How to Change from Feature-Based Selling to Value-Based Selling

Deepti Sundareshan on April 17, 2018

When making changes to your sales approach or processes, you want to be sure you achieve your desired outcomes. With a plan in place, you increase the likelihood that you will. Below are the steps you need to take to change from feature-based selling to value-based selling.

To make this transition you’ll want to follow these steps:

  •         Revise your sales process
  •         Update your competency framework
  •         Identify and create the required content
  •         Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps
  •         Guide and coach your reps through personalized training
  •         Provide ongoing updates

Revise your sales process

There are several reasons to revise your sales process. They include changes to your company, team, product, customer base, customer behaviors, and decreased results from your existing process. Changing your sales methodology is often the outcome of one of these reasons. To revise your sales process consider what changes will be necessary to accommodate your value-selling approach. When, in the buyer’s journey, will your reps be initially engaging with prospects? What steps will need to take place, using a value focus, to convert the prospect to a customer? Map this out very carefully so your sales team always knows what’s next to advance through the process successfully. Once the process is implemented, be sure to use metrics and rep feedback to fine-tune and adjust it as needed.

Update your competency frameworks

Before you can make the change from feature-based to value-based selling, you need to update your sales competency frameworks. These plans provide detailed information about behaviors, skills, and knowledge requirements for each sales position. They simplify benchmarking and help you easily recognize successful training outcomes. To update your frameworks, consider what knowledge, skills, and attributes should be removed from your current ones for each sales position. Next, add any new competencies that will be required for effective value selling. Depending on your particular product or service, these will vary. In our discussion about value-selling, we included several categories of skills and knowledge your team must have for success. They include product, case studies, marketplace, industry information, and buyer personas. Compare these to your current competencies to identify the updates needed. If you’d like more information relating to sales competency frameworks, we discuss this topic in more detail in

this article

.

Identify and create the required content

Once you’ve updated your sales process and your competency frameworks, you’ll be able to identify content gaps. Develop updated content that incorporates your new messaging for both internal and external use. Be sure that you have content for every stage of the sales process, prospect industries, and each persona involved in the buying process. Content will include training materials such as buyer personas and corresponding value propositions for each product, industry, and persona. Plus sales playbooks and training materials like audio, video, and written training snippets, assessment quizzes, games, and certification exercises. Client-facing content tools might include case studies, white papers, e-books, and the like. As this content is used, don’t forget to gather feedback on it from your sales team. Track which pieces are used and which are most effective. This will simplify future content planning.

Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps

If you training your entire sales team on the same material, you risk boring more experienced reps while confusing less experienced ones. You should allow reps to fulfill their individual training requirements. To do so, you must identify each team member’s specific knowledge and skill gaps. There are several ways to do this. These include observation of demonstrated skills and behaviors, assessments through task simulations, self-assessments, quizzes, and performance data. To learn more, you can read

this article

about identifying knowledge and skill gaps.

 

Personalized training with coaching

Armed with your reps’ knowledge and skill gap information, you can start guiding and coaching your reps through the personalized training they need. Prioritize their training needs to help them get started. Utilize short bite-sized written and video training modules. At the end of each module, include short quizzes and games designed to measure their understanding while reinforcing what they’ve learned. Simulation missions allow sales reps to practice and apply what they have learned. For minimal impact on their schedules, these are completed via mobile video and coach feedback is provided. This will reinforce correct practices and prevent the development of bad practices. It’s an excellent way to incorporate another layer of coaching.

Leverage gamification

to motivate them to advance through their training. Leaderboards and rewards will activate their competitive nature too while keeping the process fun and engaging. Incorporate certifications at the end of each course to ensure that reps are properly prepared to effectively apply their newly-learned knowledge and skills.

Provide ongoing refreshers and updates

It’s been shown that training, without ongoing reinforcement, is very quickly forgotten. This is why it is important that you provide your salesforce with refreshers and updates. Refreshers can include bite-sized pieces of supplemental information relating to what they’ve already learned. Share cheat sheets, best practice examples, and reminders. Send out pop quizzes from time to time also. This will allow them to recall knowledge they’ve been taught and apply it. Coaching and simulations exercises are also excellent ways to help your team remain effective by using their skills in different scenarios so they’re always prepared. Updates should include information about new content, new success stories, changes in the marketplace, and changes internally. With these, they’ll always have the latest information at their disposal and never be caught off guard by unexpected questions from prospects pertaining to the latest changes.

