If there is one thing we at Mindtickle have learned in our ceaseless pursuit to create a world-class Sales Readiness platform, it is the value of a strong partner ecosystem. Broadly speaking, partners enrich our market-leading offering, complementing the robust Mindtickle platform with the extra muscle needed to drive revenue growth faster and foster a culture of sales readiness for our customers. Some partnerships add to this by making it possible for Mindtickle to offer an even greater go-to-market value. Performance Solutions International (PSI), SalesSparx, and Menemsha Group are three such partners.

The vertical play with SalesSparx
Having a vertical go-to-market strategy has become increasingly important for companies today. While many technology products and solutions have historically been sold horizontally — across many industries — having a vertical-specific go-to-market strategy allows companies to capitalize on growth potential in particular markets. With this in mind, companies are looking for ways to make meaningful connections with their vertical customers that will yield more closed deals, faster.

SalesSparx enriches Mindtickle’s data-driven learning, training, and coaching capabilities with industry-specific playbooks, processes, and training needed to arm sellers in the B2B healthcare vertical — a huge market with equally huge revenue potential. The sales methodologies, strategies, and processes are created with the healthcare industry’s nuances in mind.

Alliances matter in staffing and recruiting
Similarly, Menemsha Group’s deep industry expertise complements the Mindtickle Sales Readiness platform — but for sales teams in the staffing and recruiting industry. A long-term Mindtickle partner, Menemsha provides the specific skills, knowledge, and messaging that staffing and recruitment sales teams need to move opportunities down the funnel. When Menemsha Group’s industry-focused solution is paired with Mindtickle’s platform for onboarding, skills development, training, coaching, and ongoing readiness, it results in more focused and relevant seller-to-customer interactions and a powerful way for customers to go to market

Cross-industry training content to uplevel sales conversations
Another way to build readiness in vertical-specific sales capability is by arming sellers with industry-specific knowledge and helping them demonstrate an empathetic understanding of their customers’ challenges. That’s where Performance Solutions International (PSI) comes in. PSI is a leader in industry-focused talent development and performance support that enables sales to understand their clients and prospects so they can better identify new opportunities and position solutions strategically. PSI further enriches the Mindtickle platform with industry language, market dynamics, regulatory requirements, common buyers, and supply-chain information. Together, Mindtickle and PSI clients can measurably achieve their sales readiness goals selling to businesses in financial services, health care, life sciences, insurance, manufacturing, technology, media, telecommunications, and more.

When Mindtickle’s data-driven learning, training, and coaching capabilities are paired with industry-specific content and expertise from PSI and SalesSparx, companies have an unrivaled solution to efficiently tackle the challenges inherent in selling into healthcare.

As today’s companies continue to make their vertical go-to-market strategies a priority, their sales team’s industry fluency, readiness to engage with buyers, and expertise become increasingly important factors in closing a deal. Thanks to its partnerships with companies like PSI, SalesSparx, and Menemsha Group, Mindtickle provides the firepower needed to help tip the scales in its customers’ favor, continuously improving sellers’ skill sets and knowledge, and ultimately driving better business outcomes.

The world was already moving away from classroom training toward a more ‘blended’ approach — a mix of face-to-face instruction with technology-mediated activities — becoming the preferred model for sales training among today’s organizations. According to Training Magazine’s 2018 Training Industry Report, 69.3% of training hours were delivered with blended learning techniques in 2018, up significantly from 34.7% the year before. But now, having a virtual training option is no longer optional, it’s mandatory. With its cloud-based Sales Readiness platform, Mindtickle is integral to organizations’ virtual and blended learning initiatives, and, together with partners like Halifax Consulting, we’re driving the future of learning and readiness in markets around the world.

Based in Paris, Halifax has been offering consulting and training services to organizations since 2003. Halifax’s Best-Sellers programs include the DEAL® method (business negotiation skills), the LEAD® method (mastering sales skills), the PAC$® method (skills for accelerating growth of large, key accounts), the 5i 5o® method (inside sales) and the BOSS® method (management skills). The company offers its training content in six European languages — English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese — as well as Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Halifax has historically worked with a range of vendors to provide its online sales training through various point solutions that provide video role playing, coaching, among others. However, its partnership with Mindtickle represents the first holistic solution that addresses all of these capabilities and more to create a unified user experience to true sales capability.

Specifically, Halifax is using Mindtickle as its digital delivery platform for its DEAL® method. The scope of the training includes understanding the balance of power in negotiations, preparing and structuring a negotiation, and how to perform in face-to-face negotiations. To help DEAL® method participants become proficient in negotiation skills, sellers engage with materials through the Mindtickle platform to review before the live class. (Interestingly, Halifax has noted that 80% of its business in the past 10 years has been for pre-class training.) Post-class, Mindtickle provides spaced reinforcement, microlearning, certifications, coaching and role play to deliver a prescriptive and personalized readiness path for each DEAL® student. Combined with Halifax’s in-person training, customers get an all-in-one, unified, blended-learning experience.

