Imagine all the time we spend in sales and marketing developing ideal customer profiles, or as the acronym goes, ICPs.

Sales leaders spend a lot of time and effort to:

1. Ensure the leadership team agrees upon and documents the ICP
2. Train everyone in the sales organization on sales motions aligned to the ICP
3. Collaborate with marketing and product teams to deliver content and offerings aligned to ICP needs

However, as we all know well, every sales deal has two sides – the customer and the seller.

While you may have targeted the right ICP-fit prospects, your success as a sales organization still rests greatly on the skills of your own sales rep.

So, how much time do sales leaders spend thinking about and strategizing about the ideal rep profile – or as we call it, the IRP?

Very little.

Some sales leaders like Mark Roberge, the ex-CRO at Hubspot, evangelize the concept of ideal hiring profiles. But does good sales performance begin and end at hiring the right people?

The truth is that it’s a long journey that might begin with hiring for the right fit, but along the way includes things like onboarding, ongoing training, practice, reinforcement, continuous coaching, account planning, and so much more.

And all of these performance improvement initiatives cannot operate without a sales performance benchmark.

Sales leadership teams need to define, document, and track gaps against ideal rep profiles or IRPs.

What is an ideal rep profile?

IRP is the science behind measuring and improving sales performance.

Today Mindtickle announced the launch of its new sales performance measurement product, Readiness Index.

Readiness Index helps sales leaders record their IRP competencies and skills. As an example, you could set up your IRP as a combination of competencies like:

Along with each competency, you can also add in the weight each of them has on the overall Readiness Index score for a rep or a team.

My IRP is set. What’s next?

Based on the IRP, enablement and frontline managers create custom programs and coaching plans to address every rep’s skill gaps.

Now readiness initiatives like training by the enablement team and coaching by frontline managers address the needs of the individual, above and beyond addressing only the needs of the team and the organization.

On the other hand, sales leaders can start tracking how teams and reps are performing based on their readiness score in Mindtickle.

Now sales leaders know how each team, region, and rep (or any cohort) is performing.

They know which team or rep needs help with which competency.

Can we connect readiness with revenue?

Readiness levels can now also be measured against business metrics from the Salesforce CRM.

Think quota attainment, pipeline building, competitive win rates, meetings booked (for XDRs), churn, or customer NPS (for CSMs). All of these metrics can be used to understand the impact of all your readiness activities.

Now you can focus your readiness efforts in a more targeted manner starting with the quadrant that needs improvement in both readiness and quota attainment.

Take Susan for example:

We now know she needs help with customer personas, deep discovery, and value articulation.

Steps sales leadership can take with Mindtickle to help improve Susan’s performance:

1. Listen to her discovery calls in Call AI conversation intelligence and give her prescriptive feedback on questions to ask, talk time to reduce in discovery conversations
2. Guide her on better value articulation by sending her a reinforcement course, as well as doing an AI-guided virtual role-play
3. Ensure she can use Asset Hub to easily find all persona-related content, training, highly rated roleplays submitted by top reps

Readiness Index creates more peak performers on your team by delivering bespoke education, content, and coaching based on every rep’s individual needs. Learn more about ideal rep profiles and the Readiness Index by getting a personalized demo today.

“Sales is both an art and a science.”

“It’s more about the attitude.”

“We need more reps with the ‘it’ factor.”

We’ve heard it all.

Sales rep performance is a complex challenge we’ve tried to address through traditional training and enablement programs, and for many, it’s not working the way we hoped. A study by CSO Insights suggests only 27.5% of stakeholders feel sales enablement initiatives meet or exceed their expectations.

So, is it true that sales readiness is a dream state, a mission impossible? Or can revenue organizations actually improve performance through readiness? How can sales leaders create an all-star team of quota-crushers instead of relying on a handful to carry revenue targets?

Sales leaders can master the science of sales performance by creating, tracking, and optimizing readiness with Mindtickle.

I’m proud to say that with the Fall 2021 product announcement, Mindtickle built the sales readiness platform that revenue teams need to create a state of continuous excellence.