Now you have a roadmap to help you change from feature-based to value-based selling. Once you’ve completed this process your team members will be prepared to provide more valuable solutions to their prospects. The end result will be consistently elevated rep performance and more closed deals. And isn’t that the goal? Now it’s time for you to get started with this process so you receive the benefits of value-based selling in your organization!

The Impact of AI on Your Sales Strategies

Deepti Sundareshan on April 17, 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. While there’s been a lot of hype about AI we’re yet to see it’s true value – but I don’t believe we’ll have to wait much longer. In fact, AI technology can be found in some sales software already.

AI has the potential to have a profound impact on your sales strategies and the sales readiness of your reps.

Forrester predicts that AI will disrupt your sales strategy this year. In fact, 84% of businesses believe AI will give them a competitive advantage and 69% believe their competitors will use it too.
Reasons-for-adopting-AI-worldwide-2017

It will make your sales organization more intelligent agile, and customer-centric. It may even change the way you sell altogether.

What is AI?

AI is the ability for a computer program or a machine to think and learn. AI, therefore, needs a lot of data that it can filter and process quickly. The more data you give AI the more intelligent it will become.

AI can be used in simple tasks, like playing a game of chess with you, or for more complex decisions like behind the wheel of a driverless car.

Potentially, AI can be used to do anything that a human does. It can sort through your inbox and work out what emails you should prioritize and help you research your customers. The biggest limitation on AI in the future will be what your customers are happy to accept. For example, many may not want to have a complex discussion about your product, but they may be happy to ask a chatbot some preliminary questions.

Research by Capgemini has found that AI increases sales of products and services and increases inbound customer leads.
Areas-of-AI-driven-benefit-gain-for-respondents--sales

Analyzing sales conversations

It can take hours for managers to wade through taped phone calls or listen in on live calls so they can coach their salespeople. Converastion intelligence listens to conversations, transcribing, and then analyzing them. This technology exists today and is able to pick up on key parts of the conversation like when a customer starts talking about the issues they are facing or information that competitors have given them.

This information can then be used by your sales managers to help coach their salespeople. Your sales enablement team can also use it to improve processes and best practices, like call scripts and training materials. The product and marketing teams can also use the competitor information for their market and customer insights.

This technology has the potential to develop and improve even face-to-face sales conversations in the future. Imagine if it could ‘hear’ every conversation reps have out in the field. These could all be analyzed to provide information about how to improve how each individual rep sells.

It could also be used to script phone conversations in real-time. This would give SDRs all the information they need to deal with customer questions and objections as they arise.

Optimizing lead generation

Finding the right leads for your salespeople can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Because AI can process large amounts of data quickly, and then learn from what it finds, it has the potential to revolutionize lead generation.

Rather than a person having to go through Google, social media, or other data sources, AI can review these for you. The technology can not only identify the right job titles and businesses to target, but it can also analyze the sentiment in comments made on social media or by email. This means AI can help you identify whether someone is unhappy with a competitor’s product or is in the market for a new one. When you consider that 57% of buyers are already far along their decision-making process before they meet a salesperson, the earlier you can speak to them the better your opportunity to convert them.

Some platforms already use AI to help them identify the right leads and contact them. The technology can create prospecting emails, monitor responses and improve how they react to them. It can compare lead responses to past data and even predict how each lead will respond, helping prioritize leads. This frees up the time of marketing and salespeople, qualifying prospects quicker and more cost-effectively.

Having sales conversations

While it’s unlikely that AI will replace salespeople in complex sales any time soon, they can help move sales conversations further down the process. Many businesses already use chatbots to answer simple questions for customers on their websites.

According to Forrester, these are already replacing email in customer service channels in large companies like Nike and Apple and they may influence up to 10% of purchasing decisions. The more conversations the technology has with customers, the more it will learn.

Customers are also getting used to talking to AI, with 48% of people favoring live chat compared to 54% preferring email. The gap is closing.
Live-chat-is-nearly-as-popular-as-phone-and-email

The power of AI extends far beyond the sales conversation and into the data that the technology can collect during these conversations. They can take the information that customers share, identify their sentiment and then feed that information back to your sales, enablement, product, and marketing teams. This can inform your sales training, processes, product features, and marketing strategies as well.

