How Mindtickle’s Best-in-Class ‘Missions’ Virtual Role-Play Got Even Better in 2019

Himanshu Bari on December 23, 2019

In today’s digital age where everyone is glued to their phones, the traditional ‘Elevator Pitch’ rarely happens in the elevator. It is more likely that your sellers will never have the chance to be in that “elevator” or even the same conversation if they are not able to send a concise and effective LinkedIn invitation or message and master a consultative introductory conversation with the prospect. The most successful sellers are able to capitalize on customer interactions regardless of the medium – email, phone, in-person, web-conference. 

As the industry-leading readiness platform, we enable this mastery through our ‘Missions’ capability. Missions allow sellers to practice voice-over-slideshow, video roleplay, email and task evaluation, and voice-over-screen share (product demo/walkthrough, etc.) in one unified platform. To date, our platform has seen over a quarter million Missions submitted by hundreds of customers across 10 industry verticals. In addition, Mindtickle customers are creating Missions to target use cases in all sales stages.

Here is a summary of the use cases we see:

Meeting our customer needs at this scale and variety of use cases has only been possible through our continued commitment to keep the Missions capability in Mindtickle at the cutting edge. In 2019 we pushed the envelope around the use of innovative AI-driven capabilities. These often get all the attention, but along with the new AI capabilities, we also furthered our market differentiation and lead in the critical features that don’t usually make the headlines – configuration, management, and tracking of Missions. We even redesigned the entire Missions user interface (UI) for a fresh new and intuitive experience. This ensures that the comprehensiveness of the Missions features doesn’t come at the cost of usability. This has allowed Mindtickle Missions to truly stand out from all others in the space that also claim to have Missions or role-plays but don’t have the breadth and depth in the capabilities that are critical to the successful adoption at scale in the enterprise.

Instead of simply giving a laundry list of the key capabilities, I want to articulate how we have built the Missions in Mindtickle to address the key challenges faced by three key users: the Enablement admin, the Reviewer (e.g. their rep manager or coach), and Seller. All of which are involved in the configuration, launch, and adoption of the Missions.

Enablement Admins

The admins are the lynchpin the entire Missions workflow. Here are some of their key needs to ensure the successful adoption of Missions.

Target all forms of customer interactions:
Multiple types of Missions to help target all forms of customer interactions – text emails, presentation or phone conversations

Maintain consistency in definition and quality of Mission across all admins:
Reduce time and error in Mission creation and get better consistency across admins with a guided creation workflow with intelligent default configuration values to ensure that key settings are never missed or improperly configured

Match evaluation mechanism to the use case of Missions:
Evaluation criteria of  ‘message certification’ Mission are very different from that of a ‘success story’ Mission. The criteria also vary based on the profile of the target sellers eg. Between BDRs and experienced account executives. A one size fits all approach just doesn’t work. Mindtickle Missions have extremely configurable evaluation criteria. Admins can pick between a  rating scale, multiple-choice and text feedback. They can organize the evaluation criteria in sections and customize the weights for each parameter. Certification and re-certification options allow Missions to be used for compliance or partner certification related use cases.

Ensure unbiased and consistent responses across all reviewers:
If sellers are being compared by their performance across a set of Missions, we need to make sure their Missions that are being evaluated by different people are as objective as possible

  • Reviewer guidance – This helps reduce reviewer error and bias and ensures good data quality when comparing sellers and reviewer performance
  • Multiple reviewers – helps add multiple perspectives  so you can quickly spot anomalies or at the very least help the seller get faster responses or encourage more per to peer collaboration

Drive accountability and adoption of Missions:
This usually takes a combined carrot and stick approach. Admins in Mindtickle have multiple options on both fronts at their disposal

  • Very flexible notification criteria allow admins to pick specific trigger points (e.g. on invitation, close to the due date, or submission or due date for review, etc.). They can also ensure the notifications to both the sellers and reviewers  are available over one or more preferred channels (eg. Slack notification, mobile notification or email, etc.) to avoid creating noise but ensure high open rates. All of our customers typically see at least a 15% bump in the submission/review rate around the moment a notification is sent.
  • Admins can quickly create visibility around managers/reviewers who take the extra effort in providing the most constructive feedback. Mindtickle generates this ‘review quality report’ by analyzing the text data from comments left by reviewers in Missions 
  • A global reviewer report helps admins get visibility across time to know who are their most proactive and diligent managers vs. the troublemakers. They can create the Mission completion and score reports and share it across the management chain where each manager’s data is automatically scoped by the platform to show their direct reports.
  • Some customers push the boundaries even further by integrating the certification data from Missions into their HRMS systems like Workday

Mission Reviewers

The experience of Mission reviewers in Mindtickle is optimized with AI assistance to ensure they can provide quick, consistent, and high-quality feedback. Reviewers are first shown Missions that are due or overdue to prioritize attention. Once inside the Mission, the system first shows reviewers how the submission performs on length, speech pace, and use of filler words. As the reviewers look through the evaluation criteria, they are shown inline guidance on rating parameter meaning and the difference between each value of the rating scale. They also get to see the machine analysis of the submission around the keywords that were important. The text transcript helps them quickly browse through the Mission so they can focus on the parts of the Mission where the machine shows weak coverage of the keywords. Once reviewers pinpoint the issues, they can quickly add contextual feedback using the in-line comment capability.

