Hyvara.ai Episode 9 – Scaling Excellence: RFP, Leadership & Enablement Hives

What if leadership had real visibility? What if enablement happened in the flow of work? What if expansion opportunities were spotted before churn set in? This episode explores how Hyvara’s final Hives empower leaders, develop teams, map complex stakeholders, and grow accounts — building long-term revenue, not one-and-done wins.

Transcript

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Hey folks, Kevin Kunz here. Welcome back to the SE Work Life Podcast. I'll be your host today for episode nine: Scaling Excellence, RFP, Leadership and Enablement Hives. As I mentioned back in episode eight, you know, over the last few episodes, we've been walking through the Hivera hives in the same order a deal flows from research through qualification, discovery, and proof all the way to transition and expansion. Today we're actually going to move a little bit more into hives that just don't win deals. They scale the way the team wins across the board. We're going to cover three of them RFP hive, leadership hive, and enablement hive. Together, these hives drive consistency, raise the game for the entire team, and create the operational backbone for repeatable success. Now, the first one is near and dear to me because I've spent way too many hours dealing with RFPs. We all know that unless you wrote the RFP with the client, you're nothing more than column fodder. For those new listeners, column fodder is where a large organization legally has to go out to bid and have three columns on the board in order to assess which company or vendor would be best to solve the particular problem. Now, a lot of times you're just doing this in order to get a check in the box. The customers already made the decision. They're going to go with Salesforce or they're going to go with Oracle. And it's hilarious when you read the RFPs. There are little triggers in there that you can see that, oh, you know what? This thing was wired for Adobe, or this thing is wired for Microsoft. So, you know, you still have to go through the process. And it's it's also crazy when you get the RFP. It's usually due in like five days, which is another clear indicator. I had a boss, uh Don Beck, you'll hear me talk about him a lot over at Adobe. Uh, and he would tell us in the sales organization, don't reply. That's the only leverage you have because they're looking for you to be in column. And if you don't answer and satisfy it, then they have to go find another vendor. He would say, ask them for a meeting. You're not going to fill this out until you have a meeting. It was a great technique and tactic in order to get actual conversations started with a client. And maybe you could turn the RFP around. But, you know, too often RFPs are they're just a waste of time and waste of so many resources. What we want to do here is we want the RFP to uh, you know, take the RFP, drop it into the agent. The agent will automatically fill out all the information or at least a percentage of it. You know, we we look to try to gain about 70 to 80% of that RFP will be answered based on library and opportunity data. I remember back in the day, I used to keep um old RFPs I answered in a folder, you know, digital folder, so I could copy and paste answers into other RFPs that I would get. Because you know what? Everyone has the same problem. They're trying to fix those problems. And you know, one RFP really is not much different than another RFP, especially content management or data asset management. So, you know, one RFP is just like another RFP, and the best thing to do is just you know have your data ready to go and copy and paste. Or in this case, the RFP hive will align legal product SC inputs into one interface. It'll redline compliance concerns automatically. It'll suggest competitive differentiators to emphasize. It'll score that RFP win probability based on historical data, and identify those landmines and unclear requirements that more than likely are tuned for your competitor. And it'll surface that, right? It'll give you an idea of who you're competing with there. Um, the goal here is to reduce RFP cycles by three to five days on average, saving 30 to 50 hours of SE, legal, and product time per response. Business benefit, no-brainer, right? RFP hive is not going to just save time. It'll improve accuracy and win probability by reducing the RFP cycle time and freeing 30 plus hours per deal. Your team can redirect that energy towards higher value selling. Now let's get into um the leadership hive. Now we're really pivoting into more operational stuff. I've been a leader for, let's see, in the 35 years, probably 30 of those years, I was leading teams. And, you know, visibility to what's goes on in the field is very difficult to capture. Too often leaders, you know, wait for the annual review. And about a month before the annual review, they start worrying about that review because it does take a lot of time. But they really don't worry about the relationship for the entire year. And shame on the leaders that do that. Um, I was a leader that made sure that my people got the fair assessment. And every quarter I used to do an assessment uh for my team, and and my managers would do the assessments for their individual contributors. And I felt that way we had information captured across the full year. Now, that's from a career standpoint and managing employees, but there's also the management of activity throughout the year. If you recall earlier, I think it was in uh episode eight, I mentioned that Ensemble built out a what we called a technical notebook, and it would track win-loss rates, demo to close rates, and provide us really good data. There's a company out there called Vivid. Uh, they actually are trying to provide KPI and record metrics for SE activity, but you know, unfortunately, a little bit divorced from the sales conversations, and the two really need to be aligned. So this is not just a particular line of business. It has to be all players involved through the cycle of the relationship with the customer. Uh so this leadership high will keep an ear on all types of things that are going to be relevant to reporting back to the business and/or the individual contributor and/or uh to product engineering. So, first it'll surface win-loss rates, demo to close ratios, and activate uh heat maps on where all the activities are within your entire business. Uh track SE bandwidth versus actual deal impact. Identify underutilized talent or overcommitted SEs, or maybe even understand where all the subject