Name: How to Build a Better Launch Plan (with a Little Help from AI)
Uploaded: 2025-08-06T18:32:19.740Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 3 s
Description: How to Build a Better Launch Plan (with a Little Help from AI)

Transcript for "How to Build a Better Launch Plan (with a Little Help from AI)": and thank you all for joining today's webinar on how to build a better launch enablement plan. I'm Melanie, and I'm joined by Gina. We'll do a couple introductions here in a second, but we're excited to have you here, and we'll get started here in just a couple minutes. I'm gonna allow just a few more people to join before we get started. Awesome. So hang tight, grab your coffee, and we should be good to go soon. Awesome. We're gonna get started. Alrighty. So today's webinar is all about how to build a better launch enablement plan. Right? We, it's a topic that we talk a lot about internally at Spekit. Right? We're a fast, innovative company constantly, you know, pushing new product innovations to the market, to our customers internally. We're launching all sorts of concurrent beta programs and more. And, you know, the big question is how do we ensure that ultimately our teams are successful, and that we enable them effectively? So, today's webinar will be led by myself. I'm a cofounder and CEO here at Spekit. I started Spekit eight years ago really to rethink the way that, you know, we do enablement in the market, and I'm happy to share a little bit more later. But I'm really excited to be joined by Gina who joined our team probably about six months ago on our product marketing function. So, Gina, I'll let you introduce yourself as well. Yeah. Thanks, Mel. I'm Gina Rago. I'm the senior product marketing manager here at Spekit. A little background about me. I started out in digital marketing and demand gen, and then I shifted my focus to product marketing. And that's really where I kind of found my fit. So I've spent the majority of my career in high growth b to b startups. So when I saw this position at Spekit, I really jumped on it because I felt like Spekit filled that gap in product marketing that I felt over the years, in terms of enablement. So I was really excited, to join the team. And so here, I kind of shape how we go to market and lead, PMM for net new business. Awesome. Thank you so much, Gina. Great. Well, today, we're excited to talk just a little bit about the shifting landscape, you know, why more than ever now is it important to really work through this process, you know, with cross function cross functionally as well as, you know, as you think about enabling your customers. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Then we're really gonna go into our planning communication playbook. So this part is gonna be led by Gina. She's really completely revamped how we do, our product launches internally and how to really think about who owns what, etcetera. Then we're really gonna go around the, gonna go into the playbook for enabling and reinforcing, sharing some best practices, how we think about different frameworks for determining what level of enablement is gonna be required, what should be included. And then finally, we're gonna go into, showing a few different examples of how you can leverage templates and AI and solutions like Spekit, ultimately to simplify your product launches. So excited to, to cover that today. Feel free to drop any questions in the q and a or the messages chat. Both of us will be monitoring that closely. So with that, just to to give a little bit of an introduction here, you know, we live in what we like to call expected to change economy. Right? The pace at which your products are evolving, your services, the pace at which the tools that your teams are using are changing, everything is just getting faster. Right? As the rate of innovation continues to increase, you know, we I I work closely with our r and d team, and I see how fast they're starting to develop, right, as artificial intelligence has started to bring benefits to how they develop, to how they test their products and services, etcetera. And so as innovation continues to accelerate, we really need to think about, you know, what's working and what's not. How are we gonna help our teams keep pace with the level of change that we're now seeing on a weekly or daily basis that used to happen maybe on a quarterly basis? And so as this rate of innovation has dramatically increased, so has the urgency to drive revenue and execute. Right? Competitive landscape is only getting hotter, more consolidation, more adjacent, competitors that are now starting to encroach in your space that you need to now compete against. And, ultimately, we all have revenue goals. And this market is one that really only rewards, you know, companies that both grow and grow efficiently. Now as this pressure has increased and we're feeling it across every part of the business from your pressure on your product, your pressure on your reps and your CSMs, so has the gap between how you used to do things, how teams used to enable, how teams used to document, how your teams used to communicate change, and their effectiveness. Right? Because as this velocity has increased, the effectiveness of these old playbooks, hey. Let's get everyone together and do these large scale trainings once a quarter or do these product certifications, those just can't keep pace with that with with how fast things are moving now a day. And the reality is that that has a real consequence on your business. Right? Because when you think about kind of, like, the bringing a product to market curve, there's the initial phase which is kind of, like, you know, the build phase. And in this example, I'm taking a pretty simple, feature. Right? So let's say it's a few months of building, then you've got what I would consider the launch phase. Right? That's kind of like the testing, maybe beta programs, then then you're starting to put all the materials together and then you've got the launch date. And then oftentimes, there's a huge gap between when you launch it and when you actually start seeing the benefits in your revenue, right, and what I would call monetization. And that wasted time is really what I think every single person that's involved in enablement, product marketing, product, etcetera, should all be working together to reduce. Right? How fast can we launch something and actually start seeing profitability and monetization from it? And this is where I really believe that it comes down to enablement. Right? How fast are you enabling, of course, your customers and we could do a whole separate webinar on that, but, ultimately, how fast are you enabling your internal teams to properly message, position, demo, compete, handle objections, and more on all this new functionality. And the reality is that, like, if you haven't quick you know, quite cracked the code today, it's only gonna keep getting, harder. Right? According to Salesforce, they interviewed 5,000 reps. 57% of them believe that competition has gotten tougher this year compared to last, and I'd say most of them would agree that competition was all pretty tough last year. Right? So as you think about win rates and close rates, that's really important. And then 67% of sales reps don't expect to meet their quota. And last year, 84% missed it. So, you know, when you think about how do you grow as a business, how do you ensure that you're, you know, ultimately growing your revenue, you need your reps to feel confident that they can hit their goals. You need them to feel confident that they can ultimately meet their quota. And we believe that ultimately enablement is one of the biggest answers to helping bridge that gap. Now before we go into that phase, I wanna pass it on to Gina here to talk a little bit about our planning communication playbook. And the goal is that, you know, this is a framework. This is the one that we use. This is the one that we've iterated on, but that, you know, you can take inspiration from it, etcetera. And we'll be sharing some templates and more at the end, and and following up via email so you can get some of these resources to use internally. But without further ado, off you, Gina. Yeah. Thanks, Mel. Alright. So what is the product launch reality we're all facing? Right? We've spoken with countless product marketing and enablement professionals, and a clear theme that we've seen across the board is that product launches often feel very reactive. Right? And I'm sure a lot of you have done a lot of launch planning in similar tools to, you know, what's shown here, ClickUp. But the reality is that studies show that 54% of teams lack functional handoffs between product marketing and sales. And because