Managers are able to also leverage the reports bookmarked for them by the admins to quickly get a sense of how their team stacks around the key evaluation parameters of the Missions so they can understand competency gaps.

For more information about how Mindtickle helps equip front-line managers with a data-driven coaching platform, see our solutions page on Coaching and Skill Certification for Managers.

Sellers

For sellers to derive maximum value from the Missions, the experience for the seller needs to be very closely tailored to the scenario and feedback on their submission needs to be quick, actionable, unbiased, and contextual. With the comprehensive configuration options leveraged by admins, sellers in Mindtickle see Missions that are very closely customized and matched to the intent of the exercise.

AI-enabled instant response from the machine gives seller input on the use of filler words, length, and talking pace of the role-play. This allows sellers to ‘re-attempt’ before submitting for review to their manager/reviewer. This machine-assisted practice leads to higher long term proficiency.

For areas of improvement, sellers are able to see the remediation assigned by the reviewer tailored to the evaluation criteria that need improvements. Sellers also benefit from the use of the in-video comments capability leveraged by the reviewers. By looking at seller interaction data, we see that the sellers often revisit the in-context comments multiple times — underscoring their importance.

Looking into 2020 we are excited to now leverage this Missions platform and wealth of data we have collected to add further AI-driven personalization and automation of the entire Mission workflow.

Click here for more information about Missions and full site of Sales Readiness applications!

Mindtickle’s Integration Platform for the Enterprise Tech Stack

Himanshu Bari on November 13, 2019

Mindtickle today has a comprehensive integration platform with over 60 pre-built connectors to some of the most commonly used tools in the enterprise technology stack. As part of our mission to provide our customers with the most up-to-date, comprehensive Sales Readiness solution, Mindtickle recently released new technology integrations with Slack, BambooHR, and Workday. As we consistently work to add to the list of systems we integrate with, we wanted to take some time to discuss why these integrations are important and how they provide value to you.

Why are integrations important?

As of way of helping organizations more seamlessly integrate their sales and marketing stacks, Mindtickle has developed a data and application integration platform compatible with many systems within the enterprise tech stack. With the goal of uniting disparate sales enablement solutions around a common set of complementary and interconnected sales functions, Mindtickle aims to integrate and operate with a set of APIs that permit integration with other CRM applications, complementary sales and marketing applications, and external data sources.

As sales enablement practices mature and grow within organizations, the addition of new tools and opportunities is something that happens naturally. And as those enablement needs evolve, existing enablement platforms must also adapt along with the broad set of marketing, sales, HR systems, and more that are typically deployed in the enterprise. 

Thus stands the question: how do you choose the right platform that is best suited for your multi-system environment?

Frictionless authentication & communication

The sales function is going through a phase of tool sprawl so no one likes to remember yet another password. Mindtickle supports integrations with most of the major identify providers to enable single sign-on. Also, the ongoing notifications and scheduling are done with the commonly used calendaring and communication tools

Personalize and automate your approach with HRMS data

Our backend infrastructure is designed to be scalable and accept data and content from any source. When it comes to human resources management systems (HRMS), we are proud to automatically support Workday and BambooHR. However, should the need arise, we can easily set up an integration with any HRMS system of your choice. Having this integration empowers you to seamlessly and automatically create personalized readiness paths leveraging data and content from any connected HRMS

For example, HRMS integration in conjunction with automation rules helps automate the new hire journey in Mindtickle. With the rollout of our new User Data Sync feature, you can automate the content assignment process and ultimately reducing the admin overload. As soon as the new hire is added at the source, they are automatically provisioned in Mindtickle and are assigned the relevant content. Moreover, the user’s manager is convergently auto-assigned to review the new hire’s activities and track reporting from their first day on board. In fact, anyone across the sales hierarchy will automatically be able to see the new hire’s progress without any effort by the admin. 

These benefits aren’t just for new hires: they apply to any internal moves or changes for existing employees within your company. For example, if a promoted user needs to be assigned new content automatically upon promotion, their flow gets automated as well.

Plug-in to your CRM 

The goal of any readiness and enablement platform is to support employees in the flow of work – whenever, wherever. Through our integration with CRM systems and the available API, you can take any data from Mindtickle and make it available within the existing CRM system for reporting. Ultimately, you’re able to build a rich dashboard natively within your CRM systems and get the best of both worlds: a tracked and visible presentation of correlations between sales performance and sales activity metrics within the CRM system, and the proficiency metrics from Mindtickle. The other added benefit is that Mindtickle content can be surfaced in the CRM for just-in-time and just–in-context readiness and enablement. One example is that sellers could get a recommendation for reviewing the latest information on a competitor based on the opportunity details.

