What is Sales Onboarding?

Vivian Batman on April 19, 2024

Sales onboarding is an education program that provides newly hired sales reps with the necessary knowledge, instills the company values, and shows them how to leverage the provided tools of a company in an easy-to-absorb and timely format. This process ensures all sales reps have what they need for success within the company, with the team, and in the field.

A well-defined onboarding program, in particular, allows sales reps to learn in consumable chunks, with defined learning objectives and onboarding materials that are readily available and updated with the latest competitive, corporate, and product information.

Sales reps who undergo standardized onboarding processes become productive 3.4 months sooner, on average than those who work at organizations with less formal onboarding. And those new hires are 50% more likely to stay with the organization.

To be successful, sales reps need an intimate knowledge of the products they are selling, as well as the specific procedures and behaviors that will help them succeed. To be clear, a strong sales onboarding program gives reps more credibility and confidence in their new role, boosting the success of the entire sales department. In this post, we’ll cover the the following topics so you’re ready to build an onboarding plan that sets every rep up to be a top performer:

What is the importance of sales onboarding?

What are the best sales onboarding practices?

What is a 30-60-90-day sales onboarding plan?

How does sales onboarding reduce ramp time?

What are the features of a sales onboarding platform?

What is the importance of sales onboarding?

Sales onboarding is an essential component of an effective sales enablement program. It’s the first step in ensuring sellers have the tools, resources, and support they need to be successful.

The numbers are in, and reports confirm the importance of a solid sales onboarding program for every organization.

According to G2, reps are productive in 3.4 months faster with best-in-class sales onboarding programs — that’s 37% faster than organizations with low-performing programs. 

Sales onboarding sets sellers up for success

Creating an onboarding program that is aligned with the specific needs of your sales reps as well as the organization leads to greater success in the field, as your reps will know the products they’re selling and have the knowledge and skills to back them up. Knowledge gained through onboarding also helps reps get to know their customers, both existing and potential. It provides information about current users and enhances creative thinking around new business opportunities.

Even further, reps enter the field with the comfort of knowing the values and standards of the company, so they can sell with confidence. If onboarding at your company is too general, you may miss out on opportunities to improve key sales skills aligned with your organization.

Sales onboarding improves retention and recruitment

Setting new hires up for success in their role is a huge part of attracting and retaining top talent. In today’s competitive job market, job seekers are more knowledgeable and discerning of their prospective employers than ever before. If a talented sales rep is considering joining your team, the onboarding and training programs may play a significant role in their success. A strong onboarding and training curriculum sets you apart as an employer that values and invests in its employees.

A strong onboarding program also helps you retain the top talent you have recruited.

Companies with ineffective onboarding lose 17% of new hires in the first three months.

With a great onboarding program, you can keep employees for months and years to come by giving them the knowledge and consistent onboarding experience they need to succeed in your sales department.

Sales onboarding increases rep engagement

Sales reps who are highly engaged in their work do everything they can to satisfy their clients, grow their client base, help other sales reps succeed, and contribute ideas to improve the overall sales department. These highly engaged employees are advocates for your company and an integral part of your sales department.

Building employee engagement starts with onboarding. When new reps get the tools and information they need right from the start, they are more likely to buy into the company’s goals, bond with the sales team through shared experiences, and contribute in a positive way every day.

What are the best sales onboarding practices?

A job done poorly gets poor results—and sales onboarding is no exception. An onboarding process that is effectively built from the start can lead to improved sales opportunities, more closed deals, and great salespeople who stay for the long haul.

Here are a few best practices to help you build your own sales onboarding program:

  • Build a company story: Come to the table with a clear vision of your goals. What is your company’s mission and vision? What are your company values? What do you bring to the table? How is it different from your competitors?
  • Provide clear, concise messaging: With a clear understanding of your company values, new sales reps need a guide for how to convey your message. Your onboarding program should provide key messaging tips for a variety of different sales situations and opportunities.
  • Target the right customers: Develop sample profiles of customers that are a good fit for your products, including personalities and relevant industries. Learning how to pick and choose potential customers is a great way to help new hires understand your ideal customers and sell to them effectively.
  • Standardize the process: Access to paperwork, manuals, onboarding materials, and centralized messaging can significantly improve the results of the process. Enlist the help of a dashboard-style system that keeps everything in one place. A simple, effective, repeatable system will help new reps feel confident when the process begins, and give a simple way to check back and review important information when needed.
  • Provide continuous support: Using a revenue productivity platform that standardizes your message is just the first step toward improved sales and retention. Provide opportunities for reps to check in, access sales coaching, and track their own productivity with assessments to cement the learning process with ongoing activities — a concept we call everboarding.
  • Offer engaging, varied training formats: Onboarding used to mean all-day training sessions and shadowing experienced reps — long days, information overload, and minimal retention. With advances in sales training technology, you can offer a more engaging and interesting onboarding experience. With sales training techniques like micro-learning and gamification, you can present information in various formats to keep new hires engaged and help them retain more information long-term.

While a consistent model of behavior and information makes the onboarding process run smoothly, creating one for your company is an individual, unique exercise. It must be consistently administered across new sales reps but customized for your industry, values, goals, team, and leadership.

What is a 30-60-90-day sales onboarding plan?

A common onboarding strategy sales organizations take is the 30-60-90-day plan — a roadmap for where you want new reps to be after the first, second, and third months in their role. It can look something like this:

  • 30 days: The new hire is familiar with the company mission, culture, history, products, buyers, sales processes, and tools. Offer some icebreaker activities and opportunities for collaboration and team building.
  • 60 days: The new hire becomes more hands on, participating in team meetings, confident in talking to customers and prospects, and seems motivated to perform well.
  • 90 days: The (not-so) new hire actively reaches out to their accounts independently and fits into the larger company culture. You can see a clear picture of their progress from day one.

There are different ways to approach a sales onboarding program, and where you start will depend on two things: your company objectives and what you already have in place. Using technology can help you customize the process for not only your company but also for the many different learning styles that each rep brings to the table.

How does sales onboarding reduce ramp time?

Average ramp time for new sales reps can be anywhere between six and 12 months. A strong onboarding program can use the following techniques to improve the onboarding process and decrease ramp time:

  • A repeatable process: A well-defined, easily accessed, and standard process with clearly stated goals for the first and second week, first month, and so on is a must-have. This process leaves the first impression with new reps and can make or break the relationship between the new rep and the company.
  • Written resources: Information must be easily accessed for learning and review, so ensure everything is properly recorded and accessible.
  • Goal setting: Expectations should be communicated and accountability tracked, but not rushed.
  • Company experience: Give new sales reps the opportunity to experience other aspects of the company, such as customer service and support and inventory control.
  • Mentorship and shadow opportunities: New hires get up to speed more quickly when there are ample opportunities for mentoring and shadowing. These activities allow reps to get guidance from more experienced sales team members in a less formal setting, giving them good opportunities to ask questions and learn in a real-world environment.

These techniques can be automated and/or streamlined with the help of a revenue productivity platform. 

What are the features of a sales onboarding platform?

Sales onboarding platforms are typically part of enablement or productivity software. Today, more sellers are working remotely than ever before, and using technology is crucial for ensuring that sales onboarding is accessible and adaptable for every individual rep.

These systems help to optimize the creation and execution of onboarding materials by:

  • Storing, managing, and distributing training content
  • Replicating in-person engagement through video conferencing tools and virtual instructor-led training (VILT)
  • Providing practice opportunities through recorded role-plays
  • Offering gamified learning and competitions
  • Personalizing learning paths based on proven competencies and areas for improvement
  • Tracking completion rates and scores

Successful sales onboarding with Mindtickle

The Mindtickle revenue productivity platform offers onboarding and training features that improve time-to-productivity, sales rep effectiveness, and much more. Mindtickle offers user-friendly dashboards and analytics to track new reps’ progress through onboarding modules and identify reps who need additional training in certain areas.

Once onboarding is complete, Mindtickle offers a full suite of sales training, sales coaching, analytics, and micro-learning tools to reinforce concepts and build key skills. 

Sales Onboarding with Mindtickle

Schedule a demo today to see how Mindtickle can improve your sales onboarding program.

Get a Demo

This post was originally published in January 2020, was updated in September 2022, and again in April 2024.  

The 3 Most Important Skills for Every Role On Your Sales Team

Vivian Batman on April 12, 2024

Today’s sellers face a ton of challenges. They need the right skills to overcome these challenges and emerge successful.

There’s a subset of top performers on every sales team. These are the folks who are adept at building relationships and closing deals—even in less-than-ideal circumstances. In a perfect world, you could clone these top sales reps.

Of course, this isn’t possible. But the most successful revenue organizations are doing the next best thing. They’re spending time figuring out what makes their top sellers so great and then working to replicate those skills and behaviors across the entire revenue organization.

Taking this approach, you can create an entire team of top performers. It starts with determining what skills are needed for each role on your sales team.

Defining what sales excellence looks like

Sellers have limited time, and it behooves them (and their organization) to focus their time on the prospects that best fit their offering. To help ensure that’s the case, most organizations identify and document their ideal customer profile (ICP).

Far fewer businesses take the time to identify and document their ideal rep profile (IRP), which is the list of skills, competencies, and behaviors a revenue team member needs to succeed in their role. However, the IRP continues to be a growing trend among sales productivity practitioners.

The growth of this trend makes sense. After all, how can a revenue organization drive excellence when it doesn’t even know what excellence looks like?

