What a day at HowNow HQ - the G2 Fall 2023 Reports have dropped, and it’s good news 🥁

🥳 We’ve scooped FIVE new badges 

Following on from the Momentum Leader badge in this Summer’s Reports, we received:

• Leader - United Kingdom
• High Performer - United Kingdom
• High Performer - Europe
• Mid-Market High Performer - Europe
• Mid-Market High Performer - EMEA

And it’s a huge credit to our brilliant team behind the scenes.

This time last year, we were badge-less. 

A season ago, that first badge felt like a huge win…

So you can only imagine how big the smiles were when those Fall Reports landed.

Just look at all those accolades 😍

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What this means to the team

Recognition like this always feels the sweetest because it’s based on real reviews from real customers!

Nothing but cold hard facts and genuine opinions influence who gets G2 badges.

Having seen the journey from the very beginning, we asked Nelson Sivalingam, HowNow Co-Founder and CEO, what this haul meant to him:

“We’re thrilled to be recognised by G2 as both a Leader and a High Performer based on reviews from our customers. 

“I’m incredibly proud of our HowNowers, who strive to deliver a customer experience second-to-none and push the boundaries of learning at work. 

“A big thank you to our customers and partners for being great champions as well as close collaborators. We’re excited for what’s to come because we’re just getting started.”

Want to make meaningful learning a part of everyday work AND partner with a brilliant bunch of people?

Book a demo of HowNow today

The role of HowNow+

Our HowNow+ content library was also a huge factor, offering hand picked content, from specialist providers, in one single subscription.

The reality is that people don’t want lots of learning content—they want the right content, and HowNow+ carefully curates resources from the providers you trust, directly in our learning platform.

Gloria Reina, Content Partnerships Manager, shared what these badges mean to her and her team:

"Seeing HowNow+’s development has been extremely rewarding personally. There are great e-learning libraries out there so we are extremely proud to have won five G2 badges.

"This recognition means a lot to the HowNow team and encourages us to keep working hard on upskilling the workforce of today.

“Our main focus has been partnering up with great content suppliers, our content curation services, and making HowNow+ accessible to everyone. 

“As we grow, we want to ensure we have a world-class content subscription, offered in multiple languages and making even better recommendations powered by AI."

Learn more about HowNow+ here.

What’s life like as part of HowNow’s Ruby on Rails team?

Well, with the team now at 16 members and seven of them joining in the last year, we decided it was time to get an answer to that question! 

Based in Mumbai and blessed with some truly wonderful people, we sat down with them to find out three key things:

• Why did you join and what’s it been like since?
• How have you progressed and what are the big achievements?
• And how they’d describe the culture.

Why did you join HowNow?
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“I wanted to work in a fast-paced start-up environment where I'll be a part of the product-building team. And that's why I love it. HowNow for me means that I get to participate, build, debate and learn so many things about the whole Product building lifecycle”

And this was a common sentiment among our Ruby on Rails (RoR), with many seeing HowNow as a leap forward in their careers.

From being given more responsibility than they’d had in a larger organisation, to taking on new tasks, HowNow offered better development opportunities. The team also shared that they love being able to openly debate on topics, sharing their ideas and challenging others. 

And these environments are where real learning happens 🧠

A few of our HowNowers joined from service based companies, so we asked them about the big differences.
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“You’re really able to have a voice here. I can make contributions that have a huge impact on the development of the product. Everything isn’t set in stone, so we can bring ideas and find solutions together.”

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Working for HowNow gives the RoR team more opportunity to make an impact, which they weren’t able to do before coming here.

And while we do have deadlines, quality is our biggest priority over speed, which leaves the team feeling far prouder of the projects they’re working on. And as they’re able to hear directly from the customers and iterate based on what they hear, it feels like they’re making something truly market leading that impacts peoples lives. 

What problems have you solved and which features have you built since joining?

From creating concurrent sessions from scratch to launching new features like our Optimised Search and Dashboards, the RoR team really are impacting the lives of L&D teams across the globe.

They’re removing major bugs to make the product slicker than ever, have launched our Skills function and continue building the integrations that make learning seamless for our customers. 

How have the team progressed since joining HowNow?

We ❤️️ hearing how our people are growing and evolving, so these three quotes brought big smiles to our faces.