Keep in-sync with CMS 

For enablement and readiness initiatives, organized content is imperative. When you start to think of your enablement solution in conjunction with a content repository, you actually broaden its scope. Using a content management system to better organize material not only internally – but also externally – allows you to manage the life cycle of the content in a way that’s up-to-date and always on brand. With that goal in mind, Mindtickle partners with all of the top content management systems such as Seismic, Highspot, and Mediafly.

While there the majority of your content will often be specific to the sales and customer-facing initiatives, an integrated solution extends to the broader employee workforce as well.  By no means should you overlook the information traditionally leveraged by LMS systems – Mindtickle can work with your existing LMS system to make sure all your existing content is optimized and ready for distribution. 

Leverage curated content providers

With the ever changing selling, competitive and industry landscapes, there is a constant need to reskill or upskill your sellers. Getting high quality curated content from providers like LinkedIn Learning or Skillsoft allows readiness and enablement teams to seamlessly integrate critical job related skill development right into their onboarding or on-going readiness programs.

Drive sales outcome correlations

Mindtickle provides a reporting API and other bulk data exchange options to expose the data around users’ engagement and proficiency within Mindtickle. For teams that are already familiar with and have an internal sophisticated reporting method in place, this makes Mindtickle data available for rich dashboarding in the BI tool of your choice like Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, and more.

Take home thoughts

Mindtickle uses a hybrid approach based on homegrown integration service and an OEMd leading iPaaS (integration platform as a service) as the core of its integration platform. Because of this, Mindtickle’s integration platform allows for easy connectivity to any system that exposes a REST API so we have custom connectors in a matter of days. Even if there’s a system that is not currently listed in our out of the box connectors, we can quite easily create a custom connector to that supports simple REST API based on your organization’s particular interface. 

For more information on the specific integration connectors available please visit https://www.mindtickle.com/integrations/

The 3 Negative Outcomes Associated with Poor Onboarding and How to Prevent Them

Gopkiran Rao on November 12, 2019

As products and services are increasingly commoditized by automation, low-cost manufacturing, and offshore competition, value- and outcomes-based selling become the stuff of the CRO’s dreams. In this environment, building an organization of salespeople that aligns pricing to outcomes and differentiates based on insight, long-term partnership, and need-driven solutions becomes mission critical. However, this transformation does not start and end with hiring ‘proven’ sales résumés.

The data tell us it’s increasingly difficult for enterprises to generate revenue and drive growth. Analyst firm CSO Insights found that average quota attainment for sales reps in 2018 was 54.3% — far below the 2014 rate of 63%. And earlier this year, a number of cloud companies cited poor sales execution in earnings calls. One CEO stated that newer reps were less than half as productive as more experienced reps and that they “need to improve the support of [their] new reps with training and experienced oversight to help them ramp and close new business.” 

The underlying imperative is that CROs must relentlessly pursue every avenue to equip sales teams with the competencies and capabilities they need to be on message and task every time they interact with a prospect or customer. Ensuring these competencies and capabilities reflect the current needs of the business and align with customer expectations is an ongoing priority. But the journey of every great salesperson starts with and ties back to how they are first familiarized with the organization: aka the sales onboarding program. Onboarding doesn’t just set the tone; it impacts the outcomes that define revenue organizations: rep productivity, predictable quota achievement, and regrettable rep turnover. 

When organizations fail to enable the best possible results as related to the three outcomes noted above, they struggle to achieve their revenue goals. Let’s discuss the impact of poor onboarding practices on these key outcomes.

Impact #1: Inconsistent rep productivity because onboarding was designed for a ‘universal seller’

Unlike machine parts, salespeople can’t be stamped off a production line to be carbon copies of an original. There is always a target profile and target behaviors, but there is no single sales rep, nor one selling role. It’s essential to build a granular understanding of the needed pre-sales, sales and post-sales profiles and corresponding behaviors and competencies specific to your customer and businesses. Otherwise, you probably are also missing the ability to determine what skills need to be built or what applied learning needs to take place. Simply put, if your onboarding program is designed for a template of one, you have put rep productivity at risk.

Sales reps are hired to meet the needs of specific geographies and segments, and must be equipped with corresponding competencies and capabilities. In addition, each of these new representatives has different backgrounds, product and market experiences, education levels, and skills. This understanding is particularly important because the CRO must have a near-perfect understanding of how long it will take to gain full productivity (aka ramp) across a wide variety of profiles. When onboarding is not set up to be the first phase of long-term investment in capability (i.e., ongoing readiness). it becomes extremely difficult for a sales or sales operations leader to confidently predict the average or median ramp to first deal or quota attainment.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the typical sales organization falls on a distribution curve where around 20% of reps are low performers, 60% are average performers, and the remaining 20% are the game changers. When you lack a good understanding of rep performance distribution, it’s impossible to effectively hire and develop reps to be top performers. 

