3 Mandates That Matter for CROs: A Conversation with Forrester and Juniper Networks

Gopkiran Rao on October 16, 2020

COVID-19 changed the game of life and by extension changed the way we think and do business. For people that sell, support customers, and manage clients for a living, 2020 will mark the end of an era that focused on interpersonal, in-field skill. What the pandemic has not changed is the pattern of sales leaders running full speed ahead to hit and exceed their quarterly numbers. This is both a paradox and an existential crisis. If you are a CRO and are looking at a hockey stick of quarterly sales goals you have a small window to enable your inside and outside teams. I recently hosted a webinar with two Sales Enablement experts, Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks, to discuss how CROs at the most competitive organizations are ‘democratizing B2B sales’ and building digital-first, customer-ready teams in the remote and ready era.  

Our discussion opened with a clear acknowledgement that Sales team effectiveness was an issue even before the pandemic hit. According to a March 2020 research report from the Sales Management Association, 44% of companies surveyed said their sales force isn’t effective, 57% said they’ve not been able to improve sales effectiveness over the past 12 months, and 82% don’t have effective development programs for their sales reps. All these deficits have left many companies struggling to prioritize opportunities, engage with the right buyers and connect with important prospects, demonstrate value, and retain business.

From there our discussion moved to seven trends, underlying these alarming stats, that Mary and Hang did a great job of covering  in the webinar: 

The downward trajectory of the on-site sales meeting. A Forrester survey conducted pre-COVID-19 revealed that one in seven business buyers prefers not to meet with a sales rep in person. This momentum increased as the digital-native generations became the economic buyers. Post-COVID-19, we’re likely looking at 80% of B2B sales taking place digitally anyway — over Zoom, for example — forcing sales reps to increase and improve their skill sets and close the gap between buyer expectations and seller capabilities.

The convergence of inside and outside sales. Forrester research shows that about 40% of field sellers’ activities are essentially the same as inside sales, all as a result of increased digital activation of buyers. The point is that they’re all sellers now, and as such, they all require the skills and training needed that will help them be successful.

Use of digital tools for buyers and sellers. Buyers are increasingly doing more on their own to self-educate, browsing peer-review sites, engaging with analyst communities and downloading digital content. They’re also engaging through interactive digital tools, whether that’s on a supplier website or through a remote meeting share. As the buyer does more of the legwork to understand foundational concepts of a product or service, the seller’s role becomes more consultative, where they’re advising and coaching the buyer with stats, inside information and industry trends to support and supplement the buyer’s decision. On the sales side, it’s becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing tools to be interconnected and automated. 

Increased investment in remote selling models. Companies are pouring money into the inside sales channel. For example, Microsoft completely restructured its selling organization a few years ago to account for its cloud-based business; and ADP transferred a lot of its external sellers into an internal remote selling model, making it the company’s largest quota-carrying channel.

SaaS-ification of industries outside of technology. Traditional businesses are now starting to embrace the subscription and SaaS delivery model. 

Sales motion is perpetual, not a one-time spike. The flurry of one-time sales activity before a deal closes or before renewal is unnecessary; in fact, Forrester found that the actual selling motion is only about 16% of the entire sales cycle. Buyers now expect ongoing and consistent value-added interactions across the entire customer life cycle, which could include providing ongoing data or other support even after the deal has closed. It also broadens the number of employees on the seller’s side that are involved in customer interactions, which again reiterates the need for all customer-facing personnel to have the skill sets and training required to be successful.

Buyers are indifferent to how sales organizations are set up. Customers don’t care whether they’re buying from inside or outside sales reps. They just want to engage consistently and fluidly across any channel at any point in the buy cycle.

As you can see, while COVID-19 didn’t create these trends, it certainly accelerated them. And, as we all agreed, with  the remote-work environment likely here to stay, sellers must make that 16% of their “selling motion” impactful and effective in a wholly digital landscape. Here are three tips from our discussion to keep your sales force — and sales organization as a whole — effective, efficient and successful:

Audit your sales tools, renegotiate contracts, keep only the vendors that are providing consistent and ongoing value, and create a digital selling platform at scale. There was a time when digital transformation was reserved for high-margin tech and services companies, but no more. Given the transition to digital selling, every company should be building some sort of digital selling platform that can scale.