Automating tasks

Salespeople can spend almost a quarter of their time on administrative tasks. Managing their emails, logging their activity, and updating the CRM. This is all time that could be spent selling. It is here that AI can potentially generate the quickest wins. If it can give back selling hours to each of your salespeople’s days, that has the potential to go straight to your topline revenue.

There are many ways that AI can potentially reduce administration at the frontline. Prioritizing emails and suggesting how a salesperson should respond to them is just one. Depending on the data available to it, AI could help put together the best pricing option for a customer, conduct credit checks and automate billing. AI can even do a salesperson’s reading for them, notifying them if something has changed that means they need to call a customer. If a customer has recently acquired another business or a new VP has been appointed, it may be time for your rep to touch base again.

Forecasting

Prediction is what AI specializes in so it’s only fitting that it would be used for forecasting. By providing data about past performance it can use it to predict future performance – but AI can go further.

It can take data from a wide range of sources and pull them together to create a predictive model for future performance. Rather than just telling you if you’ll meet your quota at the end of the year, AI tells you which deals are more likely to close and when. Sales managers and reps can be far more strategic about their customer interactions.

Taking it a step further, AI could tell you which customers to upsell to and when. This can save reps a significant amount of time and energy, by focusing efforts where it’s more likely to be rewarded. The result should be an increase in win rates and productivity.

A study in MIT Sloan Management Review found that 76% of early adopters aimed for higher sales growth using AI and it’s easy to see why. AI has the potential to completely change the way reps play the game. It can give them more time to sell and improve how they sell as well.

With so many different options available to you, the biggest challenge is to work out which AI technology to implement first – perhaps there’ll be an algorithm that can even tell you that soon.

Improve Sales’ Performance By Transitioning to Away from Feature-based Selling

Deepti Sundareshan on April 11, 2018

Organizations are always looking for ways to improve sales’ performance. It used to be sufficient to sell the with pointing out features and benefits. Today’s buyers expect salespeople to understand their business and guide them to solutions that target their specific challenges. The best way to do this is by focusing on value. Research by the Rain Group found that companies that drive value have 9% higher win rates than all others. That results in a dramatic impact on revenue and profitability. So, it’s time to elevate sales performance by transitioning from feature-based to value-based selling.

What is value-based selling?

Value-based selling is a process that leads to tailor-made solutions based on the needs, challenges, and goals of the prospect. These solutions result in the prospect’s desired business outcomes. This undertaking involves carefully considering the opportunity from the buyer’s perspective. To do so, sales reps must understand several things before formulating a solution. They need to know the prospect’s business and how it runs. This helps them identify their goals and challenges. Knowledge of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are important here, along with an understanding of marketplace trends.

Once reps have a feeling for the buyer’s business, they can refocus the conversation on proving the value your solution will bring to the prospect’s unique situation. This should include detailed cost and benefit information that is both tangible and intangible. Other considerations are Total Cost of Ownership, training, cost of changing, opportunity costs, and time to market. Reps need to gain a deep understanding of which of these costs are important for the buyer to be able to better position the solution’s overall value. Taking the time to understand the customer more deeply helps build the necessary trust and relationship.

Moving from feature-based to value-based selling

To prepare your sales force to engage in value-based selling you must educate them on several topics. These include the following:

  • Product:Make your reps experts in your product. Have them use it so they intimately understand it. They should be able to easily discuss its uses and applications in depth. This will increase their confidence and their credibility.

 

  • Case Studies:Share customer success stories, and use cases with your salesforce. Continually document an assortment of case studies. Make this content available for reps to share with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. Be sure to include ones from various industries and with diverse outcomes.  Have ones that will resonate with each of the personas most commonly involved in your prospect’s buying committees. This ensures your reps are always armed with the appropriate content to share with everyone engaged in the purchasing decision.

 

  • Marketplace:Keep reps current on competitor changes and new offerings. This will allow them to more effectively differentiate their solutions and build value. Awareness of marketplace trends is important as well. With this precious information, your salesforce will be better prepared to act as trusted advisors to their prospects.

 

  • Industry Information:Provide reps with an ongoing education about key industries that your customers inhabit. This will allow them to more fully understand the challenges and issues prospects are facing. With this knowledge, your reps will become strategic consultants. They’ll be able to tell prospects

    why

    they are experiencing pain instead of simply identifying their pain. Demonstrating understanding, by offering the best solution, enables reps to provide value to prospects and increases success.

 

  • Buyer Personas:It’s become more common for a group of people to make business buying decisions. Arm your sales force with an understanding of the buyer personas most often included in a buying committee. They’ll know how to communicate with each of them. Plus, addressing their concerns and building value will be simplified. This will allow them to build trust and credibility while accelerating the sales process.

It’s clear that feature-based selling is no longer effective. For your reps to produce better sales results, you must prepare them for value-based selling. That involves educating them on many topics such as product, case studies, marketplace, industry information, and buyer personas. Armed with this knowledge, your team members will be ready to successfully engage customers. Plus they’ll be able to formulate customized solutions that win more deals. By now, you’re probably ready to get started.

Why Data-driven Sales Strategies Work to Turn Prospects into Customers

Deepti Sundareshan on April 10, 2018

Selling is no longer about giving lectures or presenting well-crafted powerpoint decks,  it’s about helping customers find a solution to their problem. The answer to helping your reps provide a solution based on a customer’s needs doesn’t lie in reams of notes either, it lies in data-driven sales strategies.

New technologies allow you to automate tasks and work smarter, but they also collect data. And data holds the key to your organization transforming its sales strategies. In fact, companies that actively use data have

50% higher growth rates

than those that don’t.

Boosting and retaining knowledge

One of the biggest issues with traditional sales training has to combat is that a

ccording to research

, the average person forgets 50% of the information presented to them. Within 24 hours that becomes 70%, and a week later it’s 90%. Did you know that proven way to improve knowledge retention is through reinforcement?

According to Aberdeen’s research, 26% of companies believe long-term sales learning reinforcement is actually more important than the training. This approach includes ongoing sales learning, which results in out-performance on a number of KPIs compared to those who don’t do this. Data-driven knowledge reinforcement boosts this even further.

Data-driven knowledge reinforcement can involve leveraging data to identify gaps in reps’ knowledge. Once the gaps are identified, knowledge can be reinforced through a variety of methods such as quick quizzes or providing content in real-time. Reps can’t refer to the notes tucked away in a folder in their office when they’re meeting a client. But technology can not only help them access information when they need it, but the data it collects can also help them find the right information and even identify what they need to know.

For example, reps can be served the right information they need for a customer meeting based on what has worked for other reps in a similar situation. Over the coming year, using data to serve more relevant content and leverage best practices of top performing reps will become an integral part of high-performing sales strategies.

Approximately

95% of B2B deals

are influenced by content, but it has to be the right content. Data doesn’t just help reps find the right content, it also gives valuable information to people who create the content to help them understand what is most valuable and the impact that it has on sales performance. This feedback helps them make better content that will continue to improve sales performance.

Improve coaching methodologies

Companies who use analytics-driven sales coaching methodologies can improve their time-to-productivity by 21% according to

research by Aberdeen Group

. This is enabled by technology that helps managers coach on-the-go.

The research also found that top performers are 62% more likely to have real-time coaching for specific deals, opportunities or accounts. By enabling your managers to coach their remote salespeople in real-time on tactical issues they can help them win more deals.

Real-time deal coaching is 35% more likely to be used with dynamic training content. As described above, the data collected by technology can now help you understand what reps need to be coached on and the information they need to be given access to. Together this has the power to improve their performance as they’re speaking to customers.

This can even create an environment where reps’ create a demand for knowledge and draw on it when they need it. The more relevant the learning, the more likely reps will continue to use it regularly. Future sales strategies will be driven by what reps need and demand.
Technology-Enablers-Supporting-Data-Driven-Coaching-Aberdeen-Graphs

Data can help sales leaders understand what they should be coaching on and when. If they can see that reps are losing deals after their demo, for example, then it may mean they need coaching to help convert those opportunities. This can also help speed up the sales cycle and improve productivity.

Increase success and quota attainment

Where the rubber really hits the road is when you connect the data from your sales readiness technology to your CRM. You can then connect each stage of the sales cycle, all your salespeople’s activity, their pipeline and their results. By bringing this data together, you have the power to identify where reps are winning and losing deals, and what helps them succeed.

Research shows that applying analytics to training and coaching can improve quota attainment from 71% to 85%.

Moneyball-Meets-Sales-Coaching-Aberdeen-Graphs

This data can identify gaps, potentially suggest knowledge that would help plug those gaps and flow into an ongoing training program. The information can be used not only at an individual level, but can also help create high performing sales organizations by leveraging best practices from within your own team.

Analyzing data on key metrics at each stage of the process can identify what went wrong and what went right. By identifying best practices you can create repeatable performances that translate into predictable revenue. If you can identify what content and which message can help close deals quicker, this can create a step-change in the performance of all your reps, not just those that have ‘got’ it.

This data can also be used to predict success on a deal by deal basis, making revenue more predictable at an aggregate level. Productivity can improve as the data starts to give reps advice about when they should walk away from a deal and help them identify which deals to focus on.

Crucial to any data-driven strategy is your data – and the quality of your data depends on the tools that you use. From your CRM to sales readiness technology, it’s important to have a sales stack that enables your sales organization to be data-driven. Without it, your transformative sales strategies will fail. The technology must give you data that is accurate and relevant to what you’re trying to achieve.

Selling is complex enough in the modern age, your technology and data should make it simpler for your sales organization not more difficult. That’s why it’s important to find tools that capture, integrate and collate your data in a way that you can use it.

With the right tools and data at your disposal, you’ll have the power to create more powerful sales strategies. This year and long into the future, data will be the key to transforming how your sales organization learns, sells and performs.

[Podcast] How Sales Enablement can Strategically Guide the Sales Organization with Pat Lynch

Shrimithran R on April 5, 2018

In this

17 minute

podcast Pat explains:

  • How sales enablement has evolved over the past decade
  • How to turn around some disturbing trends in sales performance and productivity
  • The questions that can help sales enablement professionals focus on the right things at the right time
  • How to deal with sales tool fatigue

Pat Lynch has seen the evolution of sales enablement from several perspectives – in large companies like Xerox and FedEx and in research firm CSO Insights, to name a few. Now as Vice President of Enablement Excellence and Innovation at Mindtickle, Pat’s responsible for driving better outcomes for sales organizations through innovation and world-class enablement.

In recent years, Pat has seen some disturbing trends in sales organizations.

“Until last year, selling time for a sales professional was decreasing six years in a row. Now only 35% of a seller’s time is actually spent selling. Until last year, overall quota attainment also went down for six years in a row – from 63% to 51%. These are two alarming trends,”

exclaims Pat.

“Then add in the fact that you may only get 17% of the time with somebody who’s actually interested in purchasing your product or service. That’s very little time to actually develop rapport and trust with a potential customer, let alone trying to sell to them. That means salespeople have to be far more concise about the value-add that they’re bringing.”

While the numbers are worrying, it has ignited a fire under sales organizations. “

They realized that they needed to actually get somebody in the position and hold them accountable to stop these trends going in the wrong direction. With the Sales Enablement Society coming to fruition just about two years ago, we’re now seeing that enablement is a role that’s a critical success factor to getting sales organizations back on track and hitting quota,”

explains Pat.

The growth of sales enablement is certainly a step in the right direction but Pat has observed that some enablement professionals are at risk of missing a big opportunity. “

What often ends up happening is that the sales enablement executive is relegated to being a tactician. They’re trying to solve problems for salespeople. But sales enablement has a fantastic opportunity to look over the horizon to see what’s coming. They can provide strategic guidance to the VP of Sales. Some need to take a step back and look at the big picture and how they can help their sale organization.”

How Best-in-Class Sales Enablement Programs Accelerate Value Selling

Deepti Sundareshan on April 4, 2018

CSO Insights defines sales force enablement as, “A strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add

value

in every customer interaction.” And, Aberdeen Research found that “All-in” sales enablement practitioners experienced 56% greater annual revenue growth when compared to all others. “All-in” practitioners included content, technology, and training-based approaches in their sales enablement programs. This shows that best-in-class sales enablement programs accelerate value selling. Let’s look at how these programs create this change in sales velocity.

Shortens onboarding time

Average ramp time ranges from three to seven months. This is partly due to increasingly complex sales cycles. Shortening the time to new hire full productivity can have a major impact on your company’s bottom line. According to CSO Insights’ 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, onboarding training services that meet or exceed expectations result in a 14% improvement in win rates. These services are typically part of a sales enablement program. In this program, new hires learn the value they can offer their prospects, what resources they have to do so, and how to use them. Shorter onboarding through sales enablement helps accelerate the value selling process.

