Sales Readiness: Delivering a Superior Customer Experience in Financial Services

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on August 23, 2019

Once the bastion of stability, the financial services industry is now facing new challenges from every vantage point. Disruptive competitors, regulatory reform, fickle customer loyalties, changing employee expectations and reputational damage are stalling growth and increasing churn for traditional operators. While your organization needs to defend its ground, conventional weapons are no longer sufficient to maintain revenue or profits. The key to winning the battle is to change how your customer-facing people serve your customers.

There are five factors driving change globally in financial services

  1. Tech-fueled competitors are disrupting sales strategies:With a focus on personalization and self-service, modern platforms deliver superior customer experience quickly. They also use data to understand customer pain points and finetune how their sales teams deliver an effortless experience.
  2. Service excellence and seamless experiences set new benchmarks:In a digital world, customers expect their services to be delivered conveniently and effortlessly. Subscription models have also reshaped brand loyalty with customers needing to experience value or opting out.
  3. Reputational damage has affected consumer confidence:Over the past decade, events like theWells-Fargo scandal

    and the subprime mortgage crisis have left customers disappointed and frustrated. Lingering consumer sentiment continues to impact the industry’s reputation.

  4. The financial services industry is under a regulatory microscope:Laws surrounding risk management and compliance are constantly changing. This places additional pressure on your frontline to ensure they’ve met compliance obligations when dealing with customers.
  5. The workforce requires more flexibility:As baby boomers move into retirement, millennials and Generation X comprise the majority of the workforce. Organizations must take into account new preferences, like short bursts of information and digital solutions, when designing how people work.

 

While your organization can’t directly control market or regulatory responses, you can control how you deal with these challenges. By focusing on the skills and aligned behavior of your employees and the experience that they deliver to customers, your organization can have some control over how your customers respond.

Your people are key to delivering a superior customer experience 

With the financial ecosystem evolving so rapidly, customer experience is increasing in importance. It is no longer just about providing good service – it’s about fostering lifelong partnerships that require understanding, problem solving and engagement. This means customer-facing staff need to be ready to stand and deliver every time. By focusing on customer readiness drivers your people can execute a best practice experience.

There are five customer readiness drivers you can double down on to empower your customer-facing people:

  1. Align culturewith customer-focused value: At each level of your sales organization, the desired culture needs to be defined and implemented. For culture to be an effective customer-readiness driver, you also need to systematically test the behaviors you desire to ensure they are executed consistently.
  2. Adopt a solutioningapproach to customer engagement: Thanks to the internet, by the time a customer comes into contact with your salespeople they often know what solution they think

    they need. This can create friction in the customer experience that can be addressed by implementing a systematic way of providing salespeople with access to the right information and the capability to apply it.

  3. Facilitate compelling compliancebehaviors: Every back office process and customer interaction is guided by a constantly evolving framework of regulations, processes, and behaviors that must be met. Rather than being a roadblock, these can be an opportunity to reaffirm to customers that they’re in safe hands if compliance is seamlessly incorporated into your salespeople’s behaviors and skills.
  4. Implement agile transformationmethodologies: Most organizations have embarked on a process of transformation to improve and change how their business operates. To embrace accelerated change, your salespeople need to have the agility to keep up and engender confidence in their customers.
  5. Distribute campaignplaybooks to the field: Financial organizations often run multiple campaigns or new solution launches at any one time. Campaigns are only an effective customer readiness driver if they add value to customers, which requires salespeople to understand how it benefits their customers.

Arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience 

To deliver a superior customer experience and win and retain customers for longer, your sales organization needs to deliver on these customer readiness drivers. To achieve this, many look to traditional methods of training their salespeople, but these have not been designed to address the challenges facing organizations today. To build salesforce capability and meet customer needs your sales organization needs to be able to:

  • Build confidence with knowledge:In a digital world, your salespeople need to build more knowledge in a short amount of time. They also need to find new ways to stay one step ahead of their customers while creating a personalized experience. Coupled with generational changes in learning preferences, this requires knowledge to be packaged and delivered in new ways.
  • Test the ability to execute:While it’s important that salespeople have the right information at their fingertips, that knowledge is of no value if they can’t apply it to specific scenarios. New learning tools, from gamified testing to video practice, allow your salespeople to practice and hone their skills.
  • Coach for improvement:To be a significant driver of performance, coaching must be targeted and consistent. Smart technology solutions can help organizations create a consistent coaching cadence.
  • Certify and measure success:Data has the potential to take sales organizations from being reactive to implementing proactive and targeted skill development. Modern tools enable businesses to capture, correlate and apply data across their sales organization in a powerful way.

 

To address the challenges you are facing in the digital age, your sales organization doesn’t have a minute to lose. You need to arm your people with knowledge, capabilities, and processes that allow them to put their customers at the center of everything they do. To create a best practice customer experience, your salespeople need tools, platforms and services that can help them achieve this. Get in touch with Mindtickle to find out how you can arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience.

