Decreases ramp time and delivers essential product enablement

The Challenge

As a leading CRM platform provider with more than 2 million users, SugarCRM knows how important it is for organisations to deliver high-quality customer experiences. After all, the company’s mission is to help marketing, sales and customer service teams achieve high-definition service with their CRM platform that makes hard things easier.

The company has experienced tremendous growth over the years including the addition of new products and services. And with a commitment to creating customers for life, it’s extremely important that Sugar’s sales reps get up to speed on all of the company’s product offerings and stay up to date with best practices.

So, when Wayne Johnson joined Sugar as the VP of Global Solution Consulting and Sales Enablement, he set out to implement a framework that enabled new and seasoned sales reps on Sugar’s different products, the selling process and skills needed for success. “Our sales reps were really left to research and get up to speed on our products the same way as our customers,” he explains. “But, that didn’t teach them messaging or specific sales knowledge.” Additionally, the tool they were using at the time didn’t track what training reps completed or if it was making a difference. That’s when Johnson decided Sugar needed a system that was geared more towards sales enablement learning.

The Solution

When Sugar found Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly), the first priority was to double down on product sales enablement for their team of 75 sales reps. Johnson needed to train reps on multiple products which included features, functionality, positioning and how to correctly sell them.

By using Seismic Learning, Jonson organised Sugar’s five-part sales enablement process to ensure that reps knew how to sell Sugar’s products through key messaging, product demonstrations and implementation. Johnson also used Seismic Learning to roll out a qualification framework for reps.

“Seismic Learning really helped us create and organise training content based on our frameworks,” shares Johnson. “By creating that framework, we were really able to think about who we were delivering training to and who needed to take what. That allowed us to be able to set up Seismic Learning in a way that worked best for us, and I think that’s a critical part of training engagement and overall success.”

In addition to product and qualification training, Sugar created a path to onboard new sales reps. Prior to Seismic Learning, new reps were very dependent on other sales and engineer team members to be on every call in case there was a question they couldn’t answer. Now, Sugar uses Seismic Learning to scale essential training that new reps need to be sales-ready.

Seismic Learning also helped Sugar change the way they think about training and enablement. “We’ve really seen that learning doesn’t have to be an intensive and long course that requires hours of training,” explains Johnson. “Short and sweet works best, and I think Seismic Learning has helped us prove that.”

Outside of enabling sales reps, Sugar also used Seismic Learning to train nearly 500 people on a new corporate message. As part of the new messaging training for sales reps, Sugar used Practice to have reps write emails and deliver audio pitches using the new messaging. “The more they do it, the more they remember it,” Johnson explains. “I think that’s why we were so successful in rolling out the new corporate messaging.”

And because Seismic Learning’s platform is so user-friendly and intuitive, it was easy for Sugar’s marketing and customer services team to jump in and start using the platform too. “I can have someone come to me and say that they think we need a specific training course and I can have it created and ready by the end of the day,” shares Johnson. “With our previous platform, it would have taken at least a week to do the same exact work. Now, it’s so much easier. There’s not a lot of fluff, it’s organised and the lessons are so easy for our teammates to interact with.”