Serena Stashak is the Manager of Sales Enablement at HealthJoy. We recently talked with her about building a Channel Enablement program, the power of RevOps with Channel Enablement, and how to effectively measure Channel Enablement programs.
First, tell us about HealthJoy.
HealthJoy takes the complexity out of being well. We do that by centralizing all of employer provided benefits into an easy-to-navigate mobile app. When you think about an employer providing benefits, it’s really part of your compensation and something you should be able and empowered to use. But often, it’s really difficult for employees to use their benefits. There are a lot of different point solutions that are popping up for pretty much every kind of health issue, and that’s going to continue. And as employers take advantage of expanding their offerings of point solutions, well, that’s great, but then the next issue is how do employers centralize all of that for employees so that they can use those benefits. HealthJoy helps solve this through using digital-first practices that we’ve seen work time and again with services like Carvana, Prime Video, or Spotify, to name a few. The result is guiding employees to affordable, high-quality healthcare into a simple, unified digital experience
Channel Enablement sometimes falls under Product Marketing, but in your case it’s under RevOps. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of that org structure?
There are a lot of benefits, especially if you’re a very data driven sales enablement leader. I really like to put data behind our enablement efforts, and thankfully RevOps has the keys to all of that. Our RevOps team is highly cross-functional. RevOps acts like the mechanics of the entire sales and enablement machine. They’re the ones owning Salesforce, and making sure everything is set up both for sales to function efficiently, and for reporting. For Channel Enablement, we then get a buffet of data options to choose from, and we can use it to learn, and then optimize our programs.
Let’s talk about measurement. How do you approach measuring the success of Channel Enablement programs?
We look at leading and lagging indicators. Your leading indicators give you breadcrumbs to correlate what you do with the result, so you can see if you have a reliable return on investment. Forrester does a great job explaining leading and lagging indicators. Leading are Activity, Quality, and Adoption. And then Impact is the lagging indicator.
Let’s unpack those indicators with the example of an onboarding program.
Activity: you can think of it as, did it get done? These are really important tasks that, if they don’t get done, we know it’s going to negatively impact the new hire’s effectiveness. Examples could be completing all product courses, or setting up regular one-on-ones with your manager.
Quality: Quality answers, how well did they do it? For example, with sales course curricula, It’s not only important that a rep completes it, but did they really engage? We want to set a passing score. And if reps don’t pass the first time, that’s fine. We give multiple opportunities to take it, but what we want to see eventually is that they meet the passing score.
Adoption: Are they using it? One of the skills we want our freshly onboarded sales reps to be masters in is Discovery and Consultative selling–skills we know are “must-haves” to achieve a reasonable time to first deal and first sell. Adoption tells us that even after a formal training such as with onboarding has concluded, there’a a “stickiness” happening and we can depend on our sales reps using those skills reliably.
Impact: Most organizations jump to impact without any leading indicators. Impact can look like days to the first client meeting, days to deal close, and revenue metrics.
All this allows you to reverse engineer. If you’re learning that reliably so many times, we are still not reaching those lagging indicators and affecting revenue, we can backtrack and look at consistently what’s missing in our leading indicators, learn, and adjust.
Finally, since we’re a Product Marketing Agency, have to ask: how do you work with Product Marketing?
At HealthJoy, Product Marketing is a small but mighty team. Our product is evolving fast, and so is our market. So Channel Enablement relies on Product Marketing to surface what’s new and changing and share competitive intelligence and subject matter expertise. We also stay in lock step on the GTM strategy to make sure all of our efforts are always aligned.