Impact #2: Inability to drive closing behavior in the field after onboarding

Confidence in hiring and pride in a slick sales academy, bootcamp or 30/60/90-day plan is one thing. It’s an entirely different thing to send sellers into the field knowing what phone calls to make, emails to send, what CRM fields to prioritize, or how to respond to key objections. A great onboarding program requires that every piece of content, virtual role play, pre-learning and quiz is tied to developing a capability deemed vital to the sales person’s success. This will help them become ready for that time when they make their first call or onsite visit without the benefit of a frontline manager riding shotgun. 

Unless onboarding programs are tied to measurable, demonstrable capabilities that are reinforced and extended over time, CROs are depending on the charity of customers or a product that sells itself. The problem is that even in good years, companies are falling behind. Only 53% of reps made quota in 2018 per CSO Insights. As Seleste Lunsford,  Chief Research Officer of CSO Insights explains, “For us, it’s always a red flag when we see top line revenue numbers going up while all the leading indicators for sales are going down.” 

The moral of this story is that companies can’t assume that a strong economy, empowered, self-qualified prospects, or competitors going out of business will come to the rescue. No army, or sports team puts their new recruits on the field hoping for a miracle; why would a CRO?

Impact #3: Regrettable rep turnover due to poor onboarding

While the maxim is that the best sales reps follow great leaders, insights can be gleaned by studying the most successful salespeople for two things — where they choose to work and how long they stay. 

Good reps quickly realize that a poor onboarding program will likely extend into their ongoing readiness, or lack thereof, and choose either to leave or become missionaries. When even missionary reps fail to achieve quota, receive W2s well under their comp plans, lack in-field coaching or manager engagement, and don’t see a clear path to hit their personal targets, they are likely to leave. This is bad news because while the CRO misses a proven lever for production — the battle-proven backing and resources of their seasoned reps — they are also forced to constantly backfill. 

This is particularly painful because the most effective onboarding partly hinges on exposing new reps to experienced reps. According to a 2018 Sales Compensation Administration Best Practices Survey, the typical company considers sales turnover rates below 15% ideal. How many CROs can confidently claim they’re consistently hitting this benchmark? If the reps you do hire and onboard see that their more experienced counterparts are in fact not that experienced, it’s usually a short runway to their concluding that adequate investment in the success of your team is not being made 

“De-risking” revenue starts with treating onboarding as one of the most valuable activities of organizational strategy focused on revenue growth 

De-risking and preventing these negative outcomes starts with effectively onboarding — and continuously readying — your next generation of revenue producers. Knowing that new sales reps will be constantly joining while you experience some attrition — and realizing that each of these reps has different needs on their path to readiness — is critical. Ultimately, your success starts and ends with effective onboarding. 

Want to learn more about how CROs can quickly and predictably implement a system to ramp new sellers that drive deals to close faster and more profitably? Read the CRO Essential Guide: Sales Onboarding Best Practices.

Building Sales Capability in Financial Services: Key Takeaways from the Sales Operations Institute

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on November 4, 2019

Recently, the Sales Operations Institute brought together industry and corporate leaders to discuss how to build and maintain a coherent and effective sales strategy for corporate advantage. Representatives from Mindtickle (including myself) attended and ran a session with sales operations leaders that focused on building sales capability within financial service organizations to deliver enhanced customer experience. 

 

The discussions highlighted that most organizations are facing similar challenges when building sales capability that drives customer experience. The key issues identified fell into three areas – readiness program effectiveness, content adoption, and sales personalization at scale. Here are my takeaways: 

 

Effective readiness programs require alignment with sales methodologies

 

The biggest challenge identified by many of the participants was in creating alignment between readiness programs and sales methodologies. While most highlighted that they had a significant amount of sales training content available, that content didn’t necessarily fit within their existing sales processes, which garnered poor adoption.  

 

To ready sellers effectively requires specialized knowledge of not only the products and services but also the sales process. This must also align with the strategic objectives of the organization, which is crucial to obtaining top-down buy-in. Some of the leaders noted that their strategy was sometimes inconsistent between cross-functional teams, which further impeded training effectiveness. This strategic disconnect again highlighted the importance of gaining top-down buy-in across the organization before adopting solutions to improve training effectiveness.

 

The group identified several solutions that they believed were necessary to deliver effective sales readiness programs:

  • Leverage product champions or a network of product excellence to build content and get buy-in across the organization. 
  • Understand the daily life of a salesperson and map out their process so training can be aligned to sales methodologies.
  • Put in place and communicate a leaderboard to promote success within the organization.
  • Standardize playbooks to ensure there is consistency in how information is presented to customers.
  • Measure what’s working and what isn’t. By identifying gaps and opportunities to add value, the effectiveness of readiness programs can be constantly improved. 
  • Wherever possible, look for opportunities to automate processes to save both time and cost.

