How SailPoint Improved Rep Productivity by 40%

Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Enablement

A common challenge enablement teams can often face is breaking the cycle of reactive enablement. When Barrett Sellers, vice president of global revenue enablement, first joined SailPoint, she recognised this challenge as an opportunity to solidify the enablement function as a game-changer for the business. “We’re very fortunate that we have a lot of support from the top down, and it’s given me the opportunity to build the enablement journey toward maturity rather than just being in that reactive stage all the time,” shared Sellers.

Previously, the enablement team found success in implementing an onboarding programme, the Academy, that focused on developing role-based competencies. Sellers knew that this programme was just scratching the surface when it came to preparing reps for a changing buying environment, and she had a vision to reinvigorate the enablement strategy to expand its scope. “We were building a new vision of where we wanted to go with enablement. I knew that it had to be beyond just an Academy,” explained Sellers. “It needed to be around content, communications, processes, and technology.”

To execute its new vision, the SailPoint team needed a mature solution to connect its programmes with a unified strategy built for scale. “We want to replicate our programmes so they’re scalable, and we look for what’s working in the organisation right now to replicate that formula,” said Sellers. “It’s repeatable every single time, especially with the trajectory of growth that SailPoint anticipates.”

Harnessing Strategic Enablement to Drive Behaviour Change at Scale

Sellers and her team effectively brought this new vision for enablement to life at SailPoint by driving operational rigour with its programmes and demonstrating impact. The team infused this rigour by centring their programmes on a call to action, or in other words, what they wanted reps to be able to do. For example, the team identified that conducting a customer support call for a resell situation was an important action for customer success reps to know how to do, so they created training to hone this starting in the Academy and measured whether reps were implementing it post-training.

In doing so, the team was able to validate the effectiveness of the role-based competencies taught in the Academy and partnered with HR to effectively weave those competencies into hiring practices. “We’ve gotten our competencies so dialled in that when someone comes in from another company, we can test them against our competencies to see how successful they would be as a seller in SailPoint and where we might need to dig in more with that person to get them up to speed as quickly as possible,” described Sellers. By making it clear what good looks like for reps from the beginning, the team has helped decrease ramp time by 34% and increase productivity by 40%.

With this focus on operational rigour and a clear call to action, Sellers and her team developed a balanced approach to equip, train, and coach reps, threading a unified strategy across all enablement programmes. For example, by aligning with sales, sales operations, and marketing leaders on key business targets, the enablement team developed a few core initiatives for the year and ensured all their programmes tied to those initiatives and reinforced each other. “It’s been very important to me that in our intake process, we go through the whole picture: does this tie back to our initiatives? And if it’s aligned with those initiatives, we want to make sure we tie the content, training, and coaching together. It’s one big circle,” explained Sellers.

A crucial part of how SailPoint has been able to drive this operational rigour across its programmes to equip, train, and coach reps is through its investment in a unified enablement solution through Highspot. One example of how the team effectively leverages Highspot’s unified solution to deliver strategic enablement is through their approach to landing selling motions in the field. “We build our Plays to our selling motions, so it’s taught together and tied into Salesforce and our methodology,” said Sellers. The team then gathers actionable insights into programme effectiveness through Scorecards and Highspot’s integration with Salesforce to optimise business impact. “With Scorecards, we can see where each individual person may be struggling or seeing some challenges,” shared Sellers.

Strategic Enablement Unlocks Sales Agility

As a result of SailPoint’s evolution toward mature enablement, the team has reinforced enablement’s value as a strategic pillar in the organisation. Applying a strategic approach to their enablement programme with the support of Highspot’s expert professional services team and unified enablement platform has helped SailPoint improve rep engagement in its enablement programmes by 37%. Stakeholders and go-to-market teams now rely on the SailPoint enablement team to help them proactively address problems they might be facing in the field, unlocking the ability to drive efficient growth for the business. “We’re starting to hear more about the future of the market, the competition, and customer problems from what the reps are hearing in the field, and that just helps us improve our programme every single day,” explained Sellers.