Dave Derington 00:32
Hello and welcome to CELab, the customer education laboratory. We explore how to build customer and education programs, experiment with new approaches, and exterminate, and exterminate the myths and the bad advice that stopped growth in its tracks. I am Dave Derington, co host of the podcast and I am welcoming aboard Stephanie. And before we before we do that, I need to do one thing that’s always fun, which is our intro. We do it every episode. What’s the National Day of? Well today? Drumroll please. Some national chicken fried steak day. I’m hungry. Now.
Stephanie Middaugh 01:15
I know I’m having for dinner later.
Dave Derington 01:19
You can get a good chicken fried steak. Hey, that’s all about it. Stephanie. Okay, welcome aboard. Introduce yourself briefly. And then I’ll frame everything up. Well, it’s not getting your whole story line. Yeah. So you have an amazing you have an amazing story here. And this is your origin or hero story. But who are you? Where are you at? This is? This is a big episode. This is our special work ramp episode. So tell us where you’re coming from?
Stephanie Middaugh 01:44
Yeah. Stephanie Middaugh. I am the director of enablement at work for him. And also the co founder of the enablement squad community. currently based in Utah, I’ve been at work grant for a little over a year, I think, yeah, a little over a year now. But was a customer of theirs. And we’ll get into that whole story here in a second. I’m a crazy cat lady. I’m like a 65 year old woman’s stored in a 35 year old body. Find me on LinkedIn. I’m a crazy person. Yeah, there we go. You’re
Dave Derington 02:18
gonna photobomb us today like mine may do
Stephanie Middaugh 02:20
very possible. Sometimes she like jumps like trots. Right. And so it’s very possible. You’ll see her in the background.
Dave Derington 02:26
All right. Well, we’re looking forward to the two pet entrees in the show. Because we we enjoy that. And all right. Well, Stephanie, this is amazing. Let me frame up our discussion a little bit. And we were talking about this in the pregame here. Yeah. Work ramp is a very interesting product, for us in the education space to and to preface why I say that, Stephanie, it’s so I’ve been in this field like you for a while. And we both have, y’all let you get your story in. But if it’s like mine, I didn’t expect to be here. I had a journey that took me all kinds of different ways. But I really realized that deep down, I love teaching, and I love learning and and I have an insatiable curiosity for software. So we’ve found that customer education has come out, emerged out of this need for people learn, learn faster, learn, in better ways, learn in novel and new ways because old stuffs not cutting it. Why Right? Like old school, I’m gonna I’m going to talk about the platforms that were the god awful. I mean, they weren’t they were designed for HR,
Stephanie Middaugh 03:36
right? They who shall not be named, that’s what we’ll say, Oh, we
Dave Derington 03:40
can talk about them on this. But, but really, it’s not any. It’s not a slight it’s the realities of a changing environment and economy. So to frame up even further, I’ve had some experiences that brought me in alignment with work ramp and enablement teams that I thought were amazing. I feel like enablement and education are kind of two sides of the same coin, where we have very complementary roles, Stephanie, whereas you are more facing downward and not downward, inside, to our culture to our teams, because they need to know the product, they need to know the space, they need to know what tools else they have to use to get their job done that aren’t our products, right? So there’s a lot on to unpack there. That’s not customer education, the customers, of which our enablement teams are members of our everybody’s customer who uses the product. Now I’m looking externally as customer education. And I’m focusing on what what do they need to know how do they get up to speed what other tools What other concepts do they need? So we can interchange the words enablement and education fluidly. It doesn’t matter what matters to me, is that here we are. Piano Butter Jelly Time. Gonna play the song. We’re no really like, I can’t do my job without enablement and enablement. Can you do your job without education? Well, you probably do your job without me. Why I say that is because I want to know the world that you have, because how we approach our customers matters a lot in how I build content. Right, totally. So if it’s very important to me to say, I feel like we are partners, and we need to strengthen that partnership, which is why I really wanted you on this dos show. Stephanie, particularly with the work you’ve been doing with the enablement squad, like we have the C lab market and we have Slack channels, and like we’re all doing kind of the same thing. How do we get closer together? And how do we partner? That’s where I want to start our conversation today and talking about you and work ramped in this whole field of enablement.
Stephanie Middaugh 05:54
Yeah. I’m doubt like, let’s dive right in.
