Onboarding Your Sellers for the New B2B Buyer: Rapidly Building Sales Capability

According to the 2019 B2B Buyers Survey published by DemandGen Report, buying committees continue to grow. Over half (56%) of those surveyed see four or more people involved in a purchase decision, while 21% have seven or more stakeholders. Moreover, recent Gartner research shows 77% of buyers agree purchases have become very complex and difficult. It also revealed that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend just 17% of their research time meeting with potential suppliers. When comparing multiple suppliers‚ they might only spend 5% or 6% of that allotted time with any one sales rep.

The limited amount of time reps have with buyers has taken on newfound levels of importance. If sales reps fail to deliver compelling value or perceived value during that time, they will find it exceedingly difficult to establish themselves as credible or consultative. In turn, they may find themselves shut out of an opportunity for good. 

The challenge is that great sellers are not born, they are made. While trainers can onboard and educate them, experience is the ultimate teacher. However, without the luxury of time, organizations must distill the experience of winning strategies and tactics to rapidly build world-class, customer-facing capability across their teams.

 

Poor Onboarding Derails Even the Best Organizations

As we’ve discussed before, poor onboarding is often the first misstep on the way to building a substandard sales organization. Effective onboarding is a specific initiative within an overall readiness regimen focused on equipping sales reps with knowledge, skills, and behaviors aligned with the buyers’ journey so sellers can engage and convert buyers. Too many companies, however, think they have to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to establishing an effective onboarding approach. 

Let’s review some traditional onboarding approaches that have earned such a bad reputation that organizations often fail to take advantage of the positives.

Classroom-based Sales Onboarding: With a great instructor, proper program structure, and a good curriculum, the classroom is an amazing way for sellers to learn. Classroom training allows you to teach your reps in a controlled setting, in large or small groups, free from the distractions and pressures of their work environment. Your reps get the benefit of the “human touch,” both from trainers and their peers they interact with and learn from. Plus, classroom training can help build teamwork across people who need to collaborate, such as pre-sales engineers and sales reps, and account managers and customer success. 

The downside of a classroom is that as a one-time event, it lacks ongoing reinforcement even in the short term and fails to drive essential behavior change. Plus, for a consistent, global experience, you need certified instructors and a structured curriculum.

Sales Onboarding with a Learning Management System (LMS): Geared towards company-wide collaboration, a successful LMS delivers a framework for managing virtual learning. An LMS is actually designed for more than training your sellers. While it encompasses many capabilities – including registration, catalog, and content delivery – its main purpose is for compliance, testing, and tracking. This system offers your reps self-study content, allowing them to learn on demand and at their convenience. And it works well as a central record-keeping system showing whether reps completed their training. 

That said, an LMS alone is not enough. Most LMS content is static. While you can configure an LMS for basic interactivity, this modality doesn’t bring your sellers together. In other words, it’s an isolating learning experience for your sales reps. Moreover, these systems have a reputation for not being engaging. Reps tend to hate them because they lack rich media and the learning process is boring.  Even admins find an LMS hard to use for their purposes, such as developing content. In a dynamic sales environment, this more rigid structure makes it difficult to serve up timely and relevant training content. 

In-the-field/on-the-job: This training can happen in two ways: Shadowing others, and being shadowed and coached by others. A structured in-the-field/on-the-job coaching program provides a framework to coach consistently and ensures reps are up to date and regularly trained in the areas they need the most. 

However, in most cases, in-the-field/on-the-job training happens too early – reps are in the door and on the phones. Throwing them into the water to see if they can swim leads to lost opportunities. Your sellers only get one shot to make a first impression with a prospect, so you can’t afford less-than-ideal interactions and recovery attempts – or outright losses – and stressed reps.

Other ways in-the-field and on-the-job training falls short is because they lack:

  • Knowledge and behavior reinforcement. No lever exists for reinforcing knowledge and changing behavior so sellers are more effective.
  • Skills and capability building. This onboarding approach doesn’t complement skills and capability development with coaching, role play and practice focused on specific scenarios.
  • Strategic onboarding. Putting reps straight into the field with little to no guidance, aka ‘trial by fire,’ typically results in less-than-stellar results and potentially impacts seller confidence and proficiency.
  • Constructive feedback from peers and managers. Sellers have little opportunity to learn from peers and managers and garner direct feedback.

Obviously, there are benefits to each of these traditional approaches. But the secret to onboarding success is borrowing the best from each and augmenting them with modern sales approaches and sales onboarding. 

 

What B2B Buyers Value

Selling effectively in today’s environment is a matter of ensuring your sales reps are aligned with — and deliver value to — buyers at every turn, since there is little to no room for missteps. The first step is understanding the process from the buyers’ perspective. 

Two years ago, Gartner CEB debunked the myth that even so-called empowered B2B buyers are firmly in control of their buying process. Today’s buyers can access a wealth of information about topics, solutions, and vendors – which creates challenges as well as opportunities. The challenge is that they are overwhelmed to the point of often feeling paralyzed in their ability to move forward. Complicating matters is the purchase-by-consensus model that bogs down discussions and decisions. 

While it may seem counterintuitive, CEB warns that sellers should not simply offer up more information and explain a range of alternatives to buyers as doing so only exacerbates the information-deluge problem.  Instead, CEB found that sales reps who are prescriptive by clearly recommending and rationalizing a certain course of action, and present a specific offering helps ease the purchasing process by 86%. At a time when buyers are desperate for a simpler purchase process, this approach can set sales reps apart.

Yet sales reps cannot provide guidance in a vacuum; they must align with the outcomes that matter to the buyer. That alignment begins with understanding buyer pains, criteria, value and everything else the buyer journey encompasses so your reps can anticipate and manage the process internally. 

 

Equipping Your Sales Reps to Succeed

Part of the job of a sales leader’s job is enabling reps with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed to be a consultative and trusted advisor to buyers. So, understanding what resonates with buyers is the first critical step to delivering value and building this perspective into the onboarding process. 

Onboarding isn’t a once-and-done exercise. According to Ebbinghaus’ “forgetting curve,” people forget 79% of what they learn in 30 days. So it’s not a question of the quality of your program when it comes to making sure knowledge sticks – it’s a matter of how the brain works. That’s why it’s essential to focus on key capabilities driving success in the field.

Organizations must identify and define needed field capabilities in line with how buyers research and purchase. In essence, sales reps must enable today’s buyers. As Gartner says, “To win in this B2B buying environment, suppliers should focus on providing customers with information that is specifically designed to help them complete their buying jobs. We call this ‘buyer enablement’ — the provisioning of information to customers in a way that enables them to complete critical buying jobs.”

It starts with marketing and sales defining the journey and the sales plays: what is the target persona, the buyer journey, our value, etc. Without a clear understanding of this, onboarding is irrelevant because it will be teaching the wrong knowledge, skills, and behaviors. To learn and master these behaviors, your reps require knowledge of the sales process, buyer personas, buying cycles, and industry context combined with proven in-field skills. 

According to Norman Behar, Managing Director at Sales Readiness Group, CROs should monitor results (aka lagging indicators) while monitoring and managing demonstrable knowledge and capabilities (aka leading indicators).

At a macro level, today’s sales reps must understand how the buyer defines value/cultivate discovery skills to understand buyer criteria, etc. Specific examples of what a sales rep might need the ability to do are:

  • Qualify the prospect. The rep must conduct a discovery session with the prospect, asking questions to understand their needs and whether the company’s product or service can address them.
  • Guide a prospect through the buying process beyond the product or service. This requires determining the prospect’s needs, speaking to those issues, and referencing industry trends as applicable.
  • Keep a prospect engaged over time. In the B2B world, many purchase decisions take months. The seller’s task is to continue the conversation until the prospect is ready to buy. This involves understanding industry trends and news, changing product information, developments within the prospect’s business etc. to initiate and continue the conversation with the prospect over time.
  • Overcome objections. Prospects will come up with reasons they don’t want to move forward. The rep needs to respond to those objections, while reframing them in a way that is beneficial to both the prospect and the seller.
  • Demo the product or service. This entails walking through the key features that matter to the prospect while positioning those to address the prospect’s needs, as well as maneuvering around feature gaps. 
  • Engage multiple stakeholders. Selling today requires reps to engage with and speak to multiple stakeholders in the organization — from the champion to technical buyers, the economic buyer, etc. — in a consultative manner without losing their attention or trust.
  • Enable the Buyer: Buyer enablement instills confidence in buyers and their ability to make good decisions. Sellers must provide buyers with the right information, through the right channels, designed to make the purchase process easier. 
  • Close the deal. The seller needs to negotiate a contract that is appealing to the prospect and beneficial to the company and rep so no money is left on the table.

Once your sales enablement organization has mapped out the knowledge, skills, process, as well as the tools to support execution, it can develop an effective onboarding program. However, success also hinges on selecting the right onboarding approach. 

 

Enable True Sales Readiness With an Expanded Definition of Sales Training and Seller Development 

The most effective onboarding is built on the following core pillars:

  • Developing a deep, data-driven understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your sellers, which you then use to develop an individualized program suited for each rep. In other words, don’t take a cookie-cutter approach.
  • Taking control from Day 1 of the outcomes important to your organization. You do this by building and maintaining sales-specific behaviors that uniquely provide insight and perspective to customers, while ensuring the sales process is aligned to the customer’s journey. 
  • Showing (modeling excellence/best practices templates) – mentoring and coaching reps guide them towards proven winning methodologies, tactics, and behaviors. The objective here is to move beyond just a transfer of sales knowledge and helping them understand what is needed to succeed in the field.
  • Mastering skills before talking to customers. Ensure your reps practice through scenarios and at the appropriate time with virtual and classroom role plays so they can master the knowledge and skills needed in the field. Back this up with reinforcement that drives long-term knowledge retention and behavior change. Reinforcement includes mentoring and coaching, delivering contextual bite-sized content in the moment, and Spaced Learning.
  • Cultivating a feedback culture.  To promote and encourage ongoing knowledge sharing and reinforcement, give your sellers access to feedback from managers and peers. In addition,  create a 360-degree, two-way exchange of information that benefits Sellers and Managers, and keeps content current.

 

Prepare Your Sellers for Success With Mindtickle 

With it comes to effectively selling to today’s buyers, sales readiness and onboarding are arguably the most critical aspects of a sales enablement strategy. The Mindtickle platform is designed to enable effective, modern enablement and onboarding. Equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills — aligned with the process and outcomes that matter to your target buyers your sellers will confidently engage in productive interactions with prospects. That means more closed deals, larger deal sizes and, ultimately, higher revenue.

To learn more about Mindtickle and our platform, you can request a demo here!

Five Best Practices for Strong Alignment Between L&D and Sales

Learning — especially for sales reps and other customer-facing employees — is ideally intended to be ongoing to reinforce knowledge over time but to also reflect evolving business strategies, regular updates on products and services, and changes in regulatory requirements. After all, if the market landscape is dynamic, how can learning be a one-time endeavor?

Considered a core piece of any sales enablement program, teams from Learning and Development (L&D) departments often step in to drive sales training and ongoing learning, initially aligning with HR for onboarding new sales talent. All too quickly, however, it can become disconnected from sales reps and other customer-facing employees. New sales reps, for example, often see working with L&D as a one-time, check-the-box activity, knowing that the faster they get through training, the faster they can begin to tackle their quotas. Perhaps their next brush with training/L&D comes annually with sales training sessions at SKOs or perhaps during a time specific to onboarding. Outside of these opportunities, ongoing learning and more importantly, sales skills development, falls on the list of priorities.

This disconnect between the needs of sales and those tasked with training sales benefits neither customer-facing employees nor L&D itself. It can start with a lack of clarity about the sales mentality or process, communications break down leading to more missed opportunities by sales training to learn how to improve the way they operate and deliver value. And the misalignment can snowball for a number of reasons — sales enablement isn’t delivered in the flow of work, there is no feedback mechanism or there are no agreed-upon and measurable results. And this misalignment with sales usually spans across sales onboarding, sales training, and sales coaching. And for sales, the reps begin to neglect or miss opportunities to leverage best practices, resources, and development methodologies that have been proven to work.

Fortunately, a number of best practices can be undertaken to avoid such a disconnect and misalignment. Here, we put forth five ways L&D can continue to engage with customer-facing teams to help them be more effective:

Align outcomes. Define the business outcomes desired — such as better customer experiences, increased renewal revenues, the addition of net new logos, etc. — and align them with learning outcomes. In doing so, learning becomes a critical enabler of reaching the desired business outcomes, and L&D teams are more incentivized to stay engaged with the vehicles (sales reps) for reaching those outcomes.

Create a skills framework. A framework communicates clear expectations for a sales rep’s competencies and capabilities. Ideally, the framework comprises the soft skills (such as active listening and concise speaking) and hard skills (such as prospecting, lead qualification and negotiating) that combined, make an effective sales rep. The framework should map back to the outcomes listed in best practice No. 1.