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

Announcing Mindtickle’s $40M Series C for Continued Growth

Krishna Depura on July 29, 2019

Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $40M Series C round of venture capital funding led by Norwest Venture Partners as well as welcome Norwest Partner and former Salesforce executive Scott Beechuk to our Board of Directors. This is an exciting personal and professional moment for me, my cofounders Nishant Mungali and Deepak Diwakar, and for Mindtickle.

This occasion is an important validation in our collective belief that for today’s companies, every customer’s experience is only as good as the last interaction they’ve had with one of a company’s employees. This means that every customer-facing employee needs to be a steward for the values, culture, and product and service value propositions of an organization. At the same time, we saw that companies could be doing a much better job of engaging their employees while educating and equipping them to be successful by using a modern approach to learning, development and ultimately ready to have engaging and valuable interactions with customers. With a platform to support personal and professional development through employees’ mobile devices, gamification, and access to online learning for enrichment, companies could focus on and enhance the human experience in the workplace.

To this end, Mindtickle believes that in order to assess, implement and develop the demonstrable capability of customer-facing employees, a single data model must be built. The ultimate goal behind creating a data model is to find competencies that best correlate with activity metrics and sales performance, and ultimately optimize an organization’s readiness and enablement investments to develop the desired capabilities. By measuring data related to learning content engagement, assessed proficiency and demonstrated performance in near-real world environments, and then correlating these platform data sets to pipeline management metrics, we’re able to provide the leading indicators of real-world success. At the same time, the Mindtickle platform helps to identify gaps in competency or capability and provides a path to remediation. When engagement and proficiency data is combined with business outcome data and enhanced by AI and machine learning, organizations can surface insights, drive personalized recommendations and optimize sales performance.

Along this journey, we’ve also been fortunate to have supportive investors like Qualcomm Ventures, Accel, and Canaan who started with us early in Mindtickle’s development. In addition to seeing an opportunity to bring a leader transforming sales enablement and readiness to the market, they saw an untapped opportunity for Mindtickle to be at the forefront of India-founded companies that break the traditional Silicon Valley mold to drive greater innovation that would apply to a global audience.

That early foresight has proven accurate as we’ve expanded our mission from high tech, high growth start-ups to established enterprise companies while growing at a phenomenal pace. In the last fiscal year, Mindtickle grew its enterprise customer base by 200 percent and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent year over year. We’re proud to now count dozens of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, hundreds of the world’s fastest-growing and most recognizable technology companies as customers. Companies like AppDynamics, MongoDB, Unisys, Qualtrics, Procore, Square, Janssen, Cloudera, Wartsila, VF Corporation, Dexcom, Merck Group, and Benetton Group have recognized the power of a modern approach to readiness that includes microlearning in the flow of work, gamification, social and peer learning and coaching — all in context and just in time.

Together, we look forward to addressing this area that has been untouched but is critically important for today’s organizations — providing a systematic, repeatable and measurable way to prepare and assess customer-facing employees’ ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience. With Norwest Venture Partners joining the ranks of our esteemed investors, we’re collectively doubling down on the thesis that companies tackling this important problem of readiness will expand from sales to other customer-facing teams and ultimately to all teams across the organization and change the way we think about personal and professional development.

A heartfelt thanks go out to those who’ve supported us along this journey and welcome to those who have recently joined us as well as those who’ve yet to join us!

For more information about our Series C funding announcement, see the press release here!

Mindtickle Raises $40 Million in Series C Funding to Accelerate Customer-facing Capabilities of Global Organizations

JT Eger on July 29, 2019

Norwest Venture Partners invests in leader transforming sales enablement and readiness

SAN FRANCISCO—July 29, 2019—Mindtickle, the leader in Sales Readiness technology, today announced that it has secured $40 million in Series C funding. New investor Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from all existing investors including Accel Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, a spinout of New Enterprise Associates, and Qualcomm Ventures LLC. In addition, Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners and former Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce Service Cloud will join Mindtickle’s Board of Directors. This round brings Mindtickle’s total raised to more than $81 million.

“Sales and service organizations are facing a perfect storm on many fronts and company representatives that are not equipped to handle complex buyer needs and competitive challenges are being left behind. Mindtickle is empowering companies to grow revenue and build their brand value by transforming customer-facing teams preparing them to be on message and on task every time they engage with a prospect or customer,” said Krishna Depura, co-founder and CEO of Mindtickle. “Our Series C funding will fuel our strategic, long term growth plans while supporting on-going investment in our expanding products and services. We’re thrilled to have Scott join our board and welcome his insight and expertise as we embark on this new stage of rapid expansion.”

Mindtickle has experienced rapid growth by many business measures, including expanding its Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customer base by 200 percent and increasing annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent year over year. The funding news comes just recently after Mindtickle announced that they’ve hired Jeff Santelices as Chief Revenue Officer, adding an experienced and proven leader with a track record of building customer-focused sales organizations. In addition, Mindtickle has expanded that sales leadership team with the two additional hires of Ahmed Hedayat and Dan Coady. Ahmed has joined as Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, West and APAC, while Dan has joined as Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, East. 2019 has also been a year of validation and achievement for Mindtickle having recently been recognized as one of the 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies To Work For, named a ‘Best Sales Enablement Solution’ winner in the Stevie® Awards For Sales & Customer Service, and positioned as a Leader in the Aragon Research Tech Spectrum™ for Sales Coaching and Learning.