Dave Derington 05:57
Alright. Well, can you tell us your hero’s story, you want to start with that? First, you’re gonna start about work grant person and talk about how did you get here? Oh, yeah, you lead because it’s more fun that way. Well,
Stephanie Middaugh 06:11
after my hero’s story, I expect some executive to connect with me about creating my own Avenger character or something. But basically, like I so I was going to be a teacher when I was going to call it basically actually, throughout most of my childhood, I wanted to be a teacher, great always changed. Got to college, I was gonna teach high school English. That’s how that’s where I settled. And then I had a little bit of a quarterlife crisis. And I was like, I think I was a year and a half away from student teaching. And I was like, Holy shit, I don’t know that I want to do this anymore. And it was this moment of like, you’re, I think I was like, 20 to 23 at the time, and everything that I knew that I had wanted was just like, up in the air, and I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. So I was like, Well, I got to finish my degree, dropped the education part of it, and then decided to kind of like move back home to Southern California, find a job and finish up basically, the credits that I needed to get my bachelor’s out of community college to save myself some money. Unfortunately, for me, student loans are like, you’re not in school full time anymore, so you’re gonna have to pay us some money. So I needed a job. And my only work experience up until that point was basically receptionist work before I went to college. So I found the first company that would hire me as a receptionist, didn’t negotiate my salary or anything like at the time. And it was, weirdly enough, it was an ERP software company, which, if you’re familiar with kind of the space, like an old school, kind of, you know, on premise solution. I didn’t know anything about it. But I was like, Yeah, I got it, you know, this is fantastic. Fast forward a little bit, kind of like through the crazy like world, I found myself in deal desk order processing, and then I moved into kind of sales operations. And then eventually, when I was getting kind of itchy in sales operations, I found this like role with a former colleague of mine at the startup in Southern California. And it was called sales productivity at the time. And I was like, Well, that sounds interesting, and different. And it was training and education of internal employees, and making reps more productive. I loved sales reps, because they were exciting and fun. And I get to train them, which was also exciting and fun to me like this is the best of both both worlds for me. So I ended up going back and I went and did sales productivity for a little bit. I ended up getting pulled back into sales operations, because they were like, Hey, do you want more money in a higher title? And I was like, hell yeah, I do. When when. But then quickly discovered after like, a little over a year, I was like, I’m good at this. But I really don’t love it. Like, this isn’t what sets my soul on fire. So I pivoted back into what was now branded sales enablement. And I’ve been there ever since. So that was, I think, five or six years ago. So like, now I’ve been doing sales enablement, like, focused kind of, for a good five or six years at this point.
Dave Derington 09:22
That’s exceptional. I love that story. I mean, your inner teacher, you found your inner teacher for one. And that’s, I think, I felt that and others have felt that there’s just some, there’s a characteristic and some of us it’s, I love to learn, I love to figure things out, even said that in your story. Here you are, you’re a P company, you’re working with software, and you’re figuring all these things out. You found your way into the sales ops and what are you doing there? You’re trying to help people learn how to be more effective in selling the software that we have. And there’s training a lot of it. Yeah. Here’s a question that I have for you and This is this is not out of complete ignorance, but it’s just out of curiosity. Well, I this was an emergent thing, right? Let’s go back to let’s talk about customer success because I know that real well. Part of my story, six, seven years ago I was at I found myself at gain site gain sites a SAS startup company a SAS. Yep. They were adjunct to sales. Right? It’s more customer. It’s still sales. Its revenue. Yep. And but it’s a little more long term, although sales side. Yeah, oh, sales. But what I found myself working a lot more with sales enablement. People never heard the term before that working there. And what I’m trying to do is pin down like when was the first time I heard the words customer education? Well, Adam ever masscue on the co host of the podcast with me is found it it’s back in the late 1970s. Someone wrote a book on customer education, my own we’d never used it for years and years and years. So it kind of came back to life. And I’m sure somebody in the audience could say, No, it’s exactly this date. And this. I don’t know, I love to hear that. But I feel like it emerged somewhere around, you know, mid to late 20, late aughts, and then early teens, and then started to develop like UD, where did you think this field of sales enablement? Like you see it today? Now started to emerge?
Stephanie Middaugh 11:31
Gosh, I mean, I’ve heard you hear I mean, speaking of origin stories, I mean, you hear kind of like, around the campfire, like, we’re going to sales enablement start. You know, I think it’s one of those things where I’ve heard this pretty consistently of like, gosh, I’ve been doing sales enablement for 2030 years, but that’s not what they called it at the time, it was sales training, or it was just part of I was doing some other kinds of work. And it was just part of that role. So I think, in some kind of capacity, sales enablement, sales, productivity, whatever you want to call, it has always kind of been there, there’s always been a need to support teams with whatever is going on in the business. I think the difference is, is that now that we find ourselves in kind of the SAS world, especially kind of like startup SAS companies, the rate at which the company is growing, scaling, changing, is on a daily basis, a lot of times, and there’s, there’s no more is there, the ability to just kind of like, loop in while like, well, this is part of my job is to educate once a quarter on the difference, you know, different processes that kind of came up. Now we’re moving at such a fast pace that we have to actually have a dedicated headcount to figuring out like, and informing the sales team, so much is happening so rapidly, we need some team in order to kind of like support the teams in doing all of that kind of stuff. And one thing that I noticed was that usually it started in sales sales were the ones that needed the most support. But then, even like five years ago, I mean, you type in enablement into LinkedIn, and it was like, maybe get a couple like responses or you know, kind of like pings and now you type in enablement. You see it all over the place. And I keep an eye on the, like, enablement job market in general. I’m always curious to see like what people are hiring for, and I’m starting to see if you just type in enablement, you’re seeing it come up everywhere else. You see, sales enablement, revenue enablement, go to market enablement, Customer Success enablement, partner enablement. I saw one that was like marketing enablement. At one point, I was like, Ooh, that’s, that’s a new one. So I think everybody all of a sudden is realizing the impact that enablement, as it’s kind of, however it’s defined, can really have an impact on the business overall. And like, Well, why can’t my department and have enablement? Why can’t my department have kind of some support, and I think it just goes hand in hand with this idea of, we’re supporting our internal people, we’re supporting our external customers, we’re supporting even our external like, partner, channel, partner, reseller partner of ours, whatever we want to kind of, like reference them with that should be a common thread throughout all of this employee journey, customer journey, I mean, all of those things.
