Juniper Networks’ CRO Identifies Revenue Productivity Transformation as Critical Factor to 47% YOY Sales Growth

Overview

Juniper Networks, founded in 1996, is a global leader in computer network infrastructure solutions. The company develops a wide range of networking products, including routers, switches, management software, and security solutions. Juniper serves customers across industries such as manufacturing, retail, media, education, telecommunications, and healthcare.

The Challenge

Juniper Networks has a large and complex portfolio of technical solutions and sells into multiple distinct markets. As a result, its sales team needs to be armed with a lot of information. It is the responsibility of the enablement team to provide competency applications at scale, while maintaining consistency. The company is also passionate about hiring quality talent and retaining employees, so the enablement team seeks to provide the support and resources each individual needs to progress in their career.

The Solution

Mindtickle is a significant factor in the way Hang Black, VP of Global Revenue Enablement at Juniper Networks, positions and grows the value of the enablement function within the organization. The team has been able to continuously innovate their enablement strategy and quantify its impact using Mindtickle and, in doing so, they’ve not only transformed business results, but cemented their position as trusted advisors to the chief revenue officer (CRO) and sales leadership team. “Sales enablement is a scaling function of our business — I believe that if you get it wrong, you won’t be successful,” says Derrell James, CRO, Juniper Networks.

“If CROs don’t care about time to ramp and retention, they shouldn’t be in the job. Having enablement report directly to the CRO is one of our competitive advantages.” Using Mindtickle, Black and her team initially segmented sellers into groups based on their roles and personas, allowing enablement to curate content for different profiles. This hyper-personalized approach provided relevant learning for sellers to more effectively engage buyers. While beneficial, personalization alone didn’t result in ease of use. Black’s team recently conducted user testing to measure time to find content. This led to a pivot to orient content more closely with Juniper’s go-to-market structure and also to surface greater optionality on the homepage via widgets and a new tagging and content structure. This continuous innovation in pursuit of user experience and user trust is a hallmark of the team.

Comprehensive enablement versus technical training

Enablement at Juniper Networks specializes across four pillars:

1. Sales efficacy, focused on talent acquisition and development

2. Customer engagement, focused on sales methodologies and business skills

3. Portfolio enablement, focused on curating product information that serves all personas including sales, services, and partner communities

4. Enablement platforms focused on ensuring the tech stack delivers on what sellers need

Following research from Gartner and Forrester, Black and her enablement team aim to deliver no more than 10 hours of development a month, at most, to sellers and double that for technical sales audiences. In doing so, they ensure that every minute of it has a high impact while avoiding cognitive overload. Content needs to be digestible, relevant, and punchy, and Mindtickle allows the team to customize content to the needs of individual reps. “We cater to large audiences internally and have to be able to target skill level, industry level, and technical knowledge,” said Black, “We must serve up what is required, what is optional, and what reps can test out of. It’s a challenge — but with Mindtickle, we have a streamlined system to do it.”

Black has also worked hard to remove the interchangeability of the words “training” and “enablement.” As James says, “Training is the transfer of knowledge, but it doesn’t make you better at your job. Enablement creates a practical skill that makes you better.” Unlike traditional training, which focuses on minutes spent on learning platforms or number of courses completed, enablement practitioners — like Hang and the team at Juniper — focus on content being relevant and adopted to positively affect performance. This enablement philosophy, and the ability to hyper-personalize at scale using Mindtickle, played a pivotal role in Juniper Networks’ 47% growth in sales achievement from 2020 to 2021.

Hiring the right reps — and keeping them

The “Great Resignation,” a phenomenon wherein an increasing number of American workers have quit their jobs in search of greener pastures, has elevated the importance of recruiting and retaining talent for all organizations, including Juniper Networks. “It’s healthy for people to leave if they are unhappy, but how do you make them want to stay?” said Black. “Having a multigenerational pool of employees means we’ve got to hit a different nerve depending on where they are in their careers.”

This is where the enablement team’s focus on talent and providing individualized career development opportunities is so critical. Baby Boomer and Gen X sellers often want to be mentors to younger employees, Millennials are looking for a path to leadership positions, and Gen Z desires visibility to their options in the career lattice. In the latter two cases, enablement resources and coaching is essential. Within Mindtickle, the Juniper team created role-based onboarding and continuous development programs, as well as optional programs around skill-building, enabling employees to shape their own success and facilitate foundational abilities best suited to variable market dynamics.

Beyond keeping existing employees engaged and developing, Juniper Networks is equally focused on hiring the right sales talent. The company has changed its definition of an “ideal rep” over the last four years, in response to the way technology, buyer behaviors, and demands have changed. The job of a seller has evolved because of these factors, and Juniper’s reps are successful because the hiring team recognizes that the determination of the ideal rep profile must be equal parts art and science.

While the ability to build customer relationships was once the primary skill desired in hiring, Derrell James believes it’s now no longer enough. “A seller needs to have an attention to detail and be able to manipulate data and identify patterns from multiple data streams to translate it into a story for buyers,” he said.

Using Mindtickle to enable partners

Juniper Networks has a large number of resellers and managed services partners for its various products and services. Black and the enablement team are also charged with providing these partners with the assets and enablement they need to sell solutions on their behalf. Historically, enabling partners was a challenge, since they were working on separate platforms with different systems and administrative processes. Workflows were clunky, and metrics were nearly impossible to pin down.

But using Mindtickle for partner enablement, Juniper Networks works out of one system for both internal and partner intake and archival workstreams, saving time on both sides. Black and her team also develop internal content that considers partners from the beginning. And, with Mindtickle, they can quickly and easily update content, ensuring that partners have the most up-to-date information. “Channel partners are a unique cohort because you are competing for mindshare with other logos that they’re selling,” said Luke Martin, Global Revenue Enablement Platforms Manager at Juniper Networks. “Given that, we’ve begun adopting B2C tactics to cultivate engagement. It’s early in the implementation to see the full result from these actions, but Mindtickle’s platform allows us the opportunity to experiment and measure at scale, and that flexibility is of unique and significant value.”\

With Mindtickle, the revenue and enablement teams at Juniper Networks are able to work faster and smarter, therefore driving greater efficiency across the organization.

Game-Changing Revenue Enablement at Juniper Networks