“At Snowflake, the sales experience has become as significant a differentiator as the product,” said Steve Hallowell, Vice President of Sales Productivity at Snowflake.  “When companies under-invest in training their sales teams, a few exceptional sales reps drive a disproportionate share of bookings. Worse, account executives are not prepared to answer tough questions or lead customers through often-complex buying decisions. We use Mindtickle to scale a high-quality, high-impact training experience for our sales organization, our partners, and our customers. They have been a great partner and collaborator enabling our teams to be more effective in the field.”

“Mindtickle is successfully confronting one of the most complex issues facing today’s organizations — the ability to train and upskill customer-facing employees,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Mindtickle has proven product-market fit for its mobile-first, readiness platform that engages employees and delivers perpetual micro-learning experiences. As organizations continue to look beyond traditional learning management systems for  new technologies to make their teams more effective in the field, we see a tremendous opportunity ahead for Mindtickle to lead this movement.”

For additional information:

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle provides a comprehensive, data-driven solution for sales readiness and enablement that fuels revenue growth and brand affinity. Its purpose-built applications, proven methodologies, and best practices are designed to drive effective sales onboarding and ongoing readiness. With Mindtickle, company leaders and sellers can continually assess, diagnose and develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to effectively engage customers and drive growth. Companies across a wide range of industries use Mindtickle’s innovative capabilities for on-demand, online training, bite-sized mobile updates, gamification-based learning, coaching and role-play to ensure world-class sales performance. Mindtickle is a global, privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Visit them at www.Mindtickle.com.

Media Contact:

Public Relations at Mindtickle

[email protected]

Every CRO Needs Sales Readiness and Why Mindtickle Is the Secret to Driving Revenue Growth

Jeff Santelices on July 9, 2019

I have spent more than 20 years of my career being responsible for driving revenue for sales organizations – large and small, direct and channel, proprietary and open source, product and services-based, SaaS and perpetual license, SMB, and enterprise. And in that time, I have engaged in many debates with my CEOs, CFOs, and my Boards of Directors about the best ways to consistently and efficiently hit aggressive revenue targets. I have deployed and iterated on various sales models.

My biggest learning from these varyingly successful experiments: the macro-metrics that have the highest correlation to “hitting your number” with best-in-class sales efficiencies are sales productivity and ramp time.

Sales productivity is essentially the ratio of your actual sales in any given time period to total quota capacity in the same period. It can be tabulated pre-or post-churn. The benchmarks my Board investors have typically challenged us to meet have been 72-80% netting out churn, or 60-68% all-in.

Ramp time is the time it takes a sales or channel resource to onboard– learn about the company, the products, and services it sells, the competitive environment, the processes to be followed, systems to utilize, the internal and external ecosystem to be leveraged, etc. Doing this well sets up team members for long-term success by reducing churn and creating more productive capacity. Ramp time is typically measured in ‘Time to First Sale’ and/or ‘Time to full productivity.’ Benchmarks vary widely across different businesses and go-to-market models.

The beauty of both sales productivity and ramp time are that the data points needed to measure them are always tracked and often readily at hand. Every CRO and CFO and sales operations leader knows the following:

  • How many salespeople do you have onboarded?
  • What was the quota for each?
  • What business did they actually close?
  • What turnover and replacement hiring took place?
  • How quickly did new hires begin to sell on average?

With the answers to the above, you have a current-state baseline for sales productivity and ramp time, and you can visualize historical trending.

More importantly, looking forward, you can easily quantify the dollar impact of a single percentage improvement in sales productivity. Or the dollar impact of accelerating ramp time by any given time period, a week or a month, etc.

This leads me to why I am so excited to be leading the revenue efforts at Mindtickle. We provide a platform that acutely improves sales readiness, and therefore sales effectiveness as measured by Sales Productivity and Ramp Time for my CRO colleagues across the globe!
The impact Mindtickle drives can be directly correlated to the sales programs leveraging our platform, improving their readiness, and executing better and faster. There is minimal guesswork associated with ROI or payback period. And importantly for anyone in a Revenue seat where half-life is equivalent to the remaining window in the fiscal year, urgency is the name of the game and Mindtickle delivers results quickly.

A sales readiness platform like Mindtickle is a must-have. It’s as foundational as CRM and CPQ for any sales organization selling complex products and services. As customers, my counterparts leading revenue teams at over 185 of the leading brands and fastest-growing enterprises around the world would concur. That’s validation enough for me!

See the results of Mindtickle in action on our Customer Stories page!

Three Secret Sales Skills to Look for When Hiring

Abby Vietor on May 20, 2019

*Editor’s Note: In this blog post, guest author and Global Sales Enablement Leader, Abby Vietor shares the three skills sales enablement leaders should look for when hiring.

