Case Study

Fighting Existing Systems and Silos

Kingsford’s strategy consisted of: (A) demonstrating Allego’s value to mid- and senior-level leaders to encourage top-down adoption, and (B) getting Allego into as many users’ hands as possible. He was convinced that, once managers and employees used Allego and/or witnessed its benefits, they would become enthusiastic users and evangelists.

“It’s an infiltration approach,” said Kingsford. “So if someone sees it and says, ‘Oh, I wish I could do that.’ Well guess what? You can! We’re having more and more adoption as a result of the strategy.”

Since rolling out Allego in December 2019, Kingsford has also focused on improving sales performance using Allego’s virtual coaching features, and by building a centralized, easy-to-search content library that reps can access before, during and after customer interactions.

“We’ve set up [Allego] so the content channels are very specific to the target group or individual,” said Kingsford. “We’ve created a lot of internal development for certain regions and certain leaders to drive performance within their organizations…. We’ve loaded a tremendous library of on-demand content that consists of videos, SCORM packages, PDFs, PowerPoints, Excel documents and even Word documents.”

Kingsford continues, “We just redid our entire tagging library to support the next stage of our execution, which is going to be integrating core content with our Salesforce.com platform. That way, when a sales rep gets to a particular stage in the sales process, I can trigger certain pieces of content that may guide them through a challenging process or help them to close. Those are some of the things we’ve done to produce content and get it in the hands of the seller at the point we need them to engage with it—whether it’s on demand, in their daily workflow in Salesforce, or [because] their manager has noticed or is encouraging something [about their performance].”

Data is Everything

Over the past 18 months, Kingsford and his team have also employed Allego to execute a “content pull strategy,” which has successfully encouraged the crowdsourcing of new content to support sales knowledge sharing. In addition, he’s showcased the data generated by Allego to obtain buy-in from managers.

Kingsford commented that the data seen out of Allego is being used to leverage conversations with Baxter leadership, “To walk into a meeting and say, ‘in the last 18 months we’ve loaded 14,100 pieces of content’ or ‘among the sales force, we’ve had 260,000 views.’ The conversations stop at that point, and they’re like, ‘What? Okay, keep talking now. Give us some more data.’ And that data, I can show them in a graph on a dashboard instantaneously. That makes the conversations easier. From there, we started seeing some very passionate middle- to upper-level leaders who would tell their teams, ‘This is very valuable. I want my entire team on Allego.’”

This passion for using Allego spread throughout the organization with usage growing in value across other departments.

“We went from sales training taking marketing content and saying, ‘what do we use to teach our reps how to sell?” to marketers wanting to write content and share it with their sales training counterparts,” Kingsford notes.

Baxter’s compensation team wanted to use Allego as the primary platform for teaching employees through bite-sized video explaining the benefits of selling a certain product offering, and providing the context needed to showcase how to sell that product in a certain way. Baxter’s commercial analytics team then discovered the value of Allego when they wanted to be able to deliver Tableau reports directly to the sales organization through one platform and not have to navigate multiple tools to get the job done.

Kingsford mentions “Recently, we’ve had an organization that is very interested in the conversation intelligence component of Allego—how they can use that conversation intelligence to analyze a call, talk it through with our teams, and retrain their teams on how to handle that call better.”

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

According to Kingsford, this “viral” adoption of Allego has been driven by word of mouth, especially after senior management recognized the value of the Allego data. “The other thing pushing adoption is we’re in the middle of a major digital transformation, so people are always looking for value in the data and in evaluating whether we’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing.”

A significant driver of user engagement has been the introduction of new features in the platform. “As a result of these new things, we get more audiences that are passionate about a particular feature, which then makes them want to create stuff that will be using that feature.”

Kingsford explained that the icing on the cake is Allego’s ease of use. “It’s so easy for contributors to add content when they can just pick up their phone. After that, the biggest thing is getting them to ‘Think YouTube, not Hollywood.’ I don’t need them to have lighting, flashcards and Teleprompters. Once they create a piece of content and discover how easy it is, it just grows. So ease of use is another key element for my teams—for the successes that we’re having.”