The best demos aren’t about showing every single feature in your product – they’re about understanding the root cause of your customer’s pain and finding an effective solution for it.
No one understands this better than Lish Gates, who at the time of the interview was Director, Global Revenue Enablement at B2B search giant Algolia. She’s currently Director of GTM Enablement at Lattice. We talked in a recent episode of the Demo Diaries podcast about revenue enablement, training the right way, and more!
Meet Lish
Before Algolia, Lush was in sales operations at iHeartRadio. She has a sales background prior to that, and was also in the Navy. Her career has had lots of jumps and journeys.
How She Defines Revenue Enablement
Sales enablement has been very tied to just the sales team, but the customer journey doesn’t end there. Once a prospect becomes a customer, the upsells come from working with those customers on other teams. Revenue enablement is there every step of the way with every customer touchpoint, supporting all the teams that touch customers.
Training Reps on Demos
Her training strategy depends on the role and the kind of demoing they’re doing. For example, SEs need more demo training than AEs or SDRs. The heart of her demo training is trying to map the problems Algolia can solve and mapping back to a vignette of the solution. Lish avoids that kitchen sink demo with every bell and whistle, where the customer is just waiting for it to end. Effective demos for her are about mapping products and solutions to pain points.
Their product is constantly changing, so they use a mix of on-demand training, leverage real-life tools like Chorus to keep reps up to date. Then they go deeper into mock situations where they play the persona of a person or company.
Algolia uses lots of different demo types. SDRs typically show short clips of similar customers or use cases that can be sent out to people and don’t really do live demos. For AEs, it depends on segment and type and problem because Algolia has a wide mix of use cases.
Who Creates and Maintains Demos
For new products it’s PMMs, they create the storyline needed to tell for specific features and pain points. For new use cases that they hear about from customers, AEs have a heavy hand in building those demos out. They’re constantly iterating to find what’s working and what’s not. Algolia also recently created a solutions team, and they made an inspiration library on the website so customers can explore different use cases.
The 2021 Revenue Enablement Stack
Conversational intelligence is high on her list because she’s constantly trying to understand what’s happening on the front lines and see rep flows as well to see what’s resonating. And those tools can create onboarding and learning and development material.
Also, she finds a need for some form of CMS to push content at the right points of the sales cycle and see how customers accept or reject that to see what they need to build more of.
Revenue Enablement Strategy
Accountability is key. The enablement team is essentially selling best practices, content that can help move the needle, and trying to democratize all that. It’s important to create partnerships and accountability with the management team, and that’s a big piece of the tactics she’s employed.
And she makes sure whatever she’s doing is measurable. Knowing she’s actually increased revenue is exciting, whether it’s by increasing efficiency or driving new deals.
Watch the complete episode here:
