How Sales Leaders Can Leverage Technology To Engage Reps And Accelerate Growth With Amanda Ambrose
In a world where knowledge always changes, you can leverage technology to engage reps and keep them up to date with much-needed information. The show’s guest today is Amanda Ambrose, the co-founder and COO of Level213. Amanda discusses with Chad Burmeister about different technological solutions for knowledge management system, learning management system, and call coaching. Listen to this episode and discover how to properly integrate AI without giving your reps tools fatigue. You wouldn’t want to miss this!
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How Sales Leaders Can Leverage Technology To Engage Reps And Accelerate Growth With Amanda Ambrose
I've got Amanda Ambrose with me. She's worked for some pretty compelling companies, including Vorsight before where my good friend, Steve Richard, works, M3 Learning, which is Skip Miller. Skip was one of my early trainers. She works for a company that's not 213 but Level213. Why don't we go ahead and ask you, Amanda, to share with the audience? First of all, welcome to the show. Second, what does Level213 mean?
Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Level213 is a sales enablement consultancy firm. 213 is a degree above 212, where we all know that water boils. That's a change state but that cusp of change is not good enough. We're going to go above and beyond that. We're Level213 for a sustained change in your work.
I would call this conversation 301 class and 401 class. Strap in. Get ready. We're going deep on this stuff. We're going to dive right in. The topic for all of our readers is how sales leaders and sales enablement can leverage technology to engage reps and accelerate growth. Before we get there, I like to have our readers understand how you did get from there to here. When you were a kid to working with companies and helping executives, what was your passion when you were growing up that you can say, "That was my passion then and it is now?"
I have always been an athlete and a competitor. I ran varsity track as a freshman in high school. Before that, I was showing hunter jumper horses. I was a cyclist for a period of time. I've dabbled in a lot of things. Everything I do, I've taken it to the max. I'm back to horses now in my competitive efforts. I show on the West Coast Jumper Circuit. As it applies to business and my company, we're looking at how do we get in with these growing disruptive organizations partner with the revenue leader to look at what is best in class? How do we enable their reps? Any processes, tools, systems, anything that they're doing that makes them as effective as possible in a customer-facing conversation, whether it's voice, email or whatever that is, if they've engaged with a customer, they need to be top of their game. They need to be the best in class. What is that? We build that. We train that. We do all of those pieces.
In this world, there's so much automation out there around email, social outreach, voicemails and SMSs. It seems to me that the pressure on that leg of the stool, which is the face-to-face human interaction, it's becoming more important. The lights are on in the darkroom.
There's so much technology that we can use. It's a little bit of a double-edged sword. What we see, especially in SaaS companies, they're all in there with different founders that know founders, everyone wants to buy everyone's technology, what you end up with is this huge technology stack of stuff. You're oversubscribed to things. Your reps get tool fatigue. They don't know what tool they're supposed to be using. They get a little whiplash. What we usually see is there are niche things depending on your business you might want to add to your stack. The trinity of what you must have is knowledge management because knowledge is changing all the time. We're iterating so quickly that we need to know that we have trusted information available to us. Even if you're in real-time on a call and you're in Salesforce, you're in that customer record, the AI from that will surface the information that you need for that stage of the sales cycle.
That piece of it, back that up with a learning management system, we need to be able to scale our efforts to train people and keep them up to date. Pre-COVID, was something that we're using for onboarding, something that we're using to scale things now with everyone remote. It's important to be able to have that piece of it. The third piece of it is that what is happening on the calls. How do we use technology to an AI to listen to what's happening in real-time? We're not going to be able to clone ourselves. We're not going to be able to sit down next to our reps and listen to every word. How do we use that technology to get a pulse of what people are saying on calls? How is that landing with customers? What are customers asking us? We can use that. Let's go into a look at the knowledge management first and then learning management, then look at some actual call coaching.
I've always thought of knowledge management and learning management, what's the difference between the K and the L? They're both management systems. The fact that you've bifurcated that tells me there's probably more to it than that.
