Nick Salas, Author at Mindtickle

7 Ways to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Sales Role-Plays — and Start Closing More Deals

Nick Salas on April 22, 2022

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.

Leverage virtual role-plays
Assign role-plays on a quarterly basis, at minimum
Use role-plays to prepare reps for different selling situations
Incorporate written role-plays
Keep role-plays short and sweet
Allow sellers to take multiple passes at a role-play exercise
Provide focused feedback

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.

Do You Know What Makes Your Salespeople Successful?

Nick Salas on April 19, 2022

Well, do you?

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.

The Metrics for Measuring Your Sales Enablement Program (& Why Asset Views Isn’t One of Them)

Nick Salas on April 15, 2022

What’s more valuable to your business: a case study that’s viewed 1,000 times on your internal content library or one that your sales reps discuss on 10 different discovery calls as a relevant example, convincing the prospect to book a product demo and progress the sales conversation? The first option sounds good but, in the second scenario, your sales enablement content makes real impact on potential customers and moves deals forward.

Companies often use the number of views their sales enablement content gets to measure the success of their sales enablement program. But the success of your program isn’t based on how many asset views you get. Instead, sales enablement leaders should look at how their program sits within a wider sales readiness framework to understand how it affects their reps and sales processes. Performance — not views — should be their true measure.

Views or attendees are vanity metrics for sales enablement programs

Just because reps are looking at your content doesn’t mean they’re successfully using it in their sales conversations or to improve their knowledge, skills, or performance. But many sales enablement teams still use the number of content views or attendees to their training sessions as a primary measure of success. According to the Association for Talent Development, “Most enablement programs have focused on leading indicators such as butts in seats or content consumed.”

Content views and downloads are easy to track and communicate. For example, if you’ve already had 200 views on the new case study you published this morning, that feels positive. You can interpret those 200 views as an indicator that the piece is providing value to your sales team. However, all those views mean is that someone opened that case study. They might’ve closed it right away or skimmed through it without taking in the details.

A Gartner article states, “The best sales enablement programs track and enforce whether resources are being used across the sales organization.” If you’re using content views as the primary measure of success for your sales enablement program, you’re missing out on valuable insights. You’re correlating content views with engagement — making an assumption that reps are actually using that content or learning from it and that the content has a meaningful impact on your reps’ skills and knowledge.

The performance metrics that measure the real impact of sales enablement on your sales team

Forward-thinking sales enablement teams understand that the true measure of sales enablement is how it affects your sales reps’ performance and drives revenue. Instead of looking at asset views, sales enablement leaders can track key sales metrics to see how asset usage impacts rep performance. Here are some vital sales metrics that will help you understand your sales enablement program’s impact on your team:

1. Content adoption

Content adoption looks at how often your salespeople use your sales enablement content in interactions with prospects to help move deals forward. You can measure content adoption in three different ways:

Whichever of these methods you choose, you’ll be tracking how different pieces of sales enablement content are actually used by your sales team rather than assuming that views mean engagement.

Content adoption is a useful metric because you can see how often sellers use different types of sales enablement content. Content that makes it easier to engage with prospects (and, in the long run, close more deals) will be used frequently by your sellers. But content that doesn’t engage or resonate with prospects will quickly be ignored by your sales team in favor of higher-impact content.

Tracking content adoption helps you understand:

You can use these insights to inform your sales enablement content strategy. Your team can focus on creating more assets that positively impact the customer journey and get used frequently by your sales team.

2. Sales cycle length

Your sales cycle length measures how long (on average) it takes your team to close a deal. Your sales team does a lot of work to nurture a lead into a customer, from product demos to high-value calls with C-level decision-makers. The more steps in your sales process, the longer your sales cycle is likely to be.

On a more granular level, you can look at interactions at every step of the sales cycle to understand how sales enablement activities might impact a deal’s progress (or lack thereof.) Overall, you should see your sales cycle get shorter as reps are better equipped with content and coaching to nurture leads and are enabled with the skills and knowledge they need to move deals forward.

But, as well as looking at the length of your sales cycle as a whole, you could measure:

Then look at which content has been used to engage and nurture prospects. Do some deals progress quicker than others? If so, it’s a good indicator that you’re producing content that’s aligned to each stage of the sales process. As a result, your sellers have the knowledge and resources they need to sell prospects on the value of your products — and the content for prospects to convince the decision-makers in their organization.

3. Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate

The lead-to-opportunity conversion rate tracks the percentage of qualified leads that your sales reps judge to be a good fit and have a high likelihood of closing. While the definition of an opportunity varies between companies, it generally refers to a prospect who demonstrates a genuine interest in your product. Often, they have committed to initial discovery calls with your reps — possibly even an initial product demo or free trial.

This conversion rate is a good way to measure the impact of your sales enablement program. Your lead-to-opportunity conversion rate may improve when:

You should track which pieces of content your reps are using in deals that convert from lead to opportunity. Doing so will help you understand what resonates with prospects, so you can focus on creating more impactful content to enable your sellers even better.

Look past asset views to understand when reps are ready to sell

Asset views are only worth worrying about if they’re at zero. Otherwise, they tell you very little about your sales enablement program and the content within it.

Instead, the best data driven sales enablement programs equip and enable reps to use content that’s aligned to all stages of the buyer journey, informed by data from real customer interactions — which is why the most effective sales enablement programs sit within a wider structure. The sales readiness framework gives reps the tools and processes to increase their knowledge and performance, encouraging a continuous state of excellence within your team. Provide this and you’ll ensure your reps have — and use — the knowledge and skills they need for every selling scenario.

No More 80/20 Rule: How to Build an Ideal Rep Profile

Nick Salas on April 12, 2022

You’re likely familiar with the “80/20” selling philosophy, or the belief that 20% of reps make 80% of total sales for your organization. In other words, sales leaders pin their hopes on the top-performing salespeople to drive the most revenue.

