Do you struggle to create enablement strategies that show value? Do you worry about your enablement role being cut because of that? Those are both very real and legitimate concerns. But you can do things to alleviate those challenges and worries, starting with creating personalized onboarding programs and adopting tools that allow you to measure success, prove value, and grow business.

And our latest guest on the Adapter’s Advantage podcast has some advice for you.

Ben Purton is senior director of international enablement and global onboarding at RingCentral. His innovative approach to onboarding and enablement is transforming how the company’s global teams operate. In this episode, Ben reveals the secrets to smart, role-specific onboarding in a rapidly changing environment. He explains how tailored enablement strategies can drive significant value, even in diverse and widespread teams. By leveraging tools like conversation intelligence, Ben shows how combining technology with a personal touch is key to effective enablement.

Ben also emphasizes the importance of live training amidst the rise of automation. He highlights the need for strong operational guardrails and collaboration with sales operations to ensure accurate metrics and successful onboarding. From early-stage demos to continuous learning for seasoned reps, Ben provides actionable advice for enablement leaders to demonstrate their value and drive business success.

This episode is packed with valuable takeaways for anyone in the field of sales enablement and sales onboarding. Watch the interview below or read the transcript.

Episode 64: Enhancing Enablement to Provide a Personalized Onboarding Experience | Ben Purton

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From This Episode:

Deniz Olcay: Welcome everybody to the Adapter’s Advantage podcast. My name is Deniz Olcay, vice president of marketing at Allego, and I’m really excited to be joined today by Ben Purton, senior director, international sales enablement and global onboarding at RingCentral. Ben, welcome to the program.

Ben Purton: Pleasure to be here, Deniz. Thank you very much.

Tell us a little bit about what you do at RingCentral.

Purton: Well, at RingCentral, I look after everything outside of North America when it comes to sales enablement strategies. We have four main countries and then lots of subsidiary countries underneath that. From a global perspective, as you mentioned in my job title, I look after the sales onboarding. I took over that about two months ago, and that also includes America. That’s really enjoyable because that’s where my background is from, but I’ve been in sales enablement for 10 years.

Could you give a quick high-level explanation of what RingCentral does? 

Purton: Sure, so we’re a business communications company, so all things ranging from whether you are unified communications. We’ve got our contacts, our CX platform, so anything from customer experience. We’ve delved into the world of AI for the last 10-plus years, and one of the things that we’re really passionate about is stuff like [conversation intelligence and conversation analytics] CICA, which I know Allego is very passionate about, as well. We’ve got a [product] called RingSense, all things business communications there. We’ve got a full suite of solutions to suit.

It seems like you’ve taken on some responsibility in the onboarding space. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the primary priorities on your plate and how you’re thinking about onboarding in this climate?

Purton: I think personalized onboarding in this climate has to get smarter. I think sales enablement strategies in general, all of our processes and our programs, need to get smarter, more value impacting. So, we’ve tried to make it as tailored and as role specific as possible. That is a very generic term in enablement, role-specific onboarding. We really are trying to get there. I think when everyone says we’ve got to completely nail role-specific, personalized onboarding, I’m almost jealous, because some organizations like my own, they can have 20, 30 roles, and there’s all these different complex trees that go for it. So, we’re always going to be on our everboarding journey to get to sort of a utopia of role-specific sales onboarding.

Can you talk about your philosophy on the different modalities of learning to get people ramped up quickly?

Purton: So, we are utilizing our own CICA tool called RingSense. We’re also utilizing things like on demand video. We have a video platform, for example, and we use breakout rooms and sessions like that when we’re doing virtual pieces. That’s absolutely critical. … One of the things that lots of companies are guilty of doing is they [say], OK, we’ve made the best video content, and [they] can give out this best video content and even made it bite-sized, so people can do it on their Peloton. But you can automate too much. That’s one of the things I’ve learned. The biggest tip I have is don’t ever give up the live training. You need to have that mix of CICA tools: live training, plus on-demand automation of on-demand video content.

Can you talk about your philosophy on measuring all those touch points and eventually saying, yes, this cohort or this rep or this team is fully ramped and ready to go.

Purton: One of the most interesting things that I’ve found is you can sometimes shoot your metrics completely in the foot before you’ve even begun. What I mean by that is one of the most popular things I’ve seen in the industry is you have a company that’s done loads of work on tracking around training on a product, and [they] want to see how much they’re selling of this product, how quickly they’re getting to sell. What’s their average deal velocity time? Is it marking to the average? Are they above average in terms of that? All this fun metric stuff. But all of that is actually completely useless, which is a bit of a strong word to use, if you don’t do one simple sales operational thing, which is having a good set of consistent guardrails around your pipeline.

If you don’t have a pipeline given to you, if that hasn’t been guard-railed in a very particular way, then that makes all the metrics really difficult. If it has been guard-railed well, then it makes the metrics much more achievable. We look at velocity. how much they’re selling certain new products and their success in certain stages of the cycle. We also look at CI [conversation intelligence] and CA [conversation analytics] to see if they’re saying the right things. We will test them with role plays with pitching and automation of that when it comes to our LMS [learning management system] and a lot more. So, we can do all of that, that’s great. But one of the biggest things I hate to see is if you’ve got a world-class enabler doing a great job building the correct things—of all the Lego bricks, but without the Lego base to put all the bricks on—it’s really problematic. And that starts with your relationship with sales operations and with the wider business, and with the sales leadership as well.