Identify the engagement opportunities for customer-facing teams to enhance their knowledge, skills and behaviors. This includes leveraging gamification to challenge sellers and other teams to earn certifications and badges and implement rewards for participation and completion. Sellers should also be engaged in simulated and real-world scenarios through virtual role-plays to teach and reinforce desired behaviors. Another opportunity to engage teams is by distributing and sharing soft skills training and product knowledge at timed intervals while leveraging quizzes, open-ended questions, and materials in different formats to customer-facing teams.

Leverage a sales readiness platform. Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness platform combines training, content, analytics, certifications and coaching to ensure that all customer-facing employees have the tools to be successful and field-ready. With a sales readiness platform, L&D can meet mandates for everything from on-boarding to up-skilling to ongoing learning.

Build a culture of coaching. Coaching is valuable in its ability to improve performance and help the best reps perform even better through ongoing feedback that fine tunes hard and soft skills. L&D can support coaching by empowering managers to systematically assess reps’ capabilities and provide consistent, ongoing feedback and insights when and where their “coachees” need it. It’s important also to provide a coaching session cadence, easily facilitated through a sales readiness platform like Mindtickle.

In its primary role of managing the development of employees — and to do so in a way that supports other key business priorities — L&D emerges as a critical piece of the overall success of a business. As such, a close and consistent alignment with sales is crucial. By following these five best practices, L&D and sales can remain a critical part of sales enablement and readiness with the ultimate goal of building value across an organization.

The Best Sales Training Ideas: Techniques to Ensure Success

We’ve entered a new era of sales training. For many decades, long presentations in classroom environments were the only form of career learning available. But today, sales reps expect more creative and comprehensive career development tools, and customers expect salespeople to be valuable industry experts.

As technology evolves, attention spans decrease and customer knowledge skyrockets. Sales instruction must now include new methodologies that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. Today’s training is fueled by sales enablement technologies, and it’s bolstered by innovative coaching methods.

What is Sales Training?

Sales training is the ongoing process of teaching sales teams how to create profitable, deal-closing interactions with buyers. This may include in-person learning, e-learning, micro-learning, gamification, or other training techniques to help salespeople improve.

Sales training is designed to help sales reps close more deals, of course. But it’s also about teaching reps to build long-term relationships with buyers and guide them to buying decisions that best benefit their organizations as well.

Although the terms are sometimes used synonymously, sales training is not the same as “sales enablement” or “sales coaching.”

Sales enablement is a wide umbrella. While it includes training, it also involves tools, content, processes, and other resources that enable sales reps to be at their best.

Sales coaching is a crucial reinforcer of training. It’s the continuous, one-on-one guidance given to salespeople to fill each individual rep’s specific knowledge gaps.

The Best Sales Training Techniques

There’s no single training plan that works for every sales organization, and it’s beneficial to use a mix of different methods to keep things interesting. There are, however, several training techniques that, when implemented correctly, boost the performance of sales teams. Here are key sales training techniques to consider:

E-learning

Technology and flexible work arrangements continue to change how and where work is performed.

Over 40% of U.S. employees worked remotely for at least part of the time in 2017, up from only 23% in 2003.

and salespeople are no exception. Even when employees are in the office, sales teams are often dispersed throughout different cities, states, and even countries to serve different markets.

Traditional, in-person training is challenging to coordinate, expensive to execute, and requires taking the sales staff away from valuable customer-facing activities for hours or days at a time.

E-learning can take different forms, such as instructor-led classes vs. massive open online courses (MOOCs). These are most commonly used to teach several new concepts in a short span of time, such as during sales rep onboarding or training on a new system.

E-learning eliminates many of the pitfalls of traditional sales training by providing:

  • Anywhere/anytime access: By offering training courses online via the cloud, sales reps can access training materials wherever and whenever is convenient for them. The best e-learning technology also enables learners to take courses from any device, whether desktops, laptops, tablets or phones.
  • Increased sales-rep productivity: The downtime required to travel to a conference center and sit through training would be better served on the front lines with buyers. Because e-learning enables salespeople to take courses whenever their schedules permit, they gain more time to focus on customer relationship building and revenue-generating activities.
  • Cost reductions: Although e-learning requires up-front investment, it ultimately leads to steep cost reductions. Virtual learning reduces the costs of travel, training centers, physical learning materials (like training guides), and the expenses associated with bringing in dedicated trainers.
  • Many engaging formats: E-learning can be as creative and engaging as you want it to be. And in our era of shrinking attention spans, engagement is important. The best e-learning training offers a mix of presentation formats that boost engagement. Examples include video, interactive infographics, whiteboard-style free animations, kinetic text, and challenging-yet-fun assessments to test the learner’s knowledge.
  • Attractive perks for top talent: Companies with the most convenient and robust learning opportunities can win top talent better than competitors. Sales training offers career and skill development—something that millennials want and expect from their employers. A sales organization that offers 24/7 access to industry-leading training materials can highlight their commitment to ongoing improvement in the recruiting process.