of that, even with, you know, the best project management tools in place, many launches still suffer, from disconnected handoffs to misaligned teams and this mindset where teams treat launch day like it's the finish line. But in reality, like Mel mentioned, that is just the beginning of the process because a product launch isn't just a one day event. So at Spekit, we've learned that the way to kind of mitigate that very reactive feeling of a product launch is to lean into three key areas in the launch planning process. The first one is getting a really crisp, idea of what our roles are. Right? So before you can get started, you need to define who's doing what. The second is aligning on the actual size of your launch. So not everything needs, let's say, a full playbook and not every launch release or new functionality, etcetera, holds the same weight. And then third, make sure that everyone knows which tier includes what. Right? So from meetings required to, GTM and enablement delivers deliverables to the tools involved, those activities and responsibilities need to be clearly defined so no one's guessing midway through what they have to do. So you wanna go to the next slide? Yeah. Alright. So first and foremost, who actually owns the GTM motion? Having clear roles and responsibilities, like I said, here will help you understand how all the different cross functional teams kind of come together. There are so many different stakeholders in the GTM machine, but for us at Beckett, we really look at five key roles, which are product products, sales enablement, rev ops, and then PMM. And this is for us, and I'm in product marketing. PMM is kind of like the nucleus of them all. So we are the ones kind of driving the product launch efforts. But at other companies that may be held by sales enablement. So for these roles, you know, product, they're the ones who guide the product development, products. They're the ones who support the product team. They're ensuring that the processes, ops trainings, product decisions, etcetera, are all executed efficiently. Sales enablement is in charge of sales readiness. So they're equipping the frontline sellers with the brand materials, trainings, knowledge, all of that that they need to actually sell that new product or feature. And then rev ops removes silos across the team. So they should streamline the process involved, from lead generation to sales outreach to customer onboarding, etcetera, support tooling. And then product marketing is the team who really is driving that messaging, positioning. We're the ones in charge of the actual go to market launch. We drive adoption and measure revenue and market success. Absolutely. And I'd say, like, one call out is, recently, we actually forgot to involve rev ops in one of our launches because, frankly, we thought we had it covered across all the other functions. And then we realized later that one of the things that we, that we do on our, opportunities. Right? So in our CRM, one of our reps are working deals is that we track requested features. Right? So for a competitive deal, what are some of the requested features that are coming up that ultimately leading to us, you know, potentially losing the deal when we do a loss analysis. And that really helps us ultimately. That's one of the key data points we use to drive the road map and, of course, in addition to getting that in conversation intelligence tools, etcetera. And what we realized, basically, a month post launch is that as we've launched one of these, like, big new products, we hadn't updated our requested features list. And so, basically, we'd had a month of calls where we hadn't actually in the CRM logged all the late the new related feature requests that were coming on that new product. And so it's just a very simple, example. We're not having the right people in the room means that you might, you know, overlook some of those small simple, changes that ultimately affect, you know, how you're how you're monitoring, how a launch is going, how how is it landing, isn't landing. And, again, these are more leading indicators. Right? Win rate, close rate, close revenue, especially with, you know, sales cycles that are typically three months or so tend to be lagging indicators. So we try and identify what are some of those leading indicators and where are you, you know, ultimately measuring them. So that's just a simple example of, like, where not having one of those people in the room can ultimately lead to, you know, to to us on this. Yeah. That's a good point. So, like, I created that slide for us as our go to market launch playbook, and we just iterated on it and updated it to include rev ops so we don't forget that team because it's so critical to launching a product. Alright. So outside of the actual roles and responsibilities, alignment on language and definitions matter. So we've standardized at Beckett terms like alpha, beta, release, GA, to keep teams internally aligned on what's ready, who owns it, what needs to happen next. So the DRIs are the teams responsible for each one of these launch phases or categories, here are what work for us at Beckett, but kind of depending on your your company segment or industry or product line, the teams responsible for each one of these things may play different roles. Okay. Alright. So once you have your framework in place for your launch, and the phase is kind of standardized, you can then determine the impact of the tiers on your business or your pipeline revenue, etcetera. Again, here, tier one is going to have the biggest impact. It's the largest launch, and you're putting the most effort behind it, whereas a tier four will have the lowest impact. And down at this end, these releases will be felt the least across everyone, if at all, and will require very little GTM or enablement activities. And this model, in particular, helps us at Spekit kind of right size our effort and our researching and our messaging based on the level of impact that we're seeing. And it's not then based on a gut feeling or a specific team or stakeholder, asking for a specific tier, we know, hey. If it meets this criteria, then it'll be tiered accordingly. Yeah. And I think just one call out here. We'll talk a little bit more into when we when we shift to the enablement section. But one of the miss mistakes I'd say or one of the learnings we had is that we used to, classify basically, like, our what I would consider kind of, like, external go to market tier for a product launch, the same as the enablement tier. We didn't distinguish between the two. And what we've realized is that even though some capabilities that you might launch might not necessarily be, like, the biggest, most exciting net new market expansion capabilities. Right? So that might be, like, a large integration that you're launching that, like, is really, really excited to, like, your existing customer base and tuning customers, but you're not necessarily gonna be doing, you know, a press release and all those exciting things around it. From an enablement standpoint, driving those behavior changes is significant. And so what you're gonna see here is that these tiers are really speaking to basically the level of effort that we're gonna place and the kinds of goals and measurements that we're gonna put in place when it comes to bringing the product to market externally facing. It doesn't necessarily have to do with how we're gonna be enabling on it internally, which will distinguish that in a little bit. Yeah. That's a great call. Thank you, Mel. Because, again, those external activities that we're gonna talk about here and the internal enablement activities, do not have to be paired. Sometimes they will look very different across different tiers of launches. Alright. So now that we've mapped out kind of the different tiers on external facing things, this is where they translate into those external activities. So for really high impact launches, we'll have full scale campaigns where there are numerous external facing net new activities. And by net new, I mean, we're not iterating on something that we already have or we're not updating documentation or materials. We're creating brand new assets for this type of launch and not everything will be net new, but a lot of them in a tier one will be. For lower tiers, however, there's a much smaller lift and many of the GTM activities are more on that update end instead of the net new creation. Now I imagine you're thinking, you know, like, what about those enablement activities with these kind of like what Mel was saying? Again, you don't have to tie go to market activities and external facing things with enablement efforts, and and Mel will kind of go through that, a little