How Large, Innovative Companies Are Using Their LMSs for ‘Revenue Enablement’

Ryan Pimlott on June 15, 2018

I’ve been in the trenches for over three years with big enterprises while they’ve grappled with leveraging their LMSs (Learning Management Systems; and yes, many have more than one) to drive the continuous learning and development that their sales enablement programs can provide to sales reps so they can stay ahead of their discerning, self-qualifying customers. They all have one common question, “how do we leverage our LMS systems for effective sales enablement? Or do we?”
I usually respond with, “We see the need to drive more productivity from innovative top companies like yours every day. And most companies we encounter are actively seeking better ways to diagnose, swiftly and effectively react to customer requests, and ultimately drive more sales predictability.” But, what’s usually not apparent is that change is happening so fast that companies are failing when trying to use their LMSs for effective sales coaching or adequately disseminating ever-changing sales requirements. LMSs were built for managing and certifying large company employee’s accomplishments (such as certifying that personnel is trained on sexual harassment or discrimination laws). LMSs are not designed for helping effective sales teams consume and retain useful knowledge, develop skills and behaviors they can continuously improve upon, or finally, targeting specific needs and skills’ gaps.
When it comes to enabling sales and client professionals to be successful and repeatedly win deals or renew accounts, corporate learning management systems don’t do the job.

What sales need to be customer ready – beyond an LMS

What do salespeople need? Beyond LMS systems? They need to be prepared to effectively field customer requests and objections. Therefore, they need access to the latest information in an easily consumable format—in real time, not days after a training or coaching session, but at the exact moment, the information is made available.
Then, they need to be able to articulate the right messages during crucial customer conversations. There are no second chances when your competition is on the next call. Sellers who are knowledgeable and articulate are more valued, and often the winners of new business. The fact is that today’s sales professionals need more than reviews, webinars, and classroom sessions. To truly address knowledge and skills’ gaps, managers need to coach their team members on how to improve sales strategies at an ongoing basis. And for coaching, they need robust sales enablement solutions.
Plus, many managers, especially first-time managers need meaningful guidance on what effective sales coaching looks like. Even experienced managers who know how to coach and have exhausted the capabilities of corporate learning management systems need enablement tools to help them identify problem areas and gaps. Coaching is not possible with just an LMS.

More than just sales teams impact revenue

While revenue growth involves new business from sales, it must maintain (or grow) existing revenue from expansions to renewals. That’s why it’s important to point out that those who impact overall revenue growth include not only sales reps, but also customer success managers, customer support professionals, call center professionals, sales engineers, sales enablement managers, learning and development professionals, and product marketers alike. Enablement programs must reach beyond sales’ teams and extend to everyone who impacts revenue maintenance and growth. “Revenue enablement” if you will.
When customer satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS scores are low, customers are highly unlikely to expand or renew existing products or services. That’s why many Mindtickle customers are working on pilot programs and deployments that focus on improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. They repeatedly ask, “how can I diagnose and influence my company’s CSAT scores? Is it by providing all revenue influencers (sales, customer support and service roles) the right knowledge? Or skills? Or tools? How about through effective sales coaching?”

What effective ‘revenue enablement’ should accomplish

An effective revenue enablement solution begins where an LMS ends. It should onboard and updates all revenue influencers quickly and efficiently, and in a way that simultaneously helps them reinforce and retain the knowledge and skills they need.
Moving towards a complete revenue enablement model is the perfect opportunity for enterprise enablement leaders to move from measuring program adoption to correlating programs to performance. Imagine doing real-time correlations with transactional metrics, such as win/loss analysis, conversion rates, etc.
I consider Mindtickle a true revenue enablement solution because our solution actively helps managers coach, enables the retention and reinforcement of knowledge and develops skills and behaviors in an efficient and easily consumable manner. An effective revenue enablement solution like Mindtickle’s should always be there to help revenue influencers fill in skills and behavior gaps throughout the time they’re with a company.
So, if you are like many of our customers who ask where their LMS fits into sales, or what I call revenue enablement, understand that LMSs are key to a modern-day enablement solution, but, they’re just not all you need. Effective revenue enablement solutions begin where the benefits of LMSs end.
Imagine elevating the role of enablement leaders by presenting to your exec team and peers metrics that show a direct correlation between your “revenue” enablement programs and revenue growth?

Leverage Gamification in Sales Training and Coaching

Deepti Sundareshan on March 21, 2018

It used to be that training and coaching were time-consuming and infrequent. As a result, less knowledge was retained, skill development was slow and behavioral change with minimal. Now, companies are getting great results by using gamification. Gamification is the application of the look and feel of games to engage people, motivate action, and promote learning.

