Customer Story
Educate, Engage and Develop their Global Sales Workforce
Designing competency-based learning through Bridge Learning Management System to reduce sales funnel attrition
Mission
Provide SaaS technology and expertise to help the modern knowledge worker know their work matters and empower modern executives to connect their people to their greatest opportunities.
The Objective
Regardless of the industry or ware, selling requires motivation and drive, but more importantly, a practiced set of skills which can inspire action and drive change. Sales people who have been trained well become partners in solving challenges for their customers while providing a memorable experience. But getting salespeople to pitch the right message, confidently appear as experts, and lead prospects down the right sales path can be complicated and demanding.
Workfront, the first modern work management application platform, needed a coaching and training solution that would effectively develop their global sales team. Nick Salas, senior sales enablement manager, recalls some of the challenges his team faced in the following statement.
Our legacy training solution was not built to scale the growth and approach to how we view employee development. We needed a solution that would also account for our future needs—scalability, in terms of global reach, content development, and access by multiple stakeholders. We also needed intuitive reporting. Something that managers could use for real-time data, as opposed to fumbling through spreadsheets. The reporting in our legacy solution was very manual—it wasn’t easy or user friendly, and it didn't provide the level of visibility into our team’s performance that we needed to identify skills gaps.-Nick Salas, Senior Sales Enablement Manager
The Sales Enablement team at Workfront was looking for a sales employee workforce training, development, and enablement solution that would:
- Focus on continuous skill coaching, not just deal progression
- Empower sales reps to practice and master skills sets while sharing targeted feedback
- Create learning pathways to address skills gaps
- Enable expedited onboarding to reduce time to contribution
The Approach
“There is a fine line between sales enablement and enforcement. We have to establish business value, and for the sales teams, they have to see it as a tool that helps them get better at what they do,” says Salas about how the Workfront team has been able to champion skill development as a continuous journey, rather than a one-and-done activity.
Developing skills, such as authentically matching the buyer’s journey rather than pretending to be what the prospect expects, is critical when it comes to effective solution selling. Additionally, helping the sales organization realize the benefits of a dedicated team helping them develop their skills, rather than simply acting as a knowledge-base library, creates a consistent message that learning, developing, and growing is something Workfront values. “Within sales, we have the opportunity to set targeted KPIs that will help deliver real results that translate into closed deals. Our enablement team is fortunate to have a solid platform and strategy for our on-demand learning and training and even try and go beyond to help other departments create a cohesive culture of development,” says Salas about the Workfront Sales Academy.
As sales reps are enrolled and added to learning paths within Workfront Sales Academy, they learn and practice skills that help them become better, more productive salespeople. This includes basic onboarding, process-related activities, product knowledge, and messaging workshops. By leveraging Bridge Practice, the Sales Enablement team can:
Cultivate highly skilled sales reps
who are able to answer questions that come their way, devise and articulate creative solutions to customer problems, and offer consultations that’ll lead to won opportunities. “Our learners have an experience in Bridge that helps them transition from one learning to another. With Practice embedded into the programs [learning paths], checkpoints [evidence-based learning] and other related courses, we are designed to target and address what it is they need to work on,” adds Rachel Hudson, Sales Enablement Manager.
Help reps become strategic consultants
rather than tactical order-takers by leveraging Bridge Practice to help them practice their delivery, tone, and pacing and better control the conversation throughout the pitch or sales process. “With Practice, it has been a game changer for us in terms of being able to better engage the sales reps in the right messaging,” says Salas.
How Workfront Measures Success
By scaling their training for store managers and new employees through Bridge, Transamerican was able to:
Sustainable, continuous skills development
The Sales Enablement team at Workfront wants to ensure that the sales team is constantly being developed. As the team has been able to gather feedback data from the sales teams, managers, and individuals, it has allowed them to create learning programs and work streams that are relevant to the type of skills that make a difference in deal progression.
70% Practice Exercises Completed
(results based on pilot targeting skills and processes for Account Planning)
Targeted content creation
“Being able to separate different cohorts into their own group, while being able to create a very specific type of learning module to further their abilities, is great. That way we can view each group within the context of their performance, while still creating content that helps everyone,” says Hudson. Using the native, in-app authoring editor tool in Bridge, the Sales Enablement team has been able to easily create relevant, “just in time” content to address competency development. “Sales people are not looking for tags. We needed to take a proactive approach and get into the shoes of our buyer—who is a sales rep. When they are in the middle of their sales processes, they are not looking for specific tags. They are thinking ‘I need access to these resources and I need them right now.' They are not going to think about how their sales enablement team wants to organize the resources—they just know they need the right content.”
85 targeted learning modules created in 6 months
Action-driven reporting
With Bridge’s real-time and granular data-reporting capabilities, the Workfront Sales Enablement team has been able to apply the appropriate filters, run reports, and look for patterns. “As we become more strategic, we take a look back at the process and skills that it takes to get to either closing or deferring a sales opportunity. It gives us an understanding of which skills or processes we need to further target and allows us to quickly identify gaps that we need to address” says Salas.
Industry
Work Management Software
Established
2001
Headquarters
Lehi, UT
