[Office Hours] Ambition 2021 Roadmap with New VP of Product

On the 3rd Thursday of each month, Ambition hosts Office Hours to discuss industry and product best practices, trends, and insights. On March 18th, Ambition’s VP of Product, Butler Raines, and Customer Success Manager, Emma Hamilton, led an Office Hours on Ambition’s 2021 product roadmap! Here are some highlights from the session:

Meet Butler

Butler Raines comes to us from SalesLoft, a sales engagement software company, where he was Head of Product and part of the executive team that recently led the company to a $1.1B valuation.  Butler has been leading product organizations and building platforms in Atlanta over the last 10 years, including SalesLoft and The Bitter Southerner, and he credits his success in the role to building empowered, high-performing teams, his focus on customers, and great coaching and mentoring.

What excites Butler about Ambition? 

1) Ambition is a Data Processing Engine

A self-proclaimed “data nerd”, Butler is really inspired by Ambition’s data-driven approach to sales performance management. Ambition has the power to take and read data coming in from multiple sources and make that data actionable for both sales leaders and employees.

2) The Power of Scorecards & Creating Meaningful Metrics

One of the first things that stood out to Butler was Ambition’s Scorecard technology that combines activities and objectives to give you an overall score. This helps sales leaders consistently measure and understand where their team stands and create accountability.  As John Doerr writes in Measure What Matters: OKRs - The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth,

“Acute focus, open sharing, exacting measurement, a license to shoot for the moon - these are the hallmarks of modern goal science.”

3) Facilitating a Consistent Cadence of Coaching

Coming from managing a large team at SalesLoft, Butler understands the importance of having consistent, measurable coaching sessions to ensure that your team is performing their best. Ambition’s ability to overlay activity and objective metrics within a check-in helps leaders understand whether or not their coaching efforts are effective. 

Where can Ambition go from here?

We are in the process of building an Ecosystem of Accountability and Encouragement for our customers. In a remote selling environment, holding your employees accountable in an empathetic, measurable, and encouraging way are more important than ever before. Our gamification technology is facilitating the initiative to push productivity towards areas where it is needed most. In addition to our own ecosystem,  we want to be great partners with other technologies and platforms, too. We want your tech stack to play seamlessly with Ambition. 

Here’s the breakdown of tools within our ecosystem: 

Coming Soon to Ambition...

Lower is Better Metrics

• Ambition's Scorecards provide teams with the ability to have blended metric types, supporting both Higher-is-Better (traditional metrics) and Lower-is-Better metrics, like:

1. Average Handle Time

2. Transfer Rate

3. Average Ticket Response Time

4. Open Tasks in Queue

• Two Key Product Updates: 

1. The Scorecard builder will support both scoring types with their corresponding target, min, & max

2. The Scorecard widget will display these metrics with reverse polarity

Microsoft Teams Integration

• With this upcoming integration, we hope to generate the energy and engagement your remote team needs by sharing live Leaderboards & Challenge standings in Microsoft Teams with Ambition’s Action Commands. Commands include:

  • Help: Display a list of available commands & help documentation.

  • Leaderboard: Select a metric & time frame to share in a Team’s channel.

  • Competition: Share the rankings of an active or recently ended challenge.

  • Note: Send a coaching note to a direct report’s coaching timeline in Ambition.

Ambition Mobile App

• Work when, how, and where you want to work with the flexibility of a mobile app. 

• Currently, the focus is on the dialer, but we are working to expand to a live feed and various parts of the desktop application. 

Check out the full session + live Q&A below!

Don't miss next month's Office Hours! Register here.