Prevents information overload and increases selling time

It used to be that your sales force received information from many platforms such as the internet, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. Then when they needed to find the information, it wasted a lot of their time. According to a McKinsey Report, almost 20% of your reps’ time is spent just searching and gather information. CMO Council found that 40% of a rep’s time is spent searching for content created by marketing or customizing content, because they can’t find relevant materials for their particular prospect. Sales enablement, that incorporates content, technology, and training approaches, streamlines learning and communications. They’re all integrated into one platform so reps spend less time switching from one tool to another to complete tasks. This allows them to be prepared to show value in every customer meeting. Plus, they don’t waste time trying to figure out where to find the content and resources they need, so they’ll have more time to actually sell.

Improves content alignment and keeps it current

Best-in-class sales enablement tracks content engagement and gaps. This allows Marketing to identify the most effective materials as well as the gaps where assets are missing. This helps them identify gaps and develop content to fill those gaps. Sales content and sales processes remain better aligned and more impactful as a result. Plus, your sales team is more likely to have what they need, when they need it, to provide value to prospects and customers throughout the sales process.

Facilitates sales readiness

Forrester defines sales enablement as a strategic, ongoing process that equips reps with the ability to consistently have valuable conversations with customers at each stage of the sales cycle. To do so, reps must master a lot of ever-changing information relating to your products, customers, and marketplace. They also need to be skilled at implementing all the stages of your sales process as you adjust it. Best-in-class sales enablement facilitates the ongoing learning, communications, and skill building that is required to ensure your sales force is always ready to meet client needs. It prepares them to provide the value that prospects expect and demand. This readiness allows your company to stay a step ahead of the competition as well.

Sharing of best practices

Without a system in place, the sharing of best practices rarely occurs. Best-in-class sales enablement programs facilitate the collection and sharing of best practices for easy access by your sales force. This library provides examples to speed up skills development and mastery. They help reps know which content or techniques most effectively advance deals to a close. These examples also help them stay current with what customers and prospects find of value at any given point in time.

Now you can see how best-in-class sales enablement programs accelerate value selling. If you haven’t already, shouldn’t you put one in place so you can realize these results in your organization?

How to Personalize Sales Training to Fix Knowledge and Skill Gaps

Deepti Sundareshan on April 2, 2018

Products, customer behaviors, and industry dynamics change quickly in today’s sales environment. This means that even the most seasoned sales reps require ongoing knowledge and skill development. Every rep in your sales force has a different background, skills set, knowledge, and experience. Because of these variables, one size does not fit all when it comes to sales training. To provide training that meets your sales teams’ needs, it’s most effective to personalize sales training based on individual gaps in knowledge and skills. Complete the following steps to create these plans and see the best results.

Develop sales competency frameworks

Before you can identify skill and knowledge gaps for individual sales reps, you must first have a benchmark for comparison. A sales competency framework provides this by stating what skills, knowledge, and behaviors are expected. They help you identify gaps, simplify training establishment, and facilitate progress measurement. In case you missed it, we discuss how to go about developing these competencies below.

Evaluate knowledge and skill gaps

Once you have a definition of what your sales force needs to be able to do and what they must know, you are now ready to proceed. There are several ways to evaluate your team members for knowledge and skill gaps:

  • Observation: Watching your sales reps demonstrate skills and behaviors, or discussing various key topics, is one way to complete this evaluation. This may be completed in the field, for example, on a ride-along or by role play in person or via video recordings.
  • Assessments through task simulations: In this case, you may be focused on the rep’s ability to create a proposal or some other documentation. It could also be a method of determining their ability to effectively use software applications on the job. A mock scenario is provided when doing this and the staff member must complete the designated tasks to identify gaps.
  • Self-assessments: Asking your sales reps where they feel they need additional training is a helpful exercise when determining gaps. Revealing these gaps will serve to improve their effectiveness on the job.
  • Quizzes: When measuring gaps in knowledge, quizzes and serious games are effective methods. Plus, they can be engaging and fun.
  • Metrics: Reviewing performance data for individual reps will help you identify various training needs. This especially applies to weaknesses by stage of the sales process and levels of activity.

