Building out a sales training program is one thing, but measuring its success is a whole different beast. You know it’s not enough to stand up a sales training technology solution without also building out the key predictors of sales performance you need to track. We took a look at how different organizations are measuring success and broke them down into five buckets. Here they are:
Sales onboarding + ramp time
Sales everboarding (continuous training)
Practice + role-plays
Sales coaching
Call analysis
What are selling skills and why are they important?
Selling skills are the competencies your team must have, maintain, and build over time. Not all sellers join your organization with the same set of skills — and that’s OK. As a sales leader, it’s your job to identify the skills that define success at your organization and then ensure your entire team has them. Once they’re defined and codified, your teams will be more productive, individual performance will improve, and ultimately, revenue targets will be hit consistently.
Check out this graphic below that outlines the five buckets of sales training and gives you specific metrics to track in order to truly understand and accurately measure seller performance. Want the full guide? Download the Definitive Guide to Measuring Sales Readiness.
This post was originally published in July 2021 and was updated in January 2023.
Not all sales training works. In fact, research by Gartner found that sales reps only remember 13% of the information a month after their sales training.
Motivation plays a big role in sales reps’ willingness to engage with sales learning. By adding ways to engage sellers with sales training, you increase sales quota attainment and the ROI of your sales training.
Here are six ways you can change your sales training to motivate your sales team.
Avoid reteaching sales reps skills they already possess. Instead, improve career skills with personalized sales training and development.
There is nothing more boring than going over material you already know — it’s repetitive, it’s discouraging, and, ultimately, it’s not rewarding. That’s why personalization is key to fostering motivation — it’s both relevant and rewarding.
Personalized sales training puts a focus on strengthening weaknesses and filling in any knowledge gaps that are relevant to each sales rep. For example, if a particular sales rep is great at deal strategy but needs improvement on closing sales, tailor a plan to work on customer conversations to see the quickest results.
And it’s important for personalized training to come hand in hand with a personal development plan for sellers to see what steps are required for success.
To begin a personalized plan, first, define what success looks like. In other words, what skills and knowledge do each seller need to reach their sales goals? What behavior and sales approaches do sellers need to learn to close more deals?
Once those elements are defined, you can create a sales readiness index and an ideal rep profile (IRP). This helps build an end goal and vision for sales reps to work toward.
With a defined sales readiness score and a personalized development plan, sellers can take ownership of each milestone and understand what steps will need to be undertaken in order to match your IRP.
Make sales training relatable and interactive
To motivate your sales team to learn, your training needs to be relatable and relevant to your sales reps’ everyday tasks and interactions.
Use real-life scenarios and role-plays for your sales reps to get a glimpse of what actions and sales practices they need before the real action begins. Interactive sales training demands focus, which improves engagement and attentiveness to the task at hand.
Use role-plays to put into practice the skills reps have learned in a safe environment. This encourages sellers to continue their sales practice, as it prevents them from feeling demotivated or nervous in real scenarios and coaches them on how to navigate tricky situations.
Managers can also use role-plays to see their sales team in action. Then, depending on each rep’s performance, they can provide additional resources for improvement. In turn, the relevant feedback and interaction serve as motivation, being a key for improvement and signaling that managers care about the seller’s success in their role.
Support your sales reps with achievable development paths
Sales coaches often think having a 1:1 with their sales reps means their team will automatically feel supported. While that’s a good start, more is required for sellers to feel motivated and encouraged in their growth.
To begin development plans, meet with your sales reps individually to understand their personal goals. It’s much easier to build motivation when both parties are aligned in the direction of development. Once the goals have been defined, use skills tests to assess where your sales rep currently stands. Then, you’re able to track progress using benchmarks to celebrate milestones and address any pitfalls.
As a manager, it’s your responsibility to show sales reps the relationship between skill development and quota attainment. Ultimately, you want your sales reps to quickly see how new skills personally impact their sales efforts and be drawn to continually improve their success.
Nurture an environment where feedback is welcomed. Your sales reps are in a unique position to tell you exactly what sales training resources are helpful in their role. Their insights may benefit the company’s sales training quality and relevance. Not only is this information helpful, but it’s also motivating, as sellers see their thoughts on improvement are acknowledged and are making changes.
Encourage failure and practice
In training, don’t be afraid to let your sales team fail, fail again, and then learn from those experiences. Practice exercises motivate sales reps to learn from their mistakes in a safe environment.
Be clear with sales reps that tests and assessments are encouraged to understand what will help them progress in their career and are not an assessment of their ability to do their job. The difference is important because sales reps need to be allowed to acknowledge their own weaknesses and build paths for improvement.
Sales reps will find the impetus to continue working on skills that have been improved upon — particularly if they track them in their personal development plan and see how much they have progressed.
To motivate your team through failure, remember to build a sales training initiative that is inspirational with past success stories. And encourage sales reps to rely o share tips and tricks. When reps lean on one another, it removes the risk of sellers feeling isolated and builds resilience and determination to reach personal goals.
Build team identity and support
When sellers feel like they are part of a team and supported by a coached manager, the overall team’s performance can be boosted by as much as 31%. When sellers feel part of a team, they push through tasks and feel a responsibility to work together.
In an environment where team members are able to support, and encourage one another, the sense of community and aligned objectives motivates each sales rep to accomplish their sales training for the better of the team.
This helps build team identity. This is important, as research shows that employees who identify as part of a team have higher productivity rates than those who don’t (50% vs. 36%).
Team members can play toward the same goal but also stimulate one another through friendly competition that pushes each seller to outperform colleagues. In sales training, use leaderboards to nurture this.
A team environment can also keep sales reps feeling welcomed and encouraged when they experience a hard learning curve, as members can offer support and share resources and training feedback. This helps build a level of participation and incentive to continually learn and improve together as a team.
Use gamification to drive intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Learning is more fun with games (adding gamified elements to training boosts motivation to 83%) and information is retained better. Use this to your advantage when preparing sales training.
You can introduce gamification with leaderboards and scoreboards that measure the skill levels and sales readiness rankings of sales reps against one another. This encourages sales reps to either stay on top or reach the top.
