Training and coaching sales development reps and account reps can have a material impact on pipeline attainment. In this segment of the Martech Minute, we speak with Andrew Hally, CMO of Allego, about how their sales learning platform makes it easy to onboard, train, and coach SDRs and account reps.
Q: Hi Andrew, thanks for joining us today. Allego is a sales learning platform. Please give us the quick pitch – what does that involve?
Andrew Hally: Sure I think it’s really pretty simple – our goal is to do a better job getting sales people the skill and knowledge they need to win each and every opportunity. You’ve been pretty familiar through your career with helping sales people, you know sales is getting harder and harder. The buyers, they’ve got the internet, social media, they no longer rely on salespeople for baseline information. So the window that salespeople have, to engage buyers and to deliver value, to convey value, it’s shrinking. So the bar is going up and up.
But at the same time, what companies do to prepare salespeople for success really hasn’t changed very much. The model is still the same way it’s been for decades. There’s a real mismatch between, it’s getting harder and harder to sell, but really not doing a lot better of a job helping people to sell.
Q: Right, I can remember from my tenure in product marketing at Oracle, we would have these sales kickoffs once a year or every quarter where you’d fly everybody in, and each and every product marketing manager for the different product sets would give their pitch, and you had a feeling that it going in one ear and out the other. So how does the Allego sales learning platform help with that problem?
Andrew Hally: That’s exactly right, that’s the classic model, and we’ve really as an industry not done much more than tinker with that model a little bit, and it doesn’t work very well. Let me paint a different picture if you will.
It’s really not so much from sales training – so if I’m not mistaken you are a fellow mountain biker correct? Now have you gone to tubeless tires on your bike yet? So you know I’m a real geek with this stuff so I’ve got the tubeless tires so we no longer have tubes inside the tires which lets you run lower pressure and it’s just better. I’m told, anyway, it’s probably just marketing right? Well I’ve got these tubeless tires, and if you blow a tire out in the woods, you can no longer replace the tube, so you’re kind of stuck that way.
But one of my fellow mountain bikers who’s even more of a gear geek than me, told me you should get a patch kit there’s a way to kind of plug a tire. So I said okay, I got one of those. So a peer told me, and I’ve got this tool now, I’ve been carrying that thing around in my bike backpack for quite some time now.
Well finally, two/three months ago, I’m biking in Vietnam, and I come off onto a sharp rock, and I pop this tubeless mountain bike tire and lose all my air. And I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. So I’m like hah, I’ve got this thing that I need, this plug kit. I pull it out, I open it up, and it’s got all these pieces in it, and have no idea how to use it.
So, I got my mobile phone, I opened it up went to Youtube, and I typed in tubeless tire plug kit, and five or six videos come up, five or six at once and I watch a quick video, about a minute and a half on how you actually use this thing. Pretty straight forward, and then I knew how to do it. I plugged my tire, it worked, I pumped it back up, and I’m off riding on my merry way.
Q: What if you had not been in an area that had a cell phone signal?
Andrew Hally: Well, if I had Allego actually which can work offline and online, it would have been okay. But I did have a cell phone signal. But that story, the point is that you know where you described that Oracle model of how we prepare sales people with knowledge today within the work realm and it’s the same way for 30 years. Contrast that with how we find out things that we need, like that peer telling me I should get this plug kit, and then my training myself. I didn’t look through the manual – who reads manuals anymore? When you first get it you never do that, you throw it somewhere right? You learn on demand, when you need it. So I taught myself how to use that plug kit when I needed to use that plug kit. Which is when my tire was flat in the middle of the woods. Furthermore, I did it with a mobile phone. I didn’t have some big manual to look for. I looked at a video which took about a minute, right?
So I think that is a better representation of the way we could be empowering sales folks with knowledge, the training, and the skills of what to do. Not this Big Bang model that you described which is like you said, you fly everybody in at once, you pump them full of knowledge all at once, right? So it’s a huge amount of knowledge to try to cram it into the brain at once. Then you go home.
There’s no other work to retain that knowledge, right? So it immediately starts to be forgotten. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept called the forgetting curve, it’s pretty well-established, and once you get exposed to knowledge, if you don’t get re-exposed to it, i.e. study it like you do in school, that knowledge decays, and within 30 days you’ve probably forgotten about 80% of it. I mean the brain is designed to forget things. Because we get exposed to so much. It’s only the things that we get repeatedly exposed to or that we practice, we actually retain. That model doesn’t work, that fly everybody in, pump you with knowledge, and it’s too much knowledge. It gets forgotten. And who knows if it’s the right knowledge?
Like you said, every product manager gets their 10 minutes. Since this is your one shot of training the sales team, you have to train them on everything, just in case they need it. That’s with the notion that if we’re learning the way I was learning in the woods, using mobile using video, it can be much more on demand. I can learn how to handle a certain situation, how to pitch a certain product, right when I need it. I’m highly motivated to learn how to pitch that product if I’m about to meet a customer who’s interested in that product. So you’re much more motivated. You learn when you need it, just that right amount. It’s through video. It’s a much more effective medium than just looking through documents.
And one other key piece to it Colin, no offense to you and to me as marketers [Editors’s note: no offense taken!], but in most cases salespeople are not quite as interested in hearing from you and I about how to sell something. They’re much more interested in hearing from their peer. You want to hear from that that woman who made a million dollars in commission last year selling that product at Oracle. She knows how to handle an objection that may be encountered in the field much better than you or I ever would. So the sales learning platform for Allego, it’s much more, it’s mobile, it’s not big bang but it’s rather kind of continuous and you learn really when you need things. The learning gets reinforced so that you actually drive it into long-term memory, and can then use the learning in a customer conversation, versus racking your brain for that presentation you saw nine months ago. And it’s peer-oriented.
It’s super easy for me not just to watch a video in the field, but after I have a customer call and I learn something new from a competitor – two buttons, I record in 15 seconds what it is I learned about that, and boom I’m done, that field knowledge instantly gets out to my fellow sellers. So it’s peer, it’s mobile, it’s video oriented, it’s much more on demand, just like the way we use technology in everyday life. So it’s just a very different model for sales learning. And coaching I think is become more important recently I think especially in the high tech space where you and I operate.
Q: Yes, let’s look at sales development reps for example, every high tech company has an SDR team now. They’re usually pretty inexperienced when you get them on board, and they usually stick around for only about 18 months, and it’s getting shorter every year. So getting them on-boarded and productive quickly is critical. So how does the Allego platform help onboard new reps?
Andrew Hally: Yeah, so onboarding is absolutely one of the two or three most common use cases that our customers use Allego for, along with launching a new product. I mean onboarding is a classic case and we’ve seen a lot of success helping clients with that. So I don’t know if you know Apptio, they’re a software company out in the Seattle area. They’ve brought the time that it takes a rep to get to first deal close from nine months down to about five months. So those are field sales people not ADRs, but the point is when you bring better technology to it, you can dramatically shrink that onboarding time as well as reduce the number of wash outs, or identify people who aren’t going to be a fit earlier anyway. So that’s a great use case.
And companies have used Allego to reduce that in a couple of different ways. One really interesting one is if you move away from that model of having to start onboarding with a boot camp – I don’t know how often you did boot camp, but typically it’s maybe once a quarter, it’s rarely once a year, that’s not often enough, but for a sizable company, you do a new hire boot camp once a quarter. Though right there if you hire somebody, they may be sitting around for one to three months before they really get any sort of training and ability. So the clock isn’t even starting.
First is if you’re using a platform like Allego where a lot of the courseware is in the platform, and in Allego, going through a course, it’s really kind of like going through a playlist. You’re getting stepped through a series of assets, of videos where you’re learning the various things, with quizzes at the right point. But you can start that right away, rather than waiting for that next bootcamp. So that’s one element that makes it faster.