Dave Derington 14:21
Okay, let’s go deeper. Now that I mean, this conversation has been a long time coming. I’ve really wanted to have that conversation out loud with you. And why because I, I finally feel connected to enablement. I finally, it’s not that I didn’t get it, but I felt like the same way where even in education, you’ve had all these different labels, like some people, let’s go back and talk l&d. So, learning and development, I feel like it’s it’s, I mean, a lot of people from l&d. I mean, Dev learns happening soon go to that. But when I go there, I feel alien. I don’t feel accepted. I don’t feel like I’m the part of the same culture. It’s like, Oh, we found this. Like, I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m worried about educating my team, and I’m working in a startup company. And I’ve, I’ve honestly had a lot of overlap with enablement. Like, people like you. Yeah, I’ll be doing an education thing and say, well, can’t you train us internally? Yes, absolutely. But that wasn’t my charge or charter. Yep. And I’ve just seen just like a customer education. I’ve seen this explode. Now when I said I wanted to go deeper. It’s this discussion right here, I feel like is the start of us thinking more collaboratively, and aligning our communities more. I’m not trying to force the issue, but you’ve developed your community of practice and practitioners. And you know, there’s people that I’ve worked with, I’ve worked directly with that or have been in that I’ve gone to some of your sessions, and it just feels so good. It’s like, hey, all right. Now I can actually go and get value out of those sessions do as a customer education people. And when I show up to those, we’re changing shape exchanging knowledge and figuring out well, we’re all kind of doing the same stuff. Yeah. But I think you’ve defined it. Let’s go back to l&d learning and development. I was talking with my friend Debbie Smith this morning about this. And that we come up with a term of all these different kinds of trainings are happening. Nobody’s organizing any of this as a problem. But we see the value, how many positions? Have you seen the last couple of weeks for enablement? I see tons. Yeah. And but back in the day, we had like running in development, that would be part of the company’s topology and framework of helping to educate the team. It it’s not what we’re doing today. Big part of the problem with l&d There’s not a problem with it for one, but part of the thinking process around learning and development is we’re trying to focus on a an employee’s success, on how they fit into our culture, and how they come up to speed with everything. And that could involve that, you know, oh, we have to learn on our boring compliance trainings. Okay, I got to do that. It’s important. But it’s not the same language of and I think people can get stuck in that thinking, right? Oh, we’ve got to get people trained. Oh, it can happen sometime. Oh, we’re not that worried about time because we’re inside the company. But you and I debiting the table. We’re both looking outside. You are accountable to align item, you know, revenue, and making sure that love and revenue is unlocked. Because our our internal team, just get it. I don’t sell I don’t use the tools. I’m just jamming, right. I’m up to speed. But I’m up to speed on sales, post sales, whatever. And I mean, I think that’s where we’re starting to get into a segue into okay, what’s work ramp? Where did work come from? Yeah. What was the thinking? Now? You’re there? I mean, because obviously, you fell in love with this product. I did, too. I was really impressed. I was really impressed by the capabilities. So maybe let’s start talking about work ramp a little bit. Yeah. And then bring the conversation back to what we’re doing and how we collaborate. Tell me more about worker, because I know I’ve talked with you in chat. I want to learn more on your Yeah.
Stephanie Middaugh 18:24
So I first heard about work ramp, um, gosh, three plus years ago, now. I was at a startup company, I was standing the enablement function up from the ground up, I knew that we needed some kind of LMS system because it was basically just like me and like part time of like one other person. And I needed the ability to be able to, like, have these trainings available whenever they needed to happen, whether I was available or not. And basically, it was I had used a number of different tools on the market previously at other organizations. Some of them I was just like, really excited about others. I was like, hell no, I’m not touching that tool again. Because it was just awful. But this was, this was my first opportunity as like, you know, like a big professional to be able to go in and evaluate tools. So I mistakenly just like took a demo from literally every vendor on the market, which was mistake Don’t ever do that. If you’re looking for a tool no matter what it is, don’t go and like get everybody on the market, do some research. Go to GE to and like figure out like make a top five list or something. Because inevitably they start mashing together. Anyway, I was pretty set on a tool that I had used at my one of my previous companies that I loved. And then I was put in contact with a gal that actually worked at zoom at the time and they were using work RAM. And I was like I never heard of this product before. But I will take one more demo. Like that’s it but like the I’m drawing the line like just one more demo. And for me I am I’d like I said in my intro, I’m a little bit of a crazy person, I tend to think outside of the box when it comes to presenting information training enablement, I all of the things. And I really needed a system that was going to be able to flex with me, as far as I’ve got this crazy harebrained idea, how can I make this happen in my system, and the system that I was initially looking at was basically very similar to what all the other LMS systems at the on the market were at the time, which was upload a video, type a little blurb underneath it, and then ask like a multiple choice question, Bada bing, bada boom, you’re done. And I was like, I’m supporting a group of young 20 year old sales reps. I cannot just upload a video to type out a blurb and like have them absorb that information, like I knew it wasn’t going to work for them. So I needed a system that was going to be able to give me the ability to do a number of different things and work ramp, platform work ramps platform that afforded me that ability. So decided on them. And then I had in true fashion, I had the craziest idea to roll out the platform internally was I knew that change management adoption of a new tool was one of the hardest kind of things to get across. So I, I knew I needed to have some fun with it. Because we had a young group of kids, I can’t say kids young group of adults that I needed to kind of like get this tool in front of so what we ended up doing was I created a guide that was basically used every single feature. So if you aren’t familiar with work ramp, it’s essentially a WYSIWYG editor where you can drag and drop function or like