The Key to Enablement

Dheeraj Prasad: Good evening folks. This is your host Dheeraj Prasad. Today I have Jo Stewart who is the worldwide lead for enablement at Micro Focus. And can be a better time than now to actually do a full series for both and outside in and an inside out approach to digital enablement that microfocus is leading during the current times. So Joe, welcome to my show. And I'm looking forward to having a great conversation with you today.

Jo Stewart: Oh, thank you. Good evening garage. It's really good to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. And I understand that you are calling in from London today. And how are you doing? And I hope things are all good for you and your family.

Jo Stewart: Yeah, we're all good. It's slightly windy outside, but we have storm Ellen coming in, and some tropical weather. But yeah, it's all good. Lockdown is slowly easing, if not cautiously. And hopefully our children will go back to school in the next few weeks. And we can start at least getting some of our kitchens back and not have people on zoom calls during math.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. And I understand that you are calling in from London today. And how are you doing? And I hope things are all good for you and your family.

Jo Stewart: Yeah, we're all good. It's slightly windy outside, but we have storm Ellen coming in, and some tropical weather. But yeah, it's all good. Lockdown is slowly easing, if not cautiously. And hopefully our children will go back to school in the next few weeks. And we can start at least getting some of our kitchens back and not have people on zoom calls during math.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. We're looking here, by the way, Joe, I must tell you that. Okay, so let me get started off with asking you as to how, as an enablement leader for Micro Focus, you're thinking about the strategies to adapt to the current times? And how are you looking to align the entire organization towards the change that we are all currently living in and adapting to that?

Jo Stewart: That yeah, when I joined microfocus had a really traditional approach to enablement, it was very classroom-focused, really, face to face, everybody would rock up and they'd get their manual, or they'd spend time, actually, with colleagues in a room discussing this. And we have to, you know, like all companies, break that mold and not stop the learning continue, in fact, over emphasize and keep going with the learning. So we took we have, we're very blessed, we have some great technology that the company has, we use Micro Focus teams and the go-to suite. And we have a really good solver. We have a good LMS in Sabah. But we found that we went from about we accelerated the psychology of learning about four years and four months. We went from an entire classroom-based organization to an entirely online learning establishment overnight. I think we've gone from, you know, we're, when you're flying trainers around the world, you can only get through a class a week in a location. And yet now we had, I think we've gotten around between four and 500 classes, or learning activities just in the last quarter in our quarter three. So we've done things like host teams, calls where we would get all of our sellers together with experts to accelerate their pipeline, we've done lots of pipeline velocity workshops, we even put a workshop on for the more mature seller, shall we say, about getting past digital gatekeepers, because whereas before you would sweet-talk your way maybe through the receptionist, or through the team that ran the front of the house for a company, now you have to get through them on the telephone. So for some of our sellers, it's been a long while since they had to do that. So we put that course on for them really quickly. And then stood up some really fantastic hot laps and hackathons using our internal demo system to give our priests to keep our resellers and our customers working and collaborating over potential solutions.

Dheeraj Prasad: That's great.

Jo Stewart: So yeah, lots of investment in the technology we already had. We just accelerated our programs and our projects to make them more viable.

Dheeraj Prasad: That's wonderful to hear. And how have you been training the customer-facing employees primarily on the message of the business during this time? Is that are there certain key communication messages that you crafted for your customers and then trained all your customer-facing employees around that?