The IRP is essential to true sales productivity

The first step in driving org-wide excellence is to take the time to identify and document the skills needed for success. The most successful sales organizations define IRPs for their go-to-market (GTM) or customer-facing roles. The most common roles for which organizations define their IRP are:

  • Account executives (AEs)
  • Business development representatives (BDRs)
  • Channel sales specialists (CSSs)
  • Customer success managers (CSMs)
  • Sales engineers (SEs)

Team members should be continuously measured against this “gold standard” to identify each individual’s learning gaps. Then, organizations can deliver individualized learning and sales coaching that closes these gaps and creates more peak performers.

The top 3 skills for every member of the revenue team

Sure, it’s key to identify the skills each member of your revenue team needs to succeed. But what exactly are those skills?

Of course, these vary by role. The skills needed to be a successful BDR differ from those needed to excel as a sales engineer.

Recently, we analyzed activity from more than a million users at 400+ companies to understand how the best organizations are getting their sales teams ready to close more deals. We shared our key findings in our State of Revenue Productivity 2024 Report. Based on this analysis, we’ve identified the top three skills needed by five key revenue team members.

The 3 most important skills for account executives

Account executives work day in and day out to understand the needs and challenges of businesses — and then provide solutions to address them. The three most important skills for success in this role are:

Once an AE has determined the buyer’s needs, they must have the skills to articulate their solution’s value.

Our analysis found that over half (54%) of sales calls include more negative sentiment than positive. Objections are one example of negative sentiment. AEs should expect objections— and have the skills to address and overcome them.

Prospects often don’t accept an offer as-is. Instead, they want to negotiate. This is especially true in today’s economic climate. AEs must have the skills to navigate the negotiation stage of the sales cycle expertly.

The 3 most important skills for business development representatives

BDRs are often the first touchpoint a prospect has with your company. They need to master these three skills:

BDRs must know your ICPs inside and out — and be able to quickly and accurately determine if a prospect is a good fit for your company’s offerings.

Like AEs, BDRs must be prepared to expect resistance from prospects and equipped to handle it. The right enablement and coaching can ensure they’re ready to address any objection that comes their way.

Strong communication skills include both speaking and listening. BDRs must master active listening skills so they can understand what a prospect is saying and respond thoughtfully.

The 3 most important skills for channel sales specialists

Channel sales refers to the practice of a third party (also known as a partner) selling your company’s products. The top three skills needed for channel sales specialists are:

Channel sellers must know a product inside and out — and be equipped to handle any question. Continuous enablement and coaching ensure they always have current, accurate product knowledge.

Like AEs, channel sellers must be experts at conveying the value of a particular solution to the prospect.

Prospects are more likely to make a purchase from a sales rep who’s taken the time to get to know them and earn their trust. As such, relationship-building skills are essential for any channel sales specialist.

The 3 most important skills for customer success managers

Customer success managers spend most of their time meeting with current customers to address any issues and ensure the customer gets the most value from the product provided. As well, they’re often responsible for upsells and renewals. They must have a solid mastery of the following three skills to be successful in their roles:

CSMs spend a lot of time interacting with customers via phone and email. Often, they need to share feedback from customer interactions with other departments, including sales and product. Solid written and verbal communication skills are a must.

It’s less expensive to retain an existing customer than it is to obtain a new one. As such, CSMs must perfect their renewal skills. Renewal time can also be a great opportunity for upsells. CSMs should be skilled at identifying upsell opportunities and articulating the value of the upsell to the customer.

The CSM is typically their go-to if a customer runs into a problem. Customer success team members must have solid problem-solving skills to help resolve issues quickly and effectively.

The 3 most important skills for sales engineers

A sales engineer is a member of the B2B sales team whose specialty is selling complex technical products and services. They must have a mastery of these three skills:

Sales engineers must be well-versed in the myriad ways companies use a solution and can use this knowledge to articulate how the solution can work for a specific prospect.

Similar to other roles, sales engineers must be experts at articulating business knowledge to prospects.

Prospects often come to sales engineers with technical questions and objections. Sales engineers

Start building a winning revenue team

Today, many revenue leaders accept that great sellers are born, not made. They either have what it takes, or they don’t.

But that isn’t reality. Sales excellence can be taught.

First, organizations must identify the success-related skills for each revenue team role. Then, they can measure all revenue team members against their IRP to understand where they’re shining and falling short. Equipped with these insights, revenue teams can deliver personalized training, enablement, and coaching to ensure each master the skills that matter most in their role.

Mindtickle Readiness Index

In other words, you can build a team of top performers – no cloning machine required.

But not all enablement and productivity programs drive results. Instead, you need the right, data-driven strategy and technology to power your sales enablement and sales productivity programs.

Revenue Enablement in Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle empowers winning revenue organizations to build enablement and productivity programs that drive sales excellence and revenue growth?

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This post was originally published in June 2022 and was updated in April 2024. 