Rethink traditional seller hierarchies and focus on establishing a universal set of skills across revenue-generating teams. Despite the fact that customers really don’t care about whether a seller is inside, outside, SDR, etc., companies continue to hang on to the hierarchical nomenclature and terminology. It’s now time to rethink how they organize, align and train sellers and how they’re branded. 

Activate more employees on behalf of revenue goals and make readiness a CRO objective. Ensure that everyone in your company is equipped at any moment to have a customer-facing conversation because in 2021, they’re all going to have to do so.

While the pandemic has been a great global challenge, it is also driving opportunity for transformation. Just look at the gig economy: Uber, Airbnb and others emerged in our last global economic downturn in 2009. Today, companies can see this new, challenging sales landscape as teh graveyard for the good ol’ days and ways, or they can look at it as a transformational opportunity to really change the way enablement and all customer-facing teams can succeed at selling in the “next normal,” all-digital environment.  

Learn more in this on-demand webinar featuring Sales Enablement experts Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales & Technical Enablement at Juniper.

The Art of Field Communications in 2020: A CMO Perspective on Updating and Aligning Remote Teams

Gopkiran Rao on April 26, 2020

6 weeks ago like for every other profession, what it meant to go to work changed for marketers too. We gave up commuting, dress shirts, dropping by unannounced to ask our sales friends how the quarter was going, and worrying about expo hall logistics.

COVID-19 also had an unexpected, positive side effect. It has reinforced the importance of marketing as a function to coordinate the GTM response across different field organizations as we move to a new normal in which remote or hybrid-remote is here to stay. This makes three GTM priorities even more critical than usual.

  • Ensure the category, company and its solutions are more relevant than ever
  • Ensure company executives, customers, frontline personnel and partners are staying up to date on market changes and the company’s response
  • Leverage expertise across the business to rapidly roll out initiatives to reskill, re-message, and engage customer-facing teams.

This makes regular field communications and updates one of the most critical initiatives marketers can execute to engage their increasingly remote and virtual field teams. For those of us in the community sharing notes on emerging best practices for updating the field, three common, positive trends have emerged in the first wave of response to the new normal.

First Principles for Field Communications in the remote-hybrid environment

The best marketers in the business have quickly pivoted to:

  • Agile re-planning and management, manically focused on bite-sized updates produced through cross-team collaboration, while pushing urgent and transparent communications to the field
  • Continuous 1:1 feedback loops and micro-updates with individual sellers and other representatives to inform and prioritize efforts including new messaging and demand gen mechanisms like virtual events
  • Setting the expectation for scheduled, consistent field updates delivering usable information and tools with lower emphasis on ‘video perfect production values
  • Making the sensible pivot to a single cost-efficient platform like Mindtickle for communication and updates
  • Already familiar with product marketing, enablement, and content teams, as well as their audience in pre-sales, sales and services for learning, skill development, coaching and updates, the delivery platform, became a non-issue

My own team and I have been fortunate to learn from, adopt and implement many of these first principles for our own field updates and communication. It has been one of the most strategic projects we have undertaken in the last month. The result has been consistently positive feedback and demonstrable value in the field. There are a few reasons for this, many of which are core principles that we talk about in sales readiness and enablement.