 

Content adoption is crucial

 

Many organizations have created a plethora of sales content, but this is only effective in building sales capability if their people are aware of it, can access it, and know how to use it. 

 

To enable content adoption, some of the following approaches identified were:

  • Personalize and prioritize what content is pushed to salespeople.
  • Identify what readiness content is required at each stage of the sales process and surface them in the flow of work.
  • Leverage tools that are easy to use and add value quickly to encourage adoption.  
  • Track engagement and coach to the specific skill gaps of the individual.
  • When assessing tools, ensure that the sales stack is integrated so there isn’t duplication across tools. 

 

Customers demand personalization

 

One size fits all models are no longer acceptable. Customers (and salespeople for that matter) have come to expect everything to be personalized to their needs, which has created new issues when building sales capability. This is particularly problematic in financial services where risk management is paramount and consistency is essential. 

 

To personalize, organizations need to be able to develop content and use tools that are consistent and compliant while providing enough flexibility to adapt to individual customer needs. 

 

Some of the identified ways to enable personalization at scale included:

  • Enabling front line managers to improve how they coach sales reps. Coaching not only builds sales capability more broadly but can also help salespeople understand how to personalize a solution to individual customer needs whilst being consistent with the sales process. 
  • Leveraging technology to enable just in time learning opportunities. These may be tailored to specific customer situations so that salespeople can create a more personalized experience. 

 

These solutions each form part of an overall process of enabling and empowering salespeople. It’s human nature to sell within your comfort zone, but to build sales capability organizations need to expand the breadth and depth of each individual’s so that they can sell more effectively. 

 

To learn more, download our full eBook: Driving Customer Experience from the Frontline of Financial Services

Five Things to Consider When Executing Your Client Experience Strategy

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on October 10, 2019

Recently, I spoke to Julie Zhang, Director of Sales Enablement for Russell Investments, about how they took their client experience strategy from inception to execution. They achieved this by empowering and enabling their client-facing staff, but it hasn’t been easy.

One of the most important things they’ve learned along the way is that taking an idealistic strategy through to execution is challenging. It’s inevitable that things will breakdown along the way and the end result won’t always look as shiny as the strategy anticipated. Here are five things that Julie learned along the way that can help you execute your client experience strategy effectively.

1. Don’t assume people will tell you everything

When you ask someone whether they understand something, human instinct tells them to say they do know it even if they don’t. This means if your salespeople tell you they understand how a new product works or they know what a good client experience looks like, chances are they really don’t.

Rather than relying on your client-facing people to tell you what they know, test for it so you can objectively understand what they know and where their gaps are. This will give you a baseline to start with and help you put in place a roadmap for what you need to do to achieve your strategic vision.

For example, Julie asked the client-facing staff to record a video of themselves doing a pitch and send it to their managers. While this was uncomfortable for many, it was also a great learning experience because it highlighted to them very quickly that they didn’t know what they thought they did. As a result, there was no push back from the sales team when it came to executing the new strategic initiatives because they already knew they had a knowledge gap.

2. Remove friction points first

It can be futile trying to implement new processes, training or changes if your client-facing staff are distracted by other things. Before you start trying to execute on your strategy, identify and remove some of the areas of friction that are affecting how your people do their job.

For example, Julie identified that there were a lot of internal emails that were absorbing the time of their client-facing staff. These emails included sales collateral and other information that people needed to know. So Julie replaced these emails with bite-sized pieces of content, like a short video where a portfolio manager provided an update on a fund. This content was delivered to client-facing staff directly to the Mindtickle app on their mobile device. So rather than wading through emails, they could watch the content when it suited them.

This change not only gave people more time to focus on the client experience, but it also gave the sales leadership team important information. They could see who accessed the content and who needed to be followed up. Managers could also use quizzes and gamification to test who understood the information and drive engagement.

3. Don’t be afraid to rebuild

Unless you’re starting with a greenfield site, there will be processes and bad habits already in place. While change is hard, it can often be more difficult to try and work around existing processes. So don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and rebuild from the ground up.

4. Layer learning for retention

When you launch a new product or service, it can take up to six months before client-facing staff are comfortable talking about it with clients. To accelerate this process, Julie implemented a series of training that was layered and leveraged multiple mediums to improve retention. The training incorporated a blend of virtual testing, videos, integrated quizzing, pitch back videos and coaching. When combined, they found that this training accelerated the execution of their strategy and raised the bar on the skill levels of their client-facing staff.

Through this process, Julie found that knowledge retention requires a process of continuous improvement. Client-facing staff need to hone their skills and develop their knowledge on an iterative basis to execute consistently. Regular reinforcement and making training part of their day to day was crucial to layer learning so that it’s retained over the long-term. One way that Julie achieved this was by extending Russell Investment’s onboarding program from just two weeks to six months.

