Spekit x OwnBackup: How to Drive Adoption of a New Sales Methodology and Scale Enablement

Imagine this scenario: your company is growing faster than anyone would have believed over the past couple of years and, both within the same year, you raise a $240 million Series E and scale your team from 300 to 500 employees.

It’s exciting but there are undeniable growing pains. You hit a snag — while you have an incredible product and are experiencing all-around hypergrowth, your sales methodology isn't set to scale at the same pace and your teams are working within silos of information, which is keeping your company and your teams from reaching their full potential.

This is the situation that Shira Osdoba , Sales Enablement Content Manager at OwnBackup , encountered. We had the chance to discuss this very topic with Shira and hear how she addressed the related challenges in their own organization.

In addition to learning how Shira's team implementated of a new sales methodology, we also discussed the secrets to:

• Selecting a sales methodology that aligns with your company goals and (more importantly) sales style
• Driving adoption of a new sales methodology (from initial onboarding to communicating micro-changes in real-time)
• Reducing new-hire onboarding time with in-app reinforcement of processes, how-to’s, and more
• Using the right processes and tools to scale enablement efforts and support growing teams

If you'd like to hear the full conversation, you can watch the webinar on-demand here .

Deciding it was time for a new sales methodology

Shira first joined OwnBackup as an SDR when there were only 50 employees. As the team grew, her role expanded to support broader operations through sales enablement.

OwnBackup already had a sales methodology that served them well up to a point. But as they started to scale more quickly, it became clear that their methodology wasn't able to keep up.

There were separate teams for business development, customer success, and sales — each of which operated within their own silos, with their own playbooks. It was important to OwnBackup's goals that everyone could operate under the same vocabulary..

“We wanted a sales methodology that could help with forecasting, our sales process, and unite everyone together.”

Knowing that sales managers possess a variety of experiences and methodologies, the goal was to put everyone into a single sales methodology and unify teams across the board.

The key questions to ask when deciding a sales methodology

Selecting a sales methodology is a massive undertaking — certainly not something you want to have to do every year. As a core part of your business, choosing the right sales methodology is crucial for your sales reps to be successful.

"First of all," Shira said, "it’s a long process. And it's not an easy one."

When implementing a new sales methodology , Shira recommends the following:

1. Identify the key things you are looking for to make your process a lot smoother.
2. Get your sales leaders aligned on what you need and want from a sales methodology , rather than asking everyone to share their preferences/experiences of a previous vendor.
3. Be patient. For OwnBackup, they evaluated 7-8 potential vendors by asking them to pitch why they would be the best fit for OwnBackup’s particular needs and use cases — a process that took around 2.5 months.
4. Get buy-in from stakeholders such as sales leaders and front-line managers before purchasing, instead of after.

After aligning with sales leadership, Shira’s team ultimately chose Winning by Design as a provider because of their reputation for world-class training, their work with a lot of other successful SaaS companies, their experience building playbooks, and because they have a large team to help scale while training new hires, which is critical for a fast-growing company.

Successfully rolling out a new sales methodology

OwnBackup didn’t roll out the new sales methodology overnight. It took time. They had to update their sales process and make updates in Salesforce to match. They leveraged an LMS to host their on-demand training for new hires, (including the methodology overview and general principles), but there was still in-person training and hands-on training that Shira's enablement team needed to conduct before fully rolling it out to the sales team.

"You can have all of that — the technical updates, the live training, and the [LMS] — which is awesome, but then we needed to do some sort of reinforcement of the sales methodology, to remove a lot of that friction and make it as easy as possible. And, because we'd invested so much time, so much money into doing this, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to adopt the methodology.”

Making the case for a reinforcement solution

Implementing a sales methodology will only be effective if your sales reps use it the way you intended. Shira recommends reinforcement through a digital enablement platform like Spekit to ensure total adoption. Regardless of how great the training is, people will naturally forget a large majority of what they learned. Without optimizing your sales coaching , reinforcing information and giving team members access to answers quickly, the potential for success diminishes.

For example, OwnBackup uses the "SPICED" framework, which stands for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision. If employees forget the “P” of the framework when creating opportunities, they don’t have to revisit the LMS video modules (which range from 30-60 mins long) to find the answer. Instead, they can access smaller, digestible content (such as framework acronyms) inside Spekit’s digital adoption platform , which syncs across any app or browser. Rather than leave Salesforce to watch a video, OwnBackup’s employees can quickly search for an answer directly in their flow of work. This doesn’t just help ramp up new hires, but existing and seasoned sales reps also benefit from ongoing training and easy access to information.

Building a winning onboarding program

Today, OwnBackup's sales enablement strategy to onboard new hires consists of the following:

• A week-long boot camp, hosted once per month
• A 30/60/90 day ramp-up guide for SDRs and AEs that identifies specific activities they need to perform
• An LMS that hosts courses to learn about the product and sales methodology

(PRO TIP: Here's our advice on how to create a successful onboarding program )

Measuring the effectiveness of an enablement solution

After the new hire has completed their initial tasks, they have access to the same training content, from personas to process details, within Spekit.

While the perfect science of measuring digital enablement solutions or a just-in-time reinforcement solution has yet to be developed, there are a number of metrics that OwnBackup uses to measure the effectiveness of their training program.

1. Content views. Shira can access analytics to see how many views each piece of content receives. She uses the data to determine which pieces are most helpful to sales reps.
2. Sales rep activity. Shira also tracks the sales rep’s activity through Spekit to see who views the enablement content and uses this information to determine any correlations between productivity or ramp time of a new hire.

Final Thoughts

Sales enablement can be complicated, and selecting and implementing an entirely new sales methodology is a difficult breed all on its own. Combining complex processes with the added challenge of implementing a new enablement solution can seem even more daunting. But as OwnBackup shared with us, the best way to start is by making sure you're asking the right questions upfront, aligning with leadership, getting buy-in from stakeholders during the evaluation process (rather than after), and finally, reinforcing learning for ongoing success.If you'd like to hear the full conversation between Melanie Fellay, Co-Founder and CEO of Spekit, and Shira Osdoba, Sales Enablement Content Manager at OwnBackup, you can watch the webinar on-demand here .

To see Spekit in action, sign up for a free demo today!