Jo Stewart: Yes, first of all, when COVID was here and we realized that customer meetings were going to be particularly difficult. We stood up the selling in a digital world forum which was twofold. We had a landing page on our intranet where we put resources like sales, play messaging from our product marketing organization. We reinforce the Micro Focus advantage whiteboard and turn that into a digital model. But we also put together a whole wiki site. A peer-led wiki site where we would put really useful and interesting information both internally and externally. Lots of digital assets that people could use. And we also put in a whole heap of information about how our customers were using our technology to help them during these current problems. There was a very famous news article at the time about COBOL. Right at the very beginning of the crisis, it actually turned out to be not Micro Focus COBOL. But we as an organization, therefore, realized that there was a demand in the market to talk about COBOL took about these technologies that are older, that we have this amazing expertise around. So we accelerated our social media presence, accelerated the messaging internally and got everybody talking about how we go to market and support people. I do have to mention Dheeraj that we had just before COVID rolled out a new sales methodology. And that in we actually, we had already trained people before COVID hit on the same language, the same methodology in the same culture. One of those was the big crew. Part of that whole process is this concept of the crucible effect. The emotional and political pressures of the sales process go in matches. It sort of takes the customer's buying journey and our selling process and maps them together. It's formed on the book by Rick Page called ‘Hope is not a Strategy. And that whole concept that of teaching our salespeople about emotional and political pressures, it returned tenfold the learning for us because we already had prime sellers who knew the trigger points for what it's like to sell in this emotional melting pot. It's difficult for people, you know, who want to store their projects, yet they need to do them. Everybody's working from home. No one can get into the data center. It’s very, very difficult. We also put on this summer a series of webinars, it sounds really silly, but our salespeople really have had a lot of pressure on them as an organization. I don't think anybody could really imagine what it's been like to be a salesperson through this pandemic. And we took some of the best speakers out there. And we talked about how to sell what are some of the languages to use some of the nomenclatures, some of the journeys, we talked about constructive tension. So we took them through a journey of working with risk-averse and not because they're normally risk addressed, but because of the pandemic risk-averse selling, using some of this new language and new ways of working. So that's been really successful. We wrapped that up this week. But we had, you know, around 1000 people every week on a call with some of our some of the best speakers out there. Maybe in the winter, we can bring you to India.

Dheeraj Prasad: That's fantastic, you know, risk-averse, selling, and you know, getting people on that, and this is fantastic. And this is already showing some good results in terms of a common vocabulary all these sellers are using right now in their messaging to customers.

Jo Stewart: Absolutely, yes. Yeah. And I think actually, it's not just the common language. It’s the common process of selling. So I think before COVID, which we like to call BC as suspect now as a common language in this new normal world we live in and it was very easy if you had an opportunity closing to walk to your customer and to go into your customer and say hey, okay, have we got procurement line up we got finance lined up and vice versa back in the office as well. You don't have that anymore. So you've got to be in lockstep with not only internal sales, operations, finance, legal, etc. You've now got to pick up the phone And talk to those people that your customer as well. So that having the hindsight of that sales methodology that taught this ahead of the time was very fortunate for us.

Dheeraj Prasad: Yeah, absolutely. That actually takes me to the leading question is about sales enablement and revenue enablement. Being a partner to the business, how have you been leading that in terms of full organization alignment with all your business partners internally?

Jo Stewart: I think that's the pivotal thing, to be fair, today. And actually, my strategy for the next three years is really about starting to pull that together. I don't think sales movements are a relatively new term. I mean, we were learning in development or training a number of years ago. And actually, sales enablement has had has a bumpy riding where it reports up in the organization. Sometimes it can be in sales operations. Oftentimes, it's in the sales organization. At Micro Focus, we actually chose to put it in the marketing organization. So I personally report up to our CMO, Jennifer Murphy. And the reason for doing that is actually it gives me a broader scope to talk to stakeholders because my stakeholders are not just the sales organization, although I work really closely with our president of sales, Nick Wilson. Also, it's my stakeholders of the product group leaders, the guys who research and develop those products, and the solutions because I want to hear what it is they're trying to achieve. They do numerous meetings and work with our most eminent customers and our channel partners to find out what the market needs. And I need to translate that into learning and knowledge sharing for our sales organization. So by sitting in marketing, I'm closer to product groups, and close very close to the message with marketing, and close to sales and what sales need one. We always have that debate about you know, what part of enablement and it's always that healthy balance is made between product group, everybody wants everybody to be enabled on their solutions, and sell more of insert product X. And sales always want the skills and the knowledge and the capability. So actually, by sitting inside of marketing, it's almost like sitting in the United Nations because I can between myself and Jennifer, we can make that balance and the trade-offs between the two. And I think 99% of the time, we get it, right? We certify our sellers and our channel partners and our customers on the solutions that help them digitally transform. And from a sales perspective, we give them the skills, the capability and the confidence to sell those solutions. So I think that's how revenue acceleration happens within Micro Focus. Anyway,

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. As you very rightly said, you know, hope is not a strategy and the crucible effect talked about and are truly this is a great example of a strategic partnership that enablement leaders play today. And you've been a great example, Joe, in terms of how you are aligning the business needs to the internal alignment in terms of how you know all ends are firing, at the same time to adapt and win the mark in the marketplace. So, Joe, thank you so much for your insights today. Really insightful. And, you know, I look forward to speaking with you again very soon.

Jo Stewart: Thank you so much. It's been great. Thank you.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. Thank you.