tools from the side videos and survey tools and matching puzzles, pieces. And all those kinds of cool things literally dragged and dropped each one of them into kind of different sections of this guide. The guide was all around how the Pink Starburst is the best Starburst, that was our thesis. And we had every bit this was pre pandemics we’d everybody in the office at the time. And as people were completing the guided walk and going through it, I was monitoring that live and I was going and dropping Starbursts on their desk as they were completing it. So it was a nice fun, little, you know, game activity or whatever. And then the other piece of that, a lot of platforms also have kind of a video recording option as well to do like pitch certifications, also a really difficult thing to get reps to record themselves and submit the videos in. So I knew I needed to lower that barrier to entry quite a bit. So I was talking to my CSM at the time at work ramp. And I was like, I want to run an air guitar competition through the challenge feature, which is their their pitch option. And she was like, what, what do you do it.
Stephanie Middaugh 22:48
But we did it, I rolled it out, we did an air guitar contest, we actually did it the first quarter that I was here at work ramp as well when I started here. So again, it was this ability to flex on a platform that supported all of these insane ideas that I had, we also rolled it out kind of like we ended up rolling it out company wide. So with the HR department as well. So all of our regular onboarding that was happening for like engineering and product and anybody who wasn’t under kind of like my purview of support, was able to use the exact same thing. And then my HR, you know, folks, were able to go in and say, Hey, I really liked what you did with this guide, I’m gonna go ahead and copy it, and then just change a couple of things and then roll it out for the rest of the team. So it really does offer this collaboration of, I’m creating cool stuff, they’re creating cool stuff in HR. And now we can both kind of see that information. And it’s the same thing. The great thing about it is that we do also have this external facing platform, which now and I tell this to all of my new hires that come through, like here at work ramp. If I’m training my support team that needs to support my customers, why am I not giving them the exact same training as my customers? Or vice versa? Why am I not giving my customers the exact same training as my support team? Because then it takes kind of the onus off of some of them. I’m the type of person that I want to go and like find information on my own before I bother somebody with it. So like, why wouldn’t you have that same exact information. So now you really have this hub of all of this great knowledge and training that you can share with anybody internally or you could potentially share it with other people externally if you needed to, as well. So that was a lot of word vomit.
Dave Derington 24:38
No, that was spot on. I mean, we’re in these languages, or we’re using this language and we’re so used to restore use of talking out loud in our peer groups. But what the things that I keyed in on in what you said, were things like you’re using different kinds of verbs. It’s not let’s go back to the audience. Yeah, now, you’re right to, like, redefine what you’re talking. So, again, we’re where I found where I connected with you and work Grant was when I spent time in outreach. And it was very complimentary experience its sales in a way. It’s a sales engagement platform. Yep. And to really do justice to what the platform can do, we really needed to train our fields. And in my tenure there, I had seen a lot of attempts, at enablement. And all the things you’re talking about is, hey, I need to do something that sounds insane.
Dave Derington 25:41
It’s not I have to give you validation that what you think it’s insane is fun, engaging, it’s the kind of content that you can’t put, and I’m going to name drop here. If you’re really interested in this to the audience at at really thinking about how our market of platforms and tools, as it evolves, you want to go back and talk to someone like John lay? The Townsend learning who does he’s he’s an analyst that looks at the entire marketing of all the different vendors in the ecosystem. Here at C lab we focused on the ones are customer education and enablement intentionally for one reason we’re niching down. And the point is that go back to the experience you talked about, you’re using some system, you wouldn’t use that ever again. Why? Well, they weren’t designed to do the kind of things that you were talking to do. How do I do? Okay, here’s an example, where we overlap partner training or training the trainer. Okay. Yep. In a lot of ways, we’re effectively doing what I hate the term training the trainer, it’s stuck. Okay. A lot of ways you’re really trying to enable someone to enable other people. You’re trying to train someone to train other people, we use these words fluidly. When I think enablement, enablement to me isn’t a negative word, because some people will say, Oh, it has a negative connotation. enablement, more is that tactical kind of point training that we need to give somebody to, to accomplish something in their job that’s really important. Like, I need to know how to use this sales tool. And the sales tool tracks all the information that I am putting in the system. And if I read that op ed apart, you know what revenue operations is going to suffer? Downstream data is wrong. We can’t forecast we can no right. And on the other part is Who am I, I’m just I get often like you, you’re someone that gets serendipitously finds his role that you love, you’re teaching and you know, sales, and you’re doing all this stuff. You just want to do the insane things. I need to make a class that’s going to be engaging, but what’s different about enablement? How to do teach back. Oh, my God, you know, I was doing this in training on workaround, I was having fun with it, it would be like, Okay, take this stuff. And the the video, the content would be not just a video, but there’s a little, you know, exercise and some drag and drops and some flip cards and things like that. I’m like, Alright, this is kind of fun. I like this. It’s neat, it’s fluid. It’s easy to use. And the end of it. It’s, you know, a recording of, of you, Stephanie saying, nowadays, I want you to record a five minute video pitching back this thing you learned the power of that, that and this is hard. The power of that getting somebody engaged enough that they’re not scared to show their weaknesses to their entire team, who’s maybe going to grill them on how well they did a discovery call or whatever like that, that’s all use tools, like, you know, Gong and other things too, out there to like, give us information on how we’re doing. Yeah, oh my god, this is the most valuable thing ever. Right? It’s you’re literally giving people that support they need to understand how to sell or to do something. And and that has to be done all the flippin time. Not all the time.
