[Podcast] How Sales Enablement can Strategically Guide the Sales Organization with Pat Lynch

Shrimithran R on April 5, 2018

In this

17 minute

podcast Pat explains:

  • How sales enablement has evolved over the past decade
  • How to turn around some disturbing trends in sales performance and productivity
  • The questions that can help sales enablement professionals focus on the right things at the right time
  • How to deal with sales tool fatigue

Pat Lynch has seen the evolution of sales enablement from several perspectives – in large companies like Xerox and FedEx and in research firm CSO Insights, to name a few. Now as Vice President of Enablement Excellence and Innovation at Mindtickle, Pat’s responsible for driving better outcomes for sales organizations through innovation and world-class enablement.

In recent years, Pat has seen some disturbing trends in sales organizations.

“Until last year, selling time for a sales professional was decreasing six years in a row. Now only 35% of a seller’s time is actually spent selling. Until last year, overall quota attainment also went down for six years in a row – from 63% to 51%. These are two alarming trends,”

exclaims Pat.

“Then add in the fact that you may only get 17% of the time with somebody who’s actually interested in purchasing your product or service. That’s very little time to actually develop rapport and trust with a potential customer, let alone trying to sell to them. That means salespeople have to be far more concise about the value-add that they’re bringing.”

While the numbers are worrying, it has ignited a fire under sales organizations. “

They realized that they needed to actually get somebody in the position and hold them accountable to stop these trends going in the wrong direction. With the Sales Enablement Society coming to fruition just about two years ago, we’re now seeing that enablement is a role that’s a critical success factor to getting sales organizations back on track and hitting quota,”

explains Pat.

The growth of sales enablement is certainly a step in the right direction but Pat has observed that some enablement professionals are at risk of missing a big opportunity. “

What often ends up happening is that the sales enablement executive is relegated to being a tactician. They’re trying to solve problems for salespeople. But sales enablement has a fantastic opportunity to look over the horizon to see what’s coming. They can provide strategic guidance to the VP of Sales. Some need to take a step back and look at the big picture and how they can help their sale organization.”

Mindtickle Recognized as Top 100 Growing SaaS Company

Shrimithran R on March 28, 2018

In the past year, Mindtickle’s growth has been rapid – expanding our team and technology innovations. We’re proud to share that recently Mindtickle was recognized for that growth by SaaS 1000 as one of the Top 100 fast-growing SaaS companies.

The SaaS 1000 list highlights the top high-growth SaaS companies based on hiring trends and other growth indicators.
Not all training and development solutions are created equal. In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s crucial sales representatives are trained for and provided with the right information whenever and wherever they need it for the “moment of truth” in any customer conversation.
At Mindtickle, our sales readiness platform utilizes an outcome-oriented approach, meaning we’re able to track and identify sales capabilities each rep needs to close more deals and provide them with the tools to develop those skills. We look beyond traditional sales training to focus on sales effectiveness and improving skills and execution at an individual level. Our data-driven concept provides analytics to identify gaps in rep performance or skills and monitor existing capabilities. Our approach to sales readiness and enablement has been proven time and time again – driving an increase in demand for Mindtickle and fueling our growth.
Want to join Mindtickle’s fast-growing, innovative team? Learn more about our open positions and opportunities on our careers page.

[Podcast] Managing Change in a Global Industry with Johanna Kuusisto – Episode 28

Shrimithran R on March 21, 2018

In this 21 minute

podcast Johanna explains:

  • How to manage industry transformation from a sales perspective
  • How they build and measure sales competencies consistently across remote sales teams
  • Her top three tips for implementing change in a global sales force

Wartsila is a Finnish company with over 18,000 professional in over 200 locations in more than 70 countries. The company enables sustainable societies with smart technology. Their solutions cover the energy and marine industries. We spoke to Johanna Kuusisto, Senior Development Manager. She has a background in Learning and Development and now brings her expertise to the sales team.

“I work in marine solutions and am responsible for supporting our salespeople to sell and serve our customers smarter. We develop processes, tools and competencies that help our salespeople be prepared for the future,”

outlines Johanna.