According to Gartner’s Brian Burke, gamification has proven to be very successful in engaging people and motivating them to change behaviors, develop skills, or solve problems. If you’re wondering how to take advantage of this popular trend, here are some ways to leverage gamification in sales training and coaching programs at your organization.

Get them started with a familiar experience

Many people in today’s sales forces are Gen X and Y. They’ve been playing video games as they’ve grown up. This makes it easy to get them involved in learning when gamification is employed. Introduce the idea of simply getting through one learning module (or “level”) at a time before moving to the next. Rewards at the completion of the first level with points or digital badges reps can accumulate and display to coworkers. The sooner they see progress, the more motivated they’ll be to participate further.

Encourage competition

Although individual employees may be working toward individual goals, badges and points can be used to display levels of accomplishment. Post them on a dashboard or leaderboard that is accessible company-wide, office-wide or team-wide. This will register as a method of recognition too.

Identify SMEs or go-to resources

Gamification allows managers to identify who knows the most about a given topic, or who’s best at a particular skill, based on metrics. This helps identify team members who are becoming subject matter experts or excellent resources for others on the team. This may be used to facilitate rewards to officially acknowledge key accomplishments.

Motivate them to learn more skills

Rewards at the completion of one step or competency, inspire reps to move on to the next one. Elements of gamification incorporated in learning initiatives emphasize achievements and recognize them. People want to gain skills when they go through training but it’s better when others know about it.

Break learning into bite-sized segments

A complicated process, topic, or goal may seem insurmountable when approached through traditional training methods. Gamification can eliminate potential intimidation by breaking the subject down into small segments. This helps the rep focus on bite-sized amounts of information per lesson and makes complex learning more fun and engaging. Plus, as research has shown, small frequent sessions are more successful at facilitating the absorption and retention of knowledge or skills, than lengthy, infrequent ones.

Make deadlines fun

Work schedules are often packed with deadlines and activities. Gamification makes deadlines feel like fun. Instead of telling reps that they must have certain modules completed by a certain date, why not set up a competition around who can accumulate the most points by that date. You can still give them a due date and make it enjoyable in the process.

Gameplay

Incorporate short, engaging sessions that are timed or defined by the total number of questions. Quizzes that are converted into games at the end of modules, allow the measurement and reinforcement of knowledge while being engaging and entertaining. In fact, a study by the University of Colorado revealed that games improve knowledge and skill learning while increasing retention rates by 9%.

Scenario-based learning

Introduce new knowledge and skills in simulations of real-life scenarios followed by the participant recording themselves practicing using that same knowledge or skill. This allows coaches to provide timely feedback. These simulations make it easier for reps to apply what they learn without needing to adapt it to actual situations on the job. This method of gamification is not only practical but engages the team member immediately.

Capture and analyze data routinely

The data collected from all these games allows coaches to gain valuable insights. It facilitates the identification of individual coaching requirements and the provision of important feedback without the need to meet in an office. This way coaching easily fits into busy day-to-day schedules and progress continues.

Social elements

Including a news feed to share updates, recognize team members’ accomplishments, and more adds a social element to training and coaching. It promotes open communication between reps, allowing them to cheer each other on.  This further increases program participation, engagement, and results.

Start to leverage gamification in sales training and coaching at your organization. These elements stimulate friendly competition, encourage a spirit of achievement, keep users engaged, and drive behavioral change. The game feels also motivates participants to continually advance, so you see ongoing growth and improvement. Now, isn’t that the result you’re seeking?

Are you an Ultimate Sales Leader yet?

Deepti Sundareshan on March 1, 2018

As a sales manager, you have a big impact on the success of each member of your team, and your team knows it.

Research has shown that 69% of salespeople who exceed quota rate their sales manager as ‘excellent’ or ‘above average’. While it’s great to be recognized, ultimate sales leaders don’t do it for the glory, they live to inspire their team to achieve greatness and know how to push all the right buttons to help them succeed.

While most good sales leaders have high-achieving teams, they have a lot more in common. Here are some of the sales leader traits that make the difference between being good and being an ultimate sales leader.

Lead for the long-term

No sales team is successful based on one deal. A good sales team requires a long-term and strategic approach and it’s up to their sales leader to provide the big picture. Great sales leaders develop a sales playbook with vision and makes sure there team follows it to achieve their end goal. The playbook looks at every aspect of the sales process, from prospecting to closing and communicates a clear plan on how they will achieve it.

