What business problems did your organization / project face, and why did you choose a digital adoption strategy to help you solve it?
Our goal was to take our Enablement programs from knowledge-based enablement to transformational enablement that is focused on outcomes that are measured by a seller’s activation and adoption with key sales tasks.
How did you use WalkMe, in conjunction with other strategies and technologies, to address your challenges?
WalkMe has been the best solution to take our global 22k sales force through this transformation and has allowed our enablement team to show impact and tangible change in our sales force that our enablement programs helped support!
We’ve created an approach to using WalkMe I like to call AAA!
- Awareness (does the seller know?)
- Activation (did they get started)
- Adoption (have they continued?)
WalkMe was used at just about every touch point we can for sellers across enablement programs in our learning platform, and across their 30+ Platforms.
- Ensure they are aware of the programs we have and the right steps to take at any given step of their sales cycle (through ShoutOuts on 10+ platforms reminding them to start taking action.
- Provide a smooth transition from awareness shoutouts into the programs through shuttles and redirects to ensure they make it to the right learning for their roles.
- Launchers and mini-menu shoutouts full of resources and support to ensure sellers during the program and to reinforce what they’ve learned and provide playbooks at various steps of their day.
- Launchers that appear after program completion that allow sellers to show their continued engagement with the program and enthusiasm by adding their earned badges to our Cisco Directory site.
- Launchers within the CRM to remind sellers to start activating their top 5 programs and adopt the seller activities that make the most impact!
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users (customers and/or employees), your team, and leadership?
We have WalkMe Discovery that gives us an enterprise-wide view of our entire tech stack and has made all the difference in knowing when and where to engage our sellers! My motto is, “if we don’t have WalkMe on that platform, but our sellers go there on a daily basis, get it on there!”
This has required us to think about different ways of engaging the seller (in platforms outside of the traditional tech stack) and we’ve been able to innovate with the WalkMe product team to pilot Beta products like Discovery, Workflows, and more to ensure we are getting the full seller Digital DNA and understanding their current journey vs what their journey should be!
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission, goals, or values?
We’ve had an incredible amount of success just in the increase of awareness with top 5 initiatives and the activation to ensure they are getting the knowledge piece of enablement down.
But where the real transformation is happening is when we use WalkMe to its full potential to get the sellers to activate and start engaging with their quarterly priorities post-learning. By having Launchers, Shuttles, mini-menus, and popups in strategic places around their tech stack, we are able to redirect the seller path to more closely align with those key sales activities that make the biggest impact to their pipeline and opportunities.
What about your implementation or success makes you most proud? Why?
The way we are innovating! Gartner recently launched a report that showed the top 4 innovations in sales that featured “nudges” to support adoption of key actions, and…we’ve been doing those basics since 2018…
So it’s good to know that we’re about 5 years ahead of most sales programs, and we’re using those “nudges” in much more strategic ways to ensure we’re promoting the new transformative behaviors sellers need to do across 30+ platforms at Cisco!
Talk about being ahead of the curve!
Please share any additional information about your role in the project, your results, and/or your vision for the future that supports your submission.
I want to give a huge shoutout to my team, because they are the real secret to my success! Having experts from SolutionsATI in data, analytics and WalkMe builds & engineering has cleared so many roadblocks and filled so many gaps I had in my own skill set when I got to Cisco.
Through them, we’ve been able to meet our goals with WalkMe by getting nearly 100% engagement with our enablement programs (99.8% and 98.2% on our last 2 huge initiatives) and has been that crucial piece in getting our enablement teams to think beyond learning objectives and into true behavioral change and KPIs to measure the success of their learning programs!
We’ve been busy at Cisco since I came at the beginning of 2022. We’ve expanded the WalkMe program from 2 platforms to 30+ and have created a COE that supports programs and platforms all over Cisco! It’s great to know that the vision I’ve created with my team has reached beyond the initiatives in Global Sales Enablement.
About your organization
Cisco’s mission is to power an inclusive future for all!