 

(Engage, Motivate, Measure Effectiveness with customer content and social sharing)

Principles Driving Mindtickle’s Effective Use of Mindtickle for Field Communication and Updates

  • An agile mentality and personal commitment from every member of the extended marketing team to focus on usable deliverables
    • Enabling our SDRs, AEs, CSMs and other colleagues to get meetings and drive value-added conversations with customers is the single filter we use to define and execute content.
  • Load sharing, cross-training and democratizing the ideation and feedback-loop
    • Implementing a tiger team, sponsored by me and led by product marketing and enablement has allowed us to draft campaigns and roll-out across pre-sales and sales initially, then to customer services and now the entire company.
  • Using multiple tools, but focusing on Mindtickle for Mindtickle as the defining authoring, consumption and tracking mechanism as the measure of effectiveness. This has been possible because of our approach to
    • Integrating our corporate collaboration hub and channels, content repositories, email, web conferencing and work management platforms with Mindtickle.
    • Enabling the marketing team to be power users of the platform across basic features such as native content collaboration and authoring tools, as well as interactive elements like gamification, social learning, surveys and polls.
    • For the first time, getting direct insight into how the messaging updates and tools are translating into improved field capability from advanced Mindtickle capabilities like call and web-presentation intelligence (integrated AI-evaluation) and coaching feedback.
  • Constant outreach to customers, partners, analysts, board members and industry colleagues to share and validate ideas on how to best position and deliver new messaging, virtual field campaigns and tools.
  • The support of an executive team that is open and welcomes being measured on their participation and completion of certifiable materials in these updates.

Our Implementation and Experience

Finding an agile approach, cadence and a structure that works for us has been an important aspect of why the weekend update, as it’s often referred to, has become something looked forward to by the marketing and consuming teams alike.

A few highlights include

  • In Mindtickle’s case, we push out our updates every Sunday evening. After 3 weeks of waking up to the Monday morning ‘ping’, we have noticed seller participation and completion rates in excess of 50% within 2 hours of the first digital notification
  • In our working meetings we iterate on the coming week’s update and key dependencies and resources with the help of a lite Kanban board
  • Consistent content includes links to an information-packed marketing calendar, mini-customer podcasts, videos or information snippets, content, PR and analyst air cover or wins as well as competitive snippets
  • Using inputs from field surveys pushed out to the field teams; Since we started using Mindtickle’s native survey tools we have seen field input go up 100% to nearly 90%
  • While the priority is quality and speed of execution, we engage our Content as a Service team (CAAS) as a secret weapon for design, videos and graphics for market-facing content
  • Our head of strategic ops coordinates the schedule and team member submissions; By working closely with sales enablement we are now able to create a curated, sub-experience for our sales and pre-sales team while using the same content for the rest of the company
  • We use one of our most popular modules called the Quick Update to deliver the weekly update; This powerful feature allows the team to use the best possible combination of personal videos, slideware, documents as well as linked materials from customers or partners to serve up content; We are also incorporating simple assessment and certification features like quizzes, exercises and assessments to ensure retention in addition to completion
  • We regularly meet with the sales enablement and management team to share and receive feedback on completion and engagement blockers and understand how assets and tools are being perceived by customers as well as their teams

 

(Simple quizzes and polls reinforce key talking points and drive interactivity)

There is more to be done. Content across updates must be ever more relevant and usable, meet higher production standards and we are figuring out how to keep up the pace of producing 3-4 quality assets each week ranging from market-ready content like from how-to guides to fire-side chats with customers. This challenges our nimble, but small team–but the feedback and receptiveness from the company (and hopefully soon our partners) has been compelling and inspires us all to keep aiming high.

 

(Content and Tools are only as good as the engagement they drive)

New Tools for Remote and Ready Initiatives

This week, with the benefit of not just these outside best practices, but our own evolving experience we are pleased to publish this blog post as well as a comprehensive guide for field communications and updates and a quick how-to video to our remote and ready resources repository.

Whether you are a marketer, in the business of working with customers or an executive I hope you find these resources worth your time and will reach out to learn how I or my team might assist you in your own journey to engage and up-level your customer-facing teams with or without Mindtickle.