While any manager can write a playbook, what separates great leaders is their ability to set the vision, communicate it and follow through. They don’t chop and change their mind or confuse their team. They communicate the plan clearly and make sure everyone understands what it means for them and for their customers. They also define clear development plans for their people and deliver on them.

After all, sales are only successful if the customer wins, and ultimate sales leaders know this and make sure the customer is front and center of their vision.

Be motivated by the end goal

Sales is a numbers game and the best sales leaders never allow their team to take their eye off the prize – achieving target. To achieve the sales leader may have to put themselves in a position where they absorb any noise, distractions, and negativity that may bring their team down. They’re good listeners and know how to remove roadblocks or just lend an ear when a salesperson needs to vent.

What sets an ultimate sales leader apart is their ability to know when to step in and fix something, and when to let it go. This requires good judgment and an understanding of what things can actually make a difference to sales results, and what are just irritations that are having minimal impact.

Hire the right people

Nothing wastes more time than hiring the wrong salesperson.That’s why good sales leaders take the time to recruit the right people and onboard them properly. There’s no time for bad recruits or sales reps that are struggling to ramp up in a high-achieving sales organization.

Hiring the right people is a skill. You can’t just look at someone’s CV and know they’re perfect for the job. It takes good judgment and instinct to know whether someone has the skill to build strong relationships and help customers find the right solution. Great sales leaders know how to spot someone who can close a deal or know when to fold and move on to better opportunities.

They can also identify potential where others may not notice. This means they don’t spend countless hours, weeks and months trying to get a salesperson to quota when they just don’t have the capability to make it. They can then devote their energies to other tasks that will make a difference when it comes to helping their salespeople achieve success.

Coach with passion

Salespeople are hungry to sell and have a thirst for anything that will help them do it better.  Ultimate sales leaders not only know this, but they know how to tap into this desire and help their salespeople channel it. One of the best ways to improve how reps sell is to take them on a journey of discovery and learning about their profession through mentoring and coaching. In fact, dynamic coaching can improve win rates by up to 27.6%.

Structured coaching helps salespeople improve how they approach customers, manage their sales funnel and close deals. But to really make a difference, sales leaders need to customize their coaching programs to meet the individual needs of each sales rep. After all, different reps need different types of coaching. An astute sales leader will determine the best approach for the individual and adapt their coaching plan for it, whether it’s going out to sales calls with them or scenario-based coaching.

Ultimate sales leaders know that coaching is good for their team, but they also are passionate about it. They embrace the opportunity to tap into the needs of each rep and build a cadence for sales coaching. This allows ultimate sales leaders to build momentum and ensure their sales team grows and prospers.

Empower everyone through accountability

75% of high-performing sales managers hold their salespeople accountable for their quota, compared to 58% of underperforming managers. But it takes a lot more than tracking your sales reps quotas to make them accountable.

Great sales leaders strive to achieve consistency in all aspects of the sales team, from following process to the message that customers hear. They do this by empowering their team through data and process.

Research shows that 43% of high-performing sales managers have a sales process that’s closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated, compared to 29% of underperforming sales managers.

The key to keeping a sales team accountable is in the data. They set transparent performance criteria and use this to monitor and assess their team. There are no surprises, but there’s also no room for ambiguity.

Ultimate sales leaders don’t focus on lagging reports, they’re driven by data that shows them what their reps are doing today and how they can improve tomorrow. This information can then be used to both improve and inspire reps by identifying knowledge and skill gaps before they become problems and rewarding achievements straight away.

Empowering and rewarding reps is important for accountability. It keeps high performers accountable for their achievements, gives them control over their own development, and puts a fire in the belly of the laggards who also want their peers to see their name in lights.

Listen and communicate with care

Last but certainly not least, a true leader cares about the welfare of their charges. They don’t want to take the glory for themselves, they want each individual to learn, improve and for them to succeed together. By demonstrating that they care about their team, ultimate sales leaders gain the respect and trust of their reps. This helps them open up and be honest about their concerns and fears. With this knowledge, sales leaders can then help their reps become even better at selling.

The reality is that ultimate sales leaders don’t spend their time sitting behind a desk and watching the sales come in. They’re part of the team and in the trenches with their salespeople. Whenever a shot is fired they’re there – leading the way and giving them the support they need to win each and every battle.

It’s the Year of the Coach

Ryan Pimlott on February 28, 2018

Coaching is at the top of everyone’s minds at the moment – for good reason. A good coach can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10% and when you combine training and coaching, sales productivity also increases.