more. And one special call out I'd say, I'm realizing I don't think we have a specific slide on it, Gina, but I do wanna raise it here. I'd say, what's been really painful in the past is not only the fact that, like, this is just a long list of, materials and assets, etcetera, to create, and then when you pair it with all the enablement resources, it's massive too. But it feels sometimes that or at least in the past, it felt like we were almost reinventing the wheel. Right? Where we were dividing and conquering the work. So it's like, okay. This team over here is working on, let's say, like, the newsletter updates. This team over here is working on the help center updates. And the things were, you know, we had to divide and conquer, but we weren't starting necessarily with, like, what is the upfront work. And so what we're really, really focused on is making sure now that, like, with every single feature that we build, we have what we call a product brief. It's a document the product team puts together that really outlines, you know, why we're building this, what are the goals around it, you know, what are the metrics that we're hoping to drive within from a usage standpoint or from a business impact. We're including things like what's in scope, right, and what's not. And then, like, if there's you know, what's gonna be included in the beta phase versus GA. So that's really kind of like the high level, like, what's in product. Then the PMM team actually takes that document and puts it in what we call we use Gemini Gem that you can do this in chats we do too, where we take that and then we've already trained that gem with our general messaging and positioning. So we ask it to then basically, we have a template that we use for messaging positioning, and then we basically take that product brief and then create a general, like, here's a high level messaging and positioning outline for this new functionality. And in there, again, we're gonna you know, we use AI to get, I'd say, 80% of the way there, leveraging all of our existing trained, you know, messaging. Then we then customize it, and then we basically use that as the nucleus to then auto generate as much of these materials as possible. But if you don't do it in that order and you don't have that kind of centralized product group that's up to date and then that centralized go to market messaging positioning doc, it'll feel like a lot of extra work. And so I think that's just something that we've really learned, especially as we're adapting our processes to try and include AI to everything we do to move faster. And, frankly, with the piece at which our product is evolving, we have to think about ways to to move faster. That's a big one. We're also leveraging AI to actually connect directly. We use Jira as a product management tool, so that contains a lot of, like, the more granular, technical requirements around different features and user acceptance testing, etcetera. And so, just this week, actually, our team developed an internal tool where it's basically gonna take all of those tickets as well as the product brief to then generate technical release notes for our support team. So trying to find ways throughout the process to leverage AI to docu to generate as much of this documentation as possible and definitely something that I'm interested in in finding ways to automate within our product as well. Yeah. I think that's a great point too because I think I've been on both ends of before AI. I was doing all of those different activities by myself, net new. You know, they can be templatized to a a certain extent, but, really, it's like you're generating all of this new new stuff, and it just takes so much time. But now with the advent of AI and how we're utilizing it, it doesn't take nearly as long as it used to. So it's been really exciting to kind of see that shift. Alright. So now that we've kind of, like, talked through the launches and the defined, tiers and mapping it back to specific external facing activities, we have found that, like, you need very clear swim lanes defined. If everyone is seen as responsible for something, no one's responsible for anything and then, you know, chaos ensues. So at Beckett, we use RACI, but you can use whatever, responsibility assignment matrix that works for your company. Another common one is the rapid method. But I personally love a good RACI. So for us, that outlines, who's responsible, accountable, consulted, and or informed for every deliverable for a product launch. And we use it across, product and PMM enablement products to stay ahead of any miscommunications or scrambles that might happen and those are the ones that cause us to feel very reactive. So here you can see an example of what a racy for both internal and external facing activities in a product launch look like. But, really, you can develop any sort of racy or rapid method that works best for your company so you're defining who does what, when, and why, essentially. Yeah. And I will say these are all, I'd say, frameworks that we follow I would say probably 80% of the time, like, being you know, let's let's be honest. Like, we're not perfect and, like, no company is gonna, you know, follow processes perfectly every single time. You know, at the end of the day, people jump in when when there's help and support, but I do think that this ultimately helps drive one of our core values is is owning it. Right? And it's all around, like, accountability and ownership and, like, just being able to, you know, point ace someone a certain direction if they need support or something's, you know, not happening. And so it's definitely helped us in in delineating, you know, ultimately who's responsible so that it's not, you know, a, there's not duplicate of work because we've definitely fallen in that bucket before. And, you know, ultimately, someone knows how to prioritize their time based on what they're gonna be expected to do. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So then kind of once you have that RACI in place and you know who is supposed to be doing what, this is kind of what it looks like in practice. And, again, depending on the tier, we'll stagger time lines for content and enablement and product readiness, etcetera. So this timeline isn't a task list by any means. It's really that, like, shared road map that helps us keep momentum, and most importantly, like, set expectations. It also allows us on the marketing and enablement side to better partner with r and d. If they know that we need, let's say, a four month lead time for a tier one launch, there's no surprises at the end of a launch. Right? The teams aren't scrambling. You're not feeling that reactiveness as if you were to say, hey. We're gonna do a tier one launch, but you we're only gonna give you, let's say, thirty days out. So having that clear timeline will really help you move forward with a shared goal in mind. Yeah. And I'd say on average, we we try and aim for about, like, quarterly big releases. We'll typically have, like, one or two, what I'd consider tier one releases per quarter. This quarter, actually, we didn't have a full tier one release because we had one last quarter. And this quarter, we actually focus more on just, like, basically, how do we mature a lot of the functionality that we've launched. And so it'll it'll vary by by company. I'd say in the past, we had more time. In some cases, we just have compressed timelines. Right? Even though it's a tier one release, it doesn't mean that it necessarily took a tier, a tier one time to build. Right? And that's happening increasingly too. For example, we we built deal rooms earlier this year, and we our original estimates were actually longer for it than it took place. And so there there's a little bit of crunch time, and I think that's that's only speaking to just, like, how much faster teams are developing, which is super exciting. But, you know, I would anticipate these these timelines to continue to compress, and that's where really making sure that your collaboration, your your swim lines are super clear and then figuring out, you know, what are all the different ways along the path that you can use AI to, to automate some of that documentation. Some of those updates is really, really important. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. This is kind of, like, the idealistic way that you can go about it. But to Mel's point, no one launch fits a specific template each time, so you do definitely have to kind of stay on your toes and make sure that you can iterate. And you know, hey. Because I don't have this much time to do this, at least I know, you know, who is responsible for what, essentially. Now before you go into this, Gina, I I actually just wanna call this out. So I will say, at the end of the day, you know, we're an enablement company, but I laugh that we're a documentation company. Right? And so we really try and be our best users, and I'd say we try and document, like, everything we do internally because I think documentation is the the gift to your future self. And so, yes, Alexa, I love that you called it out. Simply It's Spectacular. We have a a rating for that. We wanna make sure that everything that we need is meets our standard for being a Simply It's Spectacular feature. But we we were doing most of our collaboration across functions async. Right? And I'm gonna actually show some of what that looks like in a bit here, some of the templates we use, etcetera, in the product. But still, there was just things that were falling through the cracks, and there were still time, you know, just it's we're moving fast and things were, you know, really the the more tactical refinements of, like, wait, who's gonna get communicated to and what? And so, actually, prior to Gina joining, we instituted a biweekly product launch meeting. And that meeting, it's an expensive meeting in the sense that there's a lot of folks in it. Right? You've got r and d leadership. I join it, I'd say, about half the time. But we typically have our our president and COO. We have a representative from our, CS team. We have enablement. We have PNM product. It's it's a it's a big meeting. We are very organized around it, so there's a lot of prework that happens for it just as as part of it. But that meeting is where we go over, like, all the upcoming launches, especially the ones where there's gonna be go to market alignment, making sure that we're super clear on what the go to market plan is, what's required, has there been any shifts in, like, what's actually launching or not. And then separately, we also use that meetings go over any recent launches or if something's in beta, going through the metrics. So this is one for a more, you know, upcoming launch versus one that's that's recently launched. We started, this is an example. We actually use our we we document this in our, in what we call a spec in our product, but we put this in a slide here so that you can see what it looks like in a slide format. But this kind of just quick summary that is updated every, other week, making sure that we're super clear on what's coming. So, anyway, Gina, I'll let you touch on that, but I just wanna give a little bit of context around how that that came about and why at the end of the day we decided to add a meeting for it. Yeah. I think that's a great point because you don't wanna, like, bog yourself down with a bunch of different meetings, but I do feel like this our biweekly product launches meeting in particular is really necessary, for all stakeholders involved to kind of understanding what what what's coming down the pipe. Right? So everyone across the organization can go and look up status or find assets or understand responsibilities and stay aligned without those, like, frantic one off slacks or pings or async meetings that don't really have any other purpose than just to find status of what's happening. So yeah. So kinda like what Mel was saying, we do this in our own platform, but you don't have to. If you don't have the, like, our tooling or any tooling in place, a simple Google slide with a template like this will work basically anytime. Right? So you just need a single source of truth for that planning, the communication, and the execution of what a product launch looks like with your stakeholders involved. So this is a a template you can use. Otherwise, if you have a different tool, you you can put it in place there. But having that this type of thing accompanied with a biweekly meeting just to stay aligned, I think, is is really necessary, especially as you're leading up to some of those bigger tier one launches. Love it. Thank you, Gina. Awesome. So this is really, I'd say, a lot of the prework that happens. Right? And there's there's communication that happens. We use Slack as our collaboration tool, but we have different channels that we set up which we'll speak to. We didn't go in detail into, like, each different part of the collaboration process, but, we typically have an initiative channel for each one. So there's there's quite a bit that happens upfront. And then this section that I'm gonna talk about is really, like, what our enablement process looks like. How do we determine what to enable on, what that's gonna look like, etcetera, as we launch something? So, I love reminding people that launch day is just the start. Right? And it's crazy because as, you know, a team and as a product company, you spend so much time, you know, building and testing, anticipating the launch, but the reality is that the real work begins really, like, right after launch. Right? You're gonna do your big kumbaya. Everyone's gonna be excited. You're gonna do your big social post. It's gonna feel like a win and it should. It's a huge milestone, but it's just the first milestone. Milestone. Right? The real work begins in terms of customer education adoption along with monetization, which is really where the enablement piece comes, into play immediately after launch. And I think that this is where I'd say most teams, most companies typically, fall short. I'd put ourselves in that bucket too in the past, where, you know, we do the big launching, we do a big training, and then, you know, kind of crickets. There's a little bit of reinforcement here and there, but that about it. And so this slide, I I talk a lot about this topic in my book. I think that at the end of the day, companies are really good at change management. Right? The upfront planning, coordination, collaboration, but change enablement, which I would say encompasses really the more human elements, right, the communication, the documentation, the training, the enablement is where, oftentimes, there's a lot less time and people dedicated. Right? Because in the change management phase, you've got all your technical resources, project managers, program managers, product ops, like, all those those people that we just spoke to. And then in the change enablement phase, which is really, like, where you're gonna start seeing results from all this work. Right? If your reps aren't demoing it, if they're not mentioning it on calls, if they're using wrong mess messaging, like, what's the point? Right? And I think the problem is that we don't dedicate enough time here. And so here, I'm gonna walk through a few different, tips as well. So the first one is I think is really important to align on enablement t shirt sizes. We use tiers to determine the product launch in terms of the go to market and kind of product engagement. We use t shirt sizes just to delineate between the two to really designate, you know, how big of a change is it gonna be for our internal teams and what does that enablement level look like, in in in terms of the activities associated. Then, you know, this is something that I just recommend in general. Like, we are we really try to, like, never start from scratch on anything. Just as I spoke earlier about the go to market things, we also talked about that internally. Right? So, like, of all of the internal enablement resources, whether it's objection handling, competitive battle cards, etcetera, where can we use templates? Where can we, you know, ultimately start there? And then finally, how do you make sure that you're communicating those changes and reinforcing that behavior? And so with that, the first question is, like, well, what level of enablement do your reps require? And we have a slight variation of this. I'm actually gonna use, yesterday, we had Kira. We we held a a workshop on this topic at our Denver office, and I invited Kira who leads enablement over LinkedIn's talent solutions over. And she actually, used the concept of small behavior change versus big behavior change, and I love that language because ultimately that's what it is. Right? How big of a behavior change is it gonna be for your teams in terms of, you know, needing to change the way they communicate, who they communicate to, the demos, etcetera. And then how innovative and differentiated is your product? That's what we we like to use versus is this expected market functionality. And so to give an example, like, what we would consider an Excel change, is, you know, a comprehend is is something that's both really new and exciting and and differentiated in the market, but it's also gonna require big behavior change for your reps. And so that's where we're typically gonna have a larger comprehensive strategy where we're gonna have workshops and updates and structured