Creating the Most Effective Onboarding Processes

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Michael Blanchette, who is the senior director of sales enablement at Veeam. Mike, welcome to the show.

Michael Blanchette: Hi thanks, happy to be here.

Jessica Ly: Veeam is such a phenomenal company, with over a billion dollars in revenue and over 4000 employees. You’re in the data backup for a lot of that web applications like office 360, for example. And you've done a phenomenal job at theme over the last three years on the sales enablement side. So I wanted to ask if you could share your expertise with us. So Mike, just very quickly, let us know your role and the scope of work that you are doing, Veeam.

Michael Blanchette: Sure, yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm the Senior Director of what we call sales acceleration or sales enablement here at Veeam. And our responsibilities involve the training and development of all of our different sales partner sales roles, whether that's the field or inside or technical, as well as our channel partners. And we also have certification programs that also extend up to our customer base. So our team develops all that content and delivers it.

Jessica Ly: Three years ago, you were invited to take over this role, and you have a lot of expertise coming out of SAP out of VMware. So what was the situation before and tell us about the impact you've made? Specifically, I think the onboarding is where you've seen a 50% improvement and time to first deal for reps, for example. But tell us about that.

Michael Blanchette: Sure. So I think the biggest thing I noticed when joining the team was that there was a lot of what I might guess was referred to as training order taking going on. And so we were very much sort of intake saying yes, and deliver. And the challenge is that is one is it's not scalable. And two is that when you're developing that content or going through that process, sometimes the things you're being asked for aren't necessarily the things that you ought to be focusing on. And so, having been a salesperson and a sales manager, I can say with some deference and respect that very often when they ask for some enablement, sometimes they're wrong in what it is that they're looking for. And so an example that might be a sales manager coming up to us and saying, We need negotiation training. Really why. And if you go through a couple of rounds of why you find out that maybe it's not negotiation training, but maybe it’s better at selling value upfront so that you're not getting beaten up and negotiation in the back end. So we tried to pivot from being just training order takers to being more of a performance consultancy, and trying to be a little bit more proactive in what it is we develop, because the other challenge of waiting for an ask is, if you're coming to me with that, then it's already too late. You've seen the problem. You've seen what the effect of that is in, and now you're asking us to kind of catch up and fix a problem that we might be too late to fix. We don't want to use revenue as the bellwether of whether or not we're doing our job. We want to look at leading indicators to make sure that we're headed in the right direction from the start.

Jessica Ly: But tell us some of the ROI, the impact results.

Michael Blanchette: Sure. So as we were talking, the onboarding program was one of the first things that we really kind of rolled up our sleeves around and looked at and said, How do we revamp this in a way that's going to be compelling and most impactful to the organization. So a lot of companies Veeam, including at the time, had sort of a, you know, you drink from the fire hose you get brought into the organization. And whether it's two days or two weeks, you learn everything that you need to know about the company. The problem is you forget 60 to 80% of that two weeks later. And so what we decided was maybe if we build something that's more just in time so that we're sort of following the journey of the onboarding person and giving them what they need when they need it does a couple of things. One, it makes sure that more of it is retained. And then more importantly, as you think about the dream that happens on the Salesforce, so if I am a new hire, and I learned everything I need to know in two weeks, and then three weeks later, I forgot that thing that I really need right now, who am I going to ask? And we need to ask my manager or, more likely, a colleague and say, hey, how do I do this thing. And so now I'm creating a drain on fully productive sales reps, and they have to train me or update me on something that I was supposed to learn two weeks ago. And so, by putting this more modular approach that follows the onboarding journey, we've been able to reduce that drain and increase productivity. So a couple of examples of that. We've seen for inside sales teams, for example, a 50% improvement in their time to KPIs, their time to first opportunities, their time to first call. So some really compelling numbers are on while we're shortening the ramp-up time. And if you think about an onboarding program, that's what it's about how fast you get a new higher end of the organization, and the producing member of the corporate society, if you will, and so that's been a big focus for us and we've seen a lot of positive success there.

Jessica Ly: Now measuring your effectiveness can be different levels. And so you know, you talk about retention of knowledge just one way where you can quiz them the sell cycle timeframe that to have an opportunity. But what about ultimately? How do you tie it? And what have you seen as far as the revenue increase?

Michael Blanchette: Yeah, so it depends on the program, right? So when we look at something like the onboarding program, you can start to look at the time to first deal and you can start to do some calculations there. But it's because there are so many things that touch revenue, it can be difficult to sort of isolating what part of that was enablement, what part of that was the great sales manager job or the other things that go on there. So what we've done is we've implemented a framework using the Philips ROI Institute to kind of break that out and start to do some isolation around those things. So an example that I can give that doesn't tie necessarily to enablement or to revenue, specifically, but to pipeline generation as an example. So we looked at the way that we're training the team to generate sales generated pipeline, you know, in addition to what is done by marketing, our channel partners, and through some very targeted learning efforts using sort of that performance consultancy that I talked about earlier, we've seen up to a 215% increase in over year pipeline build by those new hires. So because they're becoming more effective and more efficient, in the way they're making the calls and the way that they're approaching the target audience, we're seeing a significant ramp-up. So we spend a lot of time and what I would refer to or what the Phillips model refers to is that level for that business impact before you get to revenue. And we've seen some pretty strong results there.