Whether you’re operating within a growing business or trying to improve sales performance at a large organization, at some point shared tribal sales knowledge is no longer scalable, detailed, or accurate enough. Organizations seeking to outperform their market require the “next level” thinking that a strong sales enablement team can bring.

To build out a team dedicated to enabling and readying a sales team to drive more revenue and brand value, you need to ensure you’re looking for and hiring candidates with the right set of skills.

Broadly speaking, a solid sales enablement candidate will have a strong background in making sales teams efficient and effective, which directly affects a company’s growth and success. But for organizations seeking a “next level” enablement team, the ideal candidate possesses skill sets that are often not recruited for, but provide a tremendous benefit to your field. We can break these skill sets into three distinct, yet connected, personas: the psychologist, the social butterfly and the filmmaker.

The psychologist

The psychologist persona incorporates skills that go beyond curriculum design. All too often, large volumes of content are created without keeping in mind the audience — the seller — and how the seller feels about the type and frequency of enablement content they are consuming. We know that poorly designed curriculums reduce engagement by sellers, as does asking sellers to do too many things, too often. A candidate with a background in psychology, when networked close to the field, will be well-positioned to provide perspective beyond what a seller empathy map can provide. Enablement needs to be marketed to the field in the same way your product does. A candidate that asks “how does this make you feel?” will be more likely to create compelling and interesting content that will be absorbed and understood.

For more information about how high-performing organizations are approaching their sales knowledge transfer strategy, check out this webinar with SiriusDecisions: Sales Enablement in Real Time: How to Deliver Sales Knowledge When it Matters.

The social butterfly

The social butterfly persona speaks to the ideal candidate’s ability to interact with and earn the trust of sellers in a meaningful way, and subsequently pull valuable information about their day to day. The social butterfly collects intelligence about a seller’s cadence, whether they feel overwhelmed or poorly managed, what’s transpiring in their world in terms of a deal — deeper feelings that can be leveraged to drive enablement that suits that level of need. It’s important that this information be gathered in social interactions, rather than through surveys. Impromptu, casual conversations yield more transparent and honest insights; carefully crafted surveys and interviews yield carefully crafted responses.

The filmmaker

Finally, the filmmaker persona is important for teams that want to incorporate more video-based enablement, which has been proven to drive strong engagement. Many organizations lack the budget, talent, or bandwidth to produce any videos, let alone world-class training videos. As a result, companies either produce sub-par, uninteresting, and unpolished video content; or miss out entirely on producing any kind of compelling visual content at all. Of course, companies can contract with professionals, but this typically comes at a steep price. (Then again, sales readiness and enablement platforms like Mindtickle can make anyone a video whiz.) The ideal candidate will have the skills to produce compelling video content that will drive engagement and help to market enablement to sellers.

You’ll notice that each of these personas leverages the same two elements to connect with the seller: feelings and emotions. The psychologist is concerned with what kind of content will best resonate with the seller’s psyche. The social butterfly takes an active interest in how the seller is operating. The filmmaker creates quality video programming that emotionally engages sellers.

To see research from the Sales Management Association which explores the sales enablement function and its impact on the organization, check out: Research Brief: Sales Enablement Best Practices.

Given these requirements, your search for the perfect sales enablement hire might take more time. But don’t give up. Finding the right people is a key component to supporting your company’s growth, and will enable your sellers to be as effective and successful as possible.

Sales Enablement Executive Q&A: In Conversation with SevOne’s Brian Promes

JT Eger on May 14, 2019

As the next installment in a series of interviews with sales enablement and readiness leaders, Mindtickle’s SVP of Strategy and GTM, Gopkiran Rao, recently spoke with Brian Promes to learn about his experience transforming sales enablement into an impactful and engaging initiative at SevOne. As the Vice President of Solutions and Product Marketing, Brian is focused on making enablement an interactive, valuable and fun experience for his sales teams.

Engaging executive and sales management in sales readiness initiatives

Gop: We’ve asked this question of your peers and is a topic of interest in sales enablement societies, so it’s worth asking. How do you pitch sales readiness and a platform like Mindtickle to the CEO as a direct driver of sales enablement and effectiveness?

Brian: The most important thing for us was to align our business leadership – sales, sales engineering, marketing, product management, and executive leadership – with our GTM plan for the coming fiscal year, particularly as it relates to our sales teams being market ready. One of the pillars of our approach was to create SevOne Sales Certifications for each of our key GTM plays.  We make sure each certification – each that takes about an hour to complete, containing elements like short videos, solution guides, datasheet, competitive overviews, and more – are mini sales playbooks that align with our business objectives.

This alignment across sales enablement, sales, the leadership team and the business made a big difference when getting buy-in and support from the CEO because of Mindtickle’s role as a foundation. Also, initially, I was looking at Mindtickle not just as a communication tool, but also as a digital content system for sales. So, it serves as our content store for any marketing collateral we have, allowing us to save money on maintaining legacy systems.

Gop: Great insights! And to continue along this line of thinking of seller empowerment to get better market outcomes, how do you drive sales manager buy-in and accountability – particularly from tenured sales reps?

