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Using Empathy to Fight Pushback Against Change

With Jasmine Carnell, Sales Operations Sr. Analyst at Lessonly

Jasmine Carnell, guest speaker "Using Empathy to Fight Pushback Against Change" episode

Overview

Jasmine Carnell from Lessonly shares how the use of empathy can build stronger teams and better outcomes for a business. Keeping the end user in mind, whether internal or external, helps design processes and products that users want to use.

Meet Jasmine

Jasmine Carnell is the Sales Operations Manager at Lessonly. She’s a certified Salesforce Business Analyst with experience in client facing roles focused on public sector & nonprofit business process analysis and delivery.

Her proven ability to adapt to new challenges and be a catalyst for change drives her to pinpoint deficiencies within an organization, develop logical solutions, and devise a strategy for implementation that will ultimately facilitate a boost in performance and overall quality.

Top Takeaways

Building Processes With Empathy

What steps do you take when you want a sales team to adopt a new process?

It really starts with empathy and consideration of your audience’s pain points.

For example, if I want sales to build a quote in Salesforce, I don't want to make them press the same button five different times to get something approved.

I would like to allow them to just press a button once. They're going to feel better about that process because it's fast and easy and simple.

Identifying the Pain Points of Sales Ops

What’s your process to identify the pain points to address with Sales Ops?

You have to do your research to build a profile of your customer (Sales Ops). I start with actually shadowing a sales rep, especially when I start in a new role or a new organization.

I try to document what their biggest pains are. In the same way that a sales rep identifies the pains and use cases for their potential customer, I'm identifying themes and use-cases for each individual end user of the tech stack.

Best Practices for Communicating With Different Teams

What recommendations do you have for communicating with different teams outside of marketing?

I change the language I use depending on the focus of the team I’m interacting with. Marketing speak is usually top-of-funnel. They’re thinking about how the prospect is going to feel about the brand and the image. They’re trying to get a feeling or emotion tied to the content they’re providing.

Sales thinks about not just the emotional relationship the customer has with the product but also a strong use case for the product we’re trying to sell.

What's Next for Operations

With all the different operations - sales, marketing, data, dev, what would you like to see more of in overall operations?

I’m biased as a woman but I see more empathy being involved in operations in the future. I’m already seeing more and more women in the industry using empathy to great success.

Historically, men are very technical people working on design, vanity processes, and changes.

They tend to promote processes and changes that make sense to them. They build what they want to build because they like it, not because it works for each individual end user.

I feel like women are naturally much better at thinking with the end user in mind. It may not be so much of a gender issue rather than more empathy needed in operations in general.