How to Use AI to Create Highly Engaging Enablement Programs | Zoom Sr. Manager of Sales Enablement

Leggett, and I'm part of the SAS TRA team. We're really happy to have you here today. I'm just going to go over one or two housekeeping items before we pass it over to Michelle for today's session. So these are interactive sessions. This is a 20-minute session. So we really do encourage you to keep your camera on, unmute yourself, and really join the conversation. Other ways to join the conversation is to simply ask a question or make a comment to Michelle within the chat box. Or raising your hand to speak. So we are really excited for today's session. If you want to watch the session again after the event wraps up, all of these sessions are being recorded and available on demand. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce Michelle Dotson, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at Zoom, who will walk us through today's session. Thanks, Michelle.

Thank you, Lindsay, and thank you all for joining me today. I know that you probably have seen some sessions. I'm wondering if anyone's like me and has locked their door so their child cannot come into this session. If that's also you, just, you can raise your hand or use the reactions. If you hear screaming, that is my 3-year-old. But I'm really excited to be here, and I'm so excited to share with you how you can use AI to create highly engaging enablement programs. So, um, as Lindsay mentioned, I run Global Sales Enablement at Zoom, and I happened to start about a week before this global pandemic that we're all in. And so we had to make an immediate shift to using new ways to engage our sellers. Um, and some of the ways that you can do that— and I'll go through this and I'll share also how Zoom is, uh, using AI today. Um, some of the ways that you can use AI are around prospecting your seller, helping your sellers prospect. Sorry. You can also use AI to onboard all of your new sellers and your sales managers. And my favorite way, and the example that I'll share, is around how you can use AI to increase rep competency and productivity. And so AI is not this new cool technology. It has been around. There have been various forms of different AI technologies over the years. And it's really changing, you know, how you sell, how you train, and how you create engaging programs. So let's start with prospecting. I'm sure some of you have heard of different prospecting tools that you can use to help your sellers. There's a lot of AI tools that give your sellers and your managers kind of buyer propensity, buyer insights to help them prospect. You know, what I've used both, we have things at Zoom, I've used it in other companies as well, is AI to help your reps spend the time with the prospects that will be the most fruitful. And also to give your recommendations. AI can actually help you say if this is the, buyer profile and this is my rep profile, what are some recommended ways that we can have a successful— ensure a successful sale? So it's not just about intent buying and intent signals around prospecting, but also just giving reps insights into how they should maneuver through the sales process. And one thing I— sorry, did forget to say— is if you do have a question, you can drop it in the chat or feel free to ask me as I'm going through any of this. Um, but we all know that the, the most successful reps tend to still practice prospecting, whether they're a more senior AE, maybe they're, um, they've been doing this for a long time. I've seen a lot of our sellers who still focus on prospecting be really successful, and using AI to drive that engagement and drive the automation behind some of the more tedious tasks will help those sellers, which then means, you know, increasing your sales velocity, being more successful. So another fun way and another way that I love to use AI is around onboarding. So let's just, right, let's think about traditional onboarding for a second. It's, I start with a new company, maybe there's a new hire orientation, Maybe there's a bootcamp and you like fill my mind over 4 or 5 days and you expect me to know how to do my job. From there, there might be some e-learning you want me to take or shadow my peer. And my ramping as a new hire is solely dependent on extremely busy people with quotas. And so AI then reduces the stress on those team members that have to help me ramp. It can tailor training and onboarding kind of information and learning paths to the specific new person based on their skill, maybe their industry knowledge. And it creates this safe place for new people where you're simulating actual selling conversations and allowing them to practice. I think the worst experience that anyone can have is not feeling trained, not feeling competent, and having to try it out in front of your manager and a customer. Customer. And so you're truly kind of creating this place for them where they can practice their pitch, their— do they know the product? What if there's some objections from a C-level, uh, buyer? And so you're allowing them to kind of experience that before they get to the customer. Um, and really I think it's about building confidence and empowering them to have really, uh, just important and relevant conversations. So that's, you know, some ways we've used it that I've used AI in the past as well as we onboard our, our sellers. But what I really am excited to talk to you guys about today is how you can use AI around increasing your rep's competency and their productivity. So the next couple slides, I'm going to show you what we do at Zoom as an example, because it's— we could talk about just kind of like larger theory and general kind of openness to AI, but I want you to see how we use it. And what we have noticed is that, um, really you, you can create this, um, place and this space using AI for your reps and your managers and truly give them the insights they need of how they can get better as a rep, how your manager can coach your rep. Um, and you are ensuring— as, as I, I run