This has led to these all-too-common refrains:

Sellers are born, they’re not made.

Excellence is not a skill. It’s an attitude.

Selling is an art, not a science.

But the fact that selling actually is a science.

There’s a formula for the perfect sales rep that’s a combination of knowledge, skill, and behaviors. While the formula for each organization or role is different, there’s a method for defining what makes sellers successful.

That’s why we created and today unveiled an IRP Generator, a quick, interactive, intuitive way to create and customize your ideal rep profile. You can build multiple profiles for roles like account executives and sales development representatives in minutes and share those results with your team.

What is an IRP and why do I need one?

An IRP defines and benchmarks top competencies – a combination of knowledge, skills, and behaviors – that reps must possess to be successful in the field. It is important to document and encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes.

As you make your own IRP, keep these things in mind:

Knowledge is the information and data a rep must possess
Skills help you evaluate how your rep should behave on the field
Behaviors track how a rep is actually performing on the ground

With Mindtickle’s ideal rep profile generator, you can quickly determine and weigh the importance of the necessary skills and behaviors required of your sales reps. This generator helps you figure out how your reps stack up.

How to build your IRP

The Mindtickle IRP Generator makes creating your ideal rep profile easy. Here’s how to do it:

Choose a name. Giving your rep a name helps you better visualize your IRP. You can even give your rep a fun name like Rockstar Rachel or Moneyball Mike.

Select a role. Each role does not place the same weight on skills and strengths. Depending on the role, reps have different characteristics and benchmarks that are vital for success in their particular field. Here are the ones currently included in our generator: Account Executive, Solutions Engineer, Customer Success, Sales Development Representative, and Channel Sales.

Identify goals. Depending on the role you’ve selected in step 2, we’ll serve up common goals for this role. You can select as many or few as make sense for your team. It’s important to be clear about the characteristics someone must possess to be successful in the role. This allows you to understand the competencies needed to find the right candidate and help your team become successful through training and coaching.

Customize your scorecard. We’ll serve you up a scorecard with the key knowledge, skills, and behaviors for the role and goals you identified in steps 1 and 2. You can adjust the importance of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors of your ideal rep and even remove some entirely.

Download and share. Once you download your scorecard, we’ll also serve up some action items for each of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors identified in your IRP. You can also save your profile, download or share it with your team, and create more IRPs for other roles on your team.

How to get the most of your IRP

You should encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes. With an established ideal rep profile, the 80/20 myth is busted. You can follow a “100/100” rule instead and build a sales team full of reps with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors to be successful.

Ready to go? Use our IRP Generator to build your ideal sales rep today.

Ramp-Up Time: Everything You Need to Know to Support New Sales Hires

Nick Salas on April 5, 2022

Getting new hires up to speed is a major investment in both time and money for businesses. You pay their salary from day one, but it can take a long time for new sellers to hit quota and start bringing in revenue for the business. According to The Bridge Group, the average ramp-up time for sales development reps (SDRs) is 3.1 months. For account executives (AEs), it’s even longer—4.9 months.

Companies need to understand ramp-up time, what affects it, and how to calculate it to support new sales hires and help them reach full productivity sooner.

What is sales ramp-up time?

Ramp-up time is the amount of time it takes for new sales hires to reach full productivity after they join your company. It includes their onboarding period with time to complete product training, learn about your sales process, master your sales tools, and have initial coaching from managers or other colleagues.

Sales leaders need to know how long it takes to ramp up new hires, so they can create more accurate forecasts based on rep capacity. Additionally, it helps you plan your future hiring needs, so you can bring on new hires before your team is over capacity.

How to calculate ramp-up time for sales reps

Ramp-up time can be calculated in several ways. The right one for your organization depends on factors like average sales cycle length, product complexity, team size and structure, and the amount and type of training available to new hires. Here are three common ways companies calculate sales ramp-up time for new hires.

Method 1: Ramp-up time based on sales cycle length

The simplest way to calculate ramp-up time is to use the length of your sales cycle as a starting point. For example, if your average sales cycle takes three months from outreach to close, it should take a similar length of time for reps to reach full productivity. Some companies add an extra buffer—for example, if they have a short sales cycle, they might add an extra 90 days for reps to get up to speed.

This method is a great choice for fast-growing sales teams that hire in cohorts. It standardizes the ramp-up time for new hires, so it’s easy to see who’s on track and who needs some extra support to get to where they need to be. However, it’s not so good for enterprise companies with long sales cycles because they can’t afford to wait that long for reps to start bringing in new revenue. In that case, one of the methods below will be a better fit for your company.

Method 2: Ramp-up time based on experience level

Calculating ramp-up time based on a salesperson’s experience level is more complicated because it will vary for each rep. As before, you’ll use your average sales cycle length as a starting point, but depending on the experience level of your new hire, you’ll either add on or take off time.

For example, a brand-new college graduate may need a few extra weeks to complete training programs and build their knowledge from the ground up before they reach full productivity. However, if you’ve poached a top performer from one of your competitors, they’ll need less time than average because they’ll have a good level of industry and product knowledge from their past experience.

This calculation method is a good choice for teams that hire reps with very different skills and experience levels. It enables you to personalize targets, expectations, and training based on your reps’ individual needs.

Method 3: Ramp-up time based on time to reach full quota

Alternatively, you can calculate ramp-up time based on the average length of time it takes your new sales hires to reach full quota attainment. Here, the idea is to focus on sales productivity to benchmark new hire performance rather than your sales cycle. It’s a good choice if your company doesn’t have a standard sales cycle length — for example, if you sell products for different markets with very different sales processes.

This method helps you monitor rep progress and set targets by comparing their performance against your previous hires, using past hires as the blueprint for a successful onboarding period.