3 Types of Coaching Sessions You Need to Have With Your Sales Reps 

Vivian Batman on March 21, 2024

Like the best athletes, the best sales reps always ask for and get more coaching from their managers. 

The best managers are coaching their reps a lot more too.

According to our 2024 State of Sales Productivity Report, top managers tripled the number of coaching sessions since 2022, completing 40 sessions per month. Top-performing reps also get four more coaching sessions per month. 

The result? 

More wins. More revenue. 

So where do you start? 

Key takeways

  • The best managers are doing something differently with their reps during coaching sessions.  
  • There are three common types of coaching between managers and reps. We break them down. 
  • Next steps for setting up an efficient, personalized, and scalable coaching program at your own org. 

Coaching must go beyond deal reviews

Creating a “coaching culture” is often identified as a priority for selling orgs. We define a coaching culture as ongoing, data-driven, and infused into every manager and seller interaction.

When done well, it works. 

According to research, companies with dynamic coaching programs achieve 28 percent higher win rates.

Companies with dynamic coaching programs achieve

higher win rates
0 %

Unfortunately, many orgs struggle to create this coaching culture and instead take an ad hoc approach focused on short-term fixes. This approach is almost always primarily focused on deal reviews.

Of course, as-needed deal reviews are an important way to improve the outcome of a given sale. But on its own, deal coaching isn’t enough to improve long-term results.

The best sales orgs take a different approach to coaching. Rather than focusing solely on deal coaching, they deliver a blend of coaching types delivered at regular intervals to improve long-term success.

How the best sales managers are coaching their reps

Back to the best athletes: When they’re asking for coaching, it’s usually to address a specific issue with their game. 

The same can be said for sales reps.

However many orgs struggle to identify rep weaknesses, which makes effective coaching a struggle. 

According to our 2024 Chief Revenue Officer and Sales Leader Outlook Report, only 40% of C-level executives said they can identify rep strengths and weaknesses.

The first step to effective coaching is to understand rep strengths and weaknesses. To do this, you can take a look at your win/loss reports as well as call recordings to get a better understanding of where reps need improvement. From there, you can equip managers with what they need to “fix” those issues and get your reps back into the field with the skills they need to close more deals, 

Let’s take a closer look at the three types of coaching the best sales managers are delivering to reps — and how often they’re doing so.

#1 Opportunity sales coaching

When someone hears the phrase “sales coaching,” their mind might immediately go to opportunity coaching. That’s not surprising, as it’s the most common type of sales coaching. Our research found that 85% of sales reps report being coached on open deals.

Opportunity coaching is an important way to improve the outcome of a deal. For example, a sales manager might identify that something in a deal isn’t going as planned. This might be based on feedback from the rep during a pipeline review meeting. Or, they could get insight by leveraging a conversation intelligence solution that sheds light on how the rep is performing.

Salesforce- Coaching

In either circumstance, the manager can provide opportunity coaching to help the rep steer the deal back on course. And this will improve the chances of them ultimately closing the deal.

How often are the best managers delivering opportunity coaching? Sometimes, this coaching happens at a regular cadence — for example, during a weekly pipeline review. At these meetings, reps and managers discuss current opportunities — and how to move them forward.

Often, though, opportunity is delivered as needed — for example, when a rep raises a question or concern or meeting intelligence uncovers an issue.

#2 Skills sales coaching

In general, skills coaching is a lot less common. A mere 24% of reps report being coached on skills. 

While opportunity coaching improves the outcome of a single deal, skills coaching is required to ensure reps have the skills and behaviors needed to close deals consistently.

The best sales managers recognize the importance of skills coaching on long-term behavior. As such, they aim to deliver at least one skill-based coaching session per month per rep.

What skills do they focus on? The short answer is, it depends. The first step is for organizations to identify the knowledge, skills, and behaviors a rep needs for success by developing an ideal rep profile (IRP).

Ideal rep profile competencies

Then, each rep should be measured against this gold standard. This helps managers identify where there are skills gaps. Armed with this data, sales managers can deliver targeted, personalized skills coaching that addresses the needs of each individual rep.

#3 Targeted sales coaching

If there’s one thing sellers can count on, it’s that things are always changing. New products are released. Pricing or packaging is adjusted. A new competitor enters the marketplace. And those are just a few of the many changes faced by reps.

The best sales managers deliver coaching sessions to address changes and ensure reps are equipped to adapt. Typically, targeted coaching is a single session on a specific, targeted topic — often followed by enablement content such as content, training, or a role-play exercise.

When it comes to sales coaching, follow-up is key

Sales managers are busy. But the best ones know that coaching is worth the time and effort. On average, top managers complete 12 coaching sessions per month.

But coaching isn’t a one-time event. For example, a manager can’t simply deliver a skills coaching session focused on objection handling, check it off the list, and never think about it again — at least not if they expect actual improvement.