enablement, I'm created, I don't know, hundreds and thousands of programs over my career. Sometimes I can't really verify whether or not they know something. I can do the— I can create the best training, I just don't know if they got it. And so you can use AI to almost test and ensure that your sellers know exactly what you need them to know. So I want to introduce you to Jenny. Jenny is our sales Simulation Manager at Zoom. She happens to be one of our newest members. She is the 22nd member of our Global Sales Enablement team, and she is 100% AI tool that we use from a company called Second Nature. So Jenny, this is actually Jenny, the image that we use, um, what our, our sellers see. And if you're thinking, Michelle, this is a little weird, like That looks like a person and you're talking about her. She has a name and a title. I want you to know I was there even just a couple months ago. So Mike Fisher, who's on my enablement team, came to me and said, you need to see this, and I think it'll provide extreme value to our sellers at Zoom. And I saw what Jenny could do and was so excited and knew this is exactly what we needed to quickly ramp our sellers at Zoom. So Jenny truly is treated as one of our teammates. She even has like a fake HR profile, right? She has an actual manager, like a real live manager. She lives in our LMS and she can hang with the best of them. So what she's helping us do is have conversations, certify kind of competency on product. Health exercise as our reps are pitching different, you know, methods of selling. And she's providing tailored feedback to the reps as they go through these exercises. So the two main kind of use cases we use Jenny for is positioning the value and speaking about products at Zoom and telling our Zoom story. And Jenny has You know, there's 22 of us. That might seem like a large enablement team, but we are helping a very global new, um, kind of sales organization, and we cannot be in every single practice call, and Jenny is there. So, um, how does Jenny specifically work with our reps? Uh, Jenny is asking questions. She is actually having a conversation. She is listening, knows what to— what you, uh, your rep should be talking about, the key points you want them to address. And she's then making some judgments, and she is sharing, you know, what she needs to share as a buyer or whoever you set her up to be. Um, like I mentioned earlier, Jenny doesn't get ruffled. Jenny can be tailored. So if you work with a global audience and you need her to be more direct in one country versus another, or you want her to be she's a C-level executive and she doesn't have time for this conversation. You can fine-tune how you want Jenny to interact with your sellers. Um, so they get to practice with Jenny, and she is kind of— she's, she's like if it was practicing with you or me. She gets to, to help them in their process. And then Jenny also works with our managers, and so there our managers now have this dashboard that they use where they can see their team's strengths, their weaknesses, how they rank as a group against other teams in the same type of certification or program that she's helping with. And my favorite part is she coaches and she gives insights not just into their product knowledge, but how they can get better at pitching. Do they speak too fast? Do they use filler words? Did they seem confident? What was their tone? Were they engaging? These are, especially in this virtual world that we're in, these are incredibly critical things that your sellers need to fine-tune to be successful. So our managers love this insights that they get from Jenny in those coaching conversations with our reps. So they can really focus on what they need to focus on. Versus just thinking maybe their reps know how to do something. And so why does Zoom love Jenni and why do I personally love Jenni? I have spent the majority of my career in sales and sales operations, and I, I love data and having support data in any program. And so I wanted to show you numbers. The programs that we've used Jenni with have been optional. So they were not like, you're required or you don't get paid, or like you're required or we're going to tell your boss, right? They were optional. And we saw 100% manager and rep participation. Now that's like unheard of unless you threaten people, right? Like people were really excited to use Jenni and work with Jenni. And we saw on average 39 minutes of practice. And some of these pitches and some of the sessions we had her do are a 5-minute conversation. So if our sellers are truly spending almost 40 minutes learning something and practicing, we know that the next time they're in front of a customer, they're gonna feel way more comfortable and way more competent having that conversation. And then overall satisfaction, right? So let's look at Jenni, using Jenni as a whole. 4.5 out of 5 average. That's a high score if you look at any usage of a brand new tool. And 95% of the people who've used Jenni at Zoom prefer Jenni over the traditional methods. And so we will continue to ask this until we see that maybe they don't want to work with Jenny, right? Um, but they, the traditional method is that I record myself, I upload my recording, and maybe my manager has the time to look at it and coach me versus having this one-on-one dialogue with Jenny and getting feedback and insights into how I can get better. Another thing that I, another reason why that I love Jenny is she's helped me standardize and the enablement team standardize how we train and prepare our reps. So we now have this process around analyzing, which means getting the time to study whether it's a pitch or a product. Our reps get to practice with Jenny. So Jenny's gonna, you know, go back and forth and have these conversations. And then our reps get to execute. They get to pitch. They get to go and speak to customers, and they get to go be successful after having practice. And then we just repeat. And this is now this cycle we are bringing to Zoom around learning and how every time we release a