Create individualized sales training plans

After completing evaluations on individual sales reps, it is time to create their training plans. You should have a listing of where their skill and knowledge gaps exist. This is what training and coaching they need to receive. Prioritize these areas and direct them to the corresponding resources. Be sure to incorporate input from each individual, relating to areas they would like to develop. This will increase buy-in and commitment to the process.

Make them accountable

Provide clear expectations and well-defined goals. Your competency frameworks will help with this. You also want to observe and measure engagement in trainings provided. Obviously, if they don’t participate, they won’t progress.

Continuously monitor progress

Monitor participation and progress. Provide feedback as needed to facilitate growth. Certify reps on skills and knowledge to finalize each stage so they may advance to the next level.

Reevaluate and update sales training

Continuously cycle through this process to keep up with current training needs that correspond with product, customer, and market changes. Incorporate your reps’ personal goals into training plans to help motivate them. Guide them to additional training where appropriate and assist them with advancement as needed.

Now you know how to personalize sales training for individual skill gaps. This will ensure that training will be better understood and more easily applied on the job. It meets each rep where they are, building on their existing skills and knowledge. If you have a sales readiness platform, this process will be even easier. According to Gartner’s research, it will encourage knowledge retention by including continuous learning applications, which deliver small pieces of information or short courses and quizzes on a regular (often daily) basis. Plus they’ll be available on mobile devices for easy participation.

How to Create a Sales Competency Framework That Aligns with Organizational Goals

Deepti Sundareshan on March 29, 2018

Sales organizations today are being challenged to do more with less. With ever-rising quotas and a continuously changing marketplace, it’s important to communicate clear expectations. A sales competency framework facilitates this. It states what skills, knowledge, and behaviors are expected for each position. This simplifies hiring, training, and performance measurement. Such a useful asset is unique to each organization, since it’s aligned with corporate goals and priorities. When created properly, a sales competency framework has been found to improve hiring, increase training focus, and elevate performance outcomes.

Understanding sales competencies

So many organizations have historically conducted training and failed to measure their results. The challenge has been, how to go about actually measuring progress and recognizing results. An effective sales competency framework not only makes it possible to know when training and coaching are having a positive impact, it makes measurement easier too because it identifies desired end results.

These frameworks spell out specific profiles of ideal sales people too. This minimizes hiring errors because there’s clarity around what characteristics and abilities the best candidates should possess.

They detail the end goal of behaviors, skills, and knowledge so benchmarking of teams and individuals is simplified. Plus, they establish measurement criteria to utilize during development.

Overall, a sales competency framework lets you deliver a development program with the potential to change behavior for the better. It results in improved performance and a measurable return on investment.

How to create a sales competency framework

Now that you know what a sales competency framework is, let’s look at how to create one for your organization. Keep in mind that this is an evolutionary process that may take some time. Once you work through it, you’ll want to refine and update it periodically so it changes as your organization and marketplace do.

Start by identifying the competencies for each of your difference sales roles. They should define the knowledge, skills, and attributes needed to perform the jobs effectively. Be sure that these are all measurable and determine how they will be measured.

As you determine which competencies best represent each role, involve various people in the process. These should include top performers in your sales force as well as sales management. This will increase acceptance and use of competencies once they are implemented, plus it prevents inclusion of irrelevant competencies.

To ensure that the most important competencies are included in the framework, information should be collected for each role. It can be collected in several ways:

  • Observing of individuals while performing their roles.
  • Interviews of people in each role either in small groups or individually.
  • Questionnaires may be used to gather data relating to roles.

When putting it all together, define each of the key characteristics across a range of performance levels for easy measurement and benchmarking. These competencies need to be aligned with sales force strategies, processes, and goals so they drive the desired results of your organization.

As you implement the competency framework, remember to communicate the end goal clearly. This will increase acceptance and utilization as well as results. The framework should be a handy tool and reference for all who use it. Don’t forget to enlist feedback to facilitate adjustments and updates on a routine basis.

Having an established sales competency framework improves communication by proving a common language for describing effectiveness across your organization. It provides a vocabulary and examples for use by management when discussing performance with employees. Plus, it creates greater consistency and objectivity when assessing performance. This model reduces mistakes in recruitment and new hire selection. And, most importantly, individual employees can see a clear path for personal development and progress in their current and future roles. This simplifies the entire training and development planning and implementation process. If this is what you want for your organization, it’s time to get started developing your sales competency framework.