Micro-learning

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Micro-learning is the practice of offering bite-sized, always-accessible, individualized training content to employees. This practice uses small learning opportunities to reinforce key concepts and drive employee development.

Micro-learning is often focused on one topic or problem, and it is easily searchable so employees can find information on the right topic at the right time. Micro-learning may incorporate a range of content types, including quizzes, videos, games, simulations, audio clips, and more.

Micro-learning taps into a key principle of how humans learn: the more we repeat and use information, the more ingrained it becomes in long-term memory. Research also shows that information is retained more effectively when it is spread over a longer period of time, compared to when the information is presented all at once.

Not only does micro-learning aid in the learning process, but it also saves precious time and helps the learner absorb information in a way that’s fun and engaging.

Here are some important benefits of micro-learning:

  • Retain more training information: Conventional e-learning typically covers numerous training objectives in one lengthy course. This can create “information overload,” causing reps to struggle to retain a wide range of concepts. Micro-learning flips this tactic on its head by presenting the learner with short-and-sweet training modules.
  • Fit into busy reps’ schedules: Each training module is quick, fun, and engaging. It focuses on one learning objective, with one vital concept to remember, and then ends. The learner can then either take another training module or go about their day with that one newly-learned concept in mind.
  • Identify knowledge gaps and track progress: Advanced micro-learning platforms provide the ability for sales leaders to identify reps’ knowledge gaps, assign training to fill that gap, and track the reps’ progress in that area.
  • Customize and personalize training programs: With larger sales teams, there are numerous knowledge gaps to fill. Traditionally, the way to deal with knowledge gaps was to present dozens (or even hundreds) of reps with one lengthy training session in an attempt to cover every possible need. With micro-learning, sales coaches can assign the exact modules needed to fill every rep’s knowledge gaps. This approach boosts efficiency, saves time for the entire sales team, and gives reps a more customized approach to development.
  • Provide information that is relevant here and now: Sales training should be refreshed frequently to accommodate the latest product knowledge, buyer insights, and industry trends. Traditional classroom materials or even e-learning can take months to update. Micro-learning modules, on the other hand, can be updated within hours to ensure reps are getting the most relevant information.
  • Improve training completion rates: The longer and more challenging the training, the less likely your reps are to complete the entire program. With shorter, more approachable training that is easy to fit in with day-to-day activities, reps are more likely to start and complete their training modules.
  • Gain a competitive advantage: Companies can gain and cement their competitive advantage by using micro-learning techniques. Dynamic learning opportunities like micro-learning improve the onboarding process, increase productivity, help attract and retain top talent, and require less time to find and update than traditional training materials. All of these benefits together help you build a competitive advantage and deliver more value to customers.

Gamification

Gamification provides something that was once unheard of: training programs that are fun. Training that’s enjoyable and engaging helps the learner retain more of the material for longer periods of time.

When training and assessments are enjoyable, reps are motivated to complete modules even when they’re not assigned to them. This provides for more training opportunities and more reinforcement of key concepts covered in e-learning, micro-learning, or other training formats. When salespeople are motivated to complete more training, the result is a more highly skilled sales team that is prepared to drive revenue growth.

Some of the most effective gamification elements include:

  • Video-game components: Gaming is a familiar format to millennials, who make up the largest share of the U.S. workforce. The gaming format offers fun and engaging challenges to help apply and reinforce what is learned.
  • Leaderboards: Leaderboards and badges add healthy colleague-to-colleague competition to the training mix. Since their achievements can be publicized company-wide, reps receive more recognition and motivation than they did with traditional training courses.
  • Social elements: Newsfeeds and open communication between reps make the gamification experience even more rewarding. Social elements can promote new business connections and profitable interactions (like knowledge sharing and meaningful encouragement) within the sales force.
  • Gamified quizzes: Even quizzes can be fun when they’re turned into games. When reps don’t pass an assessment on the first try, they’re more willing and motivated to play the learning game again to pick up the information they might have missed.

