re gonna focus on training. So when we get new agents in the field, they are the ones that we count on in order to sell our product, and oftentimes they are getting in the trenches, learning about all the carriers all at the same time. It’s a lot to digest.  What we are gonna focus on is working on our training and our onboarding experience for our agent partners, and that way they can get in the field quicker with the right type of information, stay compliant with what our product actually is offering, and feel more comfortable. The hope there is truly we’re gonna sell more, more quickly, and they’re going to feel more comfortable repping our product. RR: I love the kind of internal enablement philosophies that are being extended out to the partner network—we know what you need and we want to give it to you in an easy, digestible way that is tailored to your workflow, because I’m not going to make you dig for something that you don’t even need. Keeping that in mind, I’d love to know what some of those other key building blocks for effectively equipping agents and building strong partner relationships are for you. HH: Gosh, the biggest piece is trust, right? They’re building trust, um, spending time with them. Listening. Listening is the biggest piece. When agents are telling us things, we have to listen to them and act upon them. Otherwise what’s the point? The fact of the matter is in our industry—and anyone that works in health insurance knows our agent—partners are very direct. Sometimes too direct, but they’re very direct. So when they’re telling you something, they mean it and they are going to be truthful because their livelihood is also reliant upon the information we give. But I would say relationships are the strongest one. Trust, transparency. You know, being honest. If we are, you know, if an agent questions us on something, or frankly, sometimes they’ll compare us to other carriers: “Hey, this carrier does this. How come you guys can’t do that?” Be honest about it.  But it really goes back to listening and forming those bonds to where they trust you. Because the more an agent trusts you, the more willing they are to say: “Hey, this group is a really good fit for your product. And I feel confident that you’re going to onboard them smoothly. I feel confident you’re going to take care of them from a customer service standpoint. And I feel confident that when there’s a problem, I’m going to call you, you’re gonna answer and you’re gonna help me solve it.” RR: So, you mentioned listening and building trust and transparency, and then using what agents are saying to kind of build your programs and how you support them. How are you kind of creating these channels to get in touch with your agents? Is it just getting on the phone and talking to people and then taking that information back to your strategy? How are you kind of creating that feedback loop? HH: So our team, I wanna give a little, um, shout out to the team a little bit. We are very unique, so we’re a newer team. There was not a distribution and training team before. We’re really working on the strategy for exactly what you said. How do we strategically get out? How do we make sure that our interactions are meaningful, and how do we enable our sales team to do the same?  So what we have really come up with—and it seems to be quite successful—is we’ve created a premier partner program. What that means is we’ve got different levels, essentially of our partner groups: gold, silver, and bronze. For each one of them, we provide different levels of service, so to speak, but it’s really rewarding them for their business with us.  With that, we’ve created a strategy on formal meetings. So formal meetings are when we actually go to the agency, we’re bringing our team of leaders and some of our reps, and we’re spending time with them in person and talking about our new products, some of the intricacies and nuances about what to expect, getting feedback about what they’re seeing in the industry and what they need in order to keep their clients in the space that they’re hoping to be for their employee benefits. We do that twice a year, and then we have kind of the other agency partners who we hit once a year. But on top of that, you’ve got kind of this less formal interaction, and that’s where we really come into play from an enablement standpoint. We want to make sure our sales reps have what they need when they need it. We help create some content for them so that when they are having more informal meetings—maybe they’re going to lunch, they’re going to breakfast, and they want to build a relationship, but they also want to bring some value and bring some meaningful messaging. That’s really where we’re focused. We understand that there’s different levels of that relationship building. You know, those individual reps, it’s so important that they have those relationships, but as an organization, as a whole, it’s im

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About

Welcome to the Win Win podcast by Highspot. A short show where we dive into changing trends in the workplace and best practices to navigate them successfully.

Information

  • Creator
    Highspot
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    144
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Win Win Podcast

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