Stephanie Middaugh 29:13
pretty consistently. Yeah.
Dave Derington 29:16
And it’s hard. And if you don’t have a system to do that, how do you do it? Well, you know, I have spreadsheet and they go did Jane do the train to gym? Do the training? Yeah. Okay, I have to walk around. And the very smooth, fluid platform that gives you all the verbs that’s fun that can support your imagination. And don’t ever all of you in the audience don’t ever feel bad about an insane idea. Put it out there. It’s probably not insane. Okay, so I’ll shut up a little bit, but I just wanted to connect a little bit that these things are important to speed, the agility to get content to your field to help help them understand to change to share, like if you did something and shared it with me then I can go faster on because then I don’t have to go to discovery where he go, oh, Stephanie, you just made this module on how to do this thing with the product? Well, I didn’t know that. It’s really important, I could bring that into my cocktail, as well. And
Stephanie Middaugh 30:12
there is a certain level of ownership for whoever the audience is, whether it’s your internal sales reps, whether it’s your customers, whether it’s your partners, or like, whoever it is, there is a certain level of ownership on the other side of the house on the audience members to actually like, want to go and absorb things and actually take the training that you’re doing. And I, I get this question pretty consistently from people who are like, how do I make my reps take my training? Or how do I make people like engaged with the training, I’m like, Well, you first of all, you have to kind of like build that trust with your learner. And they have to know that what they’re getting out of this training like, is amazing. So like, while you can find like, our platform is phenomenal. And it does give me the ability to like, come in and create these brilliant, like weird ideas that I’ve got. But you also have to come to the table with those brilliant, weird ideas to like, when you mentioned kind of like sometimes there are some negative connotations with enablement and education and like training. I mean, I’ve talked to those CROs before we’re like, I don’t really believe in enablement. So you got to sell me on it in order to like, make it happen. I was like, Who hurt you like what? hurts you like
Dave Derington 31:26
that? Because this is some really, this is a crucial point. 70, I think, is that, what do we have to do to prove the value of like in education? Oh, my God, it’s so hard now to measure the outcome of education. Yeah, and I say that and with all intent of scaring people, it is hard to measure education. And where I see companies, that comment you made right is why why do you doubt enabling our team is going to help? Is it because you’ve seen it done wrong? And what does that look like? Or is there something else?
Stephanie Middaugh 32:09
I think a lot of times it ends up kind of enablement tends to kind of be enablement, training education, like, we tend to be the kind of the bottom of the hill that everything kind of like rolls down into and be really like, that’s not my job, I’m not going to do it. And like, we’re just like, we’ll do it. We’ll take care of it. So one of the things that I think a lot of times like you need to shift your thinking of is instead of just being like, yep, boss, I got it, no problem. Be comfortable starting to push back a little bit and being like, what are we trying to do here, though? What behavior are we trying to change? What business impact are we trying to make? What does success look like? Because to your point, Dave, you can’t actually, it’s really, really hard to tie training to revenue, it’s damn near impossible. However, if you start with the end goal in mind, then you can start backing into it as far as like, what do I need to do in order to make this happen? And something like a people are like, Why should I get an LMS? Like, what is that going to do? I can, I can just like run a training on a slide deck. And it’s not a big deal. It’s like, yes, you technically can, however, are you able to actually capture? What does somebody know before they actually go through the training? So before, like, at the very beginning of like a guide, ask some questions around the topic that you’re about to train on, get a benchmark for where they fit in as far as like their knowledge level, train, it, then asked very similar questions at the very end of it. And you can measure kind of that impact there. That’s a really easy, like table stakes kind of a thing. Did they learn something in this training that I did? And then if you come to me, and you’re like, Oh, well, Stephanie, I need a pipeline, I need a pipeline training or something like I need the we need people to generate more pipeline. Okay, well, I have a million questions for you outside of that. But our goal is to increase the pipeline by like, 10x Fabulous, in order to do that, we need to do X, Y, and Z. And then we need to train on A, B and C in order to get there. So like now I’m able to and I’m starting to kind of like plug for work ramp again, I’m starting to do this with within our product is we’ve got a connector for Salesforce. So now I can pull in a join report of rep a took this training, they got you know, a 90% grade on the training and I saw pipeline generation increase of you know, 20% or whatever it is. Now I can start correlating, you know, the training to the thing, it can’t just be rep attended this training, and then they did really well. Ah, that’s that’s kind of difficult to make that correlation there. But if you start with the end goal in mind, and then back into it from a training perspective, now you can actually start pointing to are there a number of different factors that could have contributed to this? Absolutely. This is one of them, though. However, my training shows because of like XY and Z or whatever it is. So pulling those things together, don’t ever start a project without an end goal in mind of like, what you’re trying to affect the end of the day.
