WorkRamp Cover Story: Enabling Organizational Change at Sprout Social

WorkRamp Cover Stories shine a light on some of the best learning leaders in the WorkRamp customer community. In this feature, we sit down with Peter Zink, Senior Director of Revenue Enablement at Sprout Social, to learn more about how he and his team serve as agents of organizational change to support Sprout’s sales and CS teams to thrive in their roles.

Tell me a little about yourself and your role at Sprout Social. 

My name is Peter Zink, and I have been running revenue enablement for almost four years here at Sprout Social. 

Revenue enablement is about ensuring that our sales and success teams have the skills, assets, and focus they need to be successful in their roles. My team is a mix of folks that work on product and marketing related enablement and then another group that’s focused on role-specific enablement. 

Our job is to problem solve all the change that’s going on with Sprout Social and figure out how we can best support our sales and success teams to deal with that change.

Developing and Managing Enablement Strategy

You support over 600 sales and customer success team members at Sprout. How do you approach developing a revenue enablement strategy that serves the diverse needs of such a large team? 

One thing I always go back to is overall business objectives and company values. 

At Sprout, we have an ‘always be growing’ value and mentality that encourages people to always be learning and open to learning something new. So having sales and success teams that are willing to try new things or take time to invest in themselves has been really positive and is a leg up we have.

In terms of that strategy piece, I try to link learning objectives back to revenue or retention or what I like to call deal quality. Are we talking to better buyers? Are we expanding our deal size over time? Are we shortening our sales cycles? Are we selling more add-ons? Start with those business outcomes, look at those quality metrics, and try to work back. 

What’s something challenging about serving a team that big, and how do you work through that? 

It can be tough because there’s a lot of stakeholders, but what’s been best for me is to get alignment with all of our key senior leaders in the sales and success org going into every quarter. Make them be a big voice in determining what’s valuable and what’s not.

Once we identify the priorities, we work to get to that universal truth and figure out any common learnings that are applicable across multiple roles, and then segment where needed to create learning that’s personalized to specific roles.

Making Managers Your Agents of Enablement

What are some lessons you’ve learned from growing and scaling enablement as the company has continued growing? Any tips you’d share with first-time enablement leaders at a fast-growing organization? 

My biggest tip–and it’s one that I am trying to do more of as well–is to start with enabling managers and making those managers the agents of enablement. 

There’s an opportunity when you’re a first-time leader to come in pretty early and start your enablement with, ‘Okay, manager, these are the behaviors that we want to see out of your team. Let me help you understand what we’re trying to get our IC teams to do, and here’s some resources to support you.’ 

At Sprout, we use the ‘meeting in a box’ approach. You build a set of two or three slides with talk tracks that leaders and managers can use in meetings to communicate company changes to their teams. Having a manager explain why this matters and what the day-to-day impact will be for their specific team is a much better mechanism because team members are hearing it from somebody that they trust and need to listen to, to be successful in their roles.

Empowering Teams Through Change

That makes a lot of sense. I heard something similar from another enablement leader as well. It’s not about teaching managers how to manage. It’s about giving them, like you said, the resources and the empowerment to lead their teams through change, so that’s a great tip. 

Speaking of leading your team through change, over the last couple of years, you’ve worked on some big projects to redefine sales and customer engagement processes. What are some indicators you looked at to determine it was time to do process improvement? And in general, how do you leverage data to inform your enablement programming? 

We implemented a sales methodology last year because we were looking for a significant behavior change within our organization. Our big ‘aha’ was wanting to get more customer-centric and customer-focused, especially during the first call. 

We started evaluating surveys and metrics coming out of trainings: What did you like? What was most impactful? How confident did you feel before and after the training? Then we leveraged conversational intelligence tools like Gong to track customers’ reactions to our sales reps’ behavior on calls, observing if customers showed interest, agreed to next steps, etc.  

We overlaid those behavior indicators against win/loss rates and saw that certain actions, like agreeing on a mutual action plan or educating customers about something new, drove better win rates, so having standard survey metrics and call analysis tools like Gong and Chorus have really helped with business performance.

