Sales management platforms are crucial for B2B success bringing convenience to buyers and sellers. How do market players address this need?
To create customized experiences and content, sellers must be able to access the right learning and sales content to support a highly complex and personalized B2B buying journey.
1. Can you give us a brief of your career before Allego?
Following my early corporate career, I spent the last 15 years at various startups. Most recently, I was the founder and CEO of Refract, which was acquired by Allego in 2020 and is now Allego Conversation Intelligence, which combines the power of sales enablement with conversation intelligence to pinpoint where deals are being won or lost.
2. Could you tell us more about Allego and your role there as the VP & GM?
Allego’s AI-driven sales enablement platform accelerates performance, ensuring sellers have the skills, knowledge, and content they need to drive results in a hybrid world. As VP & GM of Allego, I provide strategic and operational leadership to my team to position Allego Conversation Intelligence as an industry leader in its space.
3. Can you shed some light on Allego’s Sales Enablement Platform?
Allego is the future of sales enablement. Our sales enablement, learning, content management, and conversation intelligence products accelerate performance for sales teams. Allego is AI-driven and seller-centric, with the agility, insight, and ease salespeople need to drive results in a hybrid world—all in a single app.
As an AI-powered sales enablement platform, Allego equips sellers with the skills, knowledge, and content to confidently engage buyers and produce more wins and revenue. Allego transforms traditional learning with insights from peers and conversations delivered in the flow of how sellers work – driving up engagement and saving precious selling time. While most content repositories are static and challenging to sift through, Allego makes marketing content intuitive and easily accessible. Sellers can personalize this content for the unique dynamics of each sales interaction while also increasing engagement through real-time or asynchronous communication with buyers. Allego drives modern learning that sticks and creates a more convenient buying experience that stands out from competitors – ultimately winning both sellers and buyers.
Allego’s platform is also flexible to accommodate different needs, address a specific challenge, or be deployed as a complete sales enablement solution. It has three products that deliver the most substantial business outcomes when activated together: Modern Learning, Content Management, and Conversation Intelligence.
4. What makes sales management platforms so crucial for B2B success?
Both B2B sellers and buyers want convenience in a virtual world, highly customized experiences, and easy-to-find content. Sellers must be able to stand out by making the sales process more convenient and their interactions more relevant for buyers.
According to Gartner, 64% of customers can’t distinguish one B2B brand’s digital experience from another. Creating a unique experience starts with curating the right content to supplement the best conversations between sellers and buyers. Doing so requires a sales management platform with easily accessible content repositories and data on what content is performing well and what isn’t.
To create customized experiences and content, sellers must be able to access the right learning and sales content to support a highly complex and personalized B2B buying journey.
This can only be achieved with AI-powered sales management platforms that surface the right content and training in the moment of need.
Sales reps use an average of six tools. Sales enablement platforms should address all seller needs in one platform, including access to learning, content, and virtual selling tools that improve efficiency and impact.
5. What makes Allego unique? Why should brands choose Allego to manage their sales channels?
Allego’s speed and consumer app design match the pace of even the most hard-charging salespeople. Content is sourced from the field, personalized for individual employees, and mastered through reinforcement, on-the-job coaching, and peer collaboration.
At Allego, we put the rep at the center of our training approach and support how they want to learn. We bridge the gap between formal and informal learning by delivering learning in the flow of how reps work – without eating into their selling time. Role-specific learning paths are dripped slowly over time in bite-sized pieces as reps need them, with continual reinforcement to ensure it sticks.
With Allego, sales teams onboard faster, deliver the right messaging, rapidly adopt best practices, coach and practice more frequently, and collaborate more broadly with peers, whether at home or at the office.
6. Could you give a sneak peek into the recent developments at Allego?
Allego recently released the latest version of its product with new offerings that deliver next-generation learning, coaching, and content features while improving enablement impact. New features include an AI-powered Dialog Simulator, dynamic content, and highlight reels.
Right now, sellers struggle to get their managers’ coaching because everyone operates on different schedules and in various locations. Our Allego-first innovation, the Dialog Simulator, delivers the capability for sales and customer success teams to simulate real-life conversations with an AI-powered virtual actor. The Dialog Simulator enables sales teams to practice two-way dialogs with a virtual actor, honing their skills before talking to a customer. Conversation intelligence technology provides instant feedback and pinpoints areas where reps need improvement, saving managers hours of time and providing coaching to reps whenever they need it.
In an increasingly virtual selling environment, dynamic content allows sellers to showcase interactive presentations and 3D product models to win buyers over remotely. Allego also added custom channels, digital sales rooms, and features to personalize presentations and documents.
Additionally, Allego now offers bite-sized highlight reels that give sales and marketing teams an immediate pulse on what’s happening in recorded sales conversations. These reels include curated highlights of moments that matter, and automatically captured meeting notes and actions that enhance enablement impact.
7. Could you tell us more about your work culture, and what makes Allego’s culture unique?
At Allego, we abide by the “teamwork makes the dream work” philosophy. It’s not about who will raise their hand to look good in front of the CEO or who closes the most deals. It’s about working together to get the best ideas and results. After all, we developed our software specifically to promote peer-to-peer collaboration and agile learning to make teams more successful. When our employees work together, this inspires two outcomes: they learn from each other and can solve problems more quickly.
When our employees collaborate and learn from each other, everyone wins. Beyond teamwork, we have seven operating principles that guide our company:
● Be a participant and not an obstacle to finding the truth
● Participate constructively in problem-solving
● Learn to accept and love your own mistakes
● We are a team that is customer-focused
● You are expected to have execution excellence
● You are expected to improve and grow
● Being “best” means going that extra mile
Our CEO, Yuchun Lee, values these principles and meets with new employees to review them together. We also hand out awards to the employees who best represent the qualities of each of the categories at our annual kick-off meeting. Allego’s leadership views these awards as the highest honor we have, which is why Yuchun hosts special dinners at his house for all the award recipients.
Allego provides sales enablement that wins buyers and sellers. To enable other companies, we first provide the same level of support and resources to our own employees. At Allego, we put our people at the forefront and have a steadfast commitment to our employees first and foremost. As evidence of this culture, Allego has received awards in recognition on Selling Power’s “50 Best Companies to Sell For in 2022” list for the third consecutive year and was named a Best Place to Work in Massachusetts honoree by Boston Business Journal for the fifth year in a row.
8. How does AI improve sales readiness and what according to you is the future of AI technology in sales?
Great sellers are built through a combination of training, practice, and coaching. Selling isn’t some innate skill reserved for a select few naturally talented individuals. In fact, of the 75% of organizations that provided practice opportunities to employees during the pandemic, 90% found it effective.
AI is becoming essential to sales training as increasingly dispersed teams are stretching managers thin and taking their time away that could be spent coaching. This is where conversation intelligence (CI) can step in to analyze reps’ practice sessions and pinpoint where improvement is needed. AI tracks top performers’ activities, providing sellers with feedback and identifying coaching opportunities for managers. Instead of listening to hours of recorded sales conversations, sales managers can review the data and quickly target moments where a call has gone well and where improvements can be made.
AI will continue to improve sales outcomes as it becomes more and more sophisticated. With AI, sales teams can now practice conversations with virtual actors and receive feedback and automatically capture meeting notes so they don’t miss a single customer interaction. AI provides sales teams with the practice and coaching reps need to achieve greatness and close their next deal.
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Kevin Beales, Founder & CEO of Refract, an Allego
Kevin Beales is the founder and CEO of Refract, an Allego company. He is passionate about providing strategic and operational leadership to his team and positioning Refract as an industry leader in its space. Following an early corporate career, he spent the last 15 years at a series of successful tech startups as founder, CEO and part of an early stage management team. In his free time, Kevin enjoys spending time with his three sons and attending Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. games. Kevin is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University.
Allego provides a complete sales enablement platform with patented technology that ensures sellers have the skills, knowledge, and content they need to engage buyers in a hybrid world. In place of traditional training and content enablement tactics, which are rapidly outdated and often ineffective, Allego empowers reps with the activated content they need to close deals faster, and the personalized coaching and learning they require for continuous improvement – and it all happens in the flow of their daily work. More than 750,000 professionals are using Allego every day to revolutionize the way they manage seller and buyer content, train and upskill teams, and collaborate with buyers digitally.
https://www.allego.com/