As well, you should reward the training effort and motivation of high-ranking sales reps. Each time a new level is achieved, it’s good practice to appreciate and validate the efforts of the sellers.
Lastly, when rewarding sales reps’ participation and involvement with sales training, your acknowledgment and compliments need to be specific and timely for them to resonate correctly. For example, if a sales rep completes a sales training on email strategy, send them a message the same day congratulating them on their new email strategy skill.
Acknowledgment and rewarding sellers’ efforts incentivizes them to receive ongoing appraisal in their next sales course training.
Motivated training makes your sales team unstoppable
Motivated sales reps have the drive and curiosity to adapt new sales insights and content into their sales approach. They become hungry to learn and continue to practice their new skills in real scenarios, which drives increased win rates.
The combination of engaging sales training and a motivated sales team leads to:
Increase in profit: Engaged and motivated employees achieve a 23% increase in business profit. This is because when your sales training is motivating, your team will be driven to grow their skills. This drive leads to an increase in course completions, which leads to sellers being a step closer to a complete sales readiness score and matching the behaviors of the IRP.
Adaptability to market changes: Sales reps typically only spend around 17% of their time in sales training. But sales training doesn’t have to stop the moment a rep completes their first course. Use sales training as ongoing development to rethink market approaches and fine-tune skills.
Improve sales KPIs: Sales training prepares the reps to use the best practices and approaches to reach and convert potential customers. When reps are motivated to continually use training to optimize their sales approach, they are more likely to hit their quarterly KPIs and objectives.
Now you’ve got a motivated sales team; what’s next?
Although learning and completing a sales training course is a good start, it’s just the first step. The real action happens when those learned skills are put into practice with real-life scenarios.
Keeping track of improvement and insights can be tricky. That’s why it’s helpful to use a sales enablement platform to keep training, content, data, and resources all in one place.
With sales enablement platforms, data taken from real conversations, content management, deal negotiations, and seller approaches tracks the performance of your sales reps. This allows the correct training course to be recommended and tracked by management.
By having all the sales data at hand, you can quickly pinpoint what skills need to be expanded upon for each repy. Not only that, but sales enablement platforms complement management’s ability to track sales reps’ development and performance and give insights when intervention or feedback is needed.
Learn how Mindtickle can motivate your sales team with training tools that set your sales team up for success. Here’s where to set up time for a Mindtickle demo.
You’ve gotten through another days- or weeks-long sales onboarding program with your new sales hires. It feels like it went well, but how can you really know whether it had an impact? Do you know the sales onboarding metrics that will show the impact of the program?
Onboarding is important for introducing new hires to your company and familiarizing them with their roles, teams, daily tasks, tools used, and more. But as happens to even the most experienced sellers, learning so much information in a matter of days is overwhelming — and some information is bound to get lost.
Research shows that over 84% of salespeople forget what they learned in sales onboarding within the first three months.
To really ensure reps are ramped up, ready for the field, and performing at a high level, you’ve got to supplement onboarding with continuous learning and support. These onboarding success metrics help you gauge your team’s performance and provide a more straightforward path on how you can guide them to improve throughout their tenure.
Top sales onboarding metrics
Knowledge retention
Sales reps must retain important information about your company and products in order to properly engage buyers. You can measure retention by providing quizzes and certifications. The best way to help sellers stay up-to-date is with learning reinforcement through virtual micro-learning, videos, recorded role-plays, and simulated sales scenarios. Once you understand where each individual rep stacks up, you can provide personalized learning paths that address any gaps.
Ramp-up time
Also known as time to productivity, ramp-up time refers to the length of time from a new hire’s first day to the day they reach full productivity. This “full productivity” means the rep is embedded in the company culture, can effectively communicate product value, and optimizes use of your tech stack. A shorter average ramp-up time indicates that onboarding has been successful in building skills, knowledge, and behaviors.
Technology adoption
Part of sales onboarding metrics is SaaS onboarding metrics. Sellers use a laundry list of tools to perform their daily responsibilities, so adoption is key in helping them succeed. Make sure your onboarding program includes a thorough review of SaaS applications. If new hires are slow to adopt them, they are either not confident in how to use it (meaning you’ve got some work to do with onboarding) or don’t find it useful for their job (meaning it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack).
Employee satisfaction
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is ensuring your new hires feel supported and empowered from their onboarding program. People aren’t shy to leave a job if they don’t feel like they’re set up for success from day one. In fact, employees who had a negative new hire onboarding experience are twice as likely to leave a job than those who had a positive experience. Save money and hold on to your salespeople by offering a post-onboarding survey, and make changes based on their feedback.
Time to refresh your onboarding program? Here’s a sales onboarding checklist to help you get started on creating a measurable, effective, scalable program.
Here at Mindtickle, we talk a lot about the importance of continuous learning. Training isn’t “one and done.” Instead, sales reps need continuous learning opportunities (what we call everboarding) to ensure they always have the latest and greatest skills and knowledge necessary for success.
But the truth is, continuous learning is essential for revenue professionals of all levels – from the sales rep to the Chief Revenue Officer. Attending sales enablement and sales readiness events is a great way to keep a pulse on industry trends and best practices, make connections, and get ideas and inspiration for refining your sales readiness program.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the best upcoming sales enablement and sales readiness events to attend either virtually or in-person. While each event has something unique to offer, all are sure to offer insights that can help you ensure your sales readiness program is running on all cylinders.
Looking to get your sales team ready to close more deals in the second half of the year? Then be sure to check out the Mindtickle Revenue Reboot.
This summer, we’re partnering up with Chili Piper, Vidyard, BoostUp, Baker Communications, and Qualified to deliver a line-up of weekly content and experiences that’ll help you reboot your revenue in the second half of the year. Sign up now to access brand new videos from experts featuring fresh sales enablement and training tips, live and in-person networking discussions, a curated summer reading list, and more.
This year’s Chief Revenue Officer Summit will gather revenue leaders from all types of companies – from the largest enterprises to promising, innovative startups. At this in-person event, attendees will have the opportunity to share stories, network, and walk away with practical ideas for driving revenue growth at their organizations.