learning in addition to the just in time reinforcement. Right? So an example of that, which I I can show later is our deal room's functionality because of the kind of the unique take we have on it as well as our new, AI sidekick like assistant. Right? Lots of product training, lots of new positioning, new personas, you name it. What we consider a large product change is one where there's a big behavior change, meaning there's, like, new demo flows, new top tracks, etcetera, but I'd say it's expected functionality. So for example, last year, we launched, new content integrations. Right? So Google Drive, SharePoint, etcetera. You know, while that was exciting for us, and and big for our existing customers, at the end of the day, you know, most content platforms have those. And so while it was a big training effort and enablement effort, it wasn't necessarily something super exciting to market. And so the way that, you know, the the the effort required is gonna be slightly different. Now what we consider a medium change is one where, it's a smaller behavior change, but it's new and different. So for example, this is where you can use a little bit more async learning, which we'll talk about with our product playlist or, combined with just in time guidance. So an example of that was we launched content recommendations, which are AI driven recommendations in our, just in time assistance so that, you know, if a rep is writing an email or reviewing a Gong call, we'll scan that and recommend content from your library for it. The reality is that there's not a big behavior change for reps because it's right there. They don't need to, like, do anything. It's it it just shows up. So our reps and our CSMs didn't need to, like, go through intensive training on it. The value proposition is relatively, you know, obvious, but it was differentiated. So there isn't a huge amount of enablement there. And then finally, what I would consider, you know, expected functionality and small behavior change, that's maybe some small admin things on your thank you, Timmy. Those are, like, some small, changes. For example, like, we added new different types of metadata on our documentation. Right? That's really gonna be just like a, here's an FYI that you need to know so that if the rep snuggles upon it, they can quickly ask a question, get an answer, but we're not gonna make, you know, waste a lot of time distracting our reps to learn that. And so similarly, and again, I won't go through each one of these. We then align on what are the enable activities, by launch. Now this is a very granular list. We literally list out what specific content is required here, so I'm not gonna go through each one. But this is where we use a combination of what I'll show in a bit here, which is like a playlist of the content that you're gonna create. You might actually get a demo in what we call our spectacular team Tuesdays, which is our all hands. So typically, we'll have a section in that where The product team can demo new functionality. Again, that's great for, like, what I would consider Excel and large changes. Otherwise, you know, if it's a smaller change, we might do, like, an async. So and we will we'll delineate between these changes to determine ultimately what the enablement activities are. And it's really important to do that upfront in the planning process because all this work needs to happen, right, and, leading up to the change. But having this alignment and getting your head of sales, your head of CS, and ideally a couple reps or managers to agree on the level of of change it is is gonna be really helpful. And I'll go through some of these examples. But with everything, you know, I think one of the big challenges is, like, you can create a lot of content. You can create great trainings. You can, like, put in all this work. But this challenge, I think, and it's the one that I believed in since day one is is really the delivery problem. Right? At the end of the day, you know, you can spend a lot of time creating a product online product certification, but by the time your reps take it, the product will probably have changed. Right? Like, that's just how fast iterations, whether it's a UI, a UX, you're getting customer feedback, things are changing. And so the lifetime value of that product certification is frankly minimal. And at the end of the day, it's they're just not so effective for retention, it tends to be checked the box. And so in terms of, like, what outcome are you driving, it's limited in value. Right? Similarly, mandatory team meetings, live trainings, right, the worst is if you schedule it end of quarter when your reps are going into calls. But at the end of the day, you know, we I was actually talking to the office one of one of our reps yesterday, and he was, joining that product marketing conversation. That's what he was highlighting. He's like, at the end of the day, like, what all I'm thinking out is the meetings I've got on my calendar, what I need to prep for them, what I need to follow-up. And so joining that, like, live training that feels really important to enablement and product marketing and product doesn't necessarily feel important to me in that moment. So I'm distracted. I'm probably writing the email on the side, and it's not because I have bad intentions, but it's because I'm just trying to prioritize what I need to ultimately close my deals. And so that's one of the limitations there too. And then, you know, we all live in Slack, Teams, Google Meets, you name it, and there was just so many updates. One of the things that we are really, really, I I put my foot down here is, like, you can communicate something in one channel. Don't communicate into five channels just to make sure everybody sees it. We need to rethink what that looks like because every single time there's a notification, you're potentially distracting, you know, hundreds of people depending on the size of your company. So, you know, at the end of the day, we wanna limit noise, limit distractions, and it's really difficult to measure engagement. It's difficult to measure whether people have actually seen it. That's oftentimes where we see the problem. And so email and Teams updates, Slack updates tend to be to be a challenge. And we know I'm not gonna spend too much time on here, but at the end of the day, this is where I think a lot of the crux of the problem is is that and and I dive into it in in my book on the chapter in contextual learning. I talk a little bit about memory function and how that works and, like, why the forgetting curve is a thing and and how it's not just a cool you know, an interesting concept in a graph, but the reality is that if if concepts aren't reinforced, you're going to forget them, especially now with the amount of time that we are on our phones and the amount of information that we're digesting on a day to day basis. Like, your brain just can't retain it all. And so at the end of the day, you're doing these these activities, but you're not necessarily gonna actually get the outcomes, which is your reps have mastered that information. Right? Because at the end of the day, there's a big time lag between when they first hear the information and when they're actually in that situation, that conversation, that follow-up, that objection handling where they actually need that information. And not just when it comes to comprehension and attention, but also when it comes to your content. So, we did a a research of enablement sorry. Research report on the impact of enablement with the SEC, the sales enablement collective, where they interviewed hundreds of sales enablement and and product marketing leaders. And across the board, 86% of teams believe that their reps use less than 60% of the content that they create. Right? And you can see that distribution right here. And so only 3% of teams believe that their teams use 80% or more of the content they create. So at a minimum, you're dealing with 20% of the things you're creating are just not getting used, but we know that number is a lot higher. And 70% of product marketers say that their biggest challenge is enabling sales to use the right content effectively. And so this isn't just, like, honestly frustrating us. Ask someone that creates a lot of content to not have it used. But it's also just a huge waste of money and time and resources. And, frankly, this environment is way too fast and competitive to afford that to afford that waste. So the question is, like, do reps just not care? Right? Why aren't they doing it? And and my thesis is that, you know, I think there's just too much that we're expecting of them. Right? We're expecting them to be pipeline experts and to prospect and create playbooks and