When No-Travel Policies Get in the Way of Sales Kick-off

Gopkiran Rao on March 6, 2020

Kick Off Productive Sales Bootcamps, Events and QBRs with Virtual Strategies

This is the story of a company like mine, maybe yours.  Perhaps you’re an enablement director, marketing or sales exec, sales ops leader, training director, field event owner or an executive admin. It’s March 5, so it’s that time of year or quarter when you’re on the verge of the multi-week showcase known as Sales Bootcamp, Sales Kick-Off (SKO), Quarterly Business Review (QBR) or Company/Global Kick-Off  (GKO). This means you’re in the throes of your evening job as the “chief sales-kick-off officer” – responsible for pulling together in a single location, corporate and field teams distributed near and far.

Then you have the mic drop moment. After all that really hard work – bad news goes viral! A no-travel policy is enforced or perhaps executive management makes the call. Employees are proactively asked to cancel all work-related travel as a precautionary measure. 

In this moment, it’s logical to pivot towards one of a few options:

Option 1: Panic 

Option 2: Cancel everything, reschedule, or worse just wait, hoping for a miracle

Option 3: Put everything, all content, all presentations in shared drives, your CMS and run long, boring web conferencing sessions, hoping against hope that something will stick

The good news is that there is a proven approach to getting a high ROI on the work that has already been done. 

  • Presenting Option 4: World-class companies implement a blended approach to sales events designed to withstand emergencies including outbreaks, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Over the last 7 years, Mindtickle has been working with these organizations to implement a readiness approach across their sales events.

Over the course of this post, I will review some of these best practices in the form of Do’s and Don’ts to help you go from a standstill to a winning virtual event in 2 weeks or less. (Scroll to the end for a link to connect with Mindtickle experts that are available for a 1:1 consultation on running great virtual sales events and kick-offs.)

Do’s and Don’ts for Moving from In-Person to Virtual in 2 Weeks or Less

Engaging Executives and Fellow Stakeholders – Build Your SWAT Team!

DON’T

  • Don’t assume you are in this alone and try to pull off the shift to an online or virtual event on your own. Continue to engage and communicate with people that worked to support the event.
  • Why: These folks have a vested interest in being consulted and playing a part in a successful follow-through. While it’s easy to focus on assuring executives and leaders that ‘something’ will happen, consulting with the end recipients, peers in product marketing, pre-sales, services, and other organizing teams will create a meaningful, engaging, and collaborative experience. 

DO

  • Do reach out to your existing telephony, conferencing, and readiness solutions partners to see what experience and insight they might offer to work with you on transforming your live event into a virtual experience. Talk to other industry peers on industry forums or in your network to incorporate their learnings.
  • Work with executives and leaders to inspire the troops.  From inspirational messages to short videos delivering and reinforcing key messages on themes, objectives, and the importance of virtual participation, the organization will feel supported and assured that business will not only continue but thrive amidst the uncertain business climate. Nothing delivers confidence like the message that business will continue as usual particularly with an event designed to make sellers and their supporting teams competitive. 
  • Virtual competitions, leaderboards and other fun activities like quizzes or polls, as well as micro-content formats on mobile to drip-serve long-form learning to pre-reading on mobile with gamification and rewards tied to completion, will also create an atmosphere of engagement with learning and reinforcement.

Transitioning Quickly from In-Person to Online 

DON’T

  • Don’t attempt to convert your live event to a live web-conferencing event on the same exact days and times as your original conference. 
  • Why: Locations, connectivity, time-zones, and home office settings are very different and not conducive to day-long sessions of one-sided content consumption in a vacuum.

DO

  • Do leverage live presentation tools in conjunction with a platform aligned with pre-conference planning and attendee preferences.
  • Do solicit feedback from sellers and attendees using surveys and polls on how they would like to participate in a virtual setting, consume content (real-time, online, offline, mobile, video/pdf, gamified, etc.) and provide feedback.
  • Use visual journey builders, social engagement like leaderboards, and gamification to build a sense of virtual community.

Keeping your Presenters and Experts Engaged Before, During and After the Event

DON’T

  • Make your presenters record every session in long videos using a web conferencing solution or video in PowerPoint and post them to a shared folder or file sharing service.
  • Why: Presenters are human too and the best presenters draw energy from participation and reinforcement from attendees. Allowing Presenters to experiment with new formats like polls and voice-over video or role-plays as well as micro-learning or spaced reinforcement modalities and feedback mechanisms like polls will engage them and create a feedback loop.