When we look at learning management versus knowledge management, think of knowledge management, of all the stuff, all the docs, all the stuff that's hidden in an email, stuff that's maybe on an internal Wiki. All the information that someone might need to reference to be able to give some pricing information, some product roadmap information, in our dynamic SaaS world where products are iterating so quickly, that information is constantly changing. If we're looking for product releases and updates, messaging, pricing and packaging, competitive intel is another big one. Those are all the things that our reps spend a shocking amount of time looking for that information. If we want to look at productivity, wasted productivity and time that they could be selling, some stats from it.
Guru is great. They have an awesome knowledge management system. We use it a lot for clients. We recommend it to about anyone who has this use case. Highspot is another solution for knowledge management. Looking at some stats from Guru that they surface was 33% of a rep's week is spent searching for and sharing information. That's a lot of time that they should be in customer-facing conversations. Seventy-one percent of reps are saying that they lack the knowledge that they needed to be able to close a deal. If they're not closing a deal because they don't have the right information at the time that they need it, that's a problem. Looking at 40% of sales knowledge is out of date or maybe it's inaccurate. If someone's in a customer-facing conversation and they are referencing information that is inaccurate, that is a problem.
What's the tipping point for a company that can be able to afford an investment? You used to have to probably spend $35,000 for something like this. It probably scales on a per-user basis, but is there a tipping point for a number of reps where it makes sense for a knowledge management system?
I don't see it as the size of your team. I look at it as how dynamic is your information that they're referencing and how you're storing it. You usually get to that tipping point when you have a bunch of things in different Google Drive folders and people are searching for them. You get to that tipping point when you recognize that half of your reps quoted something that's out of date and you're saying, "There's a new version over here." There are all sorts of questions coming to you and you have to answer questions. If you're in a management position, a sales enablement, sales ops or marketing DMM, if those people are getting the same questions over and over again and people aren't being able to find the information or they're using the wrong information, that's your tipping point.
When something changes within your training, you can plug and play a module of it.
I'm getting wriggly in my seat because I know that I have to look in the mirror on that one and figure out the answer to the problem.
If we look at the difference between the KMS, the Knowledge Management, and the LMS, the Learning Management System, think of your learning management system as your training arm. You have a lot of information that's curated. You need to be able to train people on it. We talked about pre, post-COVID. We used to all gather in a room for 2 to 3 days, do a sales kickoff, train everyone on something and off on your merry way. What we also know is 70% of that information that landed in your head and you said, "That makes sense," doesn't get used. It gets forgotten once you leave that training room. How do you keep that alive? How do you scale that? What if someone wasn't there for the SKO? Two weeks later, you had a new hire joined. How do you keep them in the fold? How do you keep them ramp at the same level as other people learning management system?
It's great because you can record sessions that maybe you did deliver live. You can have learning paths and micro-learning. Different topics, you can take a quick hit on specific topics. When something changes within your training, you can plug and play a module of it. You don't have to throw the whole thing out and train everyone again for another multiple days. It allows you to have more flexibility. It allows you to scale for the remote world that we're living in. You can bring people together from different time zones. Also, the piece around asynchronous work.
There are instances where you do want to have a live instructor-led session. That's appropriate for many reasons but there are other things. Do you need a person? Do you need your VP of product marketing in there? Maybe not. Maybe they can record something. You can have a quick hit of a micro-learning. You can have your reps look at it in their own time where it fits in their schedule. You have a record if they did it, what the assessment test out was, whether they understood it, and everyone stays up to par on the whole learning path.
These are companies like WorkRamp, Lessonly, SalesHood, to name a few of the big learning spaces.
One of the biggest use cases we see in addition to all these pieces and keeping everyone up to speed on what the current is onboarding. That's a huge piece to be able to take a rep from, "Welcome. Here's your laptop,” to fully ramped quota. What is that process? You can rinse and repeat on the learning path through that. There's so much that you can record. There's so much you can have asynchronous work. As they start to go from learning to doing, you can phase it and do different things.