“I’d seen many SQL views and queries, but hadn’t written many myself. I’ve been given the chance to stretch myself, and now I’m being a lot more proficient with SQL. MongoDB was also completely new to me before joining.” 

“Before joining, I wasn’t able to handle data. Now, I’m building features and learning to work a lot closer with other teams.”

“Massively improved my ROR skills, and learned a lot about a number of third party services - Zapier, MS Teams, Shopify, SCORM and code-writing.”

It’s just not about hard-skills though; others in the team highlighted that they’d learned to work better in teams, developing their people management, and ability to work in an agile development cycle. 

How would they describe HowNow’s culture?

Diverse views make for brilliant products and at that’s what we’re building here at HowNow!

Hiring talented individuals that vary in their demographics - socioeconomics, gender, ethnicity and others - is an important part of our future success. 

The same goes for creating an open, collaborative culture where HowNowers love coming to work, have the creative freedom to deliver their best and use that develop is how we’ll continue delivering market-leading Learning Experience Platform.

‍How about a few final quotes from the RoR team? 

“Really diverse. We’ve got people from all regions of India, and work with the UK team too. Culture is at the heart of HowNow, it’s a part of the company, whilst growing quickly!”

“Joyful, supportive and collaborative. A really open culture, where we promote transparency!”

“Friendly, diverse, and feels like a second home to me where people genuinely care for each other”

‍If you’re interested in becoming a Ruby on Rails Developer at HowNow and joining this fantastic team, check out our current vacancies here.

🤔 What’s the career journey of a Head of Sales like?

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 How do you grow a sales team and build more structure when you join a startup?

🤝 What qualities make a great sales rep in a fast-changing world?

We put these questions and a few more to Chris Chesterman, Head of Sales at HowNow, and here’s his story…

Chris, tell us about your background and career. Where did it start and how did you end up in sales in the first place?

I actually originally did a degree in industrial design. And the whole premise was that someone gave you a challenge or a specification of something they needed, then you had to kind of interrogate them, understand what they wanted and then design a solution.

Usually, you design a couple of options and pitch it back to them. And that is effectively the kind of the tenuous link I made between my original degree and what I went on to do.

But what it did give me a real passion for was getting to know people and understanding why the heck they have a problem. What’s the real human context behind it, and then how do we try and find a solution to help them move forward?

That is a mantra I’ve tried to maintain throughout my career.

Once you got into that first sales role, what was that like, and how did it progress from there?

My first job in sales was at a company called Build Online down in Maidenhead, which was like a proper bootstrap startup trying to break into the construction world.

“I was there doing 80 to 100 cold calls a day, and it was a very rude awakening to the reality of what’s required to build up that maturity to handle lots and lots of difficult conversations, to manage your time, and motivate yourself over and over and over again.”

And beyond that, I progressed into a typical kind of AE role with a company called Opel Telecom. From there, I then actually got headhunted by Pearson, which is very interesting because Pearson is now one of the biggest investors in HowNow.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career?

It probably took me a decade to realise it in truth. But when I first got into sales, I thought it was all the things you associate with sales naturally: you need to be disgracefully confident in everything you say, a little bit arrogant, and that it’s actually all about pitching and selling.

“Sales is actually about listening and storytelling. And I think that was the huge flip for me, was the realisation that storytelling is how you bring things to life and help people envisage the value of whatever it may be that you’re talking about.”

If they can picture themselves using it and the impact it will have on them, they’ll champion whatever it may be.

Why HowNow? What was it that interested you about this challenge, and why was it the right time to get on board?

Great question, and it’s very simple for me! It comes down to two things.

One, what I saw was a sense of purpose, belief and identity that felt like something that we could really magnify. And it felt super credible! It’s something we can tell a truly believable story about.

And that comes from Nelson and Kuvera having a very clear vision, working with Ashish to deliver fantastic technology and translate that into a meaningful narrative that really felt like we were empowering L&D to have an impact. And that was truly exciting.

I’m also a bit of a techie and a bit of a nerd. And I love the fact that I genuinely think it’s great tech. It looks great. It really works well. We have incredible brands evangelising for us.

“I find it very conflicting running any sales organisation to be able to encourage and motivate anyone to sell something if I personally don’t believe in its ability to have the impact that we practise and preach.”