5. Work out what you’re measuring

While measuring sales results is, of course, important, Julie found that measuring engagement was actually more important to implement their strategy. That’s because they needed their client-facing staff to learn, and to learn they needed to be engaged with the process. So Julie focused on engagement metrics, like how often people accessed training and how long they spent on training each day. By doing this, she found that as engagement increased so did their sales results.

To determine what you should measure, she suggests analyzing your data at the outset to identify what things are preventing your client-facing staff from learning and retaining knowledge. For example, Julie found that the enablement software they were using wasn’t intuitive and the training was quite boring. So they addressed these issues by using software that leverages gamification, produced more concise training videos and introduced multiple training formats.

If you’d like to hear more about how to execute your client experience strategy effectively, you can watch the full interview.

Oscar Collingwood-Smith
Lead Market Manager, Financial Services
Mindtickle

Join AWS Sales Enablement Leaders at SES 2019 for a Hands-on Workshop Supported by Mindtickle

JT Eger on October 8, 2019

AWS and Mindtickle Workshop at SES 2019

Mindtickle is thrilled to participate in this year’s Sales Enablement Society’s Annual Conference! For those who aren’t familiar with the event, the conference features the industry’s best and brightest professional sales enablement leaders and practitioners. Attendees will hear from speakers who’ll share valuable insights, knowledge, and best practices learned throughout their careers. Emerging new trends and proven successful strategies will be discussed so to attendees conquer today’s toughest sales enablement and readiness challenges. 

 

We’re particularly excited for a two-part session by Amazon Web Services’ Abby Vietor and Quintin Walker. The first part at 9:15am on October 17th, Building Next-Gen Sales Simulations for Purposeful Practice & Proficiency will cover how they use sales simulators to drive sales confidence and field effectiveness. Then, from 4:30pm – 5:15pm, they’ll lead a hands-on workshop with the support of Mindtickle.

 

AWS and Mindtickle will walk attendees through a completed sales simulator based on industry, sales role, segment, etc. With the support of Mindtickle, attendees will be guided to build their own near real-world model of a sales environment. For a detailed session description of this can’t-miss workshop, see below!

 

In addition, Mindtickle will be available throughout the conference in the exhibition hall. Our Sales Readiness experts will be offering demonstrations and actual hands-on time with our platform! We look forward to meeting you there! 

 

To learn more about the conference agenda, click here or you can register here for the event.

 

Session info:

Design Workshop: Building Sales Simulators That Maximize and Reinforce Sales Performance
Please bring a laptop to take full advantage of this hands-on session.

Speakers: 

  • Abby Vietor – Global Sales Enablement Leader, Amazon Web Services
  • Quintin Walker – Senior Learning Experience Designer, Amazon Web Services
  • Deepna Sarkar – Enterprise Customer Success Manager, Mindtickle

 

Date/Time: October 17, 4:30pm – 5:15pm CT

Location: Encino Meeting Room, The Westin Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas (conference registration required)

 

In this hands-on workshop, Enablement leaders from AWS provide the steps and tools guidance supported by Mindtickle for building a sales simulation program using sales enablement best practices and sales readiness tools that you can implement at your own organization. AWS and Mindtickle will walk attendees through a completed sales simulator based on industry, sales role, segment, etc. Then, with the support of Mindtickle, attendees will be guided to build their own near real-world model of a sales environment. 

 

Attendees will learn:

  • Components required for providing an experience that takes a seller through an entire sales cycle from opportunity identification to closing the deal
  • How to build near-real world sales simulation with onboarding, skills development, ongoing learning, and coaching
  • How to create a continuous feedback channel that reinforces sales skills and sales strategy throughout the sales cycle
  • How to integrate best practices from peers and leaders as well as previous sales training and product training

 

Mindtickle powers the world’s most customer-centric organizations with the capabilities proven to grow revenue and maximize brand value. Visit mindtickle.com to learn more about our Sales Readiness solutions, customers, resources or to schedule a demo.

Spaced Reinforcements: Helping Sales Readiness and Enablement Win the Battle Against the Forgetting Curve

Albert Fong on October 3, 2019

Mindtickle Spaced Reinforcements Blog

All too often we “commit” something to memory, only to completely forget that information or a portion of it hours later. We sometimes jokingly blame it on getting older, but these growing knowledge gaps surprisingly have less to do with our age and more to do with the way our brains actually work. There is, in fact, a term for it: the “Forgetting Curve.”

Coined in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, the Forgetting Curve is a mathematical formula depicting the rate at which humans forget information if there’s no attempt to retain it. The formula shows that humans forget approximately 50% of new information within an hour; that number increases to 70% in 24 hours and 90% after 30 days.