The best managers know that proper follow-up and ongoing reinforcement are key to effective coaching. Our analysis found that top managers are three times more likely to assign content, training or a role-play as a follow-up to a coaching session.

This follow-up is paying off. Reps who are assigned follow-up actions post-coaching see an average improvement of 13 points in Sales Readiness Index scores.

Start closing gaps and optimizing seller performance with coaching

Sales coaching, when done well, is proven to boost sales outcomes significantly. Deal coaching alone won’t cut it. The best sales leaders use a blend of deal, skills, and targeted coaching to ensure the entire sales team has what it takes to close deals.

Sales Coaching in Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle can empower you to deliver personalized, effective sales coaching at scale?

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How to Achieve Data-Driven Sales Transformation

Vivian Batman on March 18, 2024

When huge business shifts occur, companies sink or swim. Heightened customer expectations and larger buying teams have led to an onslaught of software products that simplify processes and focus on customer experiences.

Organizations that embrace these changes and adopt technology — in other words, set forth on a path to digital transformation — will find themselves well-positioned to beat out their competition and win over customers. Yet many shy away from taking on such an initiative, thinking it’s impossible to achieve given the current size of their sales team and available resources.

But it doesn’t have to be. Implementing technology and collaborating with employees makes digital transformation possible. And it often begins with your sales team. Keep reading to learn more.

What is digital transformation?

You see the term “digital transformation” everywhere, but what does it actually mean? Organizations committed to digital transformation adopt and integrate new technologies that reshape business, process, and culture models; automate certain processes; and, as a result, improve customer experiences. Spreadsheets and paper documents no longer support complex buying cycles — technology is necessary in today’s business environment.

IDC estimates that global spending on digital transformation is expected to hit $3.4 trillion by 2026.

According to IDC, global spending on digital transformation will hit
by 2026
$ 0 T

Orgs are investing in projects to modernize their infrastructures with AI, machine learning, and customer experience technologies. Digital transformation initiatives are often led by the CEO, CIO, and other senior leadership, but for them to work successfully, it requires involvement across departments.

What role does sales play in digital transformation?

Digital transformation impacts all functions of the business, but none more than sales. Sales teams have historically been a buyer’s first impression of your company. Now, buyers are doing plenty of research before ever speaking to a salesperson: visiting your website, viewing your content, and browsing your products (as well as those of your competitors).

According to Gartner, 78% of buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience, so they must have the technology and tools to maximize impact during that time. it’s also critical for sellers to make the most of these tools.

Still, salespeople have the most insight into the customer journey and should play a pivotal role in digital transformation efforts. They understand your products and services’ unique value and the best ways to communicate that to buyers. They also understand your company’s strengths and weaknesses and its daily operations. And finally, they understand how technology is essential to help employees do their jobs and create a far more pleasant experience for potential and existing customers.

Gartner reports that customers are 40% more likely to buy from sellers who tailor content to their needs — but sellers can only do this if their organization’s digital transformation has armed them with the tools and insights needed to personalize engagement.

Transforming your sales team with tech

Successful digital sales transformation fuels growth across the organization and goes beyond the blanket deployment of new technologies. A focus on automation, measurability, and how to make your sellers’ lives easier is what should guide your transformation efforts.

Data & insights

Data is at the heart of any digital transformation. The right technology provides insights into rep performance, from training engagement to content usage and time to close. These metrics help sales leadership personnel easily recognize where sellers are having success and where there are opportunities to improve.

Individualized training

Leveraging these insights, you can develop individualized learning activities for every seller. But leaders still struggle to identify gaps. According to our 2024-2025 Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report, only 40% of leaders can identify rep strengths and weaknesses for customized sales rep training.

Only

of leaders can identify rep strengths and weaknesses for customized sales rep training.
0 %

Digitally transformed sales enablement teams leverage tools that allow for customized training and hands-on learning activities automatically assigned to reps based on performance metrics — and add a level of competition with scored learning and leaderboards.

Follow up with field insights

Digitally transformed sales organizations also leverage technology that helps them ensure sellers are applying what they’ve learned during real customer interactions. Conversation intelligence goes beyond high-level performance metrics for sales leaders to gain visibility into real-world rep behaviors. From recordings and transcripts to AI-powered insights like sentiment, questions asked and answered, and more, you can pinpoint where every rep succeeds and where they fall flat when speaking to buyers — and you can arm sellers with tools to further the buying cycle.

For example, in analyzing our customer data, we found that, on average, sellers using Mindtickle share seven calls externally monthly. This is an example of how sellers in a digitally transformed salesforce can leverage conversation intelligence to elevate a prospect’s buying experiences: it enables the seller to share the transcript and recording of the call with their champion, who, in turn, is armed with the resources they need to socialize the information with their own internal stakeholders. It also makes sellers less focused on note-taking during sales conversations and more present and focused on what the prospect says.