With these results, it’s no surprise that everyone is jumping on the coaching bandwagon, but not all coaching impactful.
According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is:

“An interactive process to help individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results; improving other’s ability to set goals, take action, make better decisions and make full use of their natural strengths.”

Impactful coaching focuses on the needs of your reps and helps them improve how they approach different parts of the sales process or their customers. The results from impactful coaching go straight to your topline revenue.

Managers that are not impactful fail to move the needle on reps’ behavior and/or their performance. They just don’t have the skills required of a coach – perhaps they’re doing less coaching and more telling or controlling. Reps’ learn little from being told what they’re doing wrong, impactful coaching is a collaborative way to help them learn how to improve how they sell. Sometimes coaching is ineffective because managers just aren’t doing it properly — perhaps they’re just ticking a box or scoring their team more favorably in coaching exercises due to bias or even apathy.

It is possible to turn ineffective coaches into impactful ones, but in order to do that, you need to identify who is actually ineffective. Every sales manager is different, and short of watching every coaching session, it can be difficult to objectively know whether they’re making a difference to their reps’ performance. To do this you require data – but not just any data – the right data.

Identifying whether sales coaches are ineffective or impactful

The Sales Capability Index™ (SCI) is an index that has been developed by Mindtickle, which provides a capabilities score that, for the first time in the industry, provides a holistic, quantified assessment of sales rep and team readiness while also producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.

Essentially, the SCI provides a holistic, quantified assessment of individual sales reps and a manager’s entire team’s sales readiness. This is then linked to their performance, producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.Sales_capability_index

The SCI combines not only coaching but also knowledge and skill, so you can see what’s really impacting performance and what’s not. For example, if you’ve just launched a new product, coaching program, competitor series or other sales enablement initiatives to your sales team, you can see what elements have had an impact and by looking at scores before and after.

The score gives you a high level of conviction about how prepared your sales teams are and identify what initiatives are making an impact and what aren’t. It will also give you an indication of whether coaching (or other initiatives) are likely to impact your sales results so you can predict revenue more accurately.

As the data can be broken down by individual and by team, you can also see whether individual sales managers are coaching effectively – are they making a difference to the sales outcomes or not. This brings issues with sales manager’s coaching abilities to the surface, so they can be addressed long before the quarter or year is lost.

Coaching is only effective if it drives a business outcome. There is no point having your management team spend hours each week coaching reps if your top line revenue doesn’t grow. By using this data, coaching can be directly linked to real outcomes.

The same data can be used for most sales enablement initiatives. So if you launch a new product you can also look at the curriculum that was delivered to reps and assess whether it’s helped them sell or not. This helps you measure your enablement initiatives and identify where they need to be adjusted to make a real impact on your sales teams.

Coaching needs to have specific criteria for maximum effectiveness

In order to be effective, sales managers also need to know what to coach. No rep needs to be developed in every aspect of the sales process, but trying to find what they need help with isn’t always clear-cut.

By breaking down down the entire sales process and connecting each step with the enablement data that you have, you can look at sales competencies across each stage. This shows you exactly where a rep or a sales manager may need help.

The chart below gives you an example that shows you a rep that is able to explore opportunities and manage objections well, but perhaps needs help upselling and in call scheduling. The data pinpoints exactly where opportunities fail and evaluates qualitatively and quantitatively what competencies are needed at that specific stage.
Sales capability index™

This level of granularity allows managers to do tactical coaching and allows you to identify whether sales managers have skewed competencies. It gets to the heart of the issue and allows you to hone in on what needs to be done.

When looking at your sales team as a whole, it means you can identify if there is consistency across how teams are coached or if managers are perhaps playing to their strengths to the detriment of their team’s performance.

This kind of data has the potential to be a game changer. It can help identify bias in coaching performance and gives you the opportunity to address it objectively.

Empowering end users

A final way to improve impactful coaching across your sales teams is to give users the ability to approve or disapprove coaching feedback. Rather than just letting the sales managers have a say about how a coaching session went, let the reps tell you if they felt the session made a difference to them. This data can also be telling, because if your reps don’t feel like they’re benefitting from their coaching sessions, then it may be symptomatic of a broader problem – either with your coaching program or with individual coaches.

We all have so many tools in our sales stack, each providing an array of data. While it’s nice to have these numbers at our fingertips, they’re irrelevant if they can’t tell you how to improve your sales outcomes. After all, who has time to look through every data point available to them and work out what they’re saying.

For the Year of the Coach to make a real difference to your sales outcomes, you need to ensure that you have access to data that clearly and succinctly helps you link your coaching plans to your sales outcomes like the SCI does.