Brian: It really becomes important to set aside the time for this conversation because sales and leadership can discuss what’s expected of them in the context of the business and the market that is changing around them. While their jobs are to grow the business for their teams and for the company, they are not operating in a vacuum. Part of our job in enablement is to not be an additional burden and to bring additional measurable value through the delivery of timely information in a minimally disruptive and optimally engaging way.

Mindtickle has done a great job of making training easily accessible to folks and to see how they compare against their peers. So once we have alignment within our team, one of the things that we do is turn key elements of our enablement program into a game. Sales teams are competitive by nature and we make the most of that by sharing achievement numbers within the regional teams every week for some friendly competition.

Gop: And in terms of getting Mindtickle deployed in your organization, what were some things you did to ensure a smooth rollout?

Brian: We kept it really simple by launching at out SKO where we hosted a special session for everyone to download and log into the app at the same time. This exercise made it really easy to ensure everyone had the app at the same time.

The return on sales readiness investment


Gop: How are you measuring and maximizing the impact of enablement’s efforts on the sales team? Have you seen the work you’re doing translate into business outcomes?

Brian: For measuring impact, we try to focus on the two or three things that end up really mattering to an organization. One of the things that really drove us to Mindtickle was the ease of video communication. In the past, we’d use live or recorded WebEx sessions, but we never really knew if our reps were engaging and watching them — if they were getting what they needed. With Mindtickle, we instead started building “SevOne 2 Minute Field Updates” videos.

To keep it relevant, we only sent updates when the news matters, so sales didn’t get overwhelmed. The update should be something they care about, like an important partnership or a new product announcement. A good recent example was when we did a joint press release with BT Global Services which adopted our software for use with their customers.
In terms of tracking metrics, we look at engagement by video, by rep, and by region. Of course, we use the Mindtickle platform for other things as well, but we chose just to focus on these videos this past fiscal year and make sure that teams are watching them. Then after every video is a fun test that we use to reinforce the training.

The journey to picking a solution that lasts


Gop: When you’re evaluating a sales readiness tool for the very first time, what is it that you’re looking for? What are your evaluation parameters, and, to you, what is Mindtickle’s value proposition?

Brian: I brought Mindtickle into the organization about a year and a half ago. I remember one moment around that time when I was in my backyard with my son, who’s a sales manager at a cybersecurity firm. I was telling him that I was really struggling to find a sales enablement tool or platform to work with. I had identified a few potential solutions, but they were more content management systems that had nonintuitive mobile front-ends. At SevOne, we cared about accessibility to content, the ability to track sales’ activities, awareness of enablement programs, and, of course, the video aspect of enablement.

My son took out his phone, clicked on the now familiar orange icon, and said, “You need Mindtickle!” Within days after my “backyard introduction” to Mindtickle, SevOne had a trial instance up and running with more than 100 pieces of content, including a new “SevOne 2 Minute Field Update!”

Gop: Thank you so much for sharing, Brian. It’s always insightful for us to hear this kind of feedback so we can make sure our team keeps moving in the right direction to help empower you and your company. Good luck with all your ventures at SevOne!

Driving Sales Productivity: Aragon Research Draws the Lines Between Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness and LMS

Gopkiran Rao on May 7, 2019

If there is one thing technology vendors have really nailed, that is content marketing. With each new white paper and e-book, the digital noise aimed at buyers expands. This has been no different with sales enablement and readiness. Vendors and consultants have fallen over themselves to assure prospective buyers that they have worked out defining and differentiating sales enablement, training, sales coaching, sales effectiveness, engagement, readiness and so on. What has been missing is the authoritative voice of an analyst that marries deep practitioner experience with an in-depth understanding of the technology landscape.

The recent Tech Spectrum for Sales Coaching and Learning Report by Aragon Research is a timely and insightful snapshot of the sales training and coaching imperative as well as the technology solutions landscape. It is timely because of a renewed effort by learning platforms to co-opt sales readiness as a learning initiative and insightful because it provides a valuable framework to separate point solution pretenders from proven platforms purpose-built for sales readiness.

While this report certainly validates Mindtickle’s singular focus on tying the success of our platform to measurable capability (what reps say and do), more importantly, Aragon Research’s report lays out the interplay between sales enablement, corporate learning, and sales readiness. And at the same time, it also highlights mission-critical priorities for coaching and applied learning in the flow of work.

Mindtickle is pleased to sponsor access to the report for anyone that doesn’t have access to Aragon’s library and I invite a dialog with fellow practitioners on what I thought were three key areas the report did a particularly good job of drawing out:

  • A rubric for evaluating enterprise-readiness offerings that are winning the battle for enterprise
  • A persuasive argument for why and how sales teams should break away from corporate learning standards
  • Sales capability indexing for real-time measurement and monitoring of revenue potential.

Defining the hallmarks of a good solution provider in the modern space

Aragon Research establishes specific evaluation criteria around company leadership, including proven customer experience, company viability, product vision, and delivery, and committed R&D as a percentage of headcount and spend. Simultaneously, it assesses the product offering itself, covering pricing and packaging completeness, performance, and awareness.
In reading through the report I was struck by the subtext of this section because it underscores observations of the companies that succeed on Mindtickle.

