Sales Enablement in the Digital Age with Kathy Chou, SVP of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Operations at VMWare

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Kathy Chou, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales Strategy and Operations at VMWare. They discuss the role of sales enablement in the digital world, how to measure its ROI, and uniting sales ops with marketing and customer success ops through sales enablement.

• Kathy’s Linkedin
• VMWare’s Website

Sales enablement is critical in a digital world 

The focus must be on training your internal operations teams the same way you would train your customers and sales partners. 

VMWare has taken the approach of treating enablement as a learning experience, opposed to a one-time upskilling event. True enablement doesn’t stick unless you use learning in the line of business. In fact, Sales Enablement is now a part of the onboarding process for VMWare.

Sales enablement process at VMWare 

VMWare developed an internal learning experience platform and integrated it with Salesforce to provide support within the marquee tool. This integration offers customized learning to support the preferences of the learner.

Measuring ROI of sales enablement processes

A general guideline is to take care of the learner-aligned metrics (usage, satisfaction, and experience), as well as pipeline-related metrics (creation, management, and acceleration) through sales enablement activities. 

Improving the go-to-market process for Sales Ops through sales enablement

Don’t rush to automate, as it can be dangerous. If you automate an under-developed or poorly-documented process, you are accelerating the damage it will cause. 

Having accurate predictions based on cold hard data helps create trust at scale with buyers. Make your systems, processes, and tools intuitive and agile so that they’re baked into the learner’s journey. This helps them scale across disparately organized teams so that they can respond as the business grows.  

Using data to improve processes 

Your data has to be the single source of truth, as bad data can spawn bad processes. Once you have clean and high-quality data, ensure that your processes are iterative so that you have time to learn from internal feedback and use those insights to improve them. 

Uniting go-to-market teams without an organized rev ops function 

Customer experience must now be a part of the selling motion, the business model, and the operating model. The key to doing it successfully is a clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities to create a seamless customer journey across the marketing, sales ops, and customer success ops functions. This strategy must, again, respond to the audience segment. 

Recommended episodes

• The Six Pillars of Revenue Operations with Rhys Williams, VP Revenue Operations at Convercent
• Tracking & Accountability in Revenue Operations with Krystal Diel, Director of Revenue Operations at Capacity
• Sales Enablement Manager: Drew Elston of 6Sense Insights

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