Sales and other customer-facing representatives are likely familiar with the phenomenon. As a sales rep, information about products, services, and even industry trends boost credibility and adds value in the eyes of the customer or prospect. This in combination with the skills and behaviors to effectively convey that knowledge elevates the rep to “consultative professional” and can greatly influence customer experience, customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand value. But with the Forgetting Curve working against them, customer-facing reps have a more difficult time retaining information to be seen as a credible authority and attaining that “consultative professional” status. Even more recent research like the 2006 report Spacing Learning Events Over Time: What the Research Says by Will Thalheimer indicates that “spacing is particularly beneficial if long-term retention is the goal.” Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements has emerged as a critical capability to overcome this dilemma.

Spaced Reinforcements is the industry’s only intelligent and adaptive tool that leverages microlearning coupled with spaced repetition, retrieval practice, coaching, and personalization as well as gamification and smart notifications to promote knowledge retention. Leveraging these mechanisms that are automatically delivered at intelligently spaced intervals, Spaced Reinforcements helps reps stay productive and builds their proficiency levels so that they can retain more information and speak with more confidence, credibility, and authority to prospects and customers. More importantly, sales leaders gain insights into the improvement of the sellers across their competencies.

Through Mindtickle’s intelligent and adaptive engine, personalized questions and scenarios are presented based on how individuals respond to the reinforcement process.  For example, if a rep has demonstrated proficiency in a specific area, that area will not repeat as frequently given the individual’s mastery.  Conversely, a rep who requires improvement in an area will see increased frequency in related questions and scenarios.

Mindtickle also makes Sales Enablement and Readiness programs more engaging and fun by awarding points for correct answers and attempts. Representatives earn badges for completed levels within established time periods. At the same time, business leaders gain actionable insights into their team’s proficiency and capabilities so they can identify areas that need more help and can be remediated with training, coaching or other skill-building. And, Spaced Reinforcements can be implemented as part of a Sales Readiness strategy to help sales reps learn complex concepts and stay up to date on ongoing regulatory compliance issues that their financial services and healthcare customers and prospects care most about.

In short, Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements fosters a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing that reduces the knowledge decay depicted by the Forgetting Curve. As a result, reps bring greater value, share more meaningful insights, and address business challenges for their customers and prospects — all leading to more closed deals, revenue, better customer experiences, and greater brand value.

So, the next time you forget to remember something, remember to give yourself a break. Blame it on the Forgetting Curve. Then look into Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements.

For more information, visit the Spaced Reinforcements Solutions Page.

What’s With the Name? Find out at the all new mindtickle.com

Jeff Cowan on October 2, 2019

Mindtickle is excited to announce that we have launched the all-new mindtickle.com website featuring a fully refreshed design and loads of new content. This design represents a new and more accurate expression and representation of our brand and culture to our customers, prospects, partners, investors, current and future employees. Most importantly the site expresses the leadership and momentum Mindtickle has been building for years, showcasing what has been the best-kept secret in Sales Readiness.

In 2019 Mindtickle was recognized as a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s Market Guide for Sales Engagement Platforms and was recently named a Leader in Aragon Research’s Tech Spectrum for Sales Coaching and Learning. This past year, Mindtickle grew its enterprise customer base 200 percent while increasing annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent year over year. We count many dozens of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies as customers as well as hundreds of the world’s fastest-growing and most recognizable technology companies. Companies like AppDynamics, MongoDB, Unisys, Qualtrics, Procore, Square, Janssen, Cloudera, VF Corporation, Dexcom, Merck Group, and Benetton Group have recognized the power of our modern approach to readiness that includes microlearning, upskilling and coaching in the flow of work powered by gamification, social and peer experience and deep insights derived out of every interaction with the platform.

The design of the site incorporates elements related to our roots in gamification for employee engagement but reflects a more contemporary feel that more accurately conveys our company’s personality. We’ve also highlighted our customers’ voices more prominently in the form of G2 customer reviews on our website. By hearing from actual individual customers, you’ll be able to make more objective assessments about how Mindtickle can help you and your business. And as you can see, our customers love us and we’re a Leader in four categories of Sales Acceleration Software including, Sales Training and Onboarding, Sales Enablement, Sales Coaching, and Sales Performance Management.

We also now have a proper About Us page that dives into the backstory of our name, who we are, why we exist. To satiate some of that curiosity now, we are a global group of people who have been key players in the transformation of customer-facing teams and are focused on a core mission of sales readiness in partnership with all our customer organizations and other stakeholders in the readiness and enablement ecosystem.

While there are many other new pages and updates that are designed to help our prospects and customers navigate the site in a way that aligns with their buying journey, I wanted to highlight our new Services page. From Professional Services to Content Services, and Customer Success to Customer Support, these teams have decades of experience helping sales leaders and readiness organizations achieve their desired business outcomes. Mindtickle provides a consultative approach and all the necessary guidance to support customers on their journey to effectively ready their teams to drive revenue and build brand value.

We invite you to browse the news site, try out our new on-site search feature located in the top navbar, read some of our content, and contact us if you have any questions. Or if you like what you see and would prefer to request a demo of the platform, you can do that too. Enjoy!