Tailor coaching

Based on the strengths and weaknesses you’ve identified through data, conversation intelligence, and training, you’ll be armed with the information you need to design unique coaching experiences for every seller on your team. While over 80% of sellers report being coached on open deals, only 24% report being coached on long-term skills. But to effectively sell in a digital world, reps must be coached on skills ranging from systems and processes to written communications.

If individualized coaching seems like a lot of work, that’s because it can be — if you do it manually. Fortunately, leading revenue productivity platforms deliver the tools front-line leaders need to automatically schedule and launch coaching sessions and provide analytics to maximize the impact of coaching over the long term.

Critical skills for digital transformation

For your digital transformation to be successful, leadership must demonstrate certain skills, including the following:

Be transparent with employees throughout the entire planning and implementation process.

Gather input from various employees and work together to determine the best solutions for your business needs.

Create a transformation plan you feel passionate about and will dedicate yourself to over the weeks and months ahead.

Recognize that the process won’t go as planned and that you’ll have to adapt as circumstances change.

Ensure you take proper steps toward your goals regularly — daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Use the best platform for sales, support, and commercial transformation

Don’t view digital transformation as an obstacle to your success — think of it as an opportunity to better equip teams and gain a competitive advantage.

Mindtickle is an all-in-one platform to aid you in your digital sales transformation. Our revenue productivity tools automate tedious manual efforts for sales teams, managers, marketing departments, sales enablement people, customer success personnel, and more. With Mindtickle, you can build customizable programs with unparalleled flexibility, align these programs with your industry and business needs, and gain deep insights into program performance.

Drive digital transformation with Mindtickle

With professional services to integrate all the tools you need in one centralized platform, Mindtickle is what you need to get your revenue teams ready for anything.

Get a Personalized Demo

This post was originally published in April 2022 and was updated in March 2024. 

How One B2B Company Doubled Win Rates and Conversion 

Vivian Batman on March 5, 2024

Is your sales team drowning in a sea of software?

This B2B software leader was too. They were overloaded with tools but slashed through the clutter and doubled their win rates.

How’d they do it?

In this video, Lindsey Plocek from our Product Marketing team, shares their story. Here’s what they did:

Key takeaways

  • Aligned their revenue teams: This customer aligned all stakeholders on its revenue team, including executives and leaders from sales, marketing, and customer success. They could set clear expectations and goals by establishing a unified vision and focus areas, such as driving pipeline growth and improving deal velocity.
  • Consolidated their tech stack: By moving to Mindtickle, the company consolidated multiple disparate technologies to streamline its operations and enhance productivity. Mindtickle enabled reps to access relevant content tailored to their customers, gain insights into deal risks and blockers, receive coaching, and engage buyers more effectively.
  • Focused on improving buyer engagement: Recognizing the critical role of buyer engagement in driving sales success, the company prioritized enhancing interactions between reps and customers. By providing personalized experiences and leveraging analytics to understand buyer preferences, they were able to improve the effectiveness of their sales efforts and ultimately accelerate win rates.

Transcription

Hi, I’m Lindsay with the Mindtickle product marketing team, and I’m going to be talking about how one of our top customers improved win rates with consolidation and share some of the great learnings that they shared with us.

This customer is a high-growth B2B tech company in the customer experience space. When we talk about this customer, we’re really talking about their full revenue team. Everyone from their CEO, CRO CMO, and leaders in customer success, onboarding, and enablement were involved in this challenge. They were tasked with improving win rates by at least 4% to hit their revenue goals, and they were able to do so on key deals, driving their win rates from 15 to 30% and actually doubling them.

They also improved conversions from stage to stage in key stages by 22%. Some of the use cases they pursued were driving that revenue team alignment and accountability into best practices, building a structure to scale data-driven enablement, and coaching as well as helping reps better-engaged buyers, and providing processes to better manage and accelerate deals.

They also really focused on driving adoption of their sales methodology. The first thing that they did, right, that I really learned from was just driving that cross-functional revenue alignment. They got everyone in a room, and they talked about what does the ideal onboarding look like, the ideal structure for ongoing training, which sales methodology did they really want to use. They established a few focus areas such as driving pipeline growth and improving deal velocity. They got everyone together, and they aligned on their expectations.

From there, it became clear they needed to focus on helping their team improve buyer and customer engagement. They consolidated many disparate technologies into one solution that would help reps bind, the top used most relevant content to their book of business would help reps and managers get really rich deal insights on deal risks and blockers as well as do call coaching.

They also provided reps with a new way to engage buyers and customers in Digital Sales Rooms and really provide that personalized experience and get analytics back on what actually engaged folks. As I mentioned, streamlining their sales tech stack was a big part of this. They were able to reduce down from four or five different tools to a single solution for all of the different use cases I’m mentioning here. They reduced cost by 10s of 1000s of dollars annually. They also simplified usage to drive the adoption of the tools that they implemented.

