Mindtickle Introduces Model Pitch: A New Way for Self-Guided Practice and Improved Message Consistency

Dhruba Bhattacharya on May 20, 2020

In our current dynamic environment, businesses across the globe are shifting gears. With the increasing adoption of working remotely, sales organizations are re-evaluating processes and operating procedures. With this change, many sales organization are facing one or more of the following challenges:

  1. Fewer face to face meetings – With more buyers starting to work from home, they are canceling in-person meetings. Field sales have had to transition to primarily inside sales tactics
  2. The shift in target buyer/industry/vertical – With more traditional companies increasingly trying to adopt digital tools, there is an opportunity to address their needs
  3. Budget cuts – Buyers will spend their time and money wisely. Sellers need to focus on mission-critical challenges now more than ever

You need to make sure your sales organization is ready to address these challenges. They need to be able to sell on the phone, be able to position your offering to a new industry, and also focus on the mission-critical business challenges of the buyer.

Now more than ever before, sellers are expected to deliver the right messaging consistently in each and every sales conversation. Delivering the wrong or inconsistent messages will hurt revenue outcomes and result in lost opportunities or diminished brand value.

There are three factors which are impacting your seller’s readiness to be on message:

  1. Not knowing what ‘good’ looks like
  2. Lack of meaningful feedback
  3. Longer feedback and improvement cycles

Mindtickle’s Missions virtual role play has always helped sellers overcome these challenges. And we’re doubling down on using AI to further assist sellers with Model Pitch.

Introducing Model Pitch

We are introducing the ability to put what good looks like in the flow of practice. Model pitch is the best-in-class pitch or a response to a particular sales scenario. And you’re probably sharing it with the sellers as:

  • Standard scripts shared with sales teams (BDRs, medical sales reps, etc)
  • Standard responses to handling objection
  • Call snippets of a great phone or web conference conversation
  • A recorded video from a senior leader or a rockstar seller
  • Collateral from product marketing or brand management teams

Until now customers have been adding these as attachments in role play practice sessions or adding them to bite-sized Quick Updates or Courses so sellers learn from these and use them during their sales conversations.

Now, users will be able to leverage Model Pitch in Missions to deliver faster and meaningful feedback to sellers. This will also help sellers address some basic gaps before their manager provides them feedback.

Let’s see how Model Pitch and AI-enhanced analysis helps the three key users of the platform; Enablement Admins, Sellers, and Managers.

Enablement Admins

With the recent enhancements, admins can now configure keywords or phrases to include as well as avoid for their Missions. Configuring keywords or phrases to include is now simpler and automated by the use of Model Pitch. Mindtickle’s system automatically transcribes and fetches keywords or phrases such as names of businesses, people, location verbs, etc. Overall it is less tedious for admins to set up a Mission and much quicker.

Sellers

Sellers can learn what good looks like using Model Pitch before they practice. Every time they make a recording to practice, Mindtickle now delivers instant and meaningful feedback to them. It helps them find improvement areas. They can leverage the feedback and the model pitch to learn how to address the improvement areas and practice again. With feedback available at every practice, the seller is becoming consistent with the best in class pitch.

Managers

Managers can now focus on providing much more valuable feedback beyond the basic feedback which AI covered.

With these insights, managers can also identify and prioritize the seller who needs the feedback first, so that the manager can help them improve and get them to the required readiness levels.

We received incredible feedback from our users as we built the AI-based capabilities. 94% of them found these insights helpful while practicing and reviewing role plays. With these new capabilities in Missions, you can reduce the seller’s time to readiness and ensure they are well-verse to deliver the right message consistently. Someone rightly said, higher the readiness, better the sales outcomes! And we are just getting started. We’ll bring more AI-based insights to help improve the hard and soft skills needed to win customers.

To learn more about Mindtickle’s virtual role play or our readiness platform, read our press release or request a demo here. Or if you’re already a customer and have any questions, please reach out to your Mindtickle Customer Success representative.

Managing Change when Implementing Sales Readiness Tools: a Four-Step Approach

Dhruba Bhattacharya on March 19, 2018

Any form of change is challenging for organizations to manage, but sales teams are particularly sensitive to change. They don’t want anything to take them out of the field or negatively affect their results even for one day. This can make introducing new sales readiness tools particularly difficult.

Mendix, a platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations make web and mobile applications, knew this was an issue but their onboarding and ongoing sales training program needed to change. They were growing rapidly, hiring 15 new sales hires a quarter in a team to a base team of only 68. At the same time, the company was tasked with improving their time to sale, the number of opportunities they generated and their win rate. They wanted to reduce the time and expense of face-to-face training so they chose to implement Mindtickle, a sales readiness platform.

To ensure the new tool didn’t distract their salespeople and actually helped them to sell better sooner, they implemented a four-step approach to address the change.

1. Top-performers engaged with the tool first

Mindtickle was only rolled out to top-performing reps and engaged managers first. These people had all been identified as high performers across a range of metrics. They were called Mendix’s Champions and held up as role models in the organization.

The Champions completed missions on Mindtickle – they practiced their selling skills on the platform and were measured on how they learned and what they had learned. The results were very positive, and they were shown to the entire sales team at their next sales kickoff. By showing top performers visibly embracing change and improving their performance as well, other reps were eager to get onboard.

It was at this kickoff that the leaders of Mendix outlined what they expected of their sales organization in the coming year and explained how Mindtickle would help them achieve that. The sales readiness platform was positioned as critical to the company’s success.

2. Roll it out to the rest of the sales force

With the value of the platform clear and the sales’ objectives linked to Mindtickle, the tool was rolled out to the rest of their sales force. To help in this process Mendix’s Champions were given the responsibility of supporting members of the sales team on their missions. The champions would look at the video role plays in their missions, give them feedback and grade them. These grades were put on a leaderboard to create some healthy competition amongst the team.

This approach worked well, particularly with the younger reps who were keen to learn and improve their selling skills. Seasoned reps were reluctant to try the new tool.

3. Get CEO endorsement and incentive

As they rolled out the tool, the CEO publicly endorsed the platform. This was targeted specifically at bringing the reluctant reps onboard. At the same time, the CEO also introduced a new compensation model where reps could earn a quarterly bonus if they scored well on their missions in Mindtickle. This additional sweetener started to encourage more reps to use the platform.

4. Leaders publicly acknowledge those who have changed

The final step was for the leaders of the sales organization to start publicly acknowledging the people who had embraced the change. This began with the first salespeople to complete their missions being recognized and their scores shared. This process of communication continued every week, where the highest performers in each region were held up as role models. This helped inspire all the other sales reps to adopt and use the platform.

Within a month of rolling out Mindtickle people from each level of the sales organization were using the platform. Two months later 87% of their reps had done a mission on Mindtickle, with seven missions per seller on average. To check on how salespeople were really feeling, Mendix also collected feedback and found that even some of their strongest skeptics were seeing real value in the process. They were learning how to improve their own roles and improve how they communicate.

To keep the momentum going, the company started releasing reports every quarter to the sales organization. These reports disclosed who used the platform most and showed how it was improving sales performance. Some of the successes include:

  • New business development reps were consistently meeting quota after just three months – this had previously taken six months.
  • Their prospecting success rates doubled
  • Top performers had reduced the amount of time it took them to qualify and progress opportunities from 30 days to just seven days
  • The entire sales team was performing at 105% of its targets

Mindtickle is now an integral part of the culture of the sales organization at Mendix. It’s part of their day-to-day work, incentives, and reporting.

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