It’s a challenging time to be a seller. These days, sales teams must work harder than ever to engage buyers and articulate value throughout the customer journey. salesDisrupted, powered by B2B DecisionLabs, is a one-day, research-focused event held in Boston, MA that promises to help sales professionals and leaders level up their leadership and selling skills. Rather than teaching theory, this conference disrupts the status quo by focusing on results.
September 20-22, 2022 | San Francisco, CA and Virtual
The largest software conference in the world is returning to downtown San Francisco this fall. This year, Salesforce will be celebrating its 20th Dreamforce with an event that promises to be bigger and better than ever. Attendees can expect 1,000+ sessions and workshops, networking opportunities, and plenty of fun. Professionals of every level are sure to walk away with inspiration and ideas for finding success and growing revenue in a digital-first world. In fact, 87% of Salesforce event attendees say they learned something that helped them accelerate business growth.
This fall, sales enablement professionals and revenue leaders from around the world will gather for this one-day, in-person event in San Francisco. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from industry leaders and network and connect with peers. There will also be opportunities to evaluate best-in-class enablement and sales readiness solutions that can take any sales readiness strategy to the next level.
After a two-year hiatus, the Sales Enablement Society’s annual, in-person conference is back. The theme of this year’s event is “Take the Leap: Connect. Innovate. Elevate.” Attendees can expect an inspiring experience featuring engaging keynotes and 40+ informative breakout sessions. There will also be opportunities to network, recharge, and have some fun, including the opening night party, happy hour, and a wellness patio.
Many revenue leaders resign themselves to the notion that 20% of sellers will continue to drive 80% of revenue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to embrace the science of sales and start creating an entire team of quota-crushing reps.
This autumn, the team at Mindtickle will be making our final stop on our Road to Readiness Roadshow. Register for this in-person event for an opportunity to connect with industry leaders and peers and walk away with best practices and strategies for creating an entire team of top performers.
This October, the Sales Enablement Summit will descend on Boston. At this one-day event, sales enablement professionals from companies of all sizes and types will gather to share experiences, challenges, and ideas. The event will cover hot button sales readiness topics including cross-functional collaboration, scaling enablement, tracking key metrics to prove value, and more.
Gain insights and network with peers – all from the comfort of home or the office. Sign up for the Sales Enablement Festival to access more than 20 hours worth of content from more than 40 sales enablement leaders from companies including Google Cloud, Getty Images, IBM, Zoom, and others.
The Sales Enablement Summit is returning to the Windy City this fall. More than 300 attendees from 75+ organizations will gather to learn, discuss challenges, and share ideas during this one-day event.
Mindtickle Fall Product Announcement Webinar
Autumn 2022 | Virtual
Mindtickle’s complete sales readiness program enables revenue leaders to create high performance teams. But creating a winning platform isn’t a one-time event. Instead, we’re always innovating to make the platform even better.
Come to our fall product announcement webinar to see what’s in store for Mindtickle customers. Stay tuned for more information and a registration link.
The Sales Innovation Expo is focused on inspiring sales professionals. This free, two-day event features sessions on everything from sales engagement and enablement to leadership and sales techniques – and everything in between. Attendees are guaranteed to leave full of ideas to apply once back in the field.
The only dedicated summit for Chief Revenue Officers is making a stop in London for the first time ever. 80+ revenue leaders from 75+ companies will gather to hear from industry leaders and share knowledge, ideas, and best practices for driving sustainable revenue growth.
Are you headed to any of these sales enablement and readiness events in 2022 and 2023? So are we! We hope to meet you there to discuss how Mindtickle can help you make sales readiness a reality.
An extrovert is “an outgoing, gregarious person who thrives in dynamic environments and seeks to maximize social engagement.” That sounds like what you’d expect a typical sales rep to be like.
But modern buyers don’t want to be “sold to” anymore. Gartner found that 33% of buyers want a “seller-free sales experience,” while LinkedIn found that 88% of consumers will only make a purchase when they see a salesperson as a “trusted advisor.” Today, buyers want to learn about your product, find solutions to their problems, and be confident that they’re making the best decision. They want to be front and center in any sales conversation, with your sales rep in a supporting role.
The days of pushy salespeople who talk non-stop and never let you get a word in edgewise are long gone. Your most extroverted sales reps may thrive at networking events and in large groups of people, but talking will only get them so far. Buyers are looking to buy from people they can trust, so sellers need to develop skills more closely associated with introverts and master the consultative approach to selling.
Active listening
Active listening involves engaging with your prospects in a meaningful way to show that you understand what they’re asking from you. It’s an essential skill for sales reps to master for building rapport and earning trust.
Stephanie McSwiney, VP of Sales at Frontify, believes that active listening is one of the most challenging sales skills to hire for. She explained, “We want sales reps who really understand the client and can match their needs with our use cases. This can be complex and requires strong active listening skills, which are very hard to find in new sales hires.”
To assess your team’s active listening skills, start by reviewing call recordings to see how much time your reps talk on their calls compared with their prospects. Our State of Sales Readiness 2022 benchmark report found that customers talk for 57% of the call in top-performing reps’ discovery calls. In contrast, the average customer talk time across all the analyzed calls was just 44%.
Then look at how that talk time is divided up. Is there a healthy dialogue with customers asking lots of questions and sharing their challenges with your rep? Or is your rep talking in one solid block with minimal engagement from the prospect? Our report found that the average longest monologue by sales reps on calls (where they spoke uninterrupted) was 1 minute 37 seconds. So if your reps are talking for more than 90 seconds in a single block, they may need a reminder to give the prospect space to talk and ask questions.
Finally, you can look at whether your reps ask clarifying questions on their calls, such as, “Did I understand that correctly?” or “Have I got that right?” These questions demonstrate that a rep actively listens to their prospect and engages with what they say.
Understanding buyer needs
Understanding buyer needs is the ability to take what a prospect says and, from there, determine what they need from your product or service. This includes the challenges they’re experiencing and the problems they need to solve. It’s an essential sales skill rooted in a rep’s capacity to empathize with their prospect. If they can master this skill, they’ll be able to successfully align their product demos and discussions with what the buyer is looking for.
Freya Ward, global sales director at Headley Media, explained, “A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
“A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
For your extroverted sales reps, this may require a change in how they would naturally approach early sales calls. Train all your reps to focus on the discovery process first before they start pitching your solution.