5 tips to reduce new hire ramp-up time

As we’ve seen, it can take months for your new sales hires to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to be ready for high-value sales interactions. So here are some tips for getting your sales reps ramped up quickly and enabling them to start hitting their revenue targets sooner.

1. Create and share a ramp-up plan with new hires

Put together a document that outlines your ramp-up plan for new hires. If you have a standardized process, you can use templates for this, but if you calculate ramp-up time based on experience, you’ll need to personalize this for each rep. This document should include:

Sharing a copy of this plan with your new hires will help reps check that they’re on track and meeting your expectations every step of the way. Having visibility into your expectations and the ability to monitor their progress will enable reps to take greater ownership over their ramp-up time.

2. Plan your sales onboarding

A successful ramp-up period gives reps a complete understanding of your business and how it operates and sets them up for long-term success. Sales onboarding is the initial part of a longer ramp-up period for new hires.

It’s important to ensure your onboarding program maps the skills, processes, and content that will help your reps achieve success at your company — in both the short and long term.

Make sure you’re focusing on the areas that are most important to your business, such as:

Sales onboarding should also include revenue targets and quotas — the things your reps will be measured by when they’re fully on board. Take the time to set measurable goals so that your new hires have a clear understanding of your expectations from day one. Doing so will also help provide context as your reps move through the onboarding process.

3. Provide effective sales training and coaching

When they join a company, new sales hires often go through initial training to learn about product, market, sales process, and ideal customer profile. According to Training Industry, “Highly effective sales training reduces ramp-up time by up to seven weeks.” Successful training should be tailored to the needs of each rep and include personalized coaching and plenty of resources for self-guided learning.

By adopting an on-demand learning approach, you give reps the opportunity to learn at their own pace rather than waiting around for calls to shadow or for a supervisor to walk them through a particular selling approach. Having on-demand resources available for your reps to review and use for virtual role-plays will help your sellers get up to speed faster. It will also give them more confidence in their skills as they can be honed and evaluated in a virtual environment.

Some examples of common on-demand training modules include:

Industry news and trends: Help reps start speaking your prospects’ language from the get-go by familiarizing them with how to talk about hot topics in your space and navigate industry jargon.
Objection handling: Compile the most common objections that reps at your company face and provide strategies for overcoming them.
Pitch presentations: Give your new reps the opportunity to learn and understand how you present your product to buyers.
Veteran tips: Have your most seasoned sales reps provide their top tips for excelling in the field. It’s always great to hear advice from a high-performing peer!
Sales process: Provide an overview of what the sales process at your organization looks like, including what reps are expected to do at each stage.
Competitive insights: Ensure your reps have a strong understanding of how your product offering differs from that of your competitors and what makes yours stand out.

The best part about making these specific training modules available on demand is that it doesn’t take time away from your high-performing reps who are already busy selling, and it also ensures consistency in the onboarding process.

4. Monitor and review progress

As your reps move through the onboarding process, it can be difficult to gauge their comprehension levels and how close they are to being ready to start having real sales interactions. What helps is being able to track onboarding session completion rates, as well as conducting knowledge tests along the way. This will allow you to identify knowledge gaps and give more training attention where it’s needed.

Some key areas you’ll want to test for include:

Product knowledge — especially the ability to effectively demo your product
Competitive intel
Pricing packages
Buyer personas
Post-sale services and support
Prospecting processes
How and when to qualify a lead
Vertical- or territory-specific knowledge
Ability to use your CRM

Using data is really the only concrete way to determine how prepared your reps are to sell. A Readiness Index is a great way to get a holistic view of reps’ sales readiness, factoring in coaching, knowledge, and skill. Managers should use this index — or other performance metrics — to monitor new hires’ progress and adapt their training and coaching to set them up for success.

5. Provide training beyond your onboarding program

Research by Gartner found that sellers forget “70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month.” Because of this, you need to create a culture of ongoing learning and continuous improvement to help reps develop and maintain the skills and knowledge they need to be effective when interacting with prospects.

Many companies provide their sellers with initial training during their onboarding period, but any additional training is limited to the annual sales kick-off.

But on-the-job learning shouldn’t stop with onboarding. Messaging, techniques, product offerings, and strategy are constantly evolving, so it’s integral to ensure ongoing sales readiness with continuous learning programs.

There are a number of different ways you can promote ongoing learning within your sales organization, such as:

Microlearning modules: Great for quick tips and competitive intel
Certification programs: Ideal for new product and messaging rollouts
Quizzes: Perfect for gauging knowledge retention, so sales leaders know when to coach
On-the-go learning: Provide mobile access to your training modules with an app or mobile dedicated site, so they can be accessed any time, anywhere

By taking an everboarding approach to sales training, you create a team culture of ongoing learning and allow new hires to practice their skills in a low-pressure environment. Everboarding also encourages spaced reinforcement of new topics at regular intervals to help reps retain the information they learned in their training. This will help new hires build their knowledge and skills more quickly to ramp up faster.

Support sales reps long term, not just in onboarding

Ramp-up times are a useful benchmark for monitoring the early progress of your new sales hires. But you want to set reps up for long-term success at your company — beyond their initial onboarding period. Building a culture of continuous learning, training, and practice (that extends beyond onboarding) will set your reps up for ongoing success.

If you’re ready to make the shift from onboarding to sales everboarding and extend your training and coaching beyond the ramp-up period, download our free checklist: 5 Must-Haves for Any Sales Everboarding Strategy

5 Hacks From Best-in-Class Sales Readiness Programs

Nick Salas on March 31, 2022

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: across all industries, only 43% of sellers now meet their quota. That means nearly six out of every 10 sellers fail to meet their goals.

Here’s the good news: a comprehensive, data-driven sales readiness approach can help you overcome your key challenges — and empower more sellers to meet (and even exceed) quota.

But not all readiness strategies are the same.

So, what do the best sales organizations do differently to ensure their reps are ready to sell? To find out, we analyzed activity from more than one million users at 350 companies for our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report.