DO

  • Maximize the power of personalization to service every attendee based on their unique role. Survey reps online to collect ideas on topics that matter in the field.
  • Conduct online role-play competitions to find success stories.
  • Use a pop quiz to identify knowledge gaps.
  • Present your executive team with reasons to shift to a virtual model and get enthusiastic buy-in because of the better outcome it will offer versus simply shifting the in-person event to a series of web-conferences.
  • Take stock of and categorize your existing content and leverage internal teams or vendors like Mindtickle that have dedicated content services to help you quickly re-factor your content for consumption with modern modalities such as gamification, mobile micro-learning, virtual coaching forms, email-based reinforcement and role-plays.  

Orchestrate the Event as Series of Mini-Exercises, Each Designed to Maximize Interaction, Engagement, and Long-term Retention 

DO

  • Review my colleague Dhruv Markandey’s excellent post here on a practical action plan for implementing a quick virtual event in a few days. Our experience with our customers informs us that taking a micro-experience approach to sessions, content, exercises and a focus on personalization will drive the best possible outcomes. These include: 
    • Integrated pre-learning and pre-certification with instructor-led skill development workshops delivered via live streaming platforms. 
    • Short surveys after every micro-session to measure ROI and engagement.
    • Use of quizzes and virtual leaderboards to measure knowledge retention, engagement, and readiness.
    • Continuous drip delivery of bite-sized information updates like product and competitive snapshots from SMEs.
    • Online role plays for reps to practice their message during breaks or in between sequenced sessions on topics such as objection handling or elevator pitch.
    • Spaced reinforcement after the event to ensure reps have adopted product messages. 

While there is no size fits all to define the perfect virtual sales or corporate event, platforms such as Mindtickle have evolved to help our customers address one overriding objective. Maximizing the capability of their people by supporting how they are onboarded, aligned and reinforced to deliver in the field. Bootcamps, SKOs, QBRs, and GKOs are perhaps the most important anchor events designed to achieve this objective in a single forum to deliver the executive vision, product launch training, messaging certification, competitive training and accreditation, coaching 1:1’s and feedback loop. 

I hope this blog post sparks some ideas for your own event and look forward to opening up a conversation as we all come to grips with doing business no matter where people are.

Components of a Sales Readiness Platform: Automating the Last Mile of the Front Office

Gopkiran Rao on January 16, 2020

In search of greater levels of sales efficiency and customer engagement, organizations have spent the last 20 years implementing myriad new technologies. Many of these technologies focus on automating marketing functions or sales operations — CRM, sales activity management, forecasting, customer service success management, contract management systems, and more. All of which are designed to improve marketing’s ability to connect with prospects, or the productivity and effectiveness of sales reps, as well as the quality of data that is passed to the back office.

However, despite this influx of productivity tools, one area that remains largely unaddressed is enabling and continuously improving great person-to-person interactions between an organization and its customers. Ideally, all customer-facing employees should have the skills, knowledge, and behaviors to deliver positive and engaging customer experiences. While every company prioritizes and strives to make progress toward this goal, readiness initiatives have largely been disjointed and siloed. For example, sales enablement, sales training teams and product marketers have been tasked with providing sales with the information, tools and content to help them sell more effectively. Additionally, learning and development departments have focused on improving job performance broadly across an organization.

But most organizations still have no systematic, repeatable, and measurable way to prepare and assess customer-facing employees’ ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience. They don’t have a framework in place to automate and proactively measure their customer-engagement knowledge and soft skills — a system that surfaces the right set of quantifiable behaviors and capability data points. This is where a Sales Readiness platform enters the picture enabling reps to best utilize available sales enablement content and materials and automating this last mile of the front office.