Regards, Jeff Cowan
Sr. Director, Corporate Brand
Mindtickle

Come See Mindtickle at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference 2019

Albert Fong on August 29, 2019

 

Mindtickle is excited to participate in this year’s Gartner CSO and Sales Leader conference! The conference focuses on Chief Sales Officers and sales leaders who are tasked with delivering significant revenue and performance growth each year.  We’re especially looking forward to a special breakfast session on Day 1 led by Christi Moot, Global Director of Sales Readiness, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. For a detailed session description of this highly relevant topic, see below. 

In addition, Mindtickle will be available throughout the conference in the exhibition hall at Booth #321. Our expert booth staff will be offering Sales Readiness demonstrations, actual hands-on time with our mobile app, some exciting giveaways, and entertainment! We look forward to meeting you there! 

To find out if the conference is right for you, please read the reasons to attend and register here. Contact us for a limited-availability $400 discount code!

 

Speaker: Christi Moot, Global Director of Sales Readiness, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Date/Time: September 17, 7:45-8:30am PT

Location: Mount Royal Ballroom, The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas (conference registration required)

 

Session info:

To Incentivize Is to Motivate: Empowering Your Seller’s Revenue Edge

With a changing landscape that is highly competitive both for sales talent and for revenue generation, successful companies today are those that implement sales readiness initiatives to motivate and engage teams for measurable revenue outcomes. At LinkedIn, our culture incentivizes each employee to discover and develop the capabilities to power the next level of professional attainment – their growth edge.  Attend this session to learn how LinkedIn is building a world-class, high performing sales organization by linking measurable customer-facing capability to incentive practices.  

You will learn

  • How a more effective salesperson can lead to a faster deal/quota achievement time
  • Guiding principles that motivate and incentivize sellers to systematically build revenue behavior
  • How to delegate and assign ownership and accountability based on an individual’s specific learning and skill level
  • How to tie specific learning objectives with revenue goals based on each employee’s role
  • How to leverage and harness daily interactions between peers and leaders for social learning

 

Mindtickle powers the world’s most customer-centric organizations with the capabilities proven to grow revenue and maximize brand value. Visit mindtickle.com to learn more about our Sales Readiness solutions, customers, resources or to schedule a demo.

Sales Readiness is a Lifestyle, Not a Diet

Orbit Media on August 27, 2019

The concept of dieting has been the target of a lot of criticism over the last 10 years as experts expounded that drastic regimes aimed at quick weight loss don’t work well. Their research indicated that people eventually come off the diet and end up gaining back whatever pounds they lost. Instead, the experts and researchers say, it’s better to make the commitment to a healthy lifestyle. Exercising regularly, eating a variety of wholesome foods, and keeping your stress levels down will be much more beneficial in the long run.

While I’m no expert on diet or nutrition, this kind of thinking strikes me as a useful analogy between the “healthy lifestyle” idea and the kind of broad, balanced, sustainable approach to sales readiness that many companies are looking for. To that end, here are three analogous principles between healthy living and a healthy sales readiness program:

 

  1. Serve up content in moderate portions and spread it out over time.

    Too often, sales teams experience a kind of feast-or-famine content and training cycle. For example, a glut of content before an important initial presentation, with minimal support for the follow-up meetings. Or rigorous onboarding, followed by haphazard ongoing learning. Microlearning activities can help you distribute training over a manageable timeframe. It can provide “portion control” for your sales readiness and enablement program, so that reps don’t have to rely on ‘cram sessions’ for important meetings. It can help you build long-term, sustainable change and reduce the risk of sales teams crashing back into old habits.

  2. Stay active.

    Vigorous, sustained activity is one key to health and longevity that everyone agrees on. It’s crucial for sales readiness initiatives, too. Practice, practice, practice. Simply presenting information to your salespeople is like asking them to read a book about exercise, often doesn’t include actually doing exercise. It’s not just what you know – it’s how you apply that knowledge. This is where video role plays are hugely helpful, not just for polishing pitches, but for supporting active coaching and the ongoing conversation between reps and their supervisors or management. Virtual role plays and near-real-world simulations of sales scenarios can help your reps hone their skills and apply the knowledge they’ve acquired, in a supportive environment.

  3. Mix it up.

    Look for those different ‘colors’ on your sales readiness plate. People have different learning styles; give them a variety of content – polls, quizzes, bite-sized content, quick updates. Of course, with any healthy diet, there should still be room for dessert. Make it fun! You can sprinkle in gamification, rewards systems, leaderboards. Provide a variety of access, too, via desktops, mobile devices, or your CRM.

 

 

Mindtickle can help your business build a healthy, sustainable sales readiness program. At the same time, you’ll be helping your reps with a bit of stress reduction too! At the risk of mixing metaphors, you could think of our platform as your trusted personal trainer in your drive to sales readiness success.

To learn more about how Mindtickle can help your sales readiness initiatives, contact us!

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.