Behind the scenes of IBM Fast Start 2021: Recreating the Experience (Part 2 of 3)

This is Part 2 of my series: Behind the scenes of IBM Fast Start 2021. Part 1 can be found here: Lightning struck twice, but we prevailed: Behind the scenes of IBM Fast Start 2021 

Where I left off in part one, we had survived a couple of lightning strikes to pull off the opening "Trailblazers" sessions of our #FastStart2021 Sales Kick-off event, and were turning our attention to the major pivot required to deliver our week-long bootcamp experience in just 10 days. Our approach was to divide and conquer. The content existed, but we no longer had a vehicle to deliver it.

Small squads focused on the elements we needed to build. A small team, led by a fearless leader, focused on recreating all 900 Sales sessions and duplicating them across our 3 geo-specific bootcamps. Consistency, communication, and patience with each other were critical. 

Staying Connected with Slack

The need to communicate quickly to a large audience initially proved to be a challenge. We live in an era where emails are fading to quicker forms of communication, like texting and instant messaging. IBM adopted Slack a few years ago for internal communications and we decided to capitalize on it to reach 18K people instantly. We used the bot feature to answer questions quickly and efficiently. We also created a dedicated News Slack channel and added the invited audience to it. By restricting posting ability for the News channel to event planners, it ensured that only the most paramount messaging would be posted (note: we did have other open Slack channels for questions and comments). Slack allowed us to keep our audience informed during the pivot.

(Containerized) Content is King

Beyond clear communications, the most important currency we have is our content, and it was crucial to find a way to deliver it to our audience of sellers and business partners. In the face of massive changes at IBM, we developed a containerized learning approach. The idea (taken from open architecture) was to identify common elements across our roles, and areas where skill needs were different. This allowed us to re-use the same common content across all roles, and made our migration process just a little bit easier.

Coaching the Coaches

With our managers as the backbone of the organization, we knew the success of our newly announced sales structure was dependent upon their leadership and ability to embrace change. The Managers Bootcamp was designed to motivate, educate and activate managers to coach and lead their sellers to a successful 2021. Our themes were anchored on helping managers to empower their teams to see change as an opportunity, to instill a relentless drive to win, create safe environments to take risks and accept setbacks as learning that propels us forward.

The priority was to create an intimate and interactive learning experience where managers were willing to be open and transparent about their challenges, opportunities and best practices. The Managers Bootcamp consisted of instructor-led sessions, panel discussions, stories, polling, and active chats which leveraged managers’ expertise at all levels. Our inspirational guest speaker, Alison Levine, encapsulated all of our themes with her riveting stories and lessons learned from summiting Mount Everest. A special 'thank you' to our awards host, Drew Tarvin, and DJs Terry Bird and Ashwin Balu for creating the fun atmosphere to close each event; and, to those behind the scenes who solidified the smooth flow of the experience: Cam Scott and Shiretta Shaw.

We had over 3K worldwide managers and leaders participate via live stream in the Managers Bootcamp, with 50 SMEs, volunteer managers and leaders sharing their field expertise to ground the content in reality. To close out the session, we honored 45 of our managers with Modern Manager Selling Traits across the Geos. All sessions were recorded and available for replay and reflection.

“Great job packaging this integrated learning in a creative way. Loved the reflection and sharing.” – Sales Manager

Including the Ecosystem

The IBM Partner Ecosystem made a major pivot as well. The partner experience will continue with a tailored event on February 24 and 25. Similar to the Trailblazers, we will hold sessions in multiple time zones so our valued partners across the globe can join. While they will miss the interaction with IBMers we had planned, partners will still get to experience valuable, hand-picked content from the IBM events. There will be a mix of simu-live content and Learning Journeys hosted on IBM Training. Many of the labs that were planned will also be available throughout that week. Partners can find more details here and can sign up for the event through February 19. A big thank you to Michelle Calvillo, Cass Sil, and last but not least, Catherine Solazzo and team for their parts in leading this effort. 

Experiential Learning

For our IBM sellers and technical sellers, our goal is to drive best practices through applied learning - delivering a demo, overcoming objections, or listening in on to other sellers’ tales from the field. We focus not only on success stories, but also where we missed, where a different action could have driven a different outcome. Building deep technical skills is another primary objective of Fast Start, especially for our technical sellers. At Bootcamp, they spend time with experts learning up close through hands-on exercises how to apply solutions to solve clients’ challenges. Starting with an “outside in” client problem-based approach, Fast Start sessions help our sellers connect thoughtfully with our clients and interpret their needs, to help them – and IBM – succeed.

High Quality Production

None of this would have been possible without Tom Luciano and our SteadyNow production team. I would also like to recognize Tracey Weber, GM of IBM Digital Commerce & SaaS, and her team for their efforts during our pivot. Tom and our extraordinary production team worked overtime (pre-pivot) to produce cinema-levels of quality and somehow became nimble ninjas and pivoted when we needed them. We would not be where we are today without their focus, creativity, and dedication to our success. Find out more about the brilliant work they are doing at: https://www.steadynowpro.com.

In the end, it was the quality of the content, not the delivery method that really mattered.

Stay tuned for Part 3 to see how we enriched the experience and the overall results.