matter experts are being wasted in the sales cycle. Analyze compliance and accuracy across teams. Uh, it'll look at best practices, ensure that the sales rep, the uh solution architect, and all players involved are actually following best practices. And where they're not, it'll alert to their leaders so you can provide some corrective action andor education in order to provide coaching moments uh for your uh constituents, right? It'll provide OKRs and KPI dashboards per team. It'll map individual SE contributions, sales contributions uh to the revenue outcomes. And that one's an important one too, depending upon how your organization is set up. I remember at Oracle, at the end of each quarter, the numbers would come in and we would have to pull spreadsheets out and provide, you know, uh ultimately what our percentage of individual contribution would be against the deal, and the SE would get a slice of the compensation for it. So it wasn't cut and dry. And I know there's a lot of tools out there to try to improve that, um, but I've yet to see one that actually provides action to the activity associated to the SE. And what I mean by that is you have some SEs that in a pooled environment, um, you've got five people really, you know, working hard and you got five people who are not. And those five people that are not are actually benefiting from the five people that are, right? That's a pooled environment. Where I think we have to have more targeted relationships to our individual contributors and surface those great individual contributors so we can reward them and keep them in the business. And those that are not contributing, we need to understand the plan on what we're gonna do with them going forward. So the leadership hive is gonna help leadership understand career coaching, succession planning, uh, help leaderships make budget hiring and allocation decisions with confidence. Um, obviously, the business benefit here is leadership hive turns gut feeling management into data-driven decision making. It helps leaders deploy the right people to the right deals, uh, coach in real time and plan for sustainable growth. They result better win rates, less burnout, and higher retention. Uh at Snowflake, my boss incorporated what they call a nine-box um career assessment or uh employee assessment. And it was new to me, wasn't new to her, uh, and yet at the same time, it was all gut feel, right? It was all subjective to um how we felt about the the individual. I felt it was more like a beauty contest than data rich and supportive with data. Um, so this hive essentially will satisfy that need to ensure that everyone is being treated fairly. Lastly, in this uh podcast, we're going to talk about enablement hive. Uh, enablement hive is great. When you think about SEs joining or anybody, even a sales rep joining an organization, what happens? Well, HR has their standard uh video training andor uh boot camp that you fly out to in the first 30 days, and the next 60 days you're maybe doing some ride-alongs with SEs and/or other salespeople, and then your boss goes out in the 90, and then you know you're off the hook, right? You're thrown in the deep end of the pool with no safety net. Well, wouldn't it be great to have an enablement hive who um ultimately would be along the ride and listening to how you conduct yourself within a in the business? So, for example, an SE, SE's have certain strengths in certain areas. Let's say the SE is really strong in SQL and databases, but not strong in coding and Java or not strong in containerizations like Kubernetes and things of that nature. Um, the agent will listen into these conversations and ensure that will guide the agent, um, as we mentioned in the sales hive and in the discovery hive will guide the SC in this case with some understanding of what to say, how to say it. But at the end of the day or at the end of the week, or at the end of the month, wouldn't it be great to have an assessment of your SE population or sales population and identify those that are weak in certain areas and then map those that are stronger in those areas with them in order to help them trained? Too often the enablement team, the sales enablement or SE enablement uh departments are not filled with people that actually work in the field. It's all theory. Wouldn't it be better to have an enablement hive that surfaces those individuals, maps those to people that can help them, and the village helps themselves grow, both sales and also SEs, and quite quite frankly, anybody within the sales timeline. It'll surface learning opportunities directly inside your CRM and meeting tools. And it also can reinforce methodologies like B-Manter or MedPick in real time. Obviously, the benefit here is enablement hive closes the gap between training and execution. It can cut ramp time for new hires by 30 to 40% and bring underperformers to, you know, up to quota faster without taking them out of the field for endless workshops. And it also brings a solid level of morale. No one wants to fail. Uh, you know, we're we're all tuned to win and uh we want to know and learn. And I'm gonna try to learn the things I don't know and be rewarded for the things I do by helping others uh teach them and coach them on the things that I really excel at. So, in closing, with the RFP Hive, leadership hive, and enablement hive, we're not just closing more business, we're creating the infrastructure for scale. These are the levers that help the team move from inconsistent wins to predictable performance. Now, in our final episode, right, we mentioned we're only going to do 10 of these for the landing page. And my expectation is that you know, we'll we'll do a lot of uh uh podcasts where we have some guests on the on the stage and we can get to some real world experiences other than just uh the the few people that I've worked with here in my tenure. Uh the final episode, uh episode 10, we'll we'll bring it all together: every hive, the full sales process, the business case, and how you can be part of building the future of Hivera AI. Uh once again, my name is Kevin Coons. I'm your host, SU Work Life, and uh we're talking about Hivera.ai. Uh, very excited for uh this agent to get constructed. And we're fastly working on the MVP right now. And as technology rapidly changes what feels to be hourly, uh, we have to modify as we lay the tracks down in front of us. So excited for the next steps. Please click on the buttons uh in the landing page to either become a design partner, invest, or just want to participate in the podcast. Until then, have a great day.