So that is how one company we work with reduced tech chaos to accelerate win rates. If you have questions, please reach out and hope you learned something interesting today. Thank you.

How to Use Your CMS, DSRs, and CRM to Inform Your Content Strategy

Vivian Batman on February 29, 2024

Is traditional sales content management stifling your org’s growth potential?

In this video, Mindtickle Principal Product Marketing Manager Christian Pieper outlines how orgs can build a content strategy using data from your CMS, DSRs and CRM.

The result? 

A content strategy that’s driven by data and perfectly aligned with the buyer journey. 

Key takeaways

Here’s the rundown of the key things Christian recommends for revenue enablement pros:

Centralize your content management:

  • Consolidate all sales content into one centralized platform to reduce administrative burden and increase adoption.
  • Bring content from various sources into a unified location for better visibility and data centralization.
  • One company reduced admin burden by 40% and increased content adoption by consolidating training and external content.

Layer engagement data

  • Move beyond merely attributing content usage to deals and instead focus on understanding how content impacts deals.
  • Use Digital Sales Rooms to track engagement with content by internal and external audiences.
  • Layer engagement data on top of usage data to gain insights into how content affects deals at different stages.

Plan your content strategically

  • Plan content around the buyer journey by integrating DSRs with your CRM.
  • Understand the buyer journey to create content that addresses specific buyer needs.
  • Identify high-performing pieces and focus on creating impactful content that aligns with buyer behavior.

Transcription

Hi, I’m Christian Pieper principal product marketer at Mindtickle. I’m excited to share this video as part of our series on reducing your technology chaos. Today specifically, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use different pieces of technology related to your sales content to inform your content strategy.

Again, the biggest problem people have with content is that they don’t know what’s happening. A big part of what we will talk about today is understanding how your content is being used. And using all of that data to find actual ways to improve the strategy you’re using for building and deploying content.

The first tip I’m going to talk about is how having all your content in one place helps streamline your efforts. The next one I’ll talk about is how layering engagement data on top of your usage data can help you understand the impact of content, not just how often it was used. And finally, I’m just talking about how you can structure your content in a way that makes it more likely that your sellers will use your content to move deals forward.

I already mentioned this, but if you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t inform your content strategy using data. Most places don’t know what’s being shared by whom and in what ways, and that’s usually because content is being housed in all kinds of places. Different solutions may be on the seller’s hard drive.

Ultimately, you want to bring all of your content into one place to reduce admin burden, increase your adoption, and centralize that data. This is critical. I spoke with the head of enablement and midmarket tech company recently, and they were facing a major problem before where they had their training content in one place, and their content for external audiences in another and sellers weren’t using either solution. They didn’t have good data, they didn’t know what was happening. So they consolidated all that together, and they estimated that they reduced their admin burden by 40% while increasing their adoption in both training and external content use. Now they’re gathering data on how that content is impacting deals.

I want to stress that it’s not enough just to attribute cost to attribute content usage to deals. Yeah, you can say this content was used in these deals. And these deals were worth X dollars. But you’re not saying anything about how that content impacted those deals, maybe those closed. Despite the use of that content. Maybe that content was instrumental, you don’t know.

To understand that, you have to layer engagement data on top of your usage data. That’s why it’s really important to use good sales tech that will allow you to track engagement with your content both by your internal and external audiences.

Digital Sales Rooms is an amazing piece of new tech that really helps you understand who is engaging with your content in the buyer organization,and at what points in your deals. That way, you can see how it’s impacting deals at different stages. And not just that it was used but to what effect. By comparing these two pieces of data, you can also discover opportunities for your strategy.

If content is used not very often but generates great engagement when it is you need to find a way to impact to improve the usage of that content, you might want to include it in templates for your digital sales herbs, might want to put it in the sales place your sellers use to understand how to sell to different personas. Regardless, you will have to find a way to get it used more often.

Now, if you have continents being used a lot and generating a little engagement, you probably have identifying content that isn’t doing its job; you should find a way to make that content more impactful. You want to look at slide-level analytics and adapt. For example, which slides are people engaging with the most get rid of the ones that they aren’t engaging with and focus on the stuff that they care about, that will help you generate content that impacts deals more effectively.

Finally, I want to talk about ways you can streamline your content by identifying it or by planning it around your buyer journey. To do that you have to understand your buyer journey. Again, if you’re sharing content from your hard drive and email if your sellers are doing that, you’re not going to know how the content is impacting the buyer journey.

But if you’re using digital sales rooms, if those are integrated with your CRM, then you’re going to know what content is being shared at what points and what kind of engagement it’s generating. That should help you understand the jobs that your buyers are trying to do and the questions that you’re trying to answer. And that can help you make content that accomplishes those jobs and answers those questions.