Before determining what an ideal solution might look like, these companies carefully profile their sales teams. For example, we are increasingly seeing the need to balance seller profiles demanding on the go readiness approaches. These sellers are:

  • Increasingly desk-less and remote
  • Focused on learning in the context and in the flow of work
  • Wanting to consume bite-sized information in context, in digital formats

Aragon notes that by extension, a successful platform must not only find new ways to engage sellers in the blocking and tackling of core content learning, but also step away from simply sequencing training, coaching and skill development in proprietary formats. To extend that thought, on personalization and adaptive engagement must become a core requirement. Thirdly, a modern approach must leverage different modalities, methods, and techniques: features like video-challenges, peer-coaching, repetition-based learning, microcontent, community competitions, and others. All of these build engagement, but also lead to a comprehensive, single data model.

How to break away from corporate learning and corporate content management

To maximize their quota attainment, companies should evaluate the potential of their people as customer-facing advocates first, employees second, and as individuals third.

Aragon Research has done the market a very important service by creating a clear separation between corporate or enterprise learning, which has its place particularly for compliance, technical learning and training, and sales learning. The latter of which needs to be acknowledged separately.

With the profile of the modern salesperson in mind, the report showcases why companies need a just-in-time approach. This is a new modality to engage and ready sales giving them the information they need before they realize they need it, as opposed to teaching it to them just in case.

Aragon Research examines why corporate learning and content management are not taking the application of capability in a specified business context, which is what’s really needed to address the problem of sales teams wanting to be better. In their report, they call out critical examples of these business scenarios such as sales onboarding, ongoing sales learning, sales skills development, and sales coaching.

There are specific business scenarios that play out within the lifecycle of the salesperson, and in each of these critical moments, sales needs to know how to tailor their approach toward specific situations. From the time they walk in the door as a new salesperson, to the acquisition of the basic set of skills and knowledge they need to engage the market, to then delivering in the field – salespeople need to be coached in the context of their specific role, business objectives, and everyday job.

As sales teams grow and develop, their learning should grow and develop alongside them.

Identifying capability as a real-time revenue measurement

Finally, the Aragon report sheds light on how identifying capability can be a real-time measure of the revenue power and health of a business.

The real-time aspects of sales productivity extend beyond the real-time experience of the end participant, the salesperson. They also extend to the manager – as well as the executives who are working from HQ. They all need to understand how the sales are performing in real time and how to make micro and macro adjustments when and as necessary.

From a manager’s perspective, they need to know how to get real-time insights into what the salesperson has learned, what customer-facing skills are being invested in and developed, and what how is this being applied in the real world. To get these insights, they might do ride alongs, for example,  so they have real world visibility. And they would be able to evaluate, reinforce, intervene, and remediate. Leveraging things like machine learning to assess and improve phone calls the rep is having with smart recommendations or prescriptive insights can help facilitate the coaching process and outcomes.

Having real-time insights – even if they’re evaluated on a staggered basis – into how the salesperson is responding to these inputs physically and virtually, is incredibly empowering for any team. This sets the stage for incorporating those insights into their engagement with the customer in context, and in time.

Concluding thoughts

In my years of experience in enterprise software, I’ve come to see technology as a journey – not an end in itself. Strategic initiatives like sales readiness cannot be delivered by technology or applications alone. It’s a large-scale, long-term effort both for those actively participating in the space and for those trying to define it.

What reports like the Aragon Research Tech Spectrum help us do is put out a pulse check and a call to arms. While it was gratifying for Mindtickle to be called out as a leader based on our strengths in product, customer focus, and enterprise acquisition, it also calls out all us in the space are here because we perform a mission-critical service to the industry – empowering sellers and buyers to connect on value.

Click Here to Download Your Complimentary Copy of the Research

ATD Conference Preview: Leveraging Customer Enablement Data for Sales Readiness and Enablement

Dimple Patel on May 2, 2019

It’s looking like Sales Enablement will continue to be a hot topic at this year’s ATD International Conference & EXPO (ICE) later this month. We are all looking forward to meeting with training and enablement professionals from around the world.
What I find most exciting is the increasing interest we’ve seen over the last couple of years in looking at sales enablement through a readiness-focused lens. With all the knowledge, skills, processes, tools, content, and coaching they are provided, how confident are we in our sellers’ ability to execute? Are they ready to perform or constantly playing catch up to prospects and customers who may be one step ahead? Working in Sales Readiness, we see these challenges first hand in our customer organizations.

Sales readiness has reached a critical point and organizations can no longer simply focus on the seller. They are working collaboratively with BDRs, Sales Engineers, Marketing, Customer Enablement, and Product. Each team is contributing to and learning from the customer journey. To prepare our teams to achieve our vision, we need to understand the complete customer journey – before and after the sale. We then need to integrate this understanding with our seller’s journey and our product and solution journey. These journeys are intertwined with multiple dependencies and overlapping requirements. To stay effective, we need a new approach to enabling our all customer-facing teams to be ready to perform.