Dave Derington 35:11
This is where my soapbox, no, I love it, because this is this, your this is why I wanted to get you on the show, because directionally functionally we are aligned in education and enablement. Like, our minds are one, because you start with the end in mind as Stephen Covey, you know, old First things first, it’s, what are you trying to do? I’ve seen so many teams, and I’m not going to name names, but I’ve seen them. Oh, we didn’t implement Okay, great. Oh, we need customer education. Okay, great. What’s the goal? Ah, we’re just gonna hire somebody, and they’re gonna figure it out. If it again breaking the fourth wall, folks, if you are one of those who is today saying, I’m going to hire somebody, and I’m going to let them figure it out. Let’s just pause for a minute. Because listen, go back. Listen to what Stephanie just said, all of these points are really vital to you, if you don’t have a goal. You can’t measure the outcome of that goal. And this is why I would argue that many enablement, teams and education teams suffer, and SaaS companies, because you don’t see the outcome of it, it becomes sheer cost center investment. And then the next thing you know, you’re cutting the teams as a leader, because you haven’t achieved an ROI. I am not one of the opinion that you have to measure that are a first before you part of that team. But I believe you needed to build the scaffolding, visa vie, a platform like work ramp or other platforms that allow us to measure it, you’re not done yet. The other thing is, gosh, what you said is just spot on, you could get a connector you’re looking at, how did I make an impact? How do you know? Well, other things could happen. So you still need to do something called decouple or denormalize or normalize the data, which means you might look at cohorts which intentionally have not consumed training, you know, Frank didn’t do the training or whatever, that whole team didn’t do the training, yet. I saw an impact. And you can do the negative like, this is data science stuff. Oh, now I actually see almost a correlation. I hate to use that word. But you can get really good at showing these experiments that you’re doing just like customer education does, really doing informed experiments, you’re being data informed. Yeah, and, and your, your and even more now I see, enablement teams align under revenue operations, which me gets a little scary because it gets scary. Only because we’re we enter enablement or investment. And, yes, there should be a revenue goal probably associated with our goals and enablement. But if that’s not waited, because this takes time and experience, and a platform can plug to do, right.
Stephanie Middaugh 38:08
Yeah, one of my, one of my first leaders that I like idolized for the longest time, Hillary Hadley, she said that we were we did a talk before, like at outreach on leash actually a couple of years ago. And she came up with the phrase of like, learning as a process, and you need a process for learning. And it was just like, like, it just like blew my head. And I just like, I need to, like have it like written on like, in script on my wall or something like that behind me. But it’s so true. Is that somewhere between we don’t just like give children like a textbook, and we’re like, how about it children? Now you’re, you’re educated and like you have 12 years? We do. Yes, to be fair, but we have like 12 years of mandated schooling in order and we like build on top of it like curriculum, for a reason. Like, it’s not just because they’re children and like, their brains are still molding and whatever, that is a good reason. But somewhere between like, high school graduation, and like real life, adult world, we forgot that learning actually takes time. Like, especially for adults, because we’ve got so many other things happening. pandemics, economic strife, or whatever, like, family shit, like we’ve got so many other things happening. Learning takes a really long time to kind of like sink in. And if you’re not presenting information in a number of different ways, to all of the different learning styles as well, and you’re not giving people kind of a path to follow as well, as far as like a learning journey. Makes a big difference. makes a huge difference.