How the Best Companies Create an Agile Sales Coaching Model

Shankar Ganapathy on April 19, 2016

There has been a lot of talk about sales coaching recently, and in particular who should be driving it for the most effective results.

There are two schools of thought:

  1. Sales coaching is driven by managers who choose what reps need to be coached on.
  2. Sales enablement is responsible for structured coaching, as a part of an overall sales readiness program.

The former is the proven traditional approach, while the latter is part of a new era of sales coaching. But why has this changed? Haven’t managers been effective in coaching their teams to meet their numbers?

I asked some of our customers, and they explained that, in the past, managers were effective in both tactical and strategic coaching. But that was when product training happened once a year, and product updates occurred only every 6 months (remember V2.3.4 updates?).

Nowadays, product training is a part of day-to-day training and product updates are rolled out every week. In order to ensure that all reps have a consistent message, something drastic had to change.

As business demands change rapidly, the sales training and coaching process also needs to become agiler. There are now more people involved in coaching, with sales leadership, sales enablement, and sales managers all collaborating together to determine and execute the most effective coaching process.

These changes have also led to a new framework for coaching. One that moves away from dealing with specific issues, and instead hones the reps’ skills so that they’re always ready; Ready to convey the right message. Ready to speak to their customers. Ready to sell.

It’s not enough to coach a sales rep to have a conversation with a customer. Customers can find information from many sources, and in all instances, the message from reps must be consistent. So it’s important for reps to be message ready. This forms the foundations for each and every rep to understand your value proposition; something that can be driven by sales enablement and peer-to-peer learning. Only with this solid foundation can managers make a real impact on improving customer readiness. If a manager is left to coach a sales rep who doesn’t understand the message, their time will be less effective and they will struggle to scale their coaching efforts. This is where sales enablement and online tools can be most effective.

In a dynamic environment, your customer persona is constantly evolving, so it’s no longer enough to perfect a standard pitch, your reps need to be able to take into account the customer’s specific pain points and needs. They need to be customer ready. Where managers can make the most impact is in preparing their reps for customer readiness. As drivers of growth, they can utilize their knowledge of the customer to improve reps’ tactical sales.

When you bring customer readiness and message readiness together, you get sales readiness.

#1 Message relevance

With new product updates almost every week, and competitors innovating fast, reps are constantly faced with new use cases and objection handling scenarios. To make sure their message is always relevant, your reps need all of this information to be provided to them in real-time so they can have relevant, value-added conversations with their customers.

For example, one way that I’ve seen this done effectively is by enabling the product marketing team to send out regular updates. As the team that knows exactly what the latest feature is, who it’s relevant for and its benefits, they’re best placed to provide these updates.

#2 The power of collaborative practice

What your reps say to customers, and how they deliver their message, has a significant impact on whether they will close the deal. In old-school coaching models reps were limited to learning from their manager and the immediate team only. But thanks to technology, it’s becoming easier to facilitate collaborative practice using role plays.

For example, the sales mission capability in Mindtickle enables your reps with a safe arena to practice common customer scenarios and receive feedback from managers. They can also learn from their peers. Imagine the impact on your reps’ performance if they learned how to deliver an elevator pitch, how to handle objections, or received competitive pitch coaching, from your top performers across the country and around the globe?

By learning from peers in other teams, and even other sales managers, reps can gain a much broader perspective, and become better sales professionals as well. When done well, I’ve seen as much as 80% of the message learning can be achieved through collaborative practice.
Message Ready

#3 Manager mentorship

Mentoring is one of the best ways for reps to improve sales performance. While every manager has their own style when it comes to coaching and mentoring, when coupled with the processes described above, they will have more capacity to focus on strategic coaching. This will allow them to really hone in on skill development for their reps, helping them to become better sales professionals.

#4 Tactical coaching from manager and peers

There are lots of deal-by-deal tips and tricks that managers and other reps have up their sleeve. When managers have reps who have a solid foundation, they can focus their efforts on tactical coaching. Managers are also privy to the success stories of other reps (and managers). By sharing these across the team, reps can also gain the benefit of this knowledge that plays a pivotal role in ensuring higher win rates.

Bottomline: The coaching process needs to be more agile

Knowing and doing are two very different things, that’s why practice is so important. In order to make the coaching process more agile it needs to include more practice, in the form of role plays, and also leverage technology to enable that practice to be continual. When combined with mentorship and tactical coaching, as part of a well-defined process, you build a sales coaching cadence that will make your company and reps successful.

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