Based on our key findings, we’ve put together five proven hacks that’ll help you optimize your own sales readiness program and start crushing your sales goals.

Hack #1: Don’t reinvent the sales enablement wheel

Sales enablement is an essential component of an effective sales readiness strategy. And because key aspects of selling are always changing, enablement teams must go beyond onboarding (in favor of what we at Mindtickle refer to as sales everboarding) to deliver ongoing training and just-in-time content to ensure sellers understand these changes and internalize them.

But preparing new onboarding or ongoing training content requires a big investment of time. On average, it takes six weeks to launch a new program from scratch.

However, winning organizations launch sales enablement programs a whole lot faster — without compromising quality. What’s their secret? They focus on efficiency by leveraging templates.

Think of program templates as out-of-the-box yet customizable blueprints developed for common sales enablement use cases and based on industry best practices. Some of the most commonly used templates in Mindtickle are for:

Sales onboarding
Product training
Sales processes

Templates eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel each time you launch a new program, which means you can launch programs a whole lot faster. On average, using a template, enablement managers can launch a new program within seven days. That means sellers can consume the learning much earlier — and start applying what they’ve learned to close more deals.

Hack #2: Update key sales content on a quarterly basis

More than 25 years ago, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled, “Content is King.” In 2022, the sentiment is still very true — especially for B2B sellers. Having access to the right content ensures sellers are always ready to close more deals.

Most organizations invest significant time and resources into developing content that helps prepare reps for every selling situation. But, all too often, those same organizations release new content and then don’t give it much thought for months on end. As a piece of content gets stale, seller engagement drops.

However, top sales organizations are making it a priority to regularly update their key content. And our analysis found that new or recently updated content is correlated with better overall engagement.

Don’t mistake content development as a one-time event. Instead, commit to updating your key content on a regular basis to keep seller engagement high.

How often are the best sales organizations updating sales content?

The 10% of organizations that get the highest amount of seller engagement make content updates once every 3.25 months, on average. And they see 4.58 content engagements per seller week. In comparison, organizations that update key content once every 4.5 months see an average of 3.43 content interactions per seller per week.

That means the top 10% of sales orgs are seeing a 33% increase in overall use of sales content. Clearly, regular updates pay off in terms of seller engagement.

Hack #3: Expect resistance from prospects on sales calls — and equip reps to handle it

It’s a simple fact that if a seller isn’t making enough calls, they’re not going to close enough business to meet quota. So it’s probably not surprising that the best sales reps spend a good amount of their time on the phone.

In an ideal world, each of those sales calls would be largely positive, with prospects feeling confident and excited. But that’s not reality.

We analyzed more than 100,000 sales calls and found that negative sentiment outweighs positive sentiment — by a lot. Just over a third (37%) of calls contained positive sentiments (think confidence, analytical discussion, and excitement, among others) than negative sentiments (think anger, uncertainty, disappointment, or tentativeness). The remaining 63% of calls had more negative sentiment than positive.

Sales calls often contain more negative sentiment than positive.

But make no mistake: a negative call isn’t necessarily a lost cause — especially when it’s handled the right way. The best sales organizations train their reps to expect resistance from prospects and equip these sellers to handle it.

Ensuring reps know your messaging and can lead a proper demo is important. But it’s not enough. Be sure you’re also focusing on enablement topics such as objection handling and competitive knowledge. The right enablement can help reps build confidence and turn largely negative calls around to close more deals.

Hack #4: Support sales coaching with follow-up and reinforcement

Sales coaching, when done well, can have a big impact on the success of a seller (and the entire organization). In fact, the power of coaching is proven. Recent research found that eight out of 10 teams with effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of their sales quotas.

But coaching can’t be a case of one-and-done. A single coaching session, on its own, probably isn’t going to have much of an impact.

The best sales organizations understand that ongoing follow-up and reinforcement is essential to ensure that skills coaching sticks — and those skills are applied when it matters: in the field. In fact, top managers are three times more likely to assign content, training, or a role-play exercise as a follow-up to a coaching session.

The good news is that coaching follow-up and reinforcement are proven to improve a rep’s readiness. On average, there’s an improvement of 13 percentage points in Sales Readiness Index scores for reps who are assigned follow-up actions after a coaching session.

The average improvement in Sales Readiness Index scores for reps who are assigned follow-up actions after a coaching session.

Talking the talk is not enough. After a coaching session, assign self-paced enablement, content to read, role-plays, or other existing resources to reinforce skills and give reps opportunities to practice what they’ve learned. By doing so, you’re sure to boost reps’ overall readiness, as well as their on-call performance.

Hack #5: Document your ideal rep profile

Hiring for fit is a great start. But even the most seasoned sellers need ongoing skill development, reinforcement, and manager-led coaching for long-term success. However, before creating these programs, sales leaders must take a step back to identify exactly what skills reps need to succeed. In other words, they need to develop an ideal rep profile (IRP).

But, more often than not, they don’t take the time to do so. While 93% of companies have documented their ideal customer profile, fewer than 1% have identified and documented a corresponding IRP.

Few organizations document their IRP.

93% of companies have documented their ideal customer profile
Fewer than 1% have identified and documented a corresponding ideal rep profile

This is a big misstep. After all, how can you achieve excellence if you haven’t even defined what it looks like?

The best organizations understand that an IRP is the essential foundation of any winning sales enablement program, and they put in the time to define theirs.

Take a page from their book, and document the skills and competencies needed for sales success at your organization. Then, consistently measure teams and individual reps against the IRP. By doing so, you can shed light on the learning gaps of each rep and be better equipped to deliver learning and coaching that closes those gaps and creates more peak performers.

Benchmark your sales readiness to optimize your strategy

Sales organizations that expect to achieve quota can no longer rely on the Pareto principle — the notion that 20% of sellers generate 80% of sales. Instead, they must work to ensure every seller is ready to close any deal.