Mindtickle’s partnership with Halifax has the added benefit of cultural feet on the ground in markets where culture and language can often be barriers to success. As you know — in addition to its U.S. and India offices — Mindtickle has a U.K.-based office to serve customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa. With help from Halifax’s multi-lingual reps, Mindtickle now has partners to help us serve the French and German markets — and later, the Spain, Italy and Portugal markets (languages that, combined, represent 80% of Halifax’s current content).

Our partnership with Halifax is a real win for Mindtickle, as it unites two leaders committed to bringing blended learning to the next level for customer-facing reps around the world. Not only do users benefit, so do each of us — Halifax, with an all-in-one solution for unified sales enablement and readiness; and Mindtickle, with opportunities to tap into a larger market abroad. We look forward to many more years working with Halifax. We welcome Halifax Consulting to our partner ecosystem!

In the midst of a socioeconomic crisis brought about by COVID-19, organizations are racing to resiliency by embracing telework and remote communications and collaboration approaches as they prepare for a new paradigm, in which all their employees will be remote some of the time, and many will be remote all of the time. Sales leaders especially — charged with shaping the team that brings in revenue for an organization — must make sure their tactics and strategies for training are as effective virtually as they were in the office. To this end, sales leaders are driving initiatives that digitally onboard, train, develop skills, and coach their team members to adopt the digital skills required to make today’s remote customer engagement effective .

As Mindtickle’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Gopkiran Rao pointed out in a recent podcast with Sandler Training’s CEO and President Dave Mattson, “This is either a challenge or opportunity for every company out there” (especially when both the buyer and the seller are remote). Of course, while the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of desklessness, the reality is that the global workforce has been moving toward predominantly remote work for a while now.

The podcast discussion began with an overview of the pandemic’s role in reframing our idea of the workplace, but surfaced a number of critical market drivers and conditions as to why equipping field teams for the digital field has been such a challenge for companies in the pandemic environment.

Often with many stakeholders across sales operations, sales training, corporate learning, marketing and frontline sales management focusing on different aspects of seller engagement and productivity, there is breakdown in communication. Understanding this disconnect and determining where an organization falls short in developing a common language to uplevel sales skill can be challenging, and requires stakeholders to think more deeply about their current sales readiness programs, especially in the context of working remotely. Gop and Dave pointed out that now especially, the questions to ask include:

• Do you have remote selling proficiency and how do you measure and reinforce it?
• Do you have the ability to engage and educate your sellers in the flow of work, which is increasingly intermingled with the flow of life?
• Do you have the ability to drive spaced reinforcements of key content and skill critical to engaging remote buyers?
• Do you have the ability to do virtual ride-alongs, or shadowing and quickly address gaps in digital-first selling skill?

The partnership began earlier this year and was almost immediately recognized by leading analyst firm, Forrester Research. In the Forrester Wave™: Sales Training And Services, Q1 2020 by Mary Shea she pointed out that “Sandler Training leans into a self-service, always-on model… In partnership with Mindtickle, the provider embeds its training content into the sales readiness vendor’s tool.” Mary explained that “Sandler Training has made a strategic decision to reduce dependencies on ILT and diversify its training delivery methods. Within the past decade, the provider has pivoted to include learning management systems and online content offerings within a self-service model that leverages top-tier technologies and encourages users to access training content directly from its platform.”

And when the Mindtickle-Sandler partnership was formally announced in June, it couldn’t have come at a better time. The Sandler-Mindtickle partnership is important to addressing common pain points of organizations, because it is a focused effort to align many stakeholders responsible for parts of sales learning, management and coaching and execution. In the podcast, Gop and Dave agreed that the partnership enables a common language, set of processes, skills and knowledge that drive the business outcomes that customers are looking for. In today’s climate, in which organizations’ employees are not only working from home, but are also required to stay effective and engaged with both their teams and their remote customers. It’s more important than ever to be aligned on a repeatable methodology, professional learning, manager observation and intervention, and seller execution. By virtue of Mindtickle’s data-driven virtual training and coaching sales readiness platform and Sandler’s best-in-class sales training, organizations have a standard playbook of best practices, content training, coaching, visibility and expertise that is accessible anytime and anywhere.

Dave said that having this common language and being aligned on methodology is important because it “raises your game so much faster, which is good for the organization, good for the individual and good for the client. It’s a winning combination.”

Only technology (Mindtickle) combined with methodology (Sandler) can make possible affirmative answers to these questions.

In a deskless world, it’s more important than ever for sales teams to be enabled and ready to improve their success rates wherever they are. Together, Mindtickle and Sandler are the “what” and the “how” combined in one partnership to address this need: instilling a transformational virtual sales training and coaching culture of applied knowledge, skills development and behavior change in a joint solution.

Catch Gop and Dave’s entire conversation in a 30-minute podcast. Click here to take a listen.