For example, our benchmark report found that sales reps ask an average of 11 questions during the discovery process, which is a lot to fit into a 30-minute call. This shows that reps are keen to understand their buyers and are trying to dig into their challenges and motivations. For McSwiney of Frontify, understanding buyer needs is a must-have skill for her sellers. “Our AEs [account executives] really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product,” she explained. “It’s often a very educational sales process.”
Call planning is preparing for every call with prospects by researching the company and the person you’re speaking to and reviewing sales notes and CRM records from previous interactions. Reps need to appear professional and trustworthy to buyers, so they must ensure they’re ready for every sales conversation.
According to Crunchbase, top sellers spend “an average of six hours every week researching their prospects.” That’s 15% of a 40-hour workweek, which may feel like a big-time drain. However, Oracle found that 11% of prospects “ghost” sellers because the seller wasn’t properly prepared for their conversation. It’s worth investing a few hours to plan and prep for calls if the alternative is losing 11% of your prospects.
Many extroverted sales reps have learned to rely on their conversational skills and ability to think on their feet. They may feel confident they can run their calls on the fly and be hesitant to invest much time preparing for individual calls. Sales managers should help their reps understand the benefits of effective call planning and provide training materials to make it as easy as possible for your sellers.
For example, you could share pre-call checklists or run practice calls for product demos, discovery calls, or closing calls. These will allow your sellers complete role-play scenarios that match their upcoming calls, so they can prepare fully and make the best impression on their prospects.
We’ve also developed a sales readiness framework that includes five core steps to help sellers achieve a continuous state of excellence:
This framework is designed to help reps develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors they need to be fully prepared for any sales scenario. A sales readiness program ensures reps have the product and industry knowledge they need, plus access to relevant content when they need it, to provide a first-class sales experience for your prospects.
Create an ideal rep profile to document the skills your reps really need to be successful
The skills that actually help close deals and generate revenue for your organization aren’t the traditional sales skills anymore. So when you’re hiring new sales talent, don’t rely on outdated stereotypes and only hire reps who can deliver a killer sales pitch. Instead, prioritize “soft” sales skills like relationship-building and communication over more traditional skills.
Analyze the skillsets of your top-performing reps to identify the competencies that most closely correlate with sales success in your team. Then, create an ideal rep profile to document those skills. This provides an empirical way to assess new hires and identify the people who will actually help your company close more deals — rather than falling into the trap of only hiring new reps who fit the traditional stereotype of an extroverted salesperson.
Sales training and coaching are often reserved for new hires and low performers, with the rest of your team getting a brief refresher during your annual sales kickoff. But according to the Sales Management Association, only 30% of sales managers rate their sales training as “effective” for improving low performers.
A study from the Sales Readiness Group Training Industry found that 45% of companies only cover two to five training topics with their sales professionals, but “those with effective sales training tended to offer a wider variety of topics.”
To improve the effectiveness of training, you need to cover a full range of sales training topics on a continual basis. This will help all your reps build the skills and knowledge required for any selling scenario.
Your sales reps need to be able to build their pipeline, prioritize leads and prospects based on lead quality and sales urgency, and measure their results. McKinsey found that pipeline management is the sales skill with the biggest difference between high- and low-performing sales reps. This research suggests that effective pipeline management is closely linked to rep performance.
Training in pipeline management can set junior team members up for success. They’ll be able to keep track of all their deals in your CRM, know what pipeline stage their deals are at, and determine whether they have enough conversations in progress to hit quota.
2. Prospecting and outreach
Sales prospecting and outreach are two competencies that go hand in hand. Business development reps (BDRs) need to find and identify good-fit potential customers and then craft compelling messages to engage them. According to Crunchbase, “top sellers spend an average of six hours every week researching their prospects” to ensure they’re reaching out to good-fit prospects that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Cold calling and outreach emails are essential skills for BDRs to master if they want to bring new prospects into their pipeline. You can provide training and coaching via verbal and written role-plays to help reps practice these core skills. In fact, we found that learning to prepare cold email intros is the top use case for written role-plays by BDRs in the Mindtickle platform.
3. Qualifying leads
Nurturing or repeatedly contacting bad-fit leads is a waste of your reps’ time and energy. According to Oracle, following up with a prospect they know isn’t interested is one of the top five frustrations reps have with their jobs. And if a lead is a bad fit, they’re more likely to book time with your reps but never show up: 37% of prospects ghost sellers because the prospect was a bad lead or not a good fit.
One way to cover this in sales training is to share bite-size quizzes to test reps’ ability to qualify leads and their familiarity with your ICP. Then, if you identify knowledge gaps that may be affecting their lead qualification capabilities, you can follow up with AI-driven coaching.
4. Call planning
Your sellers need to know how best to prepare and plan for a call with a prospect at every stage of the sales cycle. For initial calls, sellers need to make a good first impression. For later calls, they need to build rapport with prospects and become trusted advisors.
Oracle found that 11% of prospects ignore sellers because the seller wasn’t properly prepared for their conversation. Call planning is essential for all sellers, but just 37% of companies provide reps with pre-call checklists to help them plan and prepare for calls.
You can create training materials such as pre-call checklists or run practice calls for product demos, discovery calls, or closing calls. These will allow your sellers to appear professional, knowledgeable, and trustworthy to prospects.
5. Building relationships with customers
Relationship building is another essential skill because, even in B2B sales, you’re still dealing with another person. Buyers rated “trust in the relationship with the salesperson” as one of the top five factors influencing their buying decision, so it’s essential that your reps get training and coaching to help them develop this skill.
Use tools like Mindtickle’s Call AI to record and analyze calls with prospects. It looks at reps’ confidence, talk time, clarity, and sentiment to understand their behavior on calls. It then identifies areas to improve. You can use these insights as a starting point for your coaching sessions or share dedicated training exercises to help them further develop the necessaryskills.
6. Identifying customer needs
LinkedIn found that 43% of buyers feel it’s an “immediate deal killer” when sellers don’t understand their company and its needs. Sellers need to be able to identify customers’ pain points so they can show how your product will solve them. If they can identify customer challenges and needs, they can tailor the conversation to address those challenges and focus on the features and use cases that are most relevant to the customer.