But sales enablement alone isn’t enough to prepare sellers. The best sales organizations know they must take a more holistic, data-driven approach to sales readiness.

By benchmarking your sales readiness against that of best-in-class organizations, you’ll shed light on opportunities to improve your own readiness strategy.

Want to learn more about what the most successful sales organizations are doing to ensure all of their reps are always ready to sell? Download the 2022 State of Sales Readiness benchmark report.

4 Practical Ways to Increase Sales Productivity

Nick Salas on March 29, 2022

Today, sales reps spend only 23% of their time on core sales activities and direct engagement with buyers. They spend an increasing amount of time on administrative chores like entering data into a growing number of disconnected sales tools. As a result, sellers are frustrated by the growing number of tasks that get in the way of their main job: selling.

To improve sales productivity, you need to focus on removing the roadblocks eating up your team’s time so reps can prioritize revenue-generating activities. Even a small uplift in the amount of time each rep spends on core selling activities will add up to a big productivity boost across your entire sales team. Here are four practical ways you can help your sales team dedicate more time to closing deals and driving revenue for your business.

1. Automate data entry

McKinsey estimates that “31% of all sales-related activities can be automated” to improve your team’s productivity levels. Data entry is a perfect candidate for automation because putting data into your customer relationship management program (CRM) is time-consuming and one of the biggest frustrations for sales professionals.

As reps work on more complex deals with multiple stakeholders and more touchpoints, each interaction creates more information and data for them to keep track of. It takes a long time to add detailed notes and provide meaningful updates for each sales activity in your CRM. Salesforce Research found that 63% of sales reps are logging more customer interactions in their CRM than they did in 2019.

To get data into your CRM faster, you need to automate data entry. Automation also improves data quality by reducing the number of incomplete CRM records — normally a clear sign that a rep started to update their records and then jumped on another call.

Use AI to analyze call recordings, outreach emails, and social media messages, looking for topics discussed, key messaging, or competitors mentioned. Then, connect that AI with your CRM to automatically link to call recordings and other sales activity, along with appropriate tags based on the insights it gathers. Using AI to automate data entry enables sellers to spend less time inputting info without compromising data quality.

2. Consolidate tools to reduce context switching

Context switching is where you jump between projects, tools, and tasks — and it affects your productivity levels and focus. For example, Asana found that “workers switch among 10 apps 25 times per day,” greatly reducing their efficiency.

For sales organizations, tool overload seems even worse. In 2019, the median number of sales-specific tools used was nine, but that has almost certainly increased as companies shifted to remote working during the pandemic. Additionally, a study by Oracle revealed that “updating multiple systems that ought to be connected” is one of the biggest frustrations for sellers. It takes a lot of time and feels like an unnecessary duplication of their work.

Consolidating your sales tech stack can increase productivity by reducing duplicated effort and context switching. According to Forrester, there is a “significant overlap in features and functionality that exists between different sales tech categories.” Consolidation will bring “greater value for buyers of sales tech, reducing dependency on point solutions.” A closer analysis of your existing tech stack may reveal duplicate functionality across multiple tools — so consolidation will save the business money, as well as help your sales reps increase productivity.

Before you start consolidating tools, sales managers should ask their teams which ones they use most and where they spend the most time duplicating work. This will help you understand the biggest inefficiencies for your sales teams and how your existing tech stack is affecting their workflow.

Then, you can review your existing tools and the functionality you get across each. Look for:

Overlapping features
Duplicate functionality
Opportunities to set up new integrations between tools
Options to switch to an all-in-one platform instead of multiple disparate applications

For example, Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Platform brings sales enablement, content management, conversation intelligence, and sales coaching together into one platform. Ken Blank, senior sales enablement program lead at Infoblox, explained, “We’ve been able to bring multiple disjointed systems into one single platform for our internal customers as well as the enablement team.”

Learn more: How Mindtickle helped Infoblox adopt a single-platform approach for enablement, content, and conversation intelligence

3. Improve access to content and resources

Finding the best content and resources is another inefficiency for many sales teams. Forrester states that “not having the right content” is one of the biggest productivity challenges facing sales teams and that “finding content and information is a significant productivity obstacle.”

Sales teams often struggle because they don’t know what content is available to them or where to find it in shared drives. Finding sales content can be especially difficult if another team (such as marketing) creates the content, and each team has different ways of organizing assets. You can help sales reps improve their productivity by making it easier for them to find and use sales content to move their deals forward.

Adopting a dedicated sales content management system makes it easy for reps to access your sales content. It provides a single, searchable home for all your content assets. In addition, you can organize your content into hubs based on topic or content type so that it’s categorized based on how your sales team will use or search for it.

When it’s easier for sellers to find relevant content to use in their sales interactions, reps aren’t spending time scrolling through shared drives hunting for relevant case studies. Instead, they can focus on their next sales conversation, equipped with the information they need for the call or follow-up message.

4. Make training and coaching an ongoing priority

At first glance, it may seem like sales training and coaching will negatively impact your sales team’s productivity. You may think it’s yet another activity that takes up reps’ time. That’s likely to be true if your company sees sales training as an ad-hoc checkbox activity rather than a long-term value-add. But personalized, continuous training helps reps improve their skills, enabling them to follow best practices and learn from other team members how to be more efficient and productive in their work.

Adopting a structured sales readiness program enables sellers to increase knowledge, enhance performance, and adapt to change. It makes training and coaching an ongoing priority and helps to foster a team culture of continuous improvement.

Training that’s personalized to each rep helps individuals make targeted improvements in key areas. For example, some reps struggle to handle objections, while others struggle to have conversations about your pricing. Sales leaders can help agents improve on areas of weakness that have been identified using AI to analyze sales call recordings and other customer interactions. This helps reps improve their productivity by handling these regular, recurring situations more easily.

