James Pursey’s Post

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of My Startup Diary. Another really busy week on the core business. But what I want to talk about today is enablement attribution, coaching attribution. I don't know what the right phrase should be for it, but how do you measure the impact? That's the word. How do you measure the impact of what you're doing, whether that's a big massive enablement program, whether that's a manager reviewing calls, whatever it is, right. How do you know if that stuff actually gets used, if it makes an immediate difference, and if it impacts a core commercial KPI and it sounds like? Some sense that that's something that would be tracked, but very, very few organizations track it and there isn't a standardized way of doing it. In fact, the most common answer that we get when we speak to revenue and enabling leaders is sending surveys. How did you feel before the training and how do you feel after the training, which is obviously pretty bias and also not quantitative. So you can't really do much with it. So we've been putting a lot of thought into this. And at its core, one of the scenarios that we're trying to solve for is getting rid of the blame game. I've posted about it a couple of times. You before, but you know enablement would typically say my program didn't come to life because managers didn't do their job and managers would typically say my reps don't follow the methodology because enablement didn't train them properly. And there's always this kind of tension that exists between those two parts of the organization when in reality they're all working in enablement and everyone has strengths and weaknesses and things they can improve. But the the Gray area that exists between execution and impact is such that people can take. Advantage of it, intentionally or otherwise. A really good example of this in my opinion is conversational intelligence platforms like GUN. So what happens is a business says we've got a coaching problem, we need to review more calls. Let's go and buy a coaching tool. And then they think that conversational intelligence and coaching tools are the same thing. So they spend like $100, 000 a year on something like gong. Gong gets used, but it mainly gets used by reps re reviewing their calls, something they could do for free just by looking at the call recording on Zoom or Google meets on Microsoft Teams or whatever it is, right? And then at the end of the year when it comes to renewal time. The conversational intelligence platform is able to paint a picture that the reason that you're coaching initiatives didn't get off the ground is because managers didn't do their job, managers didn't review enough staff. And what happens, which is utterly bizarre, is you renew the $100, 000 a year software right quite happily whilst you know, singing the praises about their brand strength, and then you just go and blame your people and blame your team. So rather than asking the right question of the technology. You put the onus on your stuff and that kind of behaviour does propagate this tension that exists between departments. So we think that we're heading towards a world where the default question that you should ask when procuring or particularly when renewing any product is, am I getting value from this and is this producing ROI? And if the answer is no, you should churn it or you shouldn't buy it, right? Like it should be really black and white. There shouldn't be something that's heavily opinion based, right, So. And technology is where we need to be demanding the the focus there. So if you've got a coaching problem and you've spent $100,000 a year on a on a tool that you think is designed to solve your coaching problem and it doesn't. Do not buy or renew that product like it's it's completely kind of illogical. Don't listen to anything that they say unless they can prove to you that it's something worth having definitively, quantitatively, not just through clever brand positioning. Don't have it. And I want to see this take off across software in its entirety, right. So not just within the enablement category, but any kind of tool in that you're buying needs to be able to show you for a fact within their products and analytics suite if it's getting used. If it's having an impact both on behavior and on the bottom line of your business and that probably gives you an indication of the direction that we're taking with Replicate Labs and more on that to come. But just put that out there going into the long weekend. So have a great long weekend everyone and hopefully we'll have some really exciting stuff to share with you soon. Thanks.