You can listen back to call recordings or view call analyses, then score reps based on their ability to identify customer needs. If reps struggle with this, you can run training exercises such as practice calls or role-plays to give them more opportunities to develop their abilities in a low-pressure setting. Manager-led coaching helps provide personalized coaching to all your sellers, targeted to their individual needs. Learn more about Mindtickle’s manager-led coaching solution.
7. Presenting the value of your products
Sellers not understanding their own product or service is another deal killer for 44% of buyers. Your reps need to be able to provide effective demos that illustrate how your products will save buyers time, money, or effort. They need to be able to show the value of your product and not just run through a list of features.
You can provide different training formats for this:
Short quizzes to test product knowledge
Practice demos and virtual role-plays
Dedicated training sessions from your product team when you roll out new features
Product training will help your reps learn how to use your product and ensure they’re able to accurately present its value to potential customers.
8. Competitor knowledge
Prospects won’t just be speaking to your sales team. They will be comparing different product options, so you need to be able to show how you measure up against your competitors. Familiarity with other products in your space is essential knowledge for sales reps, as 34% of buyers say “not understanding their competitors’ products and services” makes them unlikely to continue with a specific seller.
Train your reps on your competitors’ products by creating battle cards or in-depth instructor-led training sessions to go over the key differences and where your product excels against the competition. Then, test reps’ knowledge with quizzes that go over the material covered in the training session. Spaced reinforcement helps improve information retention, so your reps can speak confidently about your competitors months after their training session.
9. Managing objections
Our research found that 63% of sales calls contain “more negative sentiment than positive,” with negative sentiment “including anger, uncertainty, hesitancy, competitive mentions, objections, disappointment, and tentativeness.” Managing objections is an important skill to master because no buyer will say “yes” right away. Your reps need to be able to confidently address concerns to reassure prospects that they’re making the right choice with your product.
Dedicated training will help reps improve their ability to handle the most common objections faced in the sales process. You can have reps complete practice calls or virtual role-plays to practice this essential skill.
10. Closing deals
If an account executive can’t close a deal, they won’t last long in sales. Fortunately, research has identified some of the most important selling behaviors when it comes to closing deals: 56% of buyers say “maintaining relationships with existing customers” is essential, while LinkedIn identified five factors that consistently influence buyer behavior:
Trust in the brand
Price
Return on investment
Trust in the salesperson
Salesperson’s industry knowledge
If you’ve already worked the nine previous topics into your sales training, then you’ll be well on your way to addressing all of these, but you can also provide specific coaching to help your reps master conversations around pricing.
Help your reps improve sales readiness by covering a wide range of sales training topics
Sellers face constant change, so the more frequent and varied training and coaching you can provide, the better equipped they are to adapt to different selling conditions, buyer needs, and market changes. Don’t limit sales training to just onboarding or a couple of topics during sales kickoffs. Create a culture of continual learning and improvement to help your sellers excel.
You probably have an ideal customer profile to identify when a prospect is a good fit for your product or services. But most companies don’t have an ideal rep profile to map out the skills and competencies that their sales reps need to nurture those prospects, close deals, and convert them into paying customers.
Companies need to identify the skills through which their top-performing salespeople excel. Then they can look for similar abilities in new hires and train and coach their other reps to increase skill levels across the sales team. To help you identify the important abilities you need to prioritize in your hiring and training, we asked nine revenue leaders what the top sales skills are for their teams.
1. Product knowledge
Sales reps need up-to-date product knowledge to answer prospects’ questions, address competitor comparisons, and run confident demos. David Bitton, co-founder at DoorLoop, explained, “Customers will ask unexpected or difficult questions. Having a profound grasp of your product will reduce the likelihood of salespeople getting caught off-guard and stumbling over their answers.”
“Customers will ask unexpected or difficult questions. Having a profound grasp of your product will reduce the likelihood of salespeople getting caught off-guard and stumbling over their answers.”
The more your sellers know about your product, the better they’ll be able to tailor a demo or sales presentation to each prospect’s particular needs or challenges. “You must know your product inside and out,” said Freya Ward, global sales director at Headley Media.
“You need to be able to deal with any questions a client may raise and handle any potential objections they may have with confidence. You also need to understand exactly how the product will help the customer and why it is they need it,” she added.
Run dedicated training sessions with your product team when you launch product updates or new features. These will allow your reps to get hands-on with your product and learn to use it in a structured setting. Then run short quizzes to test their knowledge about your new features and virtual role-plays or practice demos to check that they are ready to present your new products to potential customers.
2. Active listening
Active listening helps sellers strengthen their rapport with customers. Cayla Thurman, business reputation consultant at Rize Reviews, explained, “Active listening is all about staying in the moment and making sure that you understand what the buyer is saying. You can rephrase what the buyer just said, verify if you got the message correctly, or slow the conversation down to ensure that you are perceived as an effective sales consultant.”
As well as helping build customer relationships, active listening is important for companies that take a more consultative approach to sales. This is the case for Frontify, and Stephanie McSwiney, their VP of sales, told us:
“Our AEs really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product. It’s often a very educational sell, so really understanding the client by active listening is key.”
You can assess reps’ active listening skills by reviewing call recordings — listening back or reading call transcripts. You want to see a good split in the talk time, with prospects talking more than your sellers. You can also look for key questions or phrases, such as, “did I understand that correctly?” or “have I got that right?” These questions demonstrate that a rep is actively engaged with what a prospect tells them.
3. Prospecting
Sales development reps (SDRs) need strong prospecting skills to find and reach out to good-fit potential customers, so they can maintain a healthy sales pipeline and hit quota. According to Crunchbase, top sales professionals “spend an average of 6 hours every week researching their prospects,” including seeking information about the company and looking up decision-makers on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Thurman explained:
“To be an effective salesperson, you need to be consistent in identifying new business opportunities, which means being great at researching potential customers, conducting cold outreach, and creating new options for better sales.”
Using a sales readiness platform like Mindtickle helps you provide AI-powered training and coaching for your reps. We found that cold email intros are the top use case for written role-plays in the Mindtickle platform as reps work to develop their prospecting and outreach skills.