Sales Readiness Systems: Data-Driven, Automated Capabilities Evaluation
The goal of a Sales Readiness platform is to evaluate how capable a customer-facing employee is at engaging a customer or prospect and driving the conversation towards a specific outcome. And similarly, answering the questions of what a rep is capable of selling and their ability to up-sell, cross-sell or reach a quota. It helps to ensure that each rep has the optimal mix of knowledge, skills and behaviors to be engaging and deliver an exceptional customer experience throughout the buying journey.

Data is the cornerstone to any top sales readiness program: A data-driven Sales Readiness platform enables the aggregation of measurable capabilities and competencies that best correlate with sales performance and activity metrics, and are most important to an organization. Those then become an organization’s “capability framework” that can be used to identify skill and knowledge gaps and drive remediation through training, learning and coaching. Through this data, organizations can optimize their readiness investments and build role-specific readiness content, training and coaching strategies that map back to the framework. Then the platform helps evaluate the impact of those programs to inform continuous improvement plans.

Attributes of a Sales Readiness Platform

When evaluating a Sales Readiness platform that aligns with a data-driven and insight-driven view of capability, it’s important to keep the following elements in mind.

Omni-channel content delivery: Web and cloud-based solutions and mobile capabilities are crucial to adoption as the mobile workforce takes hold. Reps are increasingly deskless and working from a distance. Users must be able to consume content remotely, on their own schedule, and through their device of choice.

Multi-modal ongoing education: People vary in their learning styles, so ongoing education should be delivered in a variety of modalities, such as kinesthetic, auditory and visual. Look for solutions that cater to that range, from podcasts and video to presentations and role-play.

Applications and use case-specific functionality: A Sales Readiness platform must offer the ability to automatically assign users — like new employees — to the appropriate readiness paths. And, in addition to long-format development courses, micro-learning should be considered so that users can absorb new material in easy-to-consume pieces. Of course, tracking progress through assessments and certifications is crucial. Spaced Reinforcements must proactively and automatically help bridge knowledge and skills gaps with automatic microlearning, personalized and gamified challenges, and scenario-based questions, while surfacing coaching opportunities at specific intervals for maximum retention.

Virtual role play: A Sales Readiness platform should offer virtual role-play and simulated sales scenarios for users that want to improve their sales communications and presentations. Video to see and hear the delivery of communication is a powerful tool for practicing and polishing pitches through guided role plays. But consider all the mediums through which reps interact with customers — email, phone, in-person, web-conference. A Sales Readiness platform should help practice and develop their skills for each of these kinds of engagements.

Field coaching: Look for solutions and frameworks that support live training led by instructors and coaches. Templatized coaching forms allow managers to conduct and capture observations via one-on-one sessions, ride-alongs or shadowing. These guides help manager-coaches focus on what behaviors to observe and record so that they can be analyzed to identify competency gaps. A good coaching program should leverage data gathered from coaching sessions to verify managers are coaching effectively and their representatives continue to improve. This real-time reporting helps managers be better coaches and enables senior leadership to have insights into coaching programs.

Ecosystem integrations: Sales enablement programs can’t operate in a bubble so it’s important to consider how easily data and content can be exchanged with other technology solutions and systems. The goal here is to unite disparate solutions around a common set of complementary and interconnected enterprise sales, operations and marketing functions. Look for platforms that integrate and operate with a set of APIs that permit integration with other complementary applications and data sources.

Guided readiness: Planning, implementing, optimizing and measuring the success of any sales enablement program can be daunting. Any guidance, templates and services need to be prescriptive and tailored to specific business needs. It’s important to collaborate with organizations that have a deep understanding of industry drivers, channels, and regulations as well as applicable domain expertise and best practice approaches to help achieve desired business outcomes.

When weighing the ROI of a sales readiness system, also consider that it’s not only the sales team that could be using it to impact revenue and brand perception. In fact, any customer- or prospect-facing team member is directly responsible for bringing in revenue and building brand value. So, partners, call center agents and customer service reps also benefit from a system that helps them optimize their customer engagement skills and acquire new ones.