new product or every time we release a new pitch, we will be using Jenni to help certify. And I mentioned earlier, it's not a very, it's not a future thing. AI is here. Your competitors are probably using AI. And the longer I think, to me personally, I think the longer that a team takes or a company takes to adapt to this new form of learning, kind of the, the longer you're going to be trying to play catch up. And so I saw a question in the chat about why do I prefer, prefer Jenny over a real person. I don't prefer Jenny. Jenny just multiplied to be 1,000 of us versus the 22 that we have. And we use real people, so we'll have contests and Jenny helps us scale and she helps us score who's the top performer. And then we have real people go in and pick the winners. So it's not just 100% automated through AI experience. We do still want to make sure that Jenny gives us enough feedback and that we can make decisions based on if there's a contest and if there's a winner. And your manager is then still using Jenny in a real live conversation to coach. So I know we just have a couple of minutes left and I'm, I'm happy to open up and take questions. Um, I, the 3 things, if you leave with nothing else, I just want you to know this. You can use AI to tailor and customize learning, whether it's based on your learner's profile, their skills, what they need in their job roles, it really does help streamline learning for your audience. And you can also use AI to predict and automate some of that work that your reps may be extremely busy in day to day, so you can remove that and allow them to have extremely kind of meaningful conversations with your customer. And then my biggest advice is if you do use AI, that you treat that technology, if you have something like Jenny, as part of your team. Our reps think it's fun, um, they call her by name, they ask Jenny to help, and it just has become an extension of our team. And so I think that's one way that we've been able to truly adopt using this new way of learning with the sellers at Zoom. So I'm happy to open it up to any questions, and I can look at the chat or feel free to unmute if you do have a question. So the tool was called Second Nature, I think. Thank you for whoever put it into the chat. Yes. So our managers wrote, uh, our managers can have dashboards, um, that they use to then provide feedback to their reps. So they get specific, whether it's on a pitch or a program that we've used Jenny to, um, to help certify, they can go in and then use that information from their rep session to provide feedback. Um, so Jenny does give them those insights. Um, so we— the correlation between the best performer sales numbers versus the best performer according to Jenny. What we did see in some of the data is the reps that spent the most time practicing, there was a correlation between our top reps and the reps that spent enough time practicing. And then we did— obviously you see a correlation between the reps who didn't practice at all, or maybe were practiced 5 minutes versus the 39 or 40 minutes that was average and where they are on the leaderboard. This is still something new, but definitely a metric that we are internally going to be tracking to see if there is a correlation between more practice and more successful reps. Um, how much do I estimate that I save with Jenny? Again, I, I don't know that I have that number specifically, but if I just as an enablement leader and I'm working with my sales, leadership team, we knew that the cost for Jenny and the amount of practice we would be able to give somebody in a year of the subscription we're paying for is like, it was a no-brainer for us to bring Jenny on. And so I truly think it just depends on where you are, the funds that you have, the resources that you have, and how much you've kind of invested in learning for your sellers as well. I don't have those numbers. How do I teach Jenny? So Jenny, we— Second Nature is the technology, and how we teach Jenny is we may create almost a framework for a pitch or for a product certification that we want her to help us with. And then we have a couple different reps and people go through and simulate what we want Jenny to pick up on. So there is some prep work that you have to do to train Jenny for any session that you're creating, um, but you're essentially training her. You are telling her what to listen for, you are telling her when to ask questions, and you're giving her a couple different variations of examples from people within your organization. And then you can let her go and help the rest of your sellers. And no, we did not create Jenny in-house. Again, that was through the company Second Nature. Any other questions that you would like for me to answer? I know we're pretty close to time. The biggest surprise was how much more excited people are to— how much more excited people are to talk to Jenny than to us. So I think, um, you know, we're a fun group at Zoom. We like to have a good time, and people were just so extremely excited with their results, with how it was programmed, with how it was set up. Um, it's just kind of funny, and we laugh about it. So I'm, you know, maybe we'll do like an NPS score, like who's your favorite enablement person. I don't doubt Jenny will be top of that list. And can Jenny link to external context relevant materials? So I don't necessarily know the answer to this. I know that we have her linked in our LMS. And so we have additional content in our LMS. You would need to ask and work with Second Nature to understand if, you know, what Jenny can and can't do. I'm really— I'm sorry, I'm not sure of that answer.

Do we have any last questions for Michelle live?

Hopefully this was—

Michelle, thank you. Yes, it was great. Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you for those that joined the conversation and asking Michelle these great questions. We've got a few more sessions for today. So hopefully you're sticking around. And again, thank you so much, Michelle.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Bye.