Our customers also typically cut down the time that they have the boot camp usually from two weeks down to one week. So there’s a nice cost savings there as well. And if they’re teaching something that’s not new hires, that’s one week less out of the field, which is nice as well.
And then finally a key piece of it is that when you’re trying to jam a lot of new knowledge into somebody, with Allego you can really take the 80/20 rule. What is that 20% of knowledge that you’re going to use on 80% of your calls? And you can really take the time to focus on that knowledge, to practice it. That’s a key thing here is practice. Not just read it or watch it, take a quiz, but practice it. Reps can see what ‘good’ looks like when they’re getting onboarded. So they can see a rep that’s really good at giving the pitch. Or maybe it’s the sales manager, whatever you know they give the pitch, it’s recorded, the ADR/SDR candidates at their onboarding, they can watch that, and then they record themselves practicing, just like we’re recording this here.
With Allego they record it, and they see – was I able to deliver well, and almost every time what happens is, you record it, you look at yourself, and you’re like “oh yeah,” you get that grimace. Reps on average practice six or seven times, before they say “okay I think that’s decent,” and they send it back to their manager for that coaching session. So one, they’re practicing, that’s one reason why it’s much better. They’re not just learning, they’re practicing. And then it’s like you said, it’s the coaching. So instead of having to be there listening live to these high pressure coaching situations, the rep is recording it on their own time, they’re mastering it, they feel good. Then they submit it, and meanwhile the manager then can watch and give feedback anytime they want. So it can be in the evening, it could be on a plane flight, we can do it offline.
And it’s simple for them to coach, so as they’re watching the video and listening, at any time, we’ve got this patented point in time feedback. It’s pretty cool, anytime, they just stop it and can either type or record a voice note, for some coaching. Say “Hey Jon, that was great, but you’re doing that funny thing with your tongue that you sometimes do, you’ve got to stop doing it.” And it’s right there in that time. It’s not like they get all this coaching feedback at the end of the video and they’ve got to rewind to two minutes and 13 seconds. It’s right there, in time. So the coaching, the practice, and then the reinforcement.
Now boot camp is over, two weeks are done. Instead of just never really getting exposed to that stuff again, and the memory starts to degrade thanks to the forgetting curve, we give them little mobile flashcards. It’s only 2 or 3 minutes a day, and they’re kind of like flash cards on your mobile phone or computer. But it’s reinforcing those key concepts that they learned. And it doesn’t take very much to move that new knowledge into long-term memory, where it’s there and can get utilized when the reps on a call and gets that question. Instead of “oh God, I know I got taught an answer,” and you’re waiting. It’s right there, because it’s in long-term memory.
Q: And sales management can track when the reps are actually using those flashcards and what kind of score they’re getting on those?
Andrew Hally: Yeah, it’s pretty neat for managers, because let’s say you’re the manager of that ADR team, you know there’s a lot of visibility into who’s mastered what, or who’s struggling with what. So maybe you do the onboarding program and you realize, look, the whole class is struggling with the competitive component. Maybe I should give them another class, or give them another assignment on competitors if everyone’s confused. Or maybe there’s just one or two reps that are struggling with one or two pieces of it. You can really target a little bit of additional help for those reps, as well as having the confidence that yeah the team’s pretty much there.
And so you’re going to have a lot more confidence that they’re going to hit those MQL goals, those meeting set goals, because you’re going to address any potential issues before it shows up in the numbers.
Q: Well, I think we’re just about out of time. Andrew thanks very much for this detailed view of the Allego sales learning platform. What’s the best way for interested parties to take a better look at the platform?
Andrew Hally: Yeah, just like anything, go to www.Allego.com and check it out.
Q: Alright sounds great. So that’s Andrew Hally, he’s the CMO of Allego – thanks very much for joining us today on the Martech Minute!
If you’d like to learn more about the Allego sales learning platform, visit their website at www.allego.com.
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