Additionally, WorkRamp offers excellent opportunities for self-reflection and peer learning. We use prompts and exercises in WorkRamp to help our team think about how to handle opportunities and deals moving forward.

Love that there’s opportunities for reflection on learnings, which leads into the next question. How do you ensure your teams are actually implementing what they’ve learned? 

It’s really the behavioral tracking which we get from the conversational intelligence piece I mentioned. We also check in with managers on what’s resonating and what behaviors they’re reinforcing and noticing on calls.

We’re also good about incorporating any deals they’re currently working into their training so they can tangibly apply their learnings, and then we come back later and see if they won the deal or not. 

Lastly, we have a pretty high training completion rate here. For most of our trainings, we easily clear 85%-90% completion across the org, and that’s a huge credit to a lot of our senior leadership. They really care about their team taking things seriously, so we try to align on what those priorities are, and get them to drive accountability there with their people, and it works.

That’s an amazing engagement with your learning program and says a lot about how bought in everyone is to your learning culture. Can you share more about how you structure your programming in WorkRamp? 

We use WorkRamp for a couple of things. One is strictly e-learning where we’re mixing video, reading, and all the great things that WorkRamp allows us to do very easily in terms of creating variety in our training and making it an entertaining but informative experience.

Then we also use it for assessments, either straight up quizzes or more formal certifications if it’s a more serious effort. For example, we recently acquired a company called Tagger, which means new product, new messaging. We created a Standard Deliver certification which involved training in WorkRamp, followed by a presentation reps had to deliver virtually via Zoom in order to get their final grades.

That’s probably my favorite type of learning. It’s the biggest time commitment for sure, but if you’re confident enough to get on a Zoom and present it to your manager, that’s going to help you know what to expect when you get in front of a customer.

Lots of ‘learn by doing’. I love that. What impacts to revenue and retention have you seen from these enabling your team to better serve prospects and customers? 

Definitely seeing deals written today that we didn’t see three years ago in terms of recurring revenue and elsewhere. And that’s obviously a variety of things like different products and different teams, but I like to think that the training and enablement is playing a big role there as well, just focusing on the right things and thinking about how we enable on some of the more sophisticated things that we’ve done over the last two, three years.

From a retention standpoint, we’ve really spent a lot of time trying to standardize our customer journey around how we treat and handle customers, so we’ve done a lot of training and enablement around that piece. We’re seeing people adopt these processes in their day to day, and it has driven some great saves and better retention outcomes for sure.

Looking Ahead

That’s awesome to hear. Are there any other trends or developments in enablement that you’re excited about? 

Not to be cliche, but I do think AI is a big one for enablement. I think that there’s ways to create training content now with the scaled AI approach that’s changing the game in a lot of ways. 

AI is also going to allow us to process all the data we get in much easier ways. Today, the problem is I actually have quite a lot of data coming in, but it takes time to sift through all that and figure out the gold, so I’m excited about what AI can do there. 

In line with the data piece, I hope there’s a better alignment between RevOps and enablement over time too, where it’s just a very virtuous and complimentary cycle, where they have insight from a piece of data and we can deliver some targeted enablement to capitalize on it. That’s just going to make enablement better overall.

Last question, what is next for enablement at Sprout? What are you working on that you’re excited about?

Right now we’re trying to streamline processes–owning communications, managing the noise better, and really making sure that we’re focusing on the right things to better support our teams. So we’re managing stakeholders a little bit more and coming out with some communications, governance, and things like that. It’s been fun to figure out how we can optimize going forward. 

I’ve also been keen on what we build to support managers more on an ongoing basis when we roll out an initiative. So focusing on manager enablement development and the level of support we provide when something launches. How do we continue to partner with first-line managers and make that a great experience? That’s something we’re starting to dig into a lot more.

Awesome. Well, I’m excited for all that’s ahead for you and the Sprout team!  

Learn more about what it’s like to partner with an industry-leading organization that prioritizes customer focus and success: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/case-studies/. 

Want to build your own award-winning enablement program? Chat with our team to learn more about how the Employee Learning Cloud can help.