The key highlights in the announcement include:

1. Defining your ideal rep profile and correlating skills and behaviors with sales success in our new product, Readiness Index
2. Equipping your sales teams more effectively with an integrated content experience for just-in-time learning and customer engagement in our new product, Asset Hub
3. And a few more capabilities:
   • Create programs aligned to critical competencies and based on enablement best practices using Program Templates
   • Improve remote or hybrid team engagement in training sessions or kickoffs with gamification using Live and Team Challenges
   • Act on readiness insights and gaps with role-based dashboards that give full visibility into team and rep performance

Readiness Index

What’s your ideal rep profile (IRP)?

Every deal has a customer and a rep. In sales, we devote a lot of effort to defining the ideal customer profile or ICP. But what about our own reps?

True readiness begins when sales teams know not only their ICPs but also their IRPs — ideal rep profile. Mark Roberge at HubSpot introduced the concept of ideal hiring profiles. But sales performance isn’t a challenge that can be addressed by simply hiring reps based on a profile. Your reps always need to:

1. Possess the skills
2. Display the behaviors that help win deals
3. Repeat winning behaviors consistently

Now, for the first time in any sales technology, the leadership team – CRO/CSO, heads of enablement, ops, and regions – can come together and encode their ideal characteristics in Mindtickle’s Readiness Index.

Once the IRP is set in Mindtickle, enablement programs and sales content can be aligned to deliver the knowledge and skills required to create more ideal closers. This is made even easier with our new Program Templates, which make it simpler and faster to get your courses off the ground.

Then, as reps learn, reinforce, and practice key skills in Mindtickle’s enablement programs, their readiness scores start reflecting their proficiencies and gaps in the Readiness Index visualizations.

Now, enablement teams and frontline managers can tailor their programs and coaching to help bridge gaps for each individual rep.

Asset Hub

Do your reps have access to just-in-time sales content?

When most sales teams think of sales content, they think mostly of marketing collateral. But is that all that makes reps successful? What about training content, internal talk tracks, battlecards, role-play videos, and recorded snippets from actual customer conversations?

Many kinds of content drive rep success in the field. Mindtickle’s integrated content experience in Asset Hub ensures your reps can access, learn, and share the content that’s aligned with your readiness approach and proven to help win deals.

With the right content at their fingertips, reps can:

• Prepare for calls by listening to real-world, winning conversations
• Get the latest updates from SMEs in easy-to-consume microlearning
• Respond to objections quickly and confidently
• Practice pitches using AI-powered recommendations
• Share marketing-approved assets that win, contextualized for key selling situations

Additional sales readiness product capabilities released

Role-based dashboards for sales leaders and enablement

At any time, you have parallel programs as well 1-on-1 or team-level coaching activities underway. Mindtickle Insights bring you role-based reporting and analytics for sales leaders (CROs/CSOs), enablement, frontline managers, and ops.

They cover the entire gamut of data analytics – from adoption and engagement to learning scores, conversation intelligence, and revenue outcomes. And if editing your dashboards with the widget style isn’t enough, then you can also build your own reports and dashboards from scratch.

Live and Team Challenges to gamify sales enablement and training

With Live Challenges, enablement teams and trainers can strategically intersperse interactive contests throughout live training sessions to boost attention and improve recall. Teams get a series of multiple-choice questions where scores are based on how quickly you respond. After each question, the leaderboard is flashed. It’s a great learning experience that promotes friendly competition and fun.

Hybrid sales teams can now use Team Challenges to drive more rep engagement. The product design is our homage to the arcade games of the 1980s. Team Challenges encourage teamwork, camaraderie, and retention during sales meetings and kickoffs as it involves significant teamwork, communication, and knowledge to win the game.

Templates to launch programs in days not weeks

Quickly launch new programs using Mindtickle’s templates based on industry best practices.

Use templates for onboarding, product/service knowledge, and sales methodology implementations to start delivering value quickly. These templates significantly cut down the time needed to launch a new program – the average time taken in the beta process was nine days. The Mindtickle Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) team will continue to build out the repository of templates till we eventually have an entire marketplace where enablement professionals and training organizations can offer their own templates.

And that’s a wrap!

That’s all we have in store for Fall and Winter 2021. But I can tell you that the product and engineering teams (400 strong now!) are already working toward an amazing roadmap for 2022. We’re working closely with customers and industry practitioners to get feedback.

We want to hear from you! Reach out to [email protected] to let us know your thoughts on this release and ideas for future ones. Maybe you will see them in our Spring 2022 announcement.