Real-world incentives

Salespeople are goal-driven and competitive by nature. Online training programs should leverage these traits. While many reps complete e-learning courses for their own career development, the right incentives can add motivational fuel to the fire. Here are a few important guidelines:

  • Make sure the incentives are desirable: Incentives can take many forms, like spiffs awarded after meeting a challenging training goal, or gift cards or concert tickets. Anything that will motivate your reps is fair game. Don’t make the common mistake of assuming your team will be motivated by company-branded giveaway items like pens and sport bottles—your reps are more valuable than that, so it’s worth putting time and thought into your incentives.
  • Incentives need to be achievable: If the incentive requirements aren’t attainable, such as earning 100% on all training quizzes for a month, reps will be discouraged rather than motivated. The requirements should be challenging, but reps need to believe they can actually win. Consider running “nearly impossible” incentives alongside achievable ones. For example, earning 85% or higher on all training quizzes this month will earn a standard (but desirable) reward, and landing 100% on all quizzes is worth an even more valuable reward.
  • Get input from sales reps: With larger sales teams, especially when they’re remote, it might be harder to anticipate what kinds of incentives resonate well with your reps. If you’re not sure what to offer, ask reps directly. Consider emailing a questionnaire with a list of rewards to choose from, whether gift cards, a donation to their favorite charity, etc. Then, when a rep earns an incentive, you’ll know their preferences.
  • Deliver the reward immediately: With remote sales reps, make sure the reward is mailed quickly. For reps working in the office, hand-deliver it the day it’s earned, if possible. To maintain the motivation, reps should see training incentives being received as promised.

How a Sales Training Platform Can Help

There are countless approaches to establishing effective sales training and onboarding at your organization. The right training platform can help your reps achieve quotas faster and improve new reps’ time to productivity. Look for a platform that enables you to:

  • Identify your reps’ specific knowledge gaps
  • Assign your reps the right learning paths based on their roles
  • Track onboarding progress with milestones and certifications
  • Provide training modules that incorporate gamification elements

Mindtickle is a trusted sales training platform that enables sales teams worldwide to become more competitive and profitable. Schedule a demo to see how Mindtickle can help you establish and refine your sales training program.

L&D Must Partner with Sales for Readiness: Preview of ATD TechKnowledge 2020

Sales Enablement has been gaining some serious momentum over the last three or four years. Many early adopters recognized the need to prepare their sales teams and began leveraging the necessary principles, organizational strategies, and supporting technologies. All of this to better empower and enable their sales representatives to be more effective in the field. 

But 2020 is shaping up to be the year when Sales Enablement and Sales Readiness go mainstream. We’re seeing dedicated sales enablement tracks being added to sales and marketing conferences. We’re talking to long-standing and established enterprises who, having seen the success of sales enablement at many technology companies, are establishing their own Sales Enablement teams. And we’re seeing companies of all shapes and sizes double down on the sales effectiveness programs incorporating sales readiness principles and as well as bringing the same concepts to other customer-facing teams.

In my blog posted on ATD’s site, I share five steps our colleagues in Learning and Development (L&D) can take to partner with Sales teams and make them field-ready to drive revenue, build brand value and deliver exceptional customer experiences. To my other point about organizations making their Sales teams ready through ongoing learning and skills development, organizations are leveraging coaching and virtual-role play to drive even more effective engagements. 

Mindtickle Strategic Customer Success Manager, Deepna Sarkar, will be presenting a session entitled Close the Knowledge-Skills Gap With Role Plays and Custom Scenarios.

Session Details:

Wednesday, 2/5: 2:10 PM – 2:40 PM WS201
Playground Demo Session
San Jose Convention Center
Room: Advance Stage, Playground, Grand Ballroom, Channel 1

 

Session Description:

According to SiriusDecisions, the top sales challenges for organizations today focus around understanding buyer needs and product knowledge. For example, 72 percent of sales reps are unable to connect offerings with buyer needs and challenges, and 69 percent are unable to differentiate offerings from competitors or status quo. Without enabling reps to practice messaging and develop sales skills, organizations impede the growth of their sales teams and, consequently, their top line. Join this session to learn more about how Mindtickle enables reps in customer-facing roles to optimize and fine-tune their messaging and communication skills through virtual role play and sales scenarios.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

For more information about how L&D can work with Sales for Readiness, check out this webinar with FedEx Office hosted by the Sales Management Association.

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

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.

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