As part of this new approach, insights from Customer Enablement must drive enablement and readiness capabilities across all customer-facing teams, and ultimately, be woven into the fabric of a value-driven revenue and brand strategy. Critical data from customer engagements can

and should

be considered in developing successful sales capabilities. These data points include:

  • How customers use the product
  • The value are they getting from using the product
  • The impact of Services engagement in accelerating adoption
  • The engagement level with the product, services, and other customer enablement resources
  • How customers are positioning value to each other

If you are planning to attend ATD ICE join me on Wednesday, May 22nd from 8:15 AM – 9:30 AM in Room 156 where I’ll cover four critical areas for optimizing readiness and enablement.

  • Why it’s time to re-think what sales enablement and readiness means in your organization
  • How to assess the impact of your customer’s journey on customer-facing teams
  • Ways to integrate Customer Enablement into sales readiness and enablement as a whole to drive long-term value and revenue
  • Practical tips from the field for evaluating technology solutions for readiness

And don’t forget to visit us at Booth #924 if you’ll be there!

Click Here to Learn More About Dimple’s Session at ATD Conference 2019

Click Here to Register for the Conference

TOPO Summit 2019 Learnings: How Effective Sales Enablement Allowed Procore to Successfully Scale Their Sales Team

Gopkiran Rao on April 24, 2019

Alex Jaffe, Director of Sales Enablement, Procore

I spent two days last week at the TOPO Summit, meeting with and hearing from leaders at some of the world’s best marketing and sales organizations. Based on the conversations with these industry leaders, practitioners, and TOPO analysts, it’s clear we’re making some progress toward creating better and more engaging experiences for prospects and customers.

One of the most interesting sessions, Operationalizing Sales Enablement, was from one of our customers, Alex Jaffe, a leader on the Procore Sales Enablement team. In his session, he highlighted their holistic program focused on organizational buy-in, the virtues of starting small and scaling enablement as a process, function and integrated tools, communication, onboarding, certification, and more. His story started with the fundamental question of how the organization was going to scale their organization quickly after their $15M round of funding from Bessemer Venture Partners in 2015. At that time, their core challenge was how to scale a small sales team with a lot of institutional knowledge to a much larger and more diverse sales force.

Read the Procore Case Study here.

During this transition, they developed a sales playbook after meeting with all the stakeholders from the head of sales, CEO and president to marketing and more with one, simple goal in mind — help reps sell more, faster while protecting the reps time and productivity.

As Alex noted in his TOPO Summit presentation, he and his team recognized that all the reps would need to know all relevant product information and campaign-specific information, just not all at the same time. They also realized that this process of setting and aligning expectations should begin during the sales bootcamp experience and then roll into the 30-60-90 day plans of their sales reps. As that program has developed over time, it has expanded to the point where after three to four days of intensive learning, reps go through various levels of certification. Role-playing is especially critical to ensure brand new reps have the ability to conduct an effective and engaging initial conversation with a customer right after coming out of their bootcamp. Based on the levels of the certification and their specific roles, like an SDR or an AE, they have built specialized learning paths for each of these scenarios.

The end result of these sales enablement and readiness efforts has led to Procore becoming one of the fastest growing software companies in North America.

To learn more about how Procore set their sales teams up for success and readied them to have impactful conversations with customers and prospects,

read the Procore case study: https://www.mindtickle.com/about-procore/.

Sales Enablement Executive Q&A: In Conversation with Dynamic Signal’s Danielle Schaumburg

JT Eger on April 18, 2019

As the first installment in a series of interviews with Sales Enablement and Readiness leaders, Mindtickle’s SVP of Strategy and GTM, Gopkiran Rao, recently spoke with Danielle Schaumburg of Dynamic Signal to learn about her experience making her sales team ready to delight customers. As the Director of Global Sales Enablement, Danielle is passionate about increasing sales productivity by supporting reps with the content, training, and analytics they need to have more successful sales conversations. Danielle explains the ways she’s leveraging Mindtickle at her company to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in engaging customers and prospects.

Engaging Executive and Sales Management in Sales Readiness Initiatives

Gop:
To start, here’s a question that’s been discussed in numerous sales enablement forums and sales enablement societies. How do you pitch sales readiness and a platform like Mindtickle to the CEO as a direct driver of sales enablement and effectiveness?
Danielle:
Before I even started at Dynamic Signal, my new boss and I discussed how I was using Mindtickle at my previous company – what type of programs we were running, why we were doing it, how I brought in the platform. He bought into the philosophy, vision, and purpose from the get-go, so it was easy to bring it to Dynamic Signal. It also just so happened that our CMO had used Mindtickle before, so that was another easy win for me. We rolled Mindtickle out at SKO, so we even had a relevant and compelling event that created buy-in for the entire organization.
Gop:
That’s great! To continue along this line of thinking, how do you drive sales manager buy-in and accountability – particularly from tenured sales reps?
Danielle:
While it can be difficult, alignment with management is imperative. For example, it’s critical to prioritize alignment with the VP or head of Sales. Part of that is constant communication related to the why, what, and when of readiness approaches. Regular engagement and meetings with the sales team are a must. Another aspect is to provide continuity across efforts. At Dynamic Signal, for example, we will do a training session that’s followed by a Mindtickle reinforcement module. We try and stick to this level of consistency regardless of the topic or what we’re training on – it guarantees alignment and commitment that goes well past ad-hoc communication.
Gop:
And in terms of getting Mindtickle deployed in your organization, what kind of change management did you have to lead with?
Danielle:
Mindtickle is a straightforward tool to learn and distribute. I think the biggest challenge here is behavioral: you have to train your team on getting used to a particular type of execution and consistency, as well as provide them with essential reinforcement from management.