Increase sales productivity by helping reps spend more time doing what they love

The people in your sales team became sellers for many reasons, but not one of them did so because of their love of admin and time-consuming data entry. But as sales processes become more complex and companies adopt more tools and technology, the art of sales seems to take a back seat.

Sales leaders need to enable their reps to focus on what they love doing — building relationships with prospects and helping them solve their problems and challenges. Reps who can spend more time on core sales activities will be happier and stay with your organization for longer because they’ll be doing what they signed up for. You can help them spend more time selling by automating tasks and streamlining processes.

The math is simple: to close more deals, your sales executives need to speak with more prospects. Increasing sales productivity isn’t just good for your sales team — it’s good for the entire business.

The Future of Sales: These 5 Sales Leaders Believe Sales Readiness is the Next Step

Nick Salas on March 2, 2022

When you think of the future of sales, it might conjure up images of watching product demos in virtual reality or having AI completely take over the sales discovery process. And while it’s fun to imagine these big, dramatic changes, in reality, the market transformation is likely to be much more incremental.

But even slow-moving changes still have a significant impact on your sales team. If you don’t keep your finger on the pulse of changing buyer expectations, technology, and skill sets, you might get left behind as competitors adapt faster and capitalize on new opportunities. Four revenue leaders shared their insights into where the changes are likely to occur and what form they’ll take.

Sales reps will own inbound lead generation

Gone are the days of sales and marketing working in siloes. SDRs and inbound sales reps will start to take over inbound lead generation campaigns from marketing departments.

It’s becoming more common for sales and marketing teams to be brought together into wider revenue departments, both reporting up to a Chief Revenue Officer. Terkel CEO Brett Farmiloe predicts:

“We’ll see a bigger blend between sales and marketing. In particular, we’ll start to see sales functions taking responsibility for inbound campaigns, which means we’ll see more sales resumes coming through with SEO and PPC certifications.”

If sales teams take greater responsibility for the whole sales cycle — from generating the leads right through to closing deals — then sales leaders will need to plan for new, specialist roles on their teams. According to Forrester, today, the average sales rep spends only 23% of their time on core selling activities. Increasing specialized sales roles enables other reps to dedicate more time to activities that move deals forward, rather than splitting their focus across outreach, lead generation, nurturing, closing deals — and anything else that lands on their plate.

Mindtickle Director of Sales, Jason Alumbaugh, says:

“Effective prospecting and generating demand will be essential skills for sales reps. In addition, the ability to effectively qualify leads will be the most impactful skill to help reps make the best use of their selling time.”

The rise of the sales influencer

Sales reps who have strong personal brands will be increasingly in demand with employers. As companies try to differentiate from competitors, reps with a strong social media presence will become more and more sought after. Their activities on social platforms build their reputation as an expert in their field, which helps them build trust more quickly with customers, extends their reach, and makes them a real asset to organizations.

Mindtickle GM and Regional Vice President Anthony Parker explained:

“Sales reps without a voice or personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn will find it more difficult to stand out from the pack.”

But placing greater importance on sellers’ personal brands can become a double-edged sword for businesses. It will make it easier for recruiters to identify and source top talent. Bringing on a social media savvy seller can bring attention to your organization once they join and update their networks. But reps with big personal brands may also be a risk, as they’re likely to be highly sought after by other companies and may be easily lured away by a more lucrative offer.

To prepare for this changing dynamic, sales leaders should encourage their whole team to build out their personal brand — and avoid hiring just one rockstar rep who makes a name for themselves on social media.

Sellers must be trusted advisors

According to Gartner, “33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience.” As millennials take on more decision-maker roles in the sales process in the next few years, that percentage will only increase, as “44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting.” As a result, sellers will need to adapt their behaviors and processes to keep up with changing buyer expectations.

DataRails Account Executive Ed Haft believes that sales reps need to focus on becoming trusted partners and experts rather than the stereotypical pushy salesperson. He explains:

“Relationship building will become an increasingly important skill as we shift toward people wanting to build trust and a relationship to enhance the customer experience.” He added, “Sales activity will become more intensely focused on problem-solving — being able to identify the problem the customer is looking to solve and demonstrate how you can achieve it.”

A 2020 study by LinkedIn found that 88% of consumers only buy when they see a salesperson as a “trusted advisor.” Therefore, if sellers are to remain relevant and continue to play their essential role in the future buying process, they need to prioritize building trust with their prospects. One way to do this is to focus on your customers’ desired outcomes and focus your sales conversations on solutions rather than sales.

AI will deliver crucial insights to help reps excel in any sales scenario

The majority of companies are investing in artificial intelligence and other technology to arm their teams with more customer data and insights to help drive more revenue. Forrester found that 68% of technology decision-makers have already implemented AI or are in the process of doing so. The proliferation of AI tools will mean sales teams can get more detailed insights across all their sales interactions.

Alumbaugh explains, “There will be a consolidation of sales tools so more effective AI-driven insights can be provided across all activities in the sales cycle.” While some reps may still have concerns about being replaced by AI, we believe that high-value sales transactions still need that human touch. So sales reps are perhaps some of the roles least likely to be replaced by AI and automation.

Using AI to analyze customer interactions will help sellers to better personalize their recommendations and follow-up messages based on prospects’ needs. Krittin Kalra, founder at Writecream, explained:

“Some of the most important skills for salespeople will be the ability to understand their customer’s needs and translate them into a solution, and the ability to be able to think on their feet and be able to react to different situations.” He added, “Technology is transforming the way we do business, by giving salespeople the data they need for each scenario.”

But all the AI-driven insights — and the tools themselves — will only help sales reps if they know how to use them and interpret the data. Although not a sales leader, Levi Olmstead, senior content marketing manager at Whatfix, believes that “it will be a challenge for sales leaders to support their sales reps properly. Reps will need the right process documentation and tools to be able to adopt these platforms and use them correctly.”