With customer experience top of mind for most organizations, sales readiness is perhaps the most critical piece of a sales enablement strategy. When equipped with the knowledge and skills required, customer-facing employees are confident and prepared for productive and engaging interactions with customers, which translates to more closed deals, larger deal sizes and, ultimately, greater business growth.

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

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

Gopkiran Rao on November 12, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impact #3: Regrettable rep turnover due to poor onboarding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/.

Today’s Race for Revenue is Not a Sprint, but a Marathon

Gopkiran Rao on September 14, 2018

Selling is hard, and it can often feel like your sales team is running against gale force winds. It’s no wonder sales reps use weather and sporting metaphors to describe the selling environment. For many sellers, it seems like the “perfect storm” of outcomes-focused buyers and low-cost competitors. Frontline managers sweat their forecasts all the way to the “finish line.” Successful sellers go down in history as “rainmakers.”

In this environment, sales reps have reached the upper limits of what they’re able to do to engage attention-challenged buyers.

In an effort to just get out ahead, companies have spent the better part of the last fifteen years automating the front office with new technologies – unleashing waves of new methodologies, processes, and investments in reporting and forecasting. Technology-savvy CMOs and CIOs have turned to front-office automation as their solution – their new rocket-fuel if you will. Low-tech vendors are criticized for running a ‘foot-race’ toward obsolescence.

Yet, several billions of dollars in enterprise IT spending later, we still can’t accurately measure the revenue power of a sales organization – the measure of their seller readiness and effectiveness. Management is pointing to dark clouds and the seemingly intractable problem of speeding sales.

So, what did everyone miss?

Companies, both purposefully and accidentally, have missed some useful and obvious truths. This short-sightedness also applies to sales consultants and training or learning tools vendors. All of whom have implemented or offered otherwise great technology for sales enablement. In order of importance, the truths of the revenue race are:
The race for revenue is not a sprint, but a marathon

No matter how long the race, the only winning outcome is a delighted customer. By preparing for a dash, companies have built sales management and organizations for the short distance instead of the long-term outcome – customer lifetime value. Readiness cannot happen with a one-time event such as a training course. Every process and tool for skills development should be designed and implemented with the longer term in mind.
Sales is a team sport

It’s best to think of the race for revenue as a bicycle road race, where the riders work in tandem to support the overall success of their team. To sell today, organizations find themselves needing to pull in and draft as necessary experts in different functions. These may be technical experts, solution sellers, customer success managers, customer marketing experts and in some cases even product managers. Then if that wasn’t enough, the selling team must also orchestrate their efforts to create the perfect symphony for the customer.
Environments are dynamic and ever-changing

Much like a marathon, the course, the countryside and indeed the weather are constantly changing. The rules are also contextual to those changes and therefore often elusive. For example, new competitors may emerge, customer and internal teams may re-organize, training philosophies and best practices may evolve or change. So how do you create an enduring enablement framework and programs that adapt no matter what is required at any given moment?
Many lifecycles

The lifetime of a seller, like the life of an athlete, has a beginning, an end and most importantly, a middle. Then you must consider various lifecycles are intersecting with other lifecycles – the buyer lifecycle, the company lifecycle, the manager’s lifecycle, and product lifecycles. Without a way to address the intersections of these life cycles, organizational strategy, front-line management, training and enablement efforts will typically fail.
Technology is not absolute

Technology should not target a single capability at a single point in time, but rather a set of capabilities used on a continuum, over time focused on higher order business outcomes. This then mandates that technology focuses on usable data and insight. That’s why emerging technologies like artificial intelligence or machine learning can be leveraged for interesting applications like sentiment analysis, but all of these need to be looked at in the context of continual sales readiness as a business initiative.

Looking at your customers’, partners’ and sellers’ needs now and what they might be in the future, and asking how and where your company should invest in their success will change how you approach sales readiness and enablement. Looking at sales readiness with a longer-term focus on building customer and partner-centric sales relationships is key to preparing your team to run the long marathon that is selling.

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