Dave Derington 39:47
Yeah, I can’t I can only go back in time and tell stories about how when I was this company or that company, you’d hear this lament not a lament a cry a whale from particularly A service is people who were coming in and they’re like, how do I learn this? Or salespeople who go? Well, I don’t really get how to pitch this thing or, you know, outreach, the thing that I felt blessed at for that experience was that I got to work with so many people that were in a diversity of experiences in their career. There were a lot of people in that. Well, just let’s just face it. I mean, we’re the economy has shifted, we’ve got all kinds of people that are new in the field of sales. There’s a lot of people that are very early in their careers. Oh, yes. And, but they learn differently than so one of my favorite objection moments objection, in a in a sales enablement. Thing is even better. It’s a double objection. Well, I don’t need this training. And I don’t do this because I’m God’s gift to sales. And I just know all the things I literally had a heckler in, I had to talk to outside of training sessions for trainers were really upset, because somebody bombed the training. And this is the live training, which doesn’t happen when we’re more cramped doing an on demand training as much because those people are going to have to go down the path are they they have to listen, and they have to interact, and they have to engage,
Stephanie Middaugh 41:18
or they don’t like that. I mean, that’s the that’s the other like, good happens that maybe like, they just like, don’t do it. Like, that’s the secret to it’s like for me. Another like, I had a lot of like, amazing leaders who gave me little nuggets that I just will hold on to the for the rest of my life. One of my leaders told me at the very beginning of my enablement career, I’m responsible to you, not for you. So if there are those difficult reps who think they are, you know, the Lord’s gift to, to selling fabulous, then don’t take my frickin training, like I don’t, I don’t care. Like I’m going to create this for the reps who actually want to learn from stuff. And Hell yeah, I’m going to try and get you on board, I’m going to try and cultivate that trust with you. But at the end of the day, I can’t make you do anything, you’re an adult, do what you want, like, come on, like either you trust me or you don’t. And if you don’t, then God bless have Have at it, like Go Go forth and be amazing on your own then. But yeah, I’m here to support you. And I will do my damnedest to do that. But I can’t force anybody to do anything, I will pull out all of my tricks in my bag of tricks. But at the end of the day, like, I can’t, I can lead a horse to water, I cannot make a drink all of the other metaphors that I’ve got.
Dave Derington 42:34
That is great, because it’s true. Actually, I think with with enablement, you could you can get a little bit more leverage internally from leadership. On your leadership. I’ve been absolutely like, I don’t care what they do, and they don’t do it. And then we have problems. Yeah, but that’s we’re both let’s talk a little bit on the way out here. We’ve got about eight minutes or so. And I want to give you a little bit more time again to talk about where to find work ramp and what Yeah, other value, you know, you can promote. But I want to talk a little bit more about how we can join forces, and collaborate together as fields of emerging fields of practice. Yeah, enablement is a merging field of practice, and SAS, as is customer education, but we have different functions. So what are the things that you think we can do? And I’m specifically asking you of this, with respect to work ramp as a platform? Because I know, you do both? How would you advocate to people, let’s say, again, breaking the fourth wall listeners, you’re looking at a platform, you have both of these problems, consolidation of platforms is an important thing that’s going on right now. Right? If you have enabled, I’ve been in places enablement, teams that have three or four different platforms Come on, right workarounds can do customer education, too. So tell me a little bit more how, let’s say if you it really even in your customer education team at work ramp or elsewhere with clients you’ve worked with? How do we work together better? How can you share in this responsibility of nurturing people on how to use their platform?
Stephanie Middaugh 44:03
Thank you. I think it’s, it’s the simplest answer. But it’s also one of the hardest things to kind of like achieve is just this idea of collaboration and constant communication. I think a lot of times, enablement and customer Ed tend to sit under typically two separate leaders. So usually customer EDS sits under like Customer Success arm a lot of times and they aren’t kind of like looped under the enablement umbrella necessarily. So I think, just like extending that arm across kind of the aisle of like, what are you working on? What are some of the things that you’re doing? And that’s people ask me all the time, like, well, what books do you read? And like, you know, what kind of like, articles are you paying attention to? I’m like, actually, I just, I like talking to people. Like I like having a conversation and asking, like, what are you working on? Like, that’s how I learned me personally like the best. And I think that’s one of the things that I think customer and enablement can kind of bridge that gap of like, what are you Are you working on? What are your top priorities? What are some of the things that you’re playing around with and that you’re having fun with, and a platform like work ramp? If let’s say that collaboration isn’t necessarily there, I can go in and maybe stock the stuff that you’re working on, and just kind of see, and then I can go and, Dave, I can message you and be like, I know, we haven’t really chatted, Dave, but I just happened across one of your trainings that you were working on. And I think it’s frickin brilliant, I think I would love to chat with you a little bit more about it. So it kind of breaks down those walls and those silos that will inevitably happen at any company, like it’s going to happen. So you need to address that, yes, it’s going to happen. We sit under two different leaders, you’ve got your priorities, and I’ve got mine. I’m not saying that we should like, stop those. What I’m saying is like, can’t we row in the same direction and like, learn from each other? Because I think a lot of times, like people come from such different backgrounds, and they’ve got such different viewpoints on things that like, I learned this from my team all the time of like, Good God, how did you even think of that, that’s brilliant. And like, the more that you can kind of expand that out of like, Oh, I’m working on this great training, you’re like, holy shit, this would be amazing for my sales reps, because my sales reps are struggling with this piece of the product. That’s what they need. And then if you have one platform, you don’t have to worry about recreating something or downloading a file. And Jesus, if it like, doesn’t load up properly, like, it’s just like, just me fever dreams. But like, if you’ve got that one thing, great. I’m just gonna like, go and copy it and like, soften the edges for my reps, or whatever it might be. So that’s what I would say is like, it’s the easiest thing. But the hardest thing is sometimes accomplishes that collaboration, just talking to each other and figuring out like, just talking, yeah, what are you doing? What are you working on? What are you finding fun? What do you not finding fun?