I want to shift the conversation to a little bit more about your tenured reps and how you build continual confidence and continual learning and really confidence in them being able to either get acquainted with new solutions or align to new business priorities.

Purton: So, we’ve now done this project where we’ve trained our reps to do something simple like a few demos at an early stage, what questions to ask, how to introduce it. We’ve got supporting content with that. Sounds quite simple. It’s not the easiest thing to certify loads of sales reps to do, … but really, really powerful, because the metrics that enablement can show are very trackable. How many demos per deal are we doing? Have we seen … a decrease in sales cycle or a decrease in sales stages? Have we seen an increase in speed to close? We can track all of that and pivot against when we’ve done these projects against certain products and solutions that we’ve got. You need to be able to show not only quantifiable enablement, but value and impact and call to action based enablement that you can show to anyone who asks: finance leader, sales leader, CEO.

 

If you don’t run to the fire, if you don’t show the impact of what you’re doing, then unfortunately companies will ask, can I get two or three employees [who are AI savvy] for the price of that one senior enabler? — Ben Purton

 

You need to be able to do that, and that is the secret sauce for enablers in 2024. You’re an enablement leader if you’re reactive. If you don’t run to the fire, if you don’t show the impact of what you’re doing, then unfortunately companies will ask, can I get two or three employees [who are AI savvy] for the price of that one senior enabler? … If you can’t justify, if you think that two people with AI could do a better job than you and would add more value than you, then you need to look at how you’re actioning your enablement.

How do you identify these key initiatives that prove value to the business? What made you pick that and what sorts of feedback mechanisms or analytics do you have in place to help you pinpoint these proactively?

Purton: We do a task where we basically get reps to present their pipeline. Very simple, but a lot of people do it. … One of the biggest, the gold is what do you need? There’s a slide. What’s your main ask? And a lot of time it would be like, I really could do with quicker response times from this team, I could really do with more knowledge on the product. Some of them even asked, can I start doing demos more? So, we saw that as a common theme, and also we knew that the resources are thinner than ever before. There are more solutions than ever before at RingCentral, for example, and other companies are like that, diversifying their portfolio of product sets, and so it was quite an easy one to spot. I don’t go, we should do this and come up with all these incredible ideas myself. I wish I did.

In fact, lots of the time it’s the hive of the group. So, Steve will come up with an amazing idea. Louise, my head of UK, James, and one of the sales enablement leaders, they will come up with these incredible ideas, and all I have to do is put all the chess pieces together and map it out to make sure that that program is actionable. It shows value, but sometimes it’s about cutting loose the work, and that is a skill in itself. It’s like in sales, one of the best skills in sales you can have is knowing when to walk away from a deal. Even if it’s early stage and it looks big and juicy, but you’re realistically got a north 0.5% chance. Is that really worth your time? Probably not. It’s the same in enablement. If you’ve got a project that’s not showing value, cut it. Even if it looks like you shouldn’t cut it, because it was your biggest project for half a year.

 

If you’ve got [an enablement] project that’s not showing value, cut it. — Ben Purton

 

What advice would you give someone just starting their career in sales enablement or someone that’s maybe stuck in a rut trying to really prove their value? What sort of advice would you give them to recharge and come back swinging, if you will, to make an impact on the business?

Purton: Don’t be scared of people’s job titles. If you need help, go to them, pitch to them instead of waiting for them to come to you. Because if they come to you, it’s probably not good news. If you go to them, it’s probably going to be good news. So, that’s the biggest thing I wish I knew earlier in my career. Use your network. [For example,] if I have a project that I want to get off the ground, and … my leader says, “You know what? I don’t think this is going to work, sorry.” And I’m like, “Well, I actually really believe in this project.” The best thing you could do is to go to your network and say, “Oh, hi, X person.” Let’s call them Dave. “Hi, Dave. I saw you speak. I really liked what you did. I’m struggling to get that project signed off internally. Would you mind coming on a call with my CRO [chief revenue officer] or with my head of sales, head of international to talk about what you’ve done at X company?

If you can get that, you can get nearly any [project off the ground]. You can get great ideas to borrow [from you network], and then you can also get them to help you adopt it, to not be reactive in the 2024 environment. That is, I want sales enablement strategies to grow.

Gartner and everyone are telling us [enablement is] going to grow as a function. I 100% believe that, but if you are in a senior-level enablement role, you have to show the impact and value. And you have to run to the fire. That is the absolute critical thing. If not, unfortunately, it can end badly for enablement teams, and certainly for enablement leaders.

Thank you so much again for being on the program, Ben, it was a pleasure speaking with you and hoping to have you on the program again soon.

Purton: Thanks, Deniz. Just one final thing for me is I’m the board secretary for the Revenue Enablement Society. All of those fun things that I just discussed at the end, to put a more positive spin on it, there is a huge network out there in various societies, collective squads, etcetera, that are out there to support you as a community. Definitely, definitely use them. Don’t see it as a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength. We’re always there to help as one sort of group.

I’m going to second that one, Ben. I think that’s a great positive note to end on. A shout-out to the Revenue Enablement Society. The community is there. As much as you’re running to the fire, run to the community as well.

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