Meet Jaclyn D’Arcy, Director of Revenue Enablement at GHX. In this interview, Jaclyn provides a unique perspective on why her role is important and you can build a revenue enablement team.
“Don’t be afraid to think about what you want to accomplish in 30 days, six months, one year, five years, or 10 years,” Jaclyn said. “To demand enablement, you have to do so by shaping a vision for what you want to do with an organization, build a brand, talk about it, share it and then commit and execute.”
Tell us about your role as Director of Revenue Enablement at GHX and how it’s changed in the last year.
I was previously doing sales enablement for Lumere, a 120 person startup in Chicago. I was very focused on 10 salespeople and helping them with “the normal stuff”: building their sales process, including training, certification, and onboarding.
When we were acquired by GHX in January 2020, I turned my focus to more acquisition-based enablement. I was helping solve questions like, how is Lumere getting integrated into GHX? How are we cross-training teams?
This led to the development of a revenue enablement team that I currently lead, supporting all of the commercial, customer-facing teams.
Revenue Enablement teams might be new for a lot of organizations. What is in your team’s scope and how are you organized?
Our Revenue Enablement team is responsible for supporting all of the commercial, customer-facing teams.
The support we provide can be solidified into three functions: GTM training strategy, Showpad Management, and onboarding/upboarding. Training strategy encompasses three different components: knowledge, skill, and process. Showpad Management is making sure both the internal training and external customer content is there and that our training, coaching and certifications are effective.
Lastly, we are focused on onboarding newly acquired companies to ensure speed to value for both existing and new commercial teams.
What’s one of the biggest shifts sales management needs to be thinking about now that we’re in this hybrid world of selling?
One of the things we’ve heard from our field team was pretty specific: “Hey, the hardest part of my job is not necessarily speaking the language or telling the story of how we support our customers. The hardest part is getting through everything internally that I need to do at GHX. So, where can I pull my customer data sources from? Or how do I know what CS representative is working on this account with me?”
That was a big ‘aha moment’ for us: we needed to streamline their jobs when they’re not in front of customers. Showpad took out a lot of the guesswork for customer-facing content and conversations. All of a sudden our teams knew exactly where to go. From training to messaging and certifications, they knew where everything was and what resources they had to send.
Another related shift is having our teams change their mindset to thinking about what’s happening in the industry to better support our customers. For example, in healthcare a lot of our health systems are migrating to the cloud. This will be a multi-year process that will require data automation; it’s going to be a huge lift on our health systems. And at GHX, we’re uniquely positioned because we have all the data sources to help them build, analyze and generate reports that affect their bottom line.
Our sales team and any of our commercial teams have to be equipped and knowledgeable with:
- the changes in the industry, and
- how we can support them through the cloud migration.
We have to talk about it before it happens and shift to meet these uncertain times. At the end of the day, the most important part about what we do is supporting our customers. Instilling this into our commercial team has been our primary focus. Every day, our team wakes up and thinks about how they can help their customers with the challenges they are facing in healthcare.
What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing right now?
This is probably common at most companies right now, but our team is resource-constrained.
Our biggest issue is not which organization should own which deliverable; it’s that we don’t have enough bodies to throw at the problem, which leads to us working harder, not smarter.
My goal is to get to a state where I have people on my team that manage Showpad, manage onboarding, and manage any go-to-market training. If I were able to bucket these into specific roles, then I could shift my focus to start solving some of the cross-functional process issues we’re experiencing.
How are you interacting with your customers to support sales? How is that changing?
It’s really tough right now because we’re talking about huge deal sizes and we’re asking people to commit virtually. Our qualification and discovery have shifted since COVID. We used to go in person to spend a day with a team, talk to each member and really understand their process. We’re supposed to be able to build supply chain health assessments and help them figure this out; but now it’s happening over an hour-long Zoom call.
But our customers are starting to get more comfortable with video. We had a hard time getting people to show up on video for the first year of 2020—we couldn’t tell if they were listening or determine their level of interest.
As a result, we’re investing a lot of time into how we virtually communicate with our customers. We’re moving away from focusing conversations on data and process—instead, we turn to how we will really move the needle using success stories.
I’m hoping that this will make a really big impact for our customers.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in an enablement function?
It really depends on the maturity of their organization when they’re starting—but one of the things I did when I first started at Lumere (and for a second time when I was acquired by GHX) was a status quo assessment.
It goes like this: meet with field reps, customer success managers, executives, and sales leaders to understand where their pain points are coming from and where they feel like you could move the needle. If you understand from everyone what their perspective is and where they need help, you can get some low-hanging fruit to get moving, then help the organization prioritize their needs.
To grow a meaningful enablement department, you have to create a vision, develop a strategy, create a charter, build a brand, talk about it, share it and then commit and execute.