Dave Derington 46:52
I love that. And I will resonate, it resonates with me a lot. And it’s actually been a big point of frustration. Because what I’ve always tried to do is look at, I kind of look at customer education, and we’re always working on really polished content. Ultimately, that’s not really part of my schpeel. Ultimately, we want to get there. But a lot of times, I’m going to market, I got to get the content to market scrapped All I care about. I’m mostly focused on two things. One is kind of product education. I’m getting away with that. Because we’re not click paths, we’re about how do you use a product to affect customer specific use cases. But then the other side of that is I’m talking a little bit more extrinsically, about the space and the market we’re in? And what are the skills that we need to have, in order to effectively like, if I was at Gainsight, I needed to understand as an administrator, how to merge different data sources, that’s more like a database concept. At outreach, I needed to understand concepts of sales. What is an objection? I said that earlier? What is this? What is that? What are these things you’re new to the field you need to learn about? Well, how do we actually market or sell to people? What is cold calling? How do you do? You know, how do you how do you set up some automation around that? And but those are also complementary internal, because a lot of times, we’ll already figured out how to do that in an enablement capacity. But I need to bring that through and enable that customer like that, too. So I think it’s a natural peanut butter jelly, I do challenge the modern, you know, institutional thinking right now, that separates these teams. And I think more and more increasingly, I want to be aligned with a leader above me, who is has both enablement and like, okay, good example of this. Customer and education and enablement, internal enablement, are aligned, and they’re under one leader. I think that’s great. I might be wrong. but that’s aligning more of the functions together and having them collaborate, speeds everybody up. And it keeps us from being all broken all over the place, and then having a dozen systems and people that don’t know what the left hand is doing from the right. So it’s a really good opportunity. Yep. All right, we are on the way out the door. So now I’ll give you the floor to talk about any other things. We got a couple of minutes. What else would you like the audience know about us about work ramp where to go what to see, obviously, they will I will have links on the site. So if you’re listening to this podcast and see lab, I’ll have all the things where grep is our sponsor, so you’re free to reach out to them and talk to them which heart’s content. Anything else that you’d like to share with the audience?
Stephanie Middaugh 49:40
Yeah, I think one of the things that I would love to just kind of like drill in on is if you’re using an LMS if you’re not using an LMS and you’re just kind of like, well, this is like whelming as a tool. What hurt does it have to kind of like go through an evaluation we can cover? Internal extra which we talked about, we’ve actually got a recently launched product called Work RAM content which, at your fingertips, you get 1000s of pre made SCORM, like files that you can like pull in from one of the vendors that we partnered with. It’s an amazing resource, especially for like small teams, which is like super, super exciting. And then we’ve also got a our very first work ramp learn Virtual Conference, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, it’s going to be awesome. I might have a session with a couple of really amazing enablement, leaders, where we’re gonna talk about like some big bets and trends that we’re expecting for 2023. We’ve got sessions dedicated to enablement to l&d, and HR as well as customer education. So there’s a little bit of everything there for everybody. And then we’ve got some exciting stuff that’s going to be announced during that session, as well. And it’s completely free. So you just join, we’ve got like a DJ, we’re hiring a DJ for like the virtual thing. Come on, it’s gonna be so much fun, come and have a dance party, if anything else. So other than that, if you have any other questions about work ramp or enablement, or like anything, I’m on LinkedIn, you can find me everywhere, because my mug is all over the place. You can connect with me wherever you’d like, I’m always happy to chat and shoot the shit and just chill out.
Dave Derington 51:20
Cool. And you’ve also got the enablement squad. Yes, that’s a big deal, too. And get connected, get out in the community, I’ve been to some of the enabling squad stuff. And it’s fun. If they do the road show, if you do the road show and happen to join with that. It’s great. Even if you’re in cars, go meet your peers and your partners and learn from the experience because it’s really, it was really eye opening to me, because while I’m thinking about certain use cases, for a customer, it’s slightly different or nuanced for an internal resource. And that helps you build better external content, too. So it’s, this is all wonderful, Stephanie, I really appreciate your time here today. Of course, appreciate your sponsorship and support. And with that, let me close the door here on another episode. Once again, and I will be speaking at work ramp, learn as well. So yes, come see Dave had excited to do that. All right. So remember, if you want to learn more, we have our podcast website at customer dot education. Just really simple, easy to find. You can find the show notes. There’ll be a transcription of this episode, attached on the website itself, all the notes, all the links and everything else we can. If you found value in this podcast, please please please share with your friends, your peers, over beers with your network and help us find the others that were the reason Stephanie that you’re on the call today is we’re we have been impoverished by a lack of resources. And now we’re starting to see them emerge. So it’s really great. If you reach out to me, I am usually on LinkedIn but on Twitter, I am posting more frequently at Dave Derington. Are you on LinkedIn or on Twitter as well?
Stephanie Middaugh 53:00
I’m on Twitter. I’m all over LinkedIn now. You can find all over
Dave Derington 53:04
LinkedIn. Yeah, we’re LinkedIn folks on thanks to Alan Coda for providing our theme music. And also last bit of thing if you’re out there on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, whatever. Think about giving us a five star we’ve got a great track record going so let’s not spoil it. We really above all want to share the voices of Stephanie and others in our community to get out there and and figure out how we can do this better. So get out there, educate,
Dave Derington 53:31
experiment, and find your people. Thanks, everybody.