forecast. We're expecting them to be product experts, to know more products inside out and keep track of things and handle objections and competitors. We're also expecting them to be collateral experts, to know exactly what case study and white paper and deck to use with which persona and industry in which situation. And we're also expecting them, of course, to be system experts. Right? They should also know how to use the, you know, CPQ quote that we're that we're introducing the new product packages in and to, you know, know what to select and how to use and etcetera etcetera. Anyway, the list goes on, but it's just it's a lot. Right? And it's across all these different technologies, all these different tools. And so I don't think that anyone has bad intentions. But I do think that this, environment that we're in is really tough. And frankly, I don't have a silver bullet, but it is one that, you know, we're trying to to really address then and solve. And the one thing that I know that science facts is that when information is reinforced and reviewed by your brain, it actually leads to retention. And so that's why I'm just such a believer in reinforcement, and reinforcement can start in all different ways. Right? In your weekly sales, all hands. In your one on ones, we do fifteen five, which is a, like, employee engagement tool. We'll often add a question there related to a product launch. Right? Hey. How comfortable are you feeling with deal rooms? Like, what are all the different ways you can reinforce it? But then also, what are the different ways that you can reinforce the knowledge and the content and the information that you're creating in those natural and effective possible. And that's really where we believe that, you know, the next way of enablement technology is contextual and just in time content. Right? So the first iteration was let's move everything into the cloud. Right? Google Drive, SharePoint, I've led that that vision. The next one was let's centralize all this information, make it easy to tag and organize, and there's a lot of amazing vendors, Highspot, Seismic, Confluence, etcetera, that that led that charge. I believe that the next iteration of that is, yes, let's make sure all that is centralized and we can manage it and analyze, etcetera. Let's actually leverage AI to surface that information where reps need it because if they can't find it, if they are not using it, if it's not getting reinforced, they're not gonna remember it. They're not gonna be able to use it. And that's ultimately why we believe that rather than having noise and communications in a lot of different places, surfacing and ideally automatically in a contextual and personalized way, the information that you are wanting your reps to ultimately use in their day to days is so important. And so here, I'm gonna go through a little bit of why just in time I think is important, but then I'm actually just gonna go through some examples of those templates that I was talking about earlier, so that you guys can see what it looks like. But what we, what we really believe is that enablement for reps, right, should be contextual. So meet them where they are in their flow of work, personalized to them and relevant to the deal they're working, to the buyer they're reaching out to, and really simple to use. Right? They shouldn't have to go to multiple different places to find the information, your training, your content, your collateral, your deal rooms, whatever it is should be in one simple place. And that's really where we're building Sidekick, which is the just in time assistant related to our Spekit platform. So the Spekit platforms are your centralized information. Sidekick is the assistant that follows the reps wherever they are with that information that they need. And so when you think about change management, change enablement, the old process I should actually have to say change enablement. The old process was, you know, or or maybe the process that a lot of teams use today is let's make a change, then let's go create a bunch of different assets in different places, then let's create different training sessions, then let's do all these different disparate follow-up tasks. What we wanna figure out is how can you do that in one single workflow. Right? How can we ultimately centralize that information and reduce a lot of the redundancy by making it possible for you to document it, communicate it, reinforce it, and measure it in one single workflow. And so that's what I'll I'll showcase today. So the first piece is really how can you centralize information. So from a platform standpoint, we're gonna show you how you can create a playlist. A playlist is a, you know, set of content for a product launch, from a template. So you can have templates that you just reuse, then you can use that playlist during a live training or to do a sync, right, if you're assigning an async, and then how you can send weekly product updates. Then we're gonna talk about how you can communicate the change in multiple ways. Let's say you can meet you have an update. You can either send a, you know, light browser notification. You can send an email communication, or you can send what we call spotlight, which is an in app alert, something really to get their attention and point them to the content. So different levels of severity. By the way, all of this is part of our, XLLMS ratio where we're not sending a spotlight for every little change. We're only doing that for our Excel changes. Right? So being very clear and having that repeatable playbook around how you communicate and how you reinforce is really important. And then we're gonna talk about how you reinforce it. Right? What are the different ways? So my favorite way is the most personalized way, which is, you know, having it automatically happen to reps when it just happens to be relevant to them. So that's using Sidekick. But you can also create knowledge checks. Right? I personally just don't believe in long form assessments and, certifications. I think that they take massive amounts of time and, frankly, there is zero, scientific proof that they work. It there there just isn't. I do believe in a recall, though, and so that's why we we've created, like, a very small light light, bite sized knowledge check. It's like up to four questions that you can, you know, create and make sure that people understand it because I do think that recall is a form of reinforcement, but the long form, let's have people sit down for hours and do something tends to to to have diminishing returns. And ideally, knowledge checks aren't sent the day after you take something. They're they're they're taken a couple days later. And then finally, you can embed and reinforce where it matters. And then finally, measuring. Right? The most important ingredient is making sure that you're tracking internal and external adoption. And so the first one is if you're creating knowledge checks, etcetera, you're gonna wanna look at, at, you know, internal comprehension. How did people perform? Are people understanding? Are people getting things wrong, etcetera? Then there's internal adoption of assets. Right? You've created all these resources. You've created objection handling and battle cards, etcetera. Are people using them? Are people reviewing them, etcetera? And then finally, buyer engagement. If you've created assets that your reps are sharing either, you know, in one off emails or creating what we call the deal room or digital sales room where they can combine those assets, are your buyers engaging with them? How much time are they spending on it? Are you getting, you know, positive signals that this is actually influencing pipeline and deals so that you can ultimately help prioritize the content you're creating in the future? So I'm gonna go through a few examples here. For those of you that aren't familiar with the platform, you might need to sign up for demo to actually better understand the full platform. Today, I'm gonna really just focus on specific examples for the benefit of everyone that that's joining for this specific use case. But I'm I'm gonna show you all what that would take for us, internally. So let's start here. Can everybody see yep. Okay. Great. So you can see my my screen here. So here, I wanted to to start by actually showing you. So this here, just for context, is our web application. So this is where you can centralize all the, knowledge, content, trainings that your team has. Right now, I am in our templates, parent topic, and then specifically in the product launch templates. So we create, templates for pretty much everything. So one of the things we do is that for product launches, we have a specific set of content. Right? So, typically, hey. Is