And what I said to Nelson a couple of times recently in terms of differentiating good companies and bad companies is would I recommend HowNow to my best friend as a place that they could come and work and should work?

Yes, absolutely. But equally, would I also go and sell it to my best friend if they ran a company and I wanted them to buy it? Yes, absolutely.

Thinking back to when you joined, there wasn’t necessarily the defined sales structure and we were lacking a Head of Sales, where did you start?

First thing first is to try and strip back any frustrations, emotions, processes, and talk to people, and I don’t mean that in a kind of cheesy way.

I wanted to understand everyone in the sales team’s why. Why do they still work for HowNow today? What is it that motivates them to come to work? And what do they want to achieve from work?

By understanding that, I could start to work out a plan for how I support these people and empower them to hopefully be more successful.

And in terms of the sales processes themselves, what’s the story there?

I think it’s really critical to understand what’s frustrating or limiting people’s potential. Salespeople have a number of touch points in their daily working lives that really need to work super efficiently.

1. Are we feeding them enough? In terms of do they have enough opportunity to really go and embrace and feel that they have an opportunity to achieve their goals?
2. Are the processes and the technologies making things really efficient for them?
3. Are they empowered to do the best work we could do? Are we giving them the materials and enabling them to execute to the best of their abilities?

By identifying those three things, we can build a foundation for success.

Was there one big priority you spotted by going through that process?

The more and more I dug into all of the things I just mentioned, I only identified one critical problem, and that was quite simply, we were not talking to enough people. It’s as simple as that.

Because of the great brand and so on, we’re actually blessed with pretty healthy inbound lead flow, which was good, and that was keeping people ticking over, but you’re never gonna hit your targets and exceed them if you’re just ticking over.

We effectively had two SDRs who were handling all the inbound and outbound, and that created a challenging balance in terms of how to prioritise time and where to focus. Now, the reality is if we’re not having enough conversations, it means that we’re not creating enough noise, we’re not engaging enough people.

So, we then doubled down and started hiring very emphatically around the outbound SDR functions, as part of the process where we actually segmented inbound and outbound. We had real mastery of the way that we are qualifying and managing our inbound pipeline, but then we also make sure that we have mastery in terms of outbound, bringing in the right calibre of talent and people and tools and process to really accelerate the outbound piece.

We’re speaking at the eight-month mark since you joined HowNow, how has the sales team evolved and what’s the long-term vision?

The team that I inherited in December was effectively a group of people whose roles were all kind of intermingled and there was a lack of focus and a lack of strategy. And it’s evolved a lot since then!

I think the first big milestone was to actually create what I would call structured expertise, going from a group of individuals that were all doing the same thing (a bit of inbound, outbound, mid-market and enterprise) to really breaking it down so everyone had the opportunity to show mastery in what they did.

So in terms of the structure, that will largely remain as is. However, there are a number of roles I believe we will really need in the future that we don’t necessarily have today.

For example, bringing in a team lead to champion the SDR team because that team will need to continue to scale as we maintain a ratio of SDR to AE that is really healthy in terms of how we go to market.

I want people to be able to feel like, even if I join as an inbound SDR and as my first job out of university, I can see three or four roles ahead of me within the HowNow sales team.

Finally, if you were talking to someone who’d never met our sales team before and was considering applying, what is it that you love about our sales team and culture?

I think we have some of the most remarkably passionate and intelligent salespeople I’ve ever worked with. And I mean intelligence in terms of their ability to read and understand customers, market conditions and internal structures, and come with really considered perspectives.

And the most incredible thing about this sales team is that the feedback loop is so healthy. It never comes through a critical lens, but in the sense that, if we get together, I’m going to voice these three ideas, and we can find a solution to that together.

I’m trying to avoid the words like self-starter, but there is a reality that we need people who can manage their time, are very driven, and able to go and execute on the plan they’ve drafted.

A good HowNow sales teammate has that growth mindset! The environment, economy and context is always changing, so you have to be open to feedback, mistakes, and learning every day.

You have to be an emphatic storyteller too! If you can take three of the amazing things we do and translate that into how they’ll apply to someone’s day-to-day and help learning soar, you can help build that really compelling narrative on why HowNow will have a huge impact on them and their company.

If you’re interested in joining our fantastic sales team, check out our current vacancies here.

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