Mindtickle Recognized as Top 100 Growing SaaS Company

Shrimithran R on March 28, 2018

In the past year, Mindtickle’s growth has been rapid – expanding our team and technology innovations. We’re proud to share that recently Mindtickle was recognized for that growth by SaaS 1000 as one of the Top 100 fast-growing SaaS companies.

The SaaS 1000 list highlights the top high-growth SaaS companies based on hiring trends and other growth indicators.
Not all training and development solutions are created equal. In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s crucial sales representatives are trained for and provided with the right information whenever and wherever they need it for the “moment of truth” in any customer conversation.
At Mindtickle, our sales readiness platform utilizes an outcome-oriented approach, meaning we’re able to track and identify sales capabilities each rep needs to close more deals and provide them with the tools to develop those skills. We look beyond traditional sales training to focus on sales effectiveness and improving skills and execution at an individual level. Our data-driven concept provides analytics to identify gaps in rep performance or skills and monitor existing capabilities. Our approach to sales readiness and enablement has been proven time and time again – driving an increase in demand for Mindtickle and fueling our growth.
Want to join Mindtickle’s fast-growing, innovative team? Learn more about our open positions and opportunities on our careers page.

The Enablement Power Team: Content + Training

Jake Braly on March 23, 2018

Buyers today have changed. They don’t want traditional ‘sellers’; they want trusted guides. To do this successfully, modern sales reps need on-demand access to content and training in one place so they can be ready for any buyer conversation.
True sales readiness today means that training content and customer content are linked at the hip.
There’s no doubt every sales, marketing, and enablement leader is gearing up for 2018 with this in mind. What will sales look like over the coming year? Here at Highspot, sales leaders are telling us that B2B selling is becoming increasingly complicated. In our 2017 State of Sales Enablement Report, 64.5% of sales reps reported that they are experiencing more complex sales processes.
In a sea of internal complexity, it’s more important than ever to simplify for sellers so that they are able to simplify and distill for buyers. According to one report by Aberdeen, “marketers and sellers who align content with key stages of the buyer’s journey are more likely to win business and68% of best-in-class companies have a process to align content with key stages of a buyer’s journey, vs. 53% for others.”
To align sales and marketing for success, sales readiness must be a key theme for B2B sales and sales enablement leaders in 2018. Despite the increasing complexity of the sales process, it’s clear that buyers will accept no less than a truly modern and tailored sales experience, characterized by knowledgeable reps who guide the process. These are the reps that will win deals over their competition.
Sales teams are under the gun to produce results quickly, no less so when talking to prospective buyers in real time. Sellers have a tall set of tasks they must execute perfectly and fast: they must be able to find the right piece of content to match their buyer’s current scenario at a moment’s notice—despite having to sort through volumes of content that are difficult to access or search in order to find the needed assets. They simply don’t have time to wade through all of the content available to them to pick out just the right pieces. Sales training around the latest product features or messaging or competitive kill points are just as essential to getting it right—all in a timely way.
Here are 2 practical tips to ensure your team has the power punch combo of content and training in your arsenal this year:

  1. Reevaluate where sales content is stored today:
    • Do sales have a single place to go for sales content and sales training?
    • Are sales materials aligned to opportunity stage, buyer persona, etc.?
    • Can all of this be accessed online, within your CRM system, inbox, and mobile devices?
  1. Ensure you can measure sales readiness and content activity:
    • Before you look at pipeline and quota performance, you have to first be able to answer whether reps have the knowledge, competency and are then carrying out the activity they’ve been instructed to perform. Have your reps completed their assigned training? Do they comprehend and retain core concepts? Are they using sales content at the right times, in the right places, and in the right ways?

If the answer is no to any of these, it’s time to explore alternative solutions.
Highspot and Mindtickle have worked together over the past few months to seamlessly integrated sales training and content curriculum alongside sales assets and collateral. With this integration, customers can choose to make sales training a requirement before reps are able to access certain pieces of collateral. This helps keep the bar high for sales engagement – which is what today’s buyers expect.
It’s a great time to take a closer look at how you’re using technology to enable your sellers. Companies and sellers that are modernized today will be tomorrow’s market share winners.
Learn more about how Mindtickle and Highspot work together to enable sales teams to succeed.
This is a guest post from Jake Braly, Vice President of Marketing at Highspot.

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