there a buyer persona associated with the launch? Is there battle cards, talk tracks, objection handling, product messaging? And all of these are are as much as possible optimized for AI. So I'll just go in here. So this is for an example of our second deal rooms. You'll see that we have, you know, links that you can fill out, etcetera, and then we have, basically, prompts in here. So that then based on another asset that you upload, you say, hey. Using AI, you know, help me fill this out for this specific new feature and it'll fill it out. So the idea is that you have templates for everything. Basically, what we do is we typically clone these and add them to a, topic. So you can basically, clone them and add these all to a, to another topic that you create for a specific launch. So for example, we're launching a new version of our Slack integration, hopefully in q three. And so for that, we would basically take this, clone it, and create a new template for our Slack integration. So, I'm gonna exit out of here for a quick second. So to give you an idea of what an actual, like, launch playlist looks like, here again, I'm starting in the web app. So this is the one that we created, for our Spekit deal rooms functionality. So deal rooms is our latest big product, which is why I picked it. We considered it an Excel change from an enablement standpoint because it was both new functionality, but we also have, like, our own twist on it since we have it in Sidekick. So other than, you know, most platforms, you just go to a web app and you create deal rooms. Yes. Our reps can do that too, but we also have it in Sidekick. So there's differentiation. There's a lot of benefits that we have in that. There's added features that I'll show in a few minutes that that make it really different. And so we really had a big, I'd say intensive, enablement strategy for that. So you're gonna see here is that within deal rooms, we've, related a few other topics. Right? So we're not expecting everyone to go through the deal room competitors topic right now, but you can access that really easily here. This deal room competitors topic also lives under our general competitors topic. But here to give you an idea of what that looks like, typically, you're gonna have your reps go through. So this is a playlist. They can go through the high level initiative overview. We create one of these for every single, spec. So this is the a similar, version. This is the end user facing version of that template slide that Gina had showed for new features. And so here you can see it. We link out to all the related resources. Right? Beta program overviews, etcetera, or slide decks that have been imported. So all the different go to market resources that teams want to quickly access can be find found here. And I'll show you why that's important for quick and easy access later. And then a high level overview of what the functionality is as well as what's included live functionality in progress. So that's a high level overview. This is meant to be more of like a a knowledge doc. But then you'll see here that we also, allow you to import slides and more. So here you're gonna see that we have a little training playlist here for reps to go through. So here, we want them to go through all this content here. This is a high level overview of what deal rooms are. Once they're done with it, they can go and mark it as reps, can know that they've actually completed it, once they're done. And what you're gonna notice here, and this is a huge belief that I have, I believe in reusing assets as much as possible. This here also happens to be the asset that we want our reps to use when they're sharing it with their customers. And so what you're gonna see here is that they wanted to, they can actually create a custom of this deck here that's gonna open up in Google Drive so that they can then basically customize that, they can edit, etcetera. So we'll create a copy for them right here. In Google Slides that they can go through, make edits to, etcetera. You know, maybe they wanna pull assign something else. Maybe they wanna pursue this to their specific buyer. But ideas that they can, like, make all the changes right here that they would use, and then they can always add that to a deal room later. And so the goal is that it's really simple for them once they've made those updates to then say, hey. I now wanna add this to a specific deal room. So, again, a deal room is one that you'd send. So let's say I wanted to add this to my deal room, I can add it right there. So the goal is that we're trying to fit into how they work versus creating new workflows. So going back to our in playlist, again, go through it. The great thing is I'm gonna get all the analytics as to who's looked at what and when, etcetera. Again, this is our demo org, but you can see that you can use specifically who's looked at what views, external links, who's marked things as read, and go through that. So our, playlist tend to have messaging. This is specific we literally cloned our internal, playlist for this where we link to different resources as well as videos and more. So the goal is that we have lots of different types of content here that your reps can go through. So, typically, we'll try and keep a a product launch playlist to about eight or nine, resources that we want reps to go through. So hope that gives everyone an overview here of what that looks like. Now the great thing is, again, once they've gone through this just like they would go through a typical course, the issue is how do we make sure that they can find these resources? How do we make sure they can revisit them? And so that's where we really focus. Right? So we have everything from discovery questions on rip and replace to objection handling, you name it. That's really where this ticket comes in, where we wanna make sure they can easily find that information. So going back here, I'm just gonna show here. You can see here these this is all the content I just viewed in the web app. I can open Spekit at Sidekick, the assistant, at any point in time. And that's, for example, that deal room initiative is super helpful because I can really quickly click to any of these resources right here. So I can favor this as an end user for easy access and then quickly find that information. But I don't need to be going back constantly to that first, to that web app. I can find all that information right here that I can use, share, and I can do all those sessions that I was just doing right here in the assistant. So with that, moving on, the next piece is let's say that you actually have an update on deal rooms. Right? You launch deal rooms, and you update. We then use product updates that we send on a weekly basis every Friday to communicate updates. So here again is a copy of our updates, how we do this. We'll see here is that we have a topic. I'm just gonna show you all where that lives. So we have a topic called product updates where you'll see that every single product update we have is listed right here. This all lives under product road map and updates. And this is, again, very similar to our production org. This is how we, we basically clone our demo org. So you'll see here that we have, our product updates is under our product road map and updates, but in that product road map and updates topic, you can also find our two year vision, our external road map, etcetera etcetera. But these product updates are sent in a number of different ways. So, once your product updates so here, our head of product creates a quick overview of here the quick highlights, any links to where that information lives, as well as overviews on core initiatives. So for each core initiative, these are like the XL or l size projects that we have going on. You'll see that there's an update on each one and a link to the respective specs. So for every single, initiative we have, we have a high level overview. Now what that looks like is let's pen here that I just written this update. I'm our head of product, and now I wanna communicate it. This is where you can communicate in different ways. One, you can select what teams you wanna communicate it to, and then you can enter a message, you know, hey. Please make sure to review your your latest update. And then we offer a few different communication options as I showed earlier. One is an in app notification, which I'll show you in a second. That is a browser level notification. One is an email. One is a spotlight. So here, if I open up Sidekick, this I could open it up anywhere. If I'd received a notification, I would get a little red dot here, and you'll see that this is an example of what that looks like here. So here I have that product