At RingCentral, we deployed SalesHood. Elay Cohen is a superstar, ex-Salesforce. I'm sure you know Elay. We had Sheevaun Thatcher, who's the face of sales enablement in the world now. I got to see her come in before we had any of that to post. It was night and day. One of the things that I saw with the SalesHood deployment is the accountability factor. It's not just, "Here's the new tool. Go see what you can get out of it." It was, "You're red, yellow, green,” down to an individual contributor up to the manager, up to the VP, up to everyone in the org. I remember Carson Hostetter was the Head of Enterprise. He runs half of the show at RingCentral. He's an enterprise rep with dozens if not, hundreds of field reps. When he was red, he would be called out in the entire executive meeting. They're like, "You're red." To me, getting the right materials to the right person at the right time is key but then holding people accountable, you can do that through LMS platforms.
Let's dig deep. The third part of the trifecta is the AI for call coaching. You can teach people through knowledge management. "Here's all the collateral. Here are all the latest proposals." With learning management, I've gone through the training, typically people, "You're out on your own. Go sell." What happens in the wild? Let's turn the lights on in the darkroom and understand what our reps are saying and doing. I feel like we've got a world-class team here with the world-class CRO, world-class enterprise rep. We pulled a few calls and we're going to dive into that. Before we get there, let's talk a little bit about what's your vision? What's call coaching solved? It seems like a billion-dollar space now with a couple of companies that are out there.
If we look at call coaching and employing technology to be able to do that, it allows us to scale. We can't clone ourselves. We cannot sit next to our reps on the calls and listen in, nor is that appropriate. It's weird. It's creepy to have your manager sitting there right with you. From a rep perspective, it's nice to be able to know that there is an ability to review your calls. Let's get real. It's hard to listen to your own calls. That's a hard place to be. If you make it part of your culture and that's the expectation, people get used to it real fast. They look forward to it. They're like, "That call didn't go well. Let's listen to it. Let's break it down." That's from the rep's perspective.
If you look at it from the managers and the sales coaches, you have those insights into the calls. You can set analytics for keywords, talk time. You can go back. You can look at specific things. You can look at, "To develop this rep, we need to break down this section of this call." Provide them with actionable feedback of, "I saw this. I was hoping for this.” My favorite question when I'm coaching is, “Now that we've listened back to this section of the call, what do you think you did? Where would you have gone differently if you had it to do over again?"
More times than not, they know in a debrief. The conversation comes around to, "How are we going to change that? What do you need to do differently? Is there any training? Is there any planning that you need to do?" That's where the magic happens in those pieces. When I look at using this technology, the broad terms of what I look at is like, "What did the talk time ratio look like?" That shows that engagement from the customer. Is there engagement? Is there rapport building? Is there reciprocity in this conversation? I look at that first.
Technology To Engage Reps: You must have knowledge management because knowledge is changing all the time.
The second piece I look at is how did the rep open the call? If they open the call well, it means they planned for this call. They had an understanding of where they wanted to take this deal. That shows our reps planning. The third piece I look at is how they closed it. This also goes back to that planning piece, but it also shows an analytical execution piece within our rep. Have they gotten to that place that they have that ability to, in the moment, dance with whatever showed up, execute on that, be agile and pull to those next steps instead of leaving it open?
We've all heard the end of the call where they're like, "Let's check-in next week." Why are we checking it? If I'm being sold to, what's my compelling reason to show up to that call, especially if this call didn't land as well as it should have? The fourth piece I look at is where those missed opportunities within the call were? Oftentimes, our customers will softball those things that were right in front of us. We even caught the ball but we didn't think to throw it the first day. I look for all those things. Let's bust down and call in real-time. Let's look at a call here and we can debrief what happened.
We're going to do our Zoom video and audio optimization. I'm going to push play and we'll listen. We're going to go for about one minute of this. When we hit the timer, we'll go to about 5.10. Here we go.
“Thanks, Rich. Let's dive in here. Everyone's got places they want to be. I've got the revised worksheet. We talked about Scott. This will drive our discussion for the operations aspect of this. The things I wanted to make sure that we were all comfortable with were a couple of things. One is the leads. You've got inbound leads that we're going to follow up on with calls and email. You've also got some leads from 6sense. I've got Shannon Miller on the call who's our Director of Operations.”
If you were to ask Amanda, me and ten other sales leaders in a room, how do you think that went? I bet you'd get ten answers.
He did a lot of things right. Let's give credit where it's due. It was a clear entry into doing business. He referenced that worksheet. It's a tie back to previous work they had already done. That was good. I liked that piece of it, but they jumped into tactical things without clear agenda, purpose and outcomes. If I'm on this call and I'm being sold to, I want to know, “We were there. We're going to this next place. What is the purpose of this call? What is the outcome? What is my promised land at the end of this call?” I’m wanting to know that piece of it. I also want to look at, instead of referencing the worksheet, it could have been a smoother quick recap of conversations to date. Am I talking about a long paragraph of that? No. We've been here and here. That informs our discussion in this way. The other thing is when we do that, we set the stage for the open items for now, and that's our call agenda. We can segue into that clear outcome piece of it. That's what I would have wanted to see.
I go back to Skip Miller days. He would call that sometimes, style points. What's the difference between a very clear statement and doing it in your own way? To your point, if I'm hearing this kind of an opener, it's okay. Maybe it's a B-minus or a B-plus. The difference between an A-plus in selling motion now, they're going to have 3, 4, 5 calls like this one. The person that can go in and say, "It's so great to have you on the call again. What you shared with us last time is that you're getting 200, 210 inbound leads a month. You've got two navigator accounts and you get 3,000 leads from 6sense." The challenge that you have is that you want to get more closes out of those leads. Right now, you're getting an X, you want Y. Is that still the gap that we're talking about here? Be specific as you possibly can and clear in your communications. They can either say yes or no and then, "What did I get wrong?"
It validates where we are. “Has anything changed in the business? Did I hear you right last time?” The customer feels heard. You validate where you are. It's a jumping-off spot. It allows you to paint that path forward if we are able to solve these things for you. You can get into the quantification of all the business drivers. All of those good gushy things started happening.
I can catch that a bit. It's easy to gloss over. I live in Colorado. If I drive somewhere, I've got some fabulously amazing mountains on the left side of me if I'm heading North on the West. When you live here for so long, you start to not realize that. That's what can happen in these. If you try to rely on internal management and internal leadership, a lot of times it's, "Jay knows what he's doing." He does. By having a third-party expert who's analyzed thousands of calls like this, this is the difference between winning a $50,000 deal and not. Like in your horse racing, the difference between making it over the jump and not is all in the inches in life.
No one's going to want to listen to a 30-minute call, so we're not going to do that. That's the reason why we have this AI. As this call goes on, there were a lot of tactical things. Where my worry was in the middle of this call was that there wasn't enough energy to get it over the line. Where would that energy have come from? It's that clear opening. It's that compelling reason. It's getting into the context of those business drivers. It's getting into what is the quantified change that we're trying to make here. Let's skip to the end of the call and look at how he closed.
We'll go to eighteen minutes and we're going to play for two minutes. Here we go.
“Inner council, we're good there. Scott, we've gotten through what we've gotten through. Is there anything from your end? Any concerns you feel to implement operationally that was set up to be successful? Any concerns from your end?”
From a rep perspective, it's nice to be able to know that there is an ability to review your calls.
“There are no concerns at this point. We've had great conversations. I like one of your styles. I appreciate you bringing Shannon on board and having Rich pop in. I still need to compare against a couple of folks that I was looking at. I got my pro forma budget. While I'm on PT, I'll be playing with that and see where this fits in. My thought, as I told you originally, was that instead of hiring people, I would prefer to outsource the SDR function at this point. You've come back with much more value than just bodies on the phone. You're in a great position. The number doesn't necessarily scare me. It's a matter of me having all my ducks in a row. That’s where I stand at the moment. Let me get some time. I'm shooting some text out to my team. That information will come back. I'll reach back out to you and tell you where I'm at.”
“To recap that where your decision is, you've got to look at a couple of other offers, but you anticipate to do something with an agency. Is that where you're looking at?”
“I'm leaning to outsource the SDR function and use the other budget to hire a couple of sales guys so that you've got people to feed.”
“Great. Should I find a place on your calendar may be the following week to have a check-in call?”
“That'd be fine.”
“Okay.”
If you ask ten different leaders, they might get ten different answers. What say you? How was the close compared to the open?
Things I liked, Jay did some things right. He confirmed the approach. He got a clear view of what the process is that Scott's going to be going through. He sets another meeting. He didn't set the meeting on this call but he had access to his calendar to be able to put time on his calendar. All great things, all best practices that we want to see. Here's where I'm looking for more. There was no recap summary of the call. He didn't go back and talk about, "We talked about these three things that were important to you. This is how it ties to your metrics of what you're looking to change. This is how the quantified number is around if we can solve this for you."
At the beginning of the call, Scott had introduced his initial goals and business drivers. That was something that he introduced into the conversation. Jay didn't tie it back to that. At the end of the day, what is Scott being measured on? "How are we going to make you successful there?” I want to see that. Scott also gave another important piece of information, a big clue. He said it's competitive. He's looking at the budget. We know those things but what do we know about those things? Who else are we up against competitive-wise? What portion of the budget are we looking for? Is this a time that we could ask a pointed, transparent question around how do we stack up? What do you need to hear, see or do to be able to make a decision against this? Is there something that you need from us to be able to make that decision? We don't know those things because Jay didn't ask.
The competitive differentiators, if I look at the spreadsheet here, it says phone touches 16,005 dials for $24,000. If you were to hire a typical firm to provide dials, most companies are spending $8 to $10 a dial if you're insourced or outsourced. If you tie it back to the original goals, you need to generate X number of pipelines, X number of deals tied to those 3,000 leads and 210 inbounds because that's already some cost. You've spent the money. If you can get more than 44, you're going to be in the green on that investment.
If you were to outsource this to a traditional company at 16,005 dials, that's $160,000. That's for the dialing portion. You're going to get a junior entry-level college graduate. Remember what we've talked about through this conversation. All ScaleX reps have 10 to 15, even 20 years of experience and generally have been CEOs of their own companies. “Wouldn't you agree Mr. and Mrs. Customer that $160,000 worth of dials delivered for $24,000 by a person that has 10 to 20 years, generally, CEO experience would be better than any other alternative and help you ensure that you're going to hit your 44 account number there?” Those to me seem to be areas where you can re-drop your competitive differentiation and tie it back to the original goals of the conversation.
Especially because Scott did mention that he's comparing.
Technology To Engage Reps: Level 213 is a professional services firm. It charges monthly fees for people, process, strategy, messaging, optimization, overtime.
What this makes me think about is that I pride myself on being a good seller. It's all in a black box. I'm not spending time going through this level of coaching. To me, the value of this kind of AI is in the person who holds the technology. That's why I stress if you can't afford internally to hire someone and even if you can, you got to measure and make sure they're doing this level of looking at the calls. Someone like Amanda, who's worked for Vorsight and with Skip Miller, one of the best in the business and several years running her company helping companies transform and change like this, the investment is so worth it. We've got one more call. Are there any other thoughts? You pretty much covered this call.
Jay did a lot of things right. It's that fine-tuning and tweaking. It's looking at what's the difference that's going to make the difference at the end of your revenue day. Let's look at the other call. This was a very different call.
We're going to go two minutes and then pause.
“Michelle, it's Jay Revels.”
“How are you?”
“I'm good. How are you doing?”
“I am good. Thanks for asking. My camera is not working for some reason. It won't connect to my computer. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me. I'm reaching back out. I want to dive right in. I don't know that much about the organization. I don't remember who it was that suggested it to me. I want to say it might have been, Jeff, our CEO but I don't remember off the top of my head. I'm in sales, so I will start off by saying I don't know that much about what the platform does and what it offers. Feel free to ask me as many questions as you need to help clarify on our end how it could be best used or anything you think would be relevant. We do a lot of things here. I want to give you any of the information you need in order to educate me in the best way.”
“Thank you for that. This first call, I anticipate 20, 25 minutes. I'm sure you have another call at the half-hour or at the hour. I want to introduce myself, the company, how we help customers, what we do and then learn a little bit more about you. We probably decide at the end of 20, 25 minutes if we think this is worth going to the next step. The next step would be a deeper understanding of your upper funnel prospect generation needs. What are you doing? What's not working? What is working? Where do you hope to get to? What's the target you want? There's a lot that goes into getting people interested in what you're offering. Every company has their strategy, resource, technology stack. In order for us to be helpful and design a solution that exactly meets your needs, we'd have to spend probably another session to get into some details. This is designed to figure out if we think we can help each other. That's okay. Michelle Masterson, right?”
“Yes.”
“I see Managing Partner of Next Level Exchange. Is that right?”
“Correct.”
“For some reason, I looked up KBIC. Your email was KBIC, which I thought was a fluke like a staffing executive search firm. Is that right?”
It's important to look at what's going to make the difference at the end of your revenue day.
“Yes.”
He had a totally unprepared buyer. She showed up saying she knew nothing. She was doing someone else a favor by taking the call. Jay did a good job of setting the expectations for the agenda and the goal. Where things got a little sideways there and where you heard the energy drop out of the call was he didn't capitalize on the opportunity to look at what's in it for her? What's important to her? What are her priorities? What is she looking to solve for? I would have liked to have him ask a little bit about what's working within her organization. What's not working? Where are her gaps? As this call progressed, I noticed that the talk time ratio got a little upside down. Jay ended up talking a lot. When he passed it back to her, it didn't land. Let's go to the fifteen times there and listen to how it ended.
Here's his big monologue here. He's getting ready to close up.
“A lot of companies that come to us are our ideal clients. It’s companies that have tried to get help and have failed. Most people that want help from us and are in companies like us think that, ‘This is easy. I can pay someone for performance. If they send me a lead, I pay them $700. Otherwise, I'm not on the hook for anything. I sit and wait.’ That's not how we work. We're a professional services firm. We charge monthly fees for people, process, strategy, messaging, and optimization over time. Typically our ideal clients are people that try to do this and have not done it well or they've tried to build it themselves and it hasn't worked out. I don't know where you are in terms of looking at firms like us or if you have any thoughts on that kind of ideal profile that we look for.”
“Honestly, I don't. I'm not sure how we could use you at all at this point. Based on what I shared with you, do you feel like anything resonates?”
“We can source a database of search firms. We can source it by employee count. They have phone numbers and emails. We get that and we could reach out to them. That's not an issue. It's the one thing I did want to know.”
The aircraft carriers in the ocean, the waters are deep and the airplane did not land on the carrier.
That was a pretty painful crash. With that pause before she said, “No,” was awkward. Let's talk a little bit about why that happened. You saw in the talk time that he had talked a lot. Whatever his talk track was in that period of time, did not resonate with her. He did a good job right before he passed it to her talking about solutions and ideal clients. The big miss was he didn't talk about business outcomes. What are the outcomes that these people are achieving via this solution? She didn't connect the two.
Sales reps run into this problem because we're so clear in terms of what we can do and how sexy our solution is and all these things that we do. We know that but we forget that the people we're selling to don't always have those dots connected. They don't always see that promised land over there. That was probably the miss there. He tried to go back into the bag and desperately grasps for something that was going to provide value, getting a database, searching, and all of that. Nice try but you've already lost it.
Looking at the timeline of this call, that month connected him with an interim CRO. This CRO was my personal coach for 1.5 years on business and life. He said, "I can help you with your sales team." I said, "Let's do it." He'd been out of the call center demand gen business for several years. He was reliant upon providing input and coaching to Jay based on outdated information because he hadn't been in this space for a little while. The way you sell, which is, "Let me tell you what our customer looks like. Let me tell you about me. Let me tell you about us. Do you fit with what we're selling, yes or no?" Puts that impetus back on the customer. What I've seen transition over since I got into software in '99 until now is that model is outdated. It's about, "Tell me what you're looking for."
Take ScaleX out of the picture. I want to get to know Michelle Masterson. "What do you care about when you wake up in the morning, go into work? I assume you probably work 8 to 10 hours, maybe even twelve-hour days like me. What are you doing? Why is this project landed on your plate?" Get that. Even at the beginning, you could say, "It's interesting. There's no fit here. It's nice to know you but if that's what you're trying to accomplish, we shouldn't even talk." That's where the miss happened.
What's interesting is out of 200 and so client deployments, we've deployed about five that are in the recruiting, staffing space and there had been some good successes. To your point about LMS and KMS, since we only do 5 out of 200, did that ever filter its way to Jay? Clearly not, because he would have known at the tip of his fingertips to say, "Let me tell you about what we did for Heartland IT and Newton Talent." He didn't have that information at his fingertips.
Technology To Engage Reps: We forget that the people we're selling to don't always have those dots connected. They don't always see that promise land over there.
I may not work in the talent space but I work with people who have. This is the outcome we achieve for them. They came in with this use case, these gaps in their process. This is what they were looking to solve. After we got engaged with them, they're doing this. I would have loved to see him ask her about her process. Where are things sitting now? Where have you been tasked with moving them? We all know that there's some target that you haven't gotten to the end of the quarter, month, year. Where's your target? Where are you now and where do you need to get to? Is there a way that we can contribute to getting you there faster?
For those reading, if you don't have a KMS, LMS and call coaching, my advice to you would be don't hand it over to a rep that wants to be the team lead because you're going to have the blind leading the blind. What I witnessed and I hope you all would agree is that when you have an expert who knows exactly what to listen for, I've always heard the term coach to neutral elements, not making up and go, "It could be this. It could be that." You have to teach the rep how to do it, demonstrate how to do it and then coach to that. That's where it's important to work with someone like Amanda. This has been fabulous. Any final thoughts on what you'd like to share about what we covered?
This is my wheelhouse. This is where I play, all of these technologies, all these things. If there is a client who's talking about those gaps in the process, if they don't have this gap filled, we help them fill it. We watch them go from a problem state to a finely tuned machine. At end of the day, if we've done our job right, that's where they're at. Ideally, we work our way out of a job with a client. I love talking about this stuff. I love implementing this stuff. It's been a pleasure to break it down with you.
With so many deployments that we do for customers, a lot of it is on top of the funnel. It exposes the bottom of funnel problems, especially if they're used to getting inbound leads and you're handing them leads at a very early stage. Here's the diamond in the rough kind of call. It's a lot different call than, "I came in to buy five seats of your Zoom video platform."
"It's fully qualified for the criteria. Here you go."
"How many would you like? Would you like to add on a phone with that?" Not the same kind of call. This is fabulous. Between ourselves and our customers, there could be a lot of benefit in continuing the dialogue.
It's been fun.
If people want to reach you, how can they get ahold of you, Amanda?
The best place to find me is either on LinkedIn, Amanda Ambrose and at Level213 or through our website, Level213.com. You can find me in both of those places.
It's time to turn up the temperature and get to over 212 where the real change happens. It doesn't just change for a day but it sticks. It's fabulous having you on the call. Thank you, Amanda.
Thanks so much, Chad.
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About Amanda Ambrose
Amanda Ambrose brings more than 25 years of experience, working with technology companies in sales, operations, management, coaching, and consulting roles. Amanda has worked with organizations of all sizes, ranging from early stage startups, to large, global enterprises. As co-founder of Level213, Amanda is thrilled to continue working with growing companies looking to level up their customer facing teams.
In the training and consulting realm, Amanda focuses primarily on assessments, sales process, resource development, learning integration, sales coaching, and strategic client management. Amanda also develops and facilitates customized programs for clients based on their needs.
For leadership development and executive coaching, Amanda draws on a wide variety of certifications, resources and experience. The combination of Co-Active Coaching (CPCC), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Neuroscience of Coaching, customized 360 evaluations, as well as elite athletic training and competition, allows Amanda to build customized tools and strategies to create ongoing leadership development, communication, performance, and engagement with her clients.
High performance sports has been a central theme of Amanda’s life. She grew up riding and showing Hunter Jumper horses, trained with Olympian Peter Breakwell, and currently competes on the West Coast USEF jumper circuit under the coaching and guidance of Nicole DiCorti Bush. In addition to equestrian sports, Amanda raced for the US National Cycling Team, trained at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