4. Negotiating
Negotiation is an important skill for keeping deals moving forward and overcoming potential objections and blockers to closing deals. Tim Clarke, director of sales and marketing at SEOblog.com, explained:
“A sales representative should have solid negotiation skills to create a tailored experience for their customers, helping [customers] get the products or services they want while also ensuring that their company benefits from their customers’ decisions.”
Nina Pączka, community manager at Zety, has a clear idea of what reps with strong negotiation skills look like. She says:
“A good negotiator takes customer objections and turns them to the company’s advantage. They are assertive in finalizing the deal, showing different solutions that will appeal to the customer.”
You can assess your reps’ negotiation skills by listening to their call recordings for later-stage sales conversations with prospects. Alternatively, your reps can run practice calls with their peers to see how their colleagues approach negotiation, learn from each other, and identify negotiation tactics that work in real selling scenarios.
5. Identifying and understanding customer needs
Reps need to be able to identify the challenges customers are facing and understand what they want from a product like yours. Otherwise, they won’t be able to show how your product will meet customer needs and resolve their pain points. “A good salesperson has to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch,” said Ward.
To understand customer needs, sellers need to ask thoughtful, relevant questions. Ng Jiong Han, CSO at Novocall, said:
“The ability to ask the right questions is an essential skill. It’s important because SDRs understand prospects’ problems and magnify them by asking the right questions. With this, they can easily position themselves to help prospects solve their problems without being pushy.”
This is another area where reviewing call recordings can pay off. A conversation intelligence tool like Mindtickle’s Call AI can identify the main themes and topics covered on a call. You can also track mentions of specific keywords, such as common challenges or competitors.
6. Written and verbal communication
Soft sales skills like effective communication are just as important for sellers to master as hard skills. Clarke explained, “Salespeople must know how to communicate effectively throughout the sales cycle and be confident in speaking or presenting, whether through video conference or in person.”
Your reps’ communication skills affect relationship building as well as their ability to confidently explain the benefits of your product. Many companies think that verbal communication skills are a must for sales reps but don’t look so closely at written communication. But email and outreach messages are a core part of the sales process. Poor written communication can create an unprofessional first impression and lead to missed opportunities for your team.
In a recent article, we asked revenue leaders to share their predictions for the future of sales. One important shift will be that sales reps will start to take ownership of inbound lead generation campaigns and work more closely with marketing departments. With that in mind, we wanted to bring in the demand generation perspective.
Tristan Harris, demand generation marketing manager at Thrive Agency, agrees that communication skills are essential. He said:
“You need to be comfortable communicating with your clients, customers, and peers in various situations. These instances include knowing how to ask clear and concise questions, effectively communicating and resolving customer complaints, and speaking confidently on the phone or in the video.”
7. Coachability
Coachability is your reps’ ability to receive and act on feedback to develop and improve their skills. It can be the difference between a top-performing rep and a low-performing one.
Srikanth Pendyala, SDR team lead at Outplay, said:
“Many sales leaders I talk to tell me how important it is for them to hire SDRs who are coachable. Yet there is no yardstick to measure that skill. So we bring an element of coaching into our interview process. No matter how good the rep is, if they are not ready to unlearn and learn new things, we do not make an offer.”
An AI-driven sales coaching program can improve performance levels across your team, combining deal-specific coaching with more general skills training. It helps you personalize your coaching and training to focus on the individual skills and behaviors that each rep is struggling with, so they can make targeted improvements.
Document your team’s top sales skills in an ideal rep profile
Which skills are frequently displayed by the most successful salespeople at your organization? Once you’ve identified the skills, behaviors, and competencies that matter most to your business, document them in an ideal rep profile (IRP). You can then use your IRP in your hiring process to bring on new team members with the skills that will set them up for success. With the right abilities in place across your team, you’ll reap the rewards with a more efficient sales process — and reps who are ready to close more deals to bring in more revenue to the company.
This summer, Mindtickle is hitting the road for our 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow. After more than two years of virtual operations, we couldn’t be more excited to catch up with our customers face-to-face.
Each half-day session, held in cities across the US and UK, will give attendees the opportunity to connect with peers, gain insights into making sales readiness a reality, and hear what’s new at Mindtickle.
Read on to learn where the roadshow is headed, what you can expect, and why you should register today.
Coming soon to a city near you
Think you need to travel across the country to connect with peers and access actionable insights? Think again! The Mindtickle Road to Readiness Roadshow is coming to you.
We have three planned stops on our US leg of the roadshow.
The Bay Area
Tuesday, June 7
The Marker Hotel
Chicago
Wednesday, June 15
Convene Willis Tower
New York
Wednesday, June 22
Convene 75 Rock
We’re also making a stop in London in the early fall. We’re finalizing the exact data and venue and will share those details as soon as they’re available.
Who is the roadshow for?
Just about everyone on your revenue team will benefit from attending the Road to Readiness Roadshow.
Here’s what’s in it for some of your key team members.
Sales and revenue leaders: Hear from top revenue leaders about how they’re transforming their organizations, and leave with actionable insights from new research and case studies.
Sales enablement leaders: Create your own ideal rep profile and learn how to work with cross-functional stakeholders to align around transforming seller performance
Front line managers: Learn how to transform your coaching into an engine of quota attainment and seller retention, and find out how to use your tech stack to streamline your processes so you can spend more time helping on deals.
Sales and revenue ops: Unravel sales performance data from 350+ companies and learn how science is transforming how top revenue organizations approach selling.
Walk away with actionable insights to drive your sales readiness program
We’re confident that Road to Readiness Roadshow attendees will leave the event feeling energized and full of insights and ideas that can be applied right away to optimize their readiness strategy.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the sessions that are in store for you.
New Industry Insights: The State of Sales Readiness
Have you ever found yourself wondering what top sales organizations are doing to ensure their reps are always ready to sell? Here’s your chance to find out.
During this panel discussion, we’ll discuss key insights from our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report. You’ll also have the opportunity to hear how brands are applying strategies to unlock better sales performance and revenue results.
Interactive Workshop: What’s Your Ideal Rep Profile?
You’ve probably already identified your ideal customer profiles (ICP). But what about the other half of the revenue equation?
During this hands-on workshop, the experts at Mindtickle will help you create an Ideal Rep Profile (IRP) for your organization. We’ll also share examples of how Mindtickle customers are using IRPs to benchmark, track progress, and map sellers’ competency improvement to sales results.
Level Up: Creating a Coaching Culture
Everyone knows sales coaching is important. And when it’s done well, it can have a big impact on sales outcomes. But oftentimes, coaching becomes just another box to check.
In this session, we’ll discuss how you can establish processes and leverage technology to make coaching more actionable, personalized, and seamlessly integrated into your full readiness approach.
Think back to the last time you started a new hobby. Maybe it was golf or swimming or basket weaving — it really doesn’t matter. Unless you’re some kind of unicorn, you probably weren’t perfect right out of the gate. Instead, you may have felt similar to a baby giraffe walking for the first time.
But with regular practice, you probably made improvements and started to feel more comfortable and confident with your new pastime.
The same can be said for sales. While training and coaching are key to getting them ready to sell, reps also need opportunities to practice what they’ve learned, risk free. That way, they can perfect their skills before going into the field — where there’s the risk of losing deals if things go south.
A lot of sales organizations incorporate some practice and role-plays into their enablement programs. But what are the best sales orgs doing differently to help ensure these practice opportunities actually help sellers get ready to close more deals?
Recently, we analyzed activity from more than one million users at 350 companies to understand what winning teams are doing differently to ensure reps are ready to sell. Based on these findings, we’ve identified the top ways you can improve the effectiveness of role-plays at your organization — and start empowering more reps to meet (or exceed) quota.
Practice and role-play exercises benefit everyone on the team
These days, when most sellers are pressed for time, are role-plays and practice exercises really worth the time and effort?
Absolutely.
In fact, when they’re done well, practice and role-plays benefit everyone on the sales team.
Benefits to sellers
Between onboarding and ongoing training, sellers get a lot of information thrown their way. But taking in this information isn’t enough. Sellers must also be able to apply it when it matters: when interacting with prospects.
Role-plays give sales reps the opportunity to practice what they’ve learned in a risk-free environment and get feedback from others. This practice boosts their skills and their confidence so they’re better prepared for any interaction that comes their way.
Benefits to sales managers
The success of a sales manager hinges on their team’s achievements so managers can’t just deliver training and coaching to reps, send them out into the field, and then hope for the best.
With practice and role-plays, managers can see their reps in action. Based on performance in role-plays, managers can then provide additional coaching and training to help reps hone their skills before money is on the line.
Benefits to sales enablement managers
According to Gartner, sellers forget almost 90% of information within 30 days of training. While practice is critical to ensuring learning sticks (and is applied in the field), sales enablement managers simply don’t have the time to facilitate real-time practice with every sales rep.
Practice and role-plays enable sellers to practice new skills on their own and receive the feedback and coaching they need to improve.
How to improve the effectiveness of practice exercises
Based on our analysis of one million Mindtickle users at over 350 companies, here are seven things you can start doing to ensure role-plays and practice opportunities adequately equip your sellers to close more deals.
1. Leverage virtual role-plays
The term “role-play” might conjure up visions of a sales rep standing in front of a group of peers at an in-person training or team meeting, delivering a practice pitch, and getting real-time feedback. But at a time when remote and hybrid work has become the norm, this is becoming less common.
Instead, the best organizations have shifted to virtual role-plays, with the help of AI-powered tools. With these, sellers have the opportunity to take multiple passes at a role-play — and they can do so on their own time. AI then analyzes the recorded role-play and delivers real-time insights and feedback to the presenter. Recordings can also be reviewed by managers and peers to provide additional feedback, which the seller can use to perfect their skills.
2. Assign role-plays on a quarterly basis, at minimum
Role-plays and practice exercises are important. But how frequently must organizations provide reps with these opportunities for practice?
We’ve found that on average, sellers submit two to three recorded role-plays per year. However, at top-performing companies, sellers do four role-plays per year. Industries including pharmaceuticals, retail, and technology are particularly heavy users of role-plays.
When it comes to role-plays, more is more. Aim to assign quarterly role-plays to ensure your sellers are always ready to close any deal.
3. Use role-plays to prepare reps for different selling situations
Many organizations use role-plays to help sellers perfect their sales presentations. But winning sales organizations leverage role-plays to help sellers master a whole host of selling scenarios.
Here are the top three use cases for which winning sales organizations leverage role-plays.
Product knowledge: Sellers must have solid product knowledge before interacting with prospects. Role-plays assess reps’ product knowledge and help managers identify and address any knowledge gaps before the rep goes into the field.
Pitch practice and marketing messaging: Reps’ messaging needs to be on point during pitches — every single time. Role-plays can help grow their confidence and ensure they’re always on message when interacting with prospects.
Voicemail practice: Most reps are no stranger to going to a prospect’s voicemail. Voicemail role-plays ensure sellers have what it takes to leave clear, concise messages that entice prospects to call back.
Consider incorporating these role-play use cases into your enablement strategy to ensure sellers are ready to handle every situation thrown their way.
4. Incorporate written role-plays
At many organizations, role-plays and practice are focused on improving verbal selling skills. But in today’s digital-first business environment, reps also need opportunities to practice their written selling skills. After all, poor writing can be a big turnoff for buyers.
At Mindtickle, 30-40% of practice exercises are written role-plays. In fact, in 2021, we had a 2X year-over-year increase in the use of written role-plays.
Be sure to leverage written role-plays to help your sellers hone their writing skills. A great place to start is to add written role-plays for top use cases, including cold outreach emails and post–discovery call recaps.
5. Keep role-plays short and sweet
It’s tempting to cram as much as you can into a single role-play exercise. But we suggest that you resist this urge. Sellers need practice perfecting short, high-impact messages. As such, the most successful sales organizations keep role-plays short and sweet: two to four minutes is ideal.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all role-play length. Instead, you must consider key points that need to be covered and non-negotiable points versus nice-to-haves. In addition, be sure to factor in the total number of role-plays and the amount of time it’ll take reviewers to score them.
6. Allow sellers to take multiple passes at a role-play exercise
When a rep is doing a real-time, in-person role-play, they have one chance to get it right. But we’ve found that, on average, sellers complete two drafts of a virtual role play before submitting it for review.
When assigning role-plays, consider including an example of a great submission as a reference. In addition, consider leveraging AI in your role-play exercises. The best sales organizations see improved quality when they allow sellers to review AI feedback and make multiple attempts before sending in the assignment.
7. Provide focused feedback
After a role-play has been submitted, it’s imperative to provide feedback. Often, this feedback will come from the sales manager or enablement manager. Other times, it will come from peers. Still other times, a combination is used.
Our analysis found that the top common role-play improvement instructions for reps include:
Be more concise
Sound more natural
Use customer examples
What parameters should be used for role-play evaluation? If you include too many parameters, it’ll dilute the impact of the seller’s message. Instead, the best organizations focus on parameters that correspond to key seller competencies.
Finally, be sure to require all reviewers to provide written feedback, as this will provide more valuable learning to the rep.
Improve selling performance
In the world of sales, role-plays are recognized as a great training tool — for good reason. Start improving the effectiveness of your role-plays by adopting the proven best practices of the most successful organizations. Giving your sellers more meaningful opportunities to practice their skills, will grow their confidence — and get them ready for any selling situation.
Want to learn more about what winning sales organizations are doing to ensure their reps are always ready to close deals? Check out the 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report.
You can’t improve rep performance without a baseline. And all too often, even sales organizations that regularly analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t even tracking the right metrics.
Having clear goals and expectations allows you to gauge everyone’s performance and adjust your training and coaching approach as needed. Continue reading to discover the most important metrics for sales success.
Setting your sales goals
First, you must consider what your goals are — for individual reps, teams, and even leadership. Have a new product you’re trying to push? Want to reduce the average length of your sales cycle or drive better content engagement? Make sure these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) to better measure success.
It is more effective to set these goals and then work backward to establish KPIs that will progress reps toward these outcomes, rather than determining metrics prior to goal setting.
Vanity metrics
You’ve developed objectives for where you want sales reps to be — now you must set a plan to help them get there. Many sales organizations simply measure everything available even when these measurements don’t provide relevant insights.
The metrics below aren’t reliable indicators of seller success:
Conversions: The number of new leads who turn into customers
Email engagement: The number of opens, reads, and link clicks within an email
Sales activities: The number of cold calls made, number of demos performed, number of emails sent, training completion, etc.
Total appointments booked: The number of prospect meetings scheduled
Total pipeline value: The potential revenue generated if all deals in the pipeline close
What do these metrics actually tell you? Do they give you any insight to act upon?
Use these actionable metrics instead
Numbers don’t have much meaning without context. Trade vanity metrics like the ones above for indicators that directly correlate to performance and provide insights that allow for improvement.
Conversion rates put the number of conversions into context. For instance, when analyzing sales performance, seeing that 15 customers converted within a quarter doesn’t mean much when you don’t know how many leads you started with. Knowing that 50% of leads converted, on the other hand, allows you to compare against your benchmark and understand whether you need to reevaluate your approach.
Engagement rates are similar to conversion rates in that, rather than providing an arbitrary number, they demonstrate how many people opened an email or clicked a link within that email out of the total number of people who opened it. The standalone number may seem low, but the percentage allows you to take more effective action. If you have a great open rate but your clickthrough rates are low, you need to work on content and calls to action.
Average time to close indicates just that: the average length of a sales cycle across your team. This is a far greater way to gauge performance than whether reps completed training and how they scored. However, looking at these training metrics next to time to close gives insight into how your learning materials contribute to elevated (or lowered) performance.
Deal losses are not necessarily a fun metric to view but are still significant barometers of performance. By understanding why a deal was lost, where the deal was in the sales cycle when it was lost, and other details of the process, you can identify areas for improvement.
Win/loss ratio goes beyond losses to measure how many appointments are actually closing. One of your reps may be setting a high number of meetings, but if a small percentage of those close, it’s a strong signal that something in your process needs to change.
Don’t completely count out vanity metrics
All of this isn’t to say that vanity metrics aren’t important. You should continue capturing them to measure growth over time and to put other performance indicators into context. For example, by looking at which sellers are closing the most deals and identifying any trends in their activities (they make more calls, schedule more appointments, complete more training modules), you can replicate those behaviors and incorporate them into your coaching or training materials.
To set sellers on a path to sales readiness, start by building an ideal rep profile (IRP), which sets a benchmark for these performance indicators. Learn more about what an IRP is here and get started building yours today with Mindtickle’s new IRP generator.
“Customers will ask unexpected or difficult questions. Having a profound grasp of your product will reduce the likelihood of salespeople getting caught off-guard and stumbling over their answers.”
“You need to be able to deal with any questions a client may raise and handle any potential objections they may have with confidence. You also need to understand exactly how the product will help the customer and why it is they need it,” she added.
“Our AEs really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product. It’s often a very educational sell, so really understanding the client by active listening is key.”
“To be an effective salesperson, you need to be consistent in identifying new business opportunities, which means being great at researching potential customers, conducting cold outreach, and creating new options for better sales.”
“A sales representative should have solid negotiation skills to create a tailored experience for their customers, helping [customers] get the products or services they want while also ensuring that their company benefits from their customers’ decisions.”
“A good negotiator takes customer objections and turns them to the company’s advantage. They are assertive in finalizing the deal, showing different solutions that will appeal to the customer.”
“The ability to ask the right questions is an essential skill. It’s important because SDRs understand prospects’ problems and magnify them by asking the right questions. With this, they can easily position themselves to help prospects solve their problems without being pushy.”
“You need to be comfortable communicating with your clients, customers, and peers in various situations. These instances include knowing how to ask clear and concise questions, effectively communicating and resolving customer complaints, and speaking confidently on the phone or in the video.”
“Many sales leaders I talk to tell me how important it is for them to hire SDRs who are coachable. Yet there is no yardstick to measure that skill. So we bring an element of coaching into our interview process. No matter how good the rep is, if they are not ready to unlearn and learn new things, we do not make an offer.”