update. In this case, I I would have gotten the the red notification, And you can see here I can view that update right here. Again, we link out to the different initiatives. So in this case, since deal rooms are, continuing issue that we're making updates to, you'll see that we have a specific link to the core deal room initiative. So the whole goal is how to make it as simple as possible for reps' financers. But let's say that I didn't see the update. Right? That's where as a rep now that all this information is indexed in Spekit, whether it was uploaded via Google Drive, SharePoint, or Confluence, or whether it's documented there, I can then ask, you know, hey. What is the latest, update on deal rooms and what is coming soon? Right? I'm trying to use language that reps would use. But let's say they didn't read the the latest updates. We actually had one of our reps just come back from paternity leave, and so he wanted to catch up, and he was he was using, as I could quite a bit where here you can see that based on these recent specs, here are all the different updates, etcetera, and then here's what's coming soon based on the different resources. And then here's some additional functionality in development. And you can see here that it's pointing to our internal road map as well as the latest product update. And so this can be really helpful. Of course, here we're gonna see that there's suggested questions, etcetera. But the whole goal is that it's really easy for folks to find answers. Now moving forward, I'm just gonna show a couple different examples just so you guys can see what that looked like. So if I'd sent that email update, it would have looked like this. Right? So you're not having to recreate and reinvent efforts in one workflow. You can send an email update. You can send that notification, or you can send a spotlight. So just to show what that looks like here, you can send what we call an in app alert. So that was that spotlight option. And so this is really great for reinforcement. So let's say that you have been communicating that deal rooms are coming to your team, and now it's time to learn. This is where you can target an in app alert to, or spotlight to I recommend only email or, let's say, your homepage on Salesforce, and that's really to, like, call attention to something really important. So in this case, we use it specifically to call attention to the playlist of information. So here you're gonna see, hey. There is a, you know, deal rooms are coming. It's time to learn. Here you can view the topic, and you're gonna see here that it's gonna point them to that exact same topic that we were looking at in the web app with all those different resources. So, again, these are just small types of reinforcement that you can use to make sure that your team knows where to find the assets and ultimately how to reinforce it. But then the reality is that they're not gonna be, you're not gonna be paying them constantly. Right? You're gonna send a spotlight and update and there's a cadence. You wanna minimize how much you're pushing things to them. What we really wanna make sure is that reps are pulling the information. Right? That when they need it, they can easily find it. And so that's really where we leverage, I'd say, the, AI functionality of our recommendations. But let's say I'm a rep. I'm on an opportunity, and here or, let's say that this customer in particular is interested in, some of that functionality or competing against, you know, and this is a a a a demo example, of course, but you're gonna see here that there's, all this information here that may or may not be relevant based on who are competing, etcetera. That's where when I open up Sidekick in, Salesforce, it's gonna scan the entire library here. You're seeing that it's narrowing down content. In the first place, it's gonna point you to just, you know, related content to just general guidance on opportunities, things like your security process, you know, order form templates, etcetera. But then you're gonna see that it's actually recommending content share externally. So here you're gonna see that maybe you want to showcase content related to a Showpad replacement. Right? And so here you can narrow down that content right here. And so you're gonna see here that based on what the customer is looking for, determine that these resources, maybe the Spekit versus Showpad, making this up might be relevant. And, of course, you can share more here or other resources might be relevant to send. And so from here, I can really quickly add that to a deal room, or or share. Or I can review internal knowledge. So here, you might wanna review, in this case, Showpad versus second, clearly. This is a Showpad, competitive opportunity. But you'll also see they can recommend, you know, relevant resources too. Similarly, here, let's say that I'm following up with my friend, Dan at Qualified. He's a he's a he's a dear friend. And let's say that I'm writing him an email. They use an existing vendor, for their enablement needs and they were really excited by deal rooms. Right? This is where I can, as a rep, open up Sidekick and, again, it's gonna automatically surface the information that I reviewed. So I don't even need to let's say I missed the training playlist. Let's pretend I missed every notification because some reps do. How do I make sure that the information that I created, those assets that are so powerful for them to send are still service to them? And so that's where you're gonna see that our content to share externally here is gonna highlight things. So here it's recommending, hey. You might wanna share this video on deal rooms. And immediately, they're gonna get trust because they can see how many internal views there are, how many times it's been shared already. It looks like a lot of people are sharing it, and when it was last updated. And so here, if you have this video that you created, they can again just add that to that deal room really quickly here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and add it to the qualified deal room. Boom. Boom. I've added it. Or, of course, you might have internal knowledge related to that where if I click on Spekit at deal rooms, this is information that you cannot share externally. You'll see here that there's additional information that might be relevant, like that initiatives overview, etcetera. So the whole goal is that AI is taking all that work. Sidekick is taking all that work out of your reps' needs and servicing the exact content they need organized by themes. And then here you'll see that Spekit could also automatically service the deal room that the rep had for this particular customer. It takes literally seconds to create. I'll preview it just so you guys can see, but, really, the goal is that they can easily click that link, and you'll see here that that video that was recommended is now in that deal room so that they can share that with their buyer, personalized to them. I'll show this example here. And, you know, with a quick high level exec overview, and that video here is surface to them as well. So the goal is that it's really, really simple for your reps to do everything they need in one place, and then, of course, get the notifications on who's looked at the deal room, etcetera, which I don't have time for since we're at time. But the goal is that your product launch actually now is converting into how reps are working in their day to day. It's not an event. It's not a one time thing. It's now part of how they're working where all that information that you created is naturally getting reinforced in their flow of work. And then next time, or maybe as a follow-up, we'll share a little bit how you can create knowledge checks and and quick reinforcement for that too. So with that, gonna head back here to the deck. We do have a product launch template that has a lot of what we discussed, and AI features. I will also be sharing a deal room with a lot of the materials that we covered today and examples. But if you have any questions on this, if you want best practices, feel free to reach out, especially your Spekit customer. We have a lot of our internal templates that we're happy to put in Spekit for other customers. So if you want access, please, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you very much. And then, again, my book can be accessed at justintimateenablement.com, where I talk about a lot of general best practices where the world is going, and, and really things for you to consider as you're rebuilding your enabling program for knowledge of AI. So with that, thank you so much for the time. Gina, thank you so much for stepping in, and, looking forward to, to hearing from you all soon. Thanks.