The Return on Sales Readiness Investment


Gop:
How do you measure the impact of your sales enablement program? More specifically, have you structured your readiness programs to align with on each stage of the sales funnel? How are you quantifying the impact of those activities, and showing that continuous value to leadership?
Danielle:
I try to keep my content specific to what my sales team genuinely needs. I try to make sure that sales training sessions are useful for my team: if I do one sales training that isn’t particularly aligned, I might re-engage them again the next week, but if I do two irrelevant sessions in a row, they’re likely to lose interest. It’s a matter of credibility and relevance, so everything I do has to have a direct correlation to the objectives my team has at that time.
As far as specific activities go, I like to use quizzes to drive participation. It’s imperative for me to make sure that my managers all know how their teams’ productivity and participation stack up, so I try and keep to the top 3 – 5 key takeaways that we want our sellers to learn from each session. Assigning regular quizzes creates all-around consistency for me and the team – they know what’s happening and they know when it’s coming.
Gop:
Tell me a little bit of some of the ways you’ve benefited from being able to view specific data-driven metrics with Mindtickle.
Danielle:
One of the metrics I typically ask of all my leaders is a training metric. Not only do they have to talk about what kind of pipeline they have, what they’ve closed, where they’re going, but I also have the manager go back and ask – how did you do in the last quarter around your training requirements? We can track all of that in Mindtickle.
Gop:
So, beyond training onboarding and certification, a core focus at Mindtickle is encouraging managers to coach on an ongoing basis. How are your frontline managers coaching your sales reps? Is this something, which is of near-term importance or long-term importance?
Danielle:
I think if everything becomes a coaching session, it’s too much, and you won’t get the buy-in. However, one-on-one coaching is fundamental in meetings; we need that engagement. Moreover, the coaching capability, especially when you have a diverse workforce, and they’re in different offices, is a handy tool.
If you seek to certify reps on everything, it dilutes the effectiveness of why and when you need to certify. Certification is also a big deal and is something that needs to be ingrained in behavior. It’s the same with coaching through a platform: use it when it’s necessary and when it makes sense. However, if you’re coaching through the platform the entire time, you’re losing that face-to-face interaction which is, and you need to have both.

The Journey to Picking a Solution that Lasts


Gop:
What keeps you coming back to Mindtickle?
Danielle:
One of the key reasons why I’m a repeat customer is because you guys genuinely listen. Here’s an example: my reps were having some issues with the completion function not correctly displaying their progress. When I sent in the request to your Product team, they addressed the problem immediately. You’re always there to listen for use cases to help my sales team continue to use the platform, and it shows.
Gop:
When you’re evaluating a sales readiness tool for the very first time, what is it that you’re looking for? What are your evaluation parameters, and to you, what is Mindtickle’s value proposition?
Danielle:
I’m looking for something that is straightforward and easy for all of us to use. I’ve used many learning management systems in the past, and they are too clunky and too heavy – salespeople don’t want anything to do with them. Quite frankly, I don’t want anything to do with them either. For example, if I have a Zoom session, I want to record it, upload it, and be done as quickly as possible. I don’t have time to cross-check and do a review every time I need to share content with my team, so it’s vital for me to have a solution where I can set it and forget it.

What’s Next for Sales Readiness and Sales Enablement


Gop:
There’s much activity that’s been happening in the sales enablement and sales readiness spaces. We’ve seen some consolidation, different partnerships, and more. Where do you see all this heading?
Danielle:
Throughout my career I’ve wanted to be in front of sales, talking to sales, engaging sales, and making sales smarter. I did this so that sales could go out and spend more time in front of customers rather than behind the scenes trying to figure out how to learn to be in front of customers. I think we’ve made much progress to that end. However, I see a lot more attention paid and investments made in this space, and the conversations are becoming more and more pointed and frequent.
Gop:
What is it that you’re most excited about in terms of new things that you’re looking forward to in the sales readiness space?
Danielle:
What we do is so integral to the sales process, it’s just a matter of making sure that my sales leaders understand how necessary it is. As long as I can get them engaged in the platform to know how important it is for them to be a part of the learning, I think then it will be a huge win for all. My 2019 strategy is that they have to be an integral part of the sales learning and the sales process around training. They can’t look at it as noise but look at it as critical to them hitting their number.
Gop:
Thank you so much for sharing, Danielle. It’s always insightful for us to hear this kind of feedback so we can make sure our team keeps moving in the right direction to help empower you and your company. Good luck with all your ventures at Dynamic Signal!

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