Jessica Ly: Sometimes I think people are good at taking tests. So maybe they will study the content and do very well on the test. But when you then look at hitting quotas and achieving beyond the quota isn't that's not necessarily correlating,

Michael Blanchette: Right, yeah.

Jessica Ly: You know, I want to touch on the content itself because the content that you provide to the sales rep does matter. If you're talking about industry content or thought leadership content, more of a strategic kind of content that looks at the overall business transformation. That kind of content is important in driving the conversation with a prospect and enabling to get a much bigger deal, in the end, then to talk about maybe functions and features of a product and their transactional compensation, how much are you involved in actually creating that content?

Michael Blanchette: Yeah, so we, our team, sit inside of the global marketing organizations, our report to our CMO, and we have a very strong relationship with our product marketing team. And so we work very closely with that. And the way we approach that is we refer to as sales, ready messaging. And so marketing, in general, can be really good at that third party messaging or customer-facing messaging. But if we haven't done sort of the translation of how a seller takes that message and makes it has a meaningful conversation with their customer, then then you miss an opportunity. And if you sort of expect every seller to be able to translate that the same way, then you can run into some challenges or risks. So what we've done is we built a framework where we educated our marketing team on our sales process and our sales methodology. So they understand the conversation framework, they understand the interactive model that we built. And then we have a process by which we create this SRM or sales-ready messaging that we use, and take it from the speeds and feeds as you say, and because the customer while at a technical level, that certainly is important, and there are areas where that conversation has to happen. But if I'm talking to an executive decision-maker, they really don't want to hear about speeds and feeds, they want to hear about how Veeam is going to help them keep their business online, 24/7, and so that's the conversation that we're teaching them to have. And so we work very closely, hand in hand with our product marketing team to do that.

Jessica Ly: Let's talk about the future. Where do you feel the sales enablement? Feel as far as pushing the envelope on innovation and processes? And technology? Because there's always room for improvement?

Michael Blanchette: For sure. Yeah, well, I think COVID was a great forcing function for a lot of this, right. So we've got a bunch of different technologies that we use to help with, you know, distance-based delivery and all that sort of stuff. But what we've found is that if you start to push tools to the real Outer Limits of what they can do, sometimes that can result in some hairy experiences, which aren't great learning experiences for the learner. So my team's just actually decided to kick off this focus of a learning roadmap or Technology Roadmap that we want to put in place ourself and I think the strategy we're going to take is sort of a use case approach to saying, Okay, if this is the particular use case, from concept to design, to development, to delivery to measurement, what are the different tools and toolsets we might need. And I think our approach is going to be to really look at the best of the breed to figure out how to cobble that together and really kind of know where one begins and one ends and have a strategy for that so that we're all leveraging the same tools internally, and not putting the sort of strains on the system in that way. So it will help with consistency and in the process, and also limit some of the challenges are, there are risks that you might see, because in this virtual world that we're living in right now, good enough on the delivery side is not good enough. Because if something breaks, then it's a really bad experience for the learner. And we're trying to avoid that.

Jessica Ly: Yeah, and I think you touched on this COVID situation, making changes to the way you deliver. I want to ask you to share your lessons learned so far about online sales enablement because we are no longer gathering in groups and doing breakouts in groups in person. So the online environment is actually putting certain demand on your resources, then you didn't expect to do it. Right. So tell us about that.

Michael Blanchette: Sure, yeah. So a great example of that is our sales process. And methodology workshop is typically either a two or three-day live in-class program, depending on the sales role. And the challenge with that now is since, as you say, no one's getting together in rooms, we had to figure out is how do we deliver that. So two things came into play. One is, you're not going to sit somebody in his zoom call, or a team's call, or whatever you're using for two or three solid days, that's not going to happen. So you have to really kind of pivot it to this idea of a learning campaign rather than a learning event. And then, in doing that, really understanding that the facilitator has to be able to really focus on facilitation. And so in the live workshop, it could be that one person is delivering the content, you break the teams out, and they do their skills, practice activities, and I can walk the floor and have conversations and answer questions and all of that. And in this virtual world, while I can still virtually walk the floor, I can only be in one breakout room at a time. So actually, what used to be a one-person show is now a two or a three-person show where you've got someone that's facilitating someone that's producing someone that's teeing up content and getting that ready, you might have an audio or a video producer if you're bringing video into the program as well. So it's a lot more hands and a lot more coordination. So the experience from the learner isn't necessarily different other than they're sitting in their house and taking it on. But really, the big change was from a delivery standpoint, really being coordinated and organized. And recognizing that this becomes a bit of video production. And it's not just a one-person show anymore, at least those things that you want to be highly interactive, you can still do a webinar and have that be a one to many. But if you're trying to have interaction and conversation and dialogue, one too many doesn't work as well.

Jessica Ly: And what is the size of your event so far that you've been able to manage?

Michael Blanchette: Yeah, so that's the other thing is we've really sort of tried to pare that down. So what used to be maybe a 30 person class now we might break that into two or three different classes, and have, you know, 10 to 15 people in a room at a time. It's a bit more manageable. People tend to be a bit more open and in smaller groups. And so we've tried to cater to the learning experience that way as well.

Jessica Ly: Excellent. Well, this has been a very educational and informative conversation. I appreciate Mike, you being on the show and actually sharing what's going on in your world sharing the best practice practices with us.

Michael Blanchette: Happy to do it. Thanks for having us.