Case Study

A Temporary Fix Becomes a Long-Term Advantage

As Veritas moved to remote working and learning arrangements in the spring of 2020, Miersen rolled out the Allego Sales Enablement platform as part of a temporary fix for pandemic-related challenges. However, as the company adapted to the new environment, Miersen identified several opportunities to improve the company’s long-term competitiveness.

The first opportunity was enabling the sales force to begin “learning in the flow of work” – acquiring new knowledge and skills, through virtual learning and coaching, whenever and wherever they had the time.

“Before we started rolling out the Allego platform, we were doing the traditional [videoconference] calls,” said Miersen. “But it wasn’t delivering the level of training we were hoping for. The training was [supposed to] pertain to everybody, when in fact it didn’t.”

“Things like competitive positioning. Doing live training on topics like this, when some of the sellers don’t even have an opportunity against that competitor, it’s not just-in-time learning for them. They’re going to forget this before they need it. So after rolling out the Allego platform, we started looking at making adjustments: how do we go more just-in-time? How do we allow people to consume this training more on their schedule? The other part was enabling our frontline managers to provide coaching and exercises to their teams on their own schedules,” Miersen continues.

Bringing Sales Plays to Life

The second opportunity spotted by Miersen pertained to sales content management and guided selling. Miersen and Veritas’ Marketing team worked with Allego Customer Success to bring over 7,000 current sales content pieces to deploy with buyers in Allego. The team uses Allego’s content analytics to continually monitor which assets drive business and engagement, and they capture quick explainer videos from across the base of internal content SMEs at Veritas to pair with those assets in playbooks and content recommendations to make overall content adoption easier for the reps.

“Let’s say I don’t do a very good job putting notes in the PowerPoints. I just put the words on it and upload it. My expectation is that you’re going to go off and deliver it. The stars are going to align and everything’s going to work great. The fact is: you can’t, because you don’t understand the context that I had in mind. Today, for the first time ever for our sales plays, we’ve got a customer presentation that’s uploaded and there’s a video sitting right beside it: here’s how to deliver it, and we’ve got a special offer. I’ve been receiving feedback from a lot of our sellers already, saying ‘I just watched the video. I feel I’m ready to go deliver this presentation when I call somebody.’

Matt highlights the advantage sales reps have seen leveraging personalized video messaging and digital sales rooms in Allego to contextualize content for their buyers in turn. Creating personal intros through video shows they’ve done research on their customers and provides an added level of personalization to their engagements. while deploying digital sales rooms has given them a tool to make the buying experience easier for their prospects by capturing all content and sales materials in a single secure space that they can collaborate within.

“Recently, one new hire was prospecting to a customer … who never responds. They never call us back. And sure enough, that video was differentiated. It was unique. It caught the customer off guard, and they clicked on it. The rep saw that click, followed up, and got a meeting scheduled with a customer who was never going to call us. So we used that throughout the company [as an example]. ‘Hey everybody, look at this!’ One of the challenges of virtual selling is not being able to get in front of people and make that difference. We’re proving that using this tool and using this capability is giving us an edge,” says Miersen.

New-Hire Onboarding

A third opportunity was increasing the efficiency of new-hire onboarding. Although new employees had always given the company high marks for its in-person, week-long onboarding event, maintaining that level of engagement with a virtual event would not be easy. Moreover, the “live” program was both labor- and time-intensive for trainers and learners.

To overcome this challenge, the company employed a flipped classroom model, using pre-recorded Allego videos to deliver many presentations while reserving “live” sessions for role-playing exercises and coaching.

Miersen explains, “We had a lot of content that we asked people to record. We put it into the platform and they [the new hires] watched that first. Then, day after day, there would be a Zoom call, where we would put the training that they consumed into action. We’d role play with scenarios. At the end of the day, we would give them a parting gift, which was an exercise: ‘Share with us the most important thing you learned today, or now that you saw that new product message, here’s a scenario or an objection that a customer might throw at you. How would you respond?’ This also made it very easy for us to pull in the managers who were going to manage these individuals and get them into the mode of coaching these individuals. And at the end of the week, we got a standing ovation.”