“Our sales cycle can be anything from one to five years. For example, if a cruise line decides to build a new cruise ship our salespeople first need to be engaged early on to influence and be part of the bidding process,”

explains Johanna.

“There are many players in the process – ship owners, shipyards, ship designers, and operators. Our salespeople need to create relationships and build trust with all of them. We also have hundreds of products that our salespeople need to be aware of and understand the value of. They need to match this value with each customer’s specific needs.”

Long sales cycles and complex products make sales challenging at Wartsila, but the rate of change in their industry is accelerating their need to sell differently. 

“There are mega trends happening in our industry. Regulation is changing, some products will be mandatory. People are also getting older which means we need to develop the tourism and service sector more and this involves influences customers, shipyards and ship owners,”

explains Johanna.

“Our salespeople need to accept this change. They need to be flexible in their mindset and keep their know-how up to date.”

Keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging, particularly with information scattered across emails, social media, and documents. This is amplified by remote and global sales teams.

“

Sales readiness is crucial for a company like us. We need to continuously find new ways to work and connect our people.”

[Podcast] The Future of Sales Enablement with Steven Wright: Episode 27

Shrimithran R on March 8, 2018

In this 20 minute podcast Steven explains:

  • What we can expect from technology in the sales enablement space
  • The key challenges to really enabling your sales team through content and process
  • Some of the pitfalls of trying to get sales enablement change off the ground
  • What are the hallmarks of a good sales enablement practitioner

With 20 years of experience in sales enablement both as a practitioner at companies such as IBM and as a Senior Analyst for Forrester, Steven Wright has seen a lot of change. In this day and age, change is the new normal and how we sell is transforming bringing with it new challenges, particularly with the use of technology.

“Sometimes there’s a very sharp pain and somebody finds a tool that will address it, but they haven’t really thought about the bigger picture. The overall process and program and dedication it’s gonna take to consistently execute on the sales enablement program. This tool may not help them get people onboard or keep them up to speed and keep reinforcing what they’re doing as part of an ongoing process,” explains Steven.

An area where technology has the potential to really transform how we sell in the future is in customer relationship.

“From the sales enablement perspective, companies who are using a lot of different technologies could try and lower the burden of the CRM on sellers so that they’re spending more time selling and less time doing data entry. A lot of that has to do with being able to capture data about sales activities that they were doing like how they are using emails, what they’re doing with content, is it being opened, is it being read and using all those analytics to be a real source of intelligence on what to do next,” says Steven.

Improving the productivity of reps is one area where technology has the opportunity to help and possibly hinder, training is another challenging area, particularly for businesses that have already invested in LMS.

“A lot of companies have a hybrid approach to training. This varies by industry – some have more need for certification like financial services or pharmaceuticals – that the curriculum in an LMS has. Other companies, with a focus on sales, need the approach Mindtickle brings to bear. Something that can be delivered very quickly, which on one hand meets a lot of tactical needs but can be part of a bigger development framework,” explains Steven.

“I think a lot of companies that haven’t made an investment in LMS probably aren’t going to need it if they can adopt the right kind of technology with some of the newer approaches like Mindtickle.”

[Podcast] How Focus can Increase Your Sales Team Performance – Episode 26

Shrimithran R on January 31, 2018


In this 25 minute podcast Steve explains:

  • What makes a great sales team
  • How sales enablement needs differ within sales teams and how technology can help address this
  • How Kaizen can be applied to sales teams to improve their productivity