In the end result for this is overwhelmingly found when you look at the data inside your sales content solution, a small percentage of your content is generating the vast majority of your engagement. Look for your content superstars and make more of that make less stuff but make stuff that gets used much more often.

This is based on a really amazing presentation I saw from Kathleen Pierce at Forrester – if, you have a subscription at Forrester, I’d highly encourage you to seek her out and have her brief you on her question-based framework for content. It really helps you align your content strategy around data that you generate about your buyer behavior.

Hope this video was helpful on how you can reduce your chaos by consolidating technology and making it more impact. If you want more actionable insights. Please click our scan. This QR code will take you to more videos from my colleagues that will answer how you can do this and other ways in your organization. Thanks for your time and good luck out there.

What is Marketing Enablement and How is it Different From Sales Enablement?

Vivian Batman on January 3, 2024

Generic, one-size-fits-all marketing no longer works. Modern buyers expect personalized experiences – wherever they are on the purchase journey.

But often, organizations struggle to deliver marketing that resonates with buyers.

That’s where marketing enablement comes in.

In this post, we’ll explore what marketing enablement is, why it’s important, and how it differs from sales enablement. We’ll also share tips and best practices for an effective marketing enablement plan.

What is marketing enablement?

Today’s B2B buyers are more informed than ever. Oftentimes, they’ve done plenty of research on their own before engaging with a sales rep. In addition, these buyers have high expectations for outstanding experiences.

Marketing teams are under pressure to develop campaigns, content, and initiatives that resonate with these discerning buyers. Marketing enablement can help marketing teams deliver.

Let’s set the stage with a marketing enablement definition.

marketing enablement definition on an orange background

Essentially, marketing enablement is a practice focused on equipping marketing teams with the tools, data, information, and training they need to be better at their jobs. When marketing teams have what they need, they can create more effective, efficient campaigns and content that attract prospects and help move them through the funnel.

Marketing enablement helps ensure marketing teams better understand their buyers. This is foundational to any successful marketing program.

Marketing enablement also equips teams with the marketing enablement tools and resources they need to develop content and campaigns that engage buyers throughout the sales cycle.

Finally, marketing enablement also equips marketing teams with data (often, within a marketing enablement tool) that enables them to understand how (or whether) their content, campaigns, and other initiatives are impacting sales outcomes. With these insights, marketing teams can better align with sales and focus their attention on creating optimized content and campaigns that will improve sales outcomes.

Marketing enablement vs. sales enablement: What’s the difference?

In the world of B2B sales, marketing enablement, and sales enablement are two phrases we hear often. Sometimes, marketing enablement and sales enablement are even used interchangeably.

Both marketing enablement and sales enablement have the power to improve sales engagement and drive revenue growth. But marketing enablement and sales enablement aren’t the same thing.

Marketing enablement

Aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing initiatives.

Sales enablement

Aims to ensure every seller is ready to take on any deal that comes their way.

Marketing enablement aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing initiatives. The goal is to ensure marketing initiatives – including content and campaigns – resonate with buyers. Optimized marketing activities increase buyer engagement. When buyers are engaged, it’s easier for sales reps to shepherd them to the next stage of the purchase journey.

On the other hand, sales enablement aims to ensure every seller is ready to take on any deal that comes their way. Sales enablement teams collaborate with key teams including sales, marketing, and sales ops to identify the key skills and competencies a seller needs to be successful in the field. Then, they develop and deliver myriad initiatives – including onboarding, training, content, information, and coaching – that enable those sellers to develop the skills and competencies needed to close more deals.

While marketing enablement and sales enablement are different practices, there are some similarities.

As we’ve already covered, both marketing and sales enablement can positively impact buyers’ experiences and enable reps to close more deals. In addition, both practices rely on the right data and technology to drive their activities. For example, sales enablement can leverage data available in their sales enablement platform to determine how many sales reps completed a recent training – and whether it impacted seller performance. On the other hand, marketing teams can leverage data in a marketing enablement platform to determine whether a piece of content is being used – and whether it’s impacting the outcome of deals.

Finally, effective marketing enablement and sales enablement both require a customer-centric mindset. Teams must understand their buyers – including their key opportunities and challenges. These buyer personas must be the north star of any marketing enablement or sales enablement activity.

What are the key benefits of marketing enablement?

Marketing enablement isn’t exactly a new concept. But recently, a growing number of organizations have started to adopt this practice.

The growing popularity of marketing enablement isn’t surprising. Marketing enablement – when it’s done well – delivers plenty of benefits. Let’s take a look at a few.

Improved alignment between marketing and sales

All too often, marketing and sales teams act as adversaries, rather than partners. Per a LinkedIn report, nine in 10 sales and marketing professionals indicate they are misaligned around strategy, content, process, and culture.

0 out of 10

Sales and marketing