How Vortexa Effectively Reinforces Sales Playbooks Without a Dedicated Enablement Team Using Spekit
The problem
Vortexa provides market-leading real-time data and advanced analytics for energy and shipping markets. Sam Choi, Vortexa’s head of revenue operations, was tasked with building out a sales enablement program by his CRO, yet he was finding it hard to ensure that all aspects of everything from on-boarding to ongoing enablement were done in a consistent and effective manner due to lack of bandwidth, budget, and scalability.
Before Spekit, enablement at Vortexa was handled “very Sporadically and manual” through a combination of Google Docs, Notion, GitHub, LMS courses, and time-consuming meetings with various teams. New classes of sales reps were required to attend 30–40 hours of training meetings during their onboarding. As a result, Sam’s calendar was constantly dedicated to repeatedly teaching and updating teams on the latest process changes, drastically reducing his own productivity. This process was ineffective, time-consuming, and impossible to scale and sustain.
As the Vortexa organization grew and processes began to change rapidly, Sam knew it was time to start looking for a cost-effective, easy-to-implement solution that would allow his already stretched thin team of four to strategically document, organize, and share up-to-date information internally at scale. He was faced with the choice to take some of his own RevOps budget to build out an enablement team or find a scalable software solution.
That is when he found Spekit.
The solution
Low Cost Software Solution
For Sam, choosing Spekit was a no brainer. He was able to easily justify the cost of Spekit to his CRO as it was only 5–10% that of the headcount he would need to run the enablement function. Plus, the deployment of the Spekit software was straightforward and did not require additional resources or the help of IT. And unlike many other software solutions, Sam was able to train his team how to use Spekit within an hour.
“With Spekit, the initial barrier to entry is quite low, so you can prove the value of the tool. Then once you scale it, that's where the increased revenue is going to come from. Setup was an easy pill to swallow, and it’s a lot cheaper than trying to sign off a headcount budget.”
Sam Choi, Head of Revenue Operations at Vortexa
Scalable enablement solution without extra headcount
Unlike hour-long meetings, creating LMS courses, or putting together extensive training documents, Speks — a bite-sized version of a training, knowledge article, answer to a question or process — can be made in a matter of seconds. Sam finds that Spekit “simplifies the need to manually organize content by thematic categories as by the nature of making Speks forces your hand in administration of segments. In other words, less time spent tagging, more time spent doing.”
“Could someone do [sales enablement] manually? Of course, they can. It's just taking that 5% time instead of doing documentation in an old crappy way on Google Docs, you do it in a nice neat way on Spekit."
Sam Choi, Head of Revenue Operations at Vortexa
Consistent delivery of commercial frameworks to a global team
The main power of Spekit is illustrating playbooks and doubling down on frameworks to the right people., “having to train out more complicated topics to a commercial team such as qualification, discovery, pricing, margin discussions, how to close, what to look for, how to get through, procurement strategies around selling, and pricing strategies are notoriously difficult concepts to train. You usually rely on your sales leaders to coach your sales team and then your sales team then coaches the BDR.” Instead, Spekit has given Sam a way of consistently delivering commercial frameworks, and best practices globally, all from a centralized place.
In addition to topics that are important to cover such as simple battlecards and objection handling, Sam leverages embed speks to contextually surface more in-depth topics, such as how to effectively qualify, how to manage pricing and margins, how to discount effectively, and more. He calls these his “micro sales playbooks” which reps can access directly in the tools such as Salesforce when they need them.
“Spekit’s true power is being able to deliver snippets of playbooks in context. If I train my head of sales to qualify, it makes more sense for him to see the process when he's about to qualify someone. It doesn't make a lot of sense if I have to run it through every week in a random meeting. Contextual enablement is definitely the future."
Sam Choi, Head of Revenue Operations at Vortexa
The results
"Strategically, the low-cost [of Spekit] has meant an easier time proving the benefits of this form of enablement and training solution to our organization. For a fraction of the cost and risk, getting a solution instead of a headcount while still generating a positive return allows us to really conceptualize what it could mean in two to five years for our head of finance. I suspect that if we went down the route with a sales enablement headcount, we would still be drawing up a job description and fighting over budget.”
Sam Choi, Head of Revenue Operations at Vortexa
Since rolling out Spekit, the Vortexa team’s response has been very positive. Sam was actually worried that some of the team's more seasoned sales reps might find the pop ups and embedded speks to be intrusive, or have resistance to adopt the new tool, but Sam is pleased that the entire team has leveraged Spekit to close deals faster.
The ease of use of Spekit has allowed Sam’s team to “set and forget a few key training paths and call outs.” therefore increasing the productivity and efficiency of his team. He’s also found a “reduction in repetitive queries of other departments when it comes to finding stuff, an invaluable metric for a small company.”
Sam says the most thoughtful benefit of Spekit has been “a peak in interest of the commercial team in sales training, execution, and closing more deals due to internal expertise.” “We have certainly built more pipeline, driven more leads through the funnel more effectively, and reduced the amount of queries, so I would say it's been a great success.”
Sam has plans to roll out Spekit to the CS teams and find even more use cases for the tool in the near future.
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