Competitive knowledge is a non-negotiable selling skill

In the U.S. alone, more than 400,000 new business applications were submitted each month in 2021, totaling over 5.3 million new businesses created over the year. So if you think you’re operating in a crowded market now, chances are it’s going to get even more so over the next few years.

Increasingly crowded markets mean that buyers have more suppliers to choose between. Haft from DataRails predicts, “The most important skill for sales reps will be their competitive knowledge and the ability to clearly and concisely differentiate your product and service against others in the market.”

Sales managers can help their reps build knowledge through ongoing sales enablement and training to prepare for this. Seemingly small improvements, such as achieving messaging consistency across the team, will help to present a more knowledgeable, prepared, and professional face to your prospects and help you stand out against less-prepared competitors.

The future of sales is full of opportunities — for companies that start preparing now

Incremental shifts are a big danger for sales organizations as they can be harder to detect and respond to than huge, sweeping changes. You don’t want to be the proverbial frog in the gradually boiling water, struggling as changes creep up on you and realizing you’re too late to adapt. But if sales leaders can help their teams embrace these changing market conditions and ensure reps develop the necessary tech skills and sales behaviors, they stand to capitalize on these opportunities while competitors get left behind.

The 4 Fundamentals of Revenue Intelligence That Actually Matter

Nick Salas on March 1, 2022

Revenue intelligence sounds like a dream come true for any sales leader. Of course, you want more intelligence about how to predict and grow revenue. But is it the game-changer it sounds like? According to Salesforce, it’s simply “a data-driven way to sell [using] AI and automation to create visibility across the revenue lifecycle.”

Behind its shiny wrapper and market buzz, we’ve boiled down revenue intelligence into four fundamental elements that actually matter to sales teams.

1. Automate data entry to improve data quality

Revenue intelligence tools use AI and automation to reduce manual and repetitive tasks, such as data entry. The tools automatically collect data from every interaction your reps have with a prospect, such as call recordings and emails. This helps to improve the quality of data in your customer relationship management solution (CRM) as you’re not left with incomplete entries when your sales reps jump on another call before they finish updating their notes from the previous one.

The improved data quality then enables revenue intelligence tools to more accurately predict revenue growth based on the data from your past deal flow.

So far, so good — except sales forecasting is hardly a new concept. Capterra lists 199 sales forecasting tools so while improving the quality of data in your CRM is a worthwhile pursuit, a revenue intelligence tool isn’t the only option for achieving that outcome.

And looking at the big picture, there’s more at stake than just revenue. The tools you use should also support the needs of your reps and automating data entry is one way to help them improve productivity and get some usable time back in their day. Reps can spend more time on knowledge building, training, and coaching to ensure sales readiness. The less time reps spend entering data into your CRM, the more time they have to prepare for their next calls — equipped with the right content assets and ready for the conversation, whether they’re talking pricing or delivering a demo of your latest features.

2. Increase visibility into deal flow

Revenue intelligence tools are already capturing data from customer interactions This data can be analyzed to identify key terms and topics covered — such as product features or competitors — making it easier for sales reps, managers, and other team members to get greater visibility into their deal flow and how customer conversations are progressing.

But revenue intelligence tools aren’t the only way to get that level of visibility into your customer interactions. G2 lists 70 conversation intelligence tools that enable users to “identify keywords and topics of conversation so users can quickly jump to those points in the recorded sales calls and further analyze valuable insights.”

Increased visibility into customer interactions is a good thing for sales teams — but only if you look at the bigger picture and use the insights to improve your whole team’s performance. Revenue intelligence tools provide those insights on a deal-by-deal basis. But it’s more useful if you make conversation intelligence part of an overarching sales readiness framework and use those insights to provide your team with optimal training, content, and coaching. That way, your sales team can learn from each other’s experiences, plus follow established best practices, to improve overall performance.

3. Get real-time access to sales data

According to Oracle, entering data into the CRM was one of the top five complaints from sellers who are frustrated with the time-consuming elements of their jobs. As a result, fewer than half of sellers use their CRM daily. The manual, time-consuming nature of data entry means that more than half of reps don’t enter data from their sales conversations until the next day, at the earliest.

Revenue intelligence tools give sellers access to data from their sales conversations much sooner. Also, they analyze what’s being said in sales interactions as they happen, looking for key topics and messaging.

Sellers can quickly see what was discussed on their last call. Similarly, managers can listen to call recordings or review transcripts to identify signs of a rep going off message or missing key opportunities.

This sounds great — but what are you using that data for? Revenue intelligence tools allow you to identify the next best steps to move that particular deal forward. But sales interaction data can be better used to enable your sales team by helping them optimize behaviors to improve their overall performance.

The last two stages of Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Framework enable sales teams to analyze their performance and optimize behavior. Our conversation intelligence tool, Call AI, analyzes sales data and uses those insights to deliver personalized, tailored training and coaching programs to your reps. In the long run, a more knowledgeable, informed, and skilled sales rep will be better prepared to handle complex selling situations and close more deals. Remember — it’s not the data that matters; it’s what you do with it.

4. Operate based on facts, not opinions

Revenue intelligence tools can help you make smarter decisions by giving you access to all your sales data, so you can act based on facts, not opinions. But often the focus is on gathering more and more data and assuming that insights will magically appear.

If your aim is to collect sales data, your reps have a lot of tools at their disposal, like your CRM, call transcripts, conversation intelligence tools — even the handwritten notes they make while on a call with a prospect. Sure, some of those aren’t automated, but you’re still collecting and recording data about your customer interactions and using that as the basis for deciding how best to move forward with the sales process.

You can collect all the data you want — but if your reps don’t know how to uncover useful insights to help them improve, it won’t make a difference to your bottom line.

What’s more important is developing a culture of continuous improvement for your sales team. Your sellers need to be able to interpret data and use it to move their deals forward. They also need to be able to learn from it — that conversation or customer email — and know how they do better next time. In the long run, that will have a bigger impact on your sales performance (and your revenue) than simply handing a load of data over to your reps and expecting actionable insights to materialize.

Revenue intelligence misses your sellers

What’s the top priority for sales orgs using revenue intelligence tools? The clue’s in the name — revenue. And while that’s likely true for your sales team, too, it’s your salespeople who are the real revenue drivers, not all your old sales data. All the revenue data in the world won’t change a thing unless you use it to empower your sales team.

Now that you understand what revenue intelligence really means and where its blind spots are, you can find tools that meet your team’s practical needs — for your people, not just your company’s bottom line. Look for platforms that use data to empower your sellers through enablement, training, and coaching to help them build the skills, knowledge, and behaviors to achieve sales excellence.

It’s time for sales organizations to put people before data as they’re the ones that bring in revenue.

AI Isn’t Replacing Sales People — It’s Making Them Better

Nick Salas on February 15, 2022

One of the most frequently searched questions about AI in sales is, “Will AI replace salespeople?” The fear of this is driven by attention-grabbing headlines like this one from Forbes: Why Artificial Intelligence Will Eliminate Millions of Sales Jobs. With articles like that, it’s no surprise some reps worry that AI and automation will eliminate their jobs and view technology as a competitor. Those reps are, subsequently, often resistant to adopting tools that help them and make their lives easier.

But AI for sales teams can become an enabler and collaborator rather than a competitor. AI isn’t replacing salespeople; it’s helping optimize performance, improve close rates, and excel in their work.

AI in sales streamlines lead prioritization

Using AI for lead prioritization saves your reps time and helps them work more efficiently. AI tools automate and streamline lead scoring and prioritization, based on how likely prospects are to convert into customers. It analyzes multiple data sets including your sales team’s existing interactions with the prospect. Then it compares the lead against the profile of similar companies in your database, to prioritize the best-fit leads for your sales team.

Without AI, sales reps would need to do a lot of that analysis themselves, or prioritize leads based on guesswork and their gut instinct. But if you use AI to handle lead prioritization, your sellers have more time to spend on core selling activities.

Instead of needing to comb through your CRM, reps can now focus on building their knowledge around competitor products and handling objections, or practicing product demos and pitches. Sellers can prioritize readiness activities to ensure they’re fully prepared for their next customer call.

Additionally, reps can focus more of their time on qualified leads rather than chasing the wrong opportunities. This makes it more likely that they’ll book their target number of meetings or hit quota, as they’re spending more time with engaged prospects.

AI in sales analyzes customer conversations

Sales teams can use AI tools to record, transcribe, and analyze customer calls and other sales interactions. Tools like Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence solution analyze customer conversations to identify the main topics and themes discussed. You can also track specific keywords, such as competitor names, product names, or common challenges.

This data categorizes the prospect’s pain points and desired outcomes. With this information, sales reps can better tailor their follow-up messages and identify the next best actions to nurture their leads without having to listen back to their call recordings.

Similarly, AI can help identify prospects who are a good fit for upsell or cross-sell conversations by detecting cues in their conversations, such as mentions of other products or use cases. By flagging any product names or competitors that prospects refer to on their sales calls, reps can spot when prospects are looking for other solutions or features and can explore that in future conversations.

AI analyzes rep behavior to personalize coaching

AI tools can help sales managers get real-time insights into rep performance during customer interactions. Mindtickle’s Call AI provides call scores after each sales activity and identifies the strengths and weaknesses demonstrated by the rep on that call.

Based on the rep’s score and behavior on the call, it prescribes practice exercises and training activities for the rep to complete such as practice demos and virtual role-plays. Call AI then analyzes and scores the completed training exercises, which managers can also review to offer further coaching where required.

“A manager will use the coaching template in Mindtickle to review a team member’s performance,” explained Tovi Dana, knowledge and learning director at Elmo Motion Control. “This provides a framework for their discussion afterward and makes it easy to track how much the rep is improving with these structured coaching sessions.”

AI-assisted coaching makes personalized sales training possible at scale. Leveraging AI to monitor rep behavior and personalize training accordingly means reps are able to make bigger improvements in a shorter time. Instead of running through one-size-fits-all training exercises, they can focus on the specific areas they need to work on — such as cold outreach, closing deals, or handling objections.

AI improves close rates across the sales org

With an AI tool like Mindtickle’s Call AI, more salespeople make or exceed quota than before the company started using it to monitor their sales performance. For example, Turing Video saw a 200% increase in quota attainment year-on-year after implementing Call AI.

Greg Myers, regional VP of sales at Turing Video, explained, “The recordings and transcripts provided by Call AI are a prime piece of business intelligence for me. This allows me to coach my team to more wins and emphasize what’s working for us.”

Call AI creates a continuous cycle of performance analysis, skills development, coaching, assessment, and improvement. It gives sales leaders actionable insights into why deals are won or lost so they can make changes to their process and better set sellers up for success. As a result, your reps are more likely to win deals when they come up against your competitors because they can better prepare for high-value sales calls.

AI helps set your sales team up for success

AI isn’t going to replace your salespeople because the human touch is essential to building long-lasting customer relationships. If anything, sales is one of the business functions most unlikely to be replaced by AI because that human connection is so important. Just think of how quickly people hang up on an automated robocall compared with when they’re speaking to another person.

While AI isn’t replacing salespeople, sales organizations are increasingly finding new use cases for AI, machine learning, and automation. AI helps sales teams improve their processes and engage more quickly with their prospects, fully equipped with the relevant information to move sales conversations forward.

Ready to add artificial intelligence into your sales team’s toolkit? Check out our Buyer’s Guide to Conversation Intelligence Solutions.

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