“Whatever type of sales team you have, the larger it gets the more important the sales enablement and sales operations role becomes. If you have 100 guys, and you save them all 5% of their time, that’s hiring five guys for free,” exclaims Steve Benson.
Steve began his career in software sales and has worked for IBM, HP, and Google. Now as CEO of Badger, he helps field salespeople focus on their best customers and optimize revenue opportunities by mapping out their territories.
The key to optimizing your sales team is a focus. “You have to study your sales team almost like an anthropologist or a sociologist would and use those stats. What people often find is that there’s a lot of value in a lack of focus on field sales teams. People are spending their time on the wrong leads. They’re not focusing on the highest probability deals to close, and making sure that they make it over the line. It’s the same for inside sales team, helping them focus on the right groups, with the right message, at the right time is really important,” explains Steve.
While the focus is important, it’s also essential that sales enablement, operations, marketing and other members of the team understand what each sales reps need when looking at ways to leverage technology.
“What the outside guys need is different to what the inside guys need. What the people who are selling to giant companies need is different than the people that are selling over the phones to small companies. There’s a variety of ways you can split up your sales team and different strategies to do that, but then I think it’s really important that one size does not fit all from your sales tech sack.”

In Conversation with Mark Tefakis of Fuze

Shrimithran R on December 11, 2017

MARK-TEFAKIS_sales enablement_fuzeThis post is based on a webinar where Mark Tefakis, VP of Global Enablement at Fuze, shares the key pillars of successful sales enablement and how to show its ROI to your leadership.
Fuze is an award-winning “cloud-based unified communication platform that addresses complexities around the modern workforce with the ability to work in a way that drives efficiency and effectiveness for the growth and profitability metrics companies need,” explains Mark. “Founded in 2006, we’re headquartered in Boston and have offices throughout Europe, into Australia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.”

The evolution and need for sales enablement

“Sales Enablement centered around training and development initially and expanded into how you fully enable the sales organization,” Mark continued. “A lot of CSOs are being challenged with having a constant pulse on the business, to be able to report on where they are today, where they’re going tomorrow, and knowing the lead and lag indicators so they can be responsive to the demands of the business. The discipline of sales enablement is a foundational set of processes and standards that help the CSO address that pressure and scrutiny. This foundation includes time to ramp (TTR) [onboarding], ongoing enablement [to increase productivity], and [preventing] unplanned churn.”

The five pillars of sales enablement

Mark developed the concept of the five pillars of sales enablement through his experience in sales and sales leadership. They are:

  1. Organizational alignment: “Before you get started you have to understand the dynamics around the organizational alignment. Do you have governance and some process in place where everybody understands the vision, strategies, initiatives, scorecards, and metrics that you’re putting in place to drive the success of the program? That’s critically important,” explained Mark.
  2. Role-based certification: Most sales organizations have several different roles that vary by company and industry. Role-based certification involves identifying the competency model tied to the skills and knowledge associated with each role. As you look through the motion of each role, what is the thing reps need to know, say, show, and do as they manage the day-in-a-life of performing against the expectations of the role? Next, turn it into a curriculum and how you want to train, develop, and evaluate the performance of these roles. There are three levels that comprise this certification model:
    1. Lecture and test the retention of knowledge;
    2. Exercise and application, transitioning from understanding a concept into applying and exercising the skill tied to that concept prior to going out into the field; and
    3. Managers evaluateperformance in the field and coach.
  3. Enablement on demand: “Leverage technology to streamline how effectively you execute against the things that are defined in the role-based competency model. There’s no need for heavy dependency on instructor-led training or virtual training when there are technology and applications that allow you to better drive efficiency and effectiveness, plus scale better for the organization within a proper cost model,” explains Mark. “Leverage technology as part of this foundational layer and put the power in the palm of the hand of the individual. Do this within cloud-based applications, with integration into CRM, where you can tie learning and sales supporting assets to a specific sales scenario, prescribing assets and learning based on that scenario. Also building in some gamification to drive contest around how people learn is really compelling. I would encourage you to think about enablement on demand,” he continues.
  4. Predictive analytics: “It’s one thing to look at reports and reference a dashboard of things that happened in the past. It’s another to look through the windshield, at the road ahead, and predictively be able to tell where your business is going. If you establish the right lead and lag metrics, supporting technology can show when individuals in your sales organization are heading for disaster. You can then start to prescribe specific learning to get them over that hurdle so they can start to perform much better,” suggests Mark.
  5. Sales advisory boards (a.k.a. voice of the customer): “If you don’t establish champions and have a feedback loop from the sales organization, you will battle some apprehensive people while you’re pushing programs out. This is a mechanism for you to be able to gather insight and feedback in a structured fashion. Sales can contribute to the design and development of your initiatives through localized champions who can support and help drive adoption,” he explains.

“With the five pillars of successful sales enablement,” Mark explained, “we’re leveraging really interesting technology to help do this so you can scale with the demands of the business. You’re not asking the CFO for a ton of bodies, you’re actually leveraging the power of technology, and better equipping and enabling the field based on the power in the palm of your hand, which ties back to the center pillar of enabling on demand.”

How sales enablement works at Fuze

“First and foremost is sales methodology. Whether you do it internally or you leverage an external partner, you have to start there because that is the foundation that drives the rest of the bubbles to the right,” Mark continued.
“Once you have that in place, you then start to think in terms of how to establish a best practice approach to outreach and engagement to the marketplace. We use Mindtickle for our learning management system and recently launched it to our global sales organization. We use Savo for our content management system and a combination of both Mindtickle and Savo to help us with ‘voice of the customer’ and engagement with the field.  This gives us the pulse of what’s going on,” explains Mark.
“All of these equate to very effective sales productivity based on the pillars and the underlying enablement technology that you can put in place.”

In Conversation with Dabur on Sales Effectiveness

Shrimithran R on June 13, 2017

This post is based on an interview with Chirag Singh, Sales Capability Development Manager at Dabur. You can listen to the podcast here.

Dabur is the world’s largest Ayurvedic and natural healthcare company.  With over 2,000 sales reps Dabur has certainly had its challenges finding the best way to train and coach its salespeople working in different geographical regions. Chirag Singh who leads the sales capability development function at Dabur talk to us about how this FMCG giant enabled their sales team, regardless of their location.

Their sales organization structure has many levels

FMCG sales reps require specific skills

Sales in the FMCG space is very different to B2B sales. Sales reps require very different skill sets to deal with the unique challenges of their business model, where they deal with a range of distributors from large chains to mom and pop stores.

Apart from the typical negotiations, conflict management, and partner management skills, it’s important to drive process adherence. Coaching focuses not only on team handling and negotiations skills but also basic analytical skills. This helps identify whether sales reps are able to interpret data as expected.

Prioritizing sales readiness initiatives was crucial

It was important for Dabur to create a strategy for their initiatives that focused on the skill sets that their reps needed to improve. To achieve this, prioritizing their initiatives was crucial, particularly when you consider the size of their team. To improve the sales effectiveness of their team Dabur implemented several initiatives.

“The most important initiative, and one of the most basic is to standardize the onboarding process for all new hires in the sales team. Dabur is a large and diverse organization so it is even more important to have a standard onboarding system in place.  We use Mindtickle to provide us with visibility on the learning curve of every new hire in the sales team,” explains Singh.

Dabur also had a long-term vision for their digital sales readiness initiatives that extended beyond sales onboarding.

“Another thing that is really helping us is the creation of a knowledge bank. This is a repository of all sales processes and sales related collaterals. Since the Mindtickle platform is online and agile, it is much easier for us to add and update modules as and when there is a change in our process. It’s been about 8 months since we started and this has now become a part of our daily work,” continues Singh.

Managers have visibility into every sales rep’s progress

“Using a platform like Mindtickle gives us visibility into what skills each rep needs to improve. That is the greatest benefit we’ve obtained from this initiative. Improvement takes time, for some individuals it can take a few weeks, and for some, it can take a few months. It really depends on the kind of work assigned to them,”  explains Singh.

Dabur’s initiatives also help them identify and fix their rep’s knowledge gaps. They have implemented a manager led feedback system that has been essential to their sales transformation program.
“Mindtickle allows us to track the coaching tasks given to each sales rep after the fact. We then involve the manager, using a feedback mechanism, to review the improvement in their reps’ performance and actually give them feedback. This process is really helping us drive effectiveness and improve our performance,” explains Singh.

By leveraging technology Dabur has automated and simplified its sales process. At the same time, they have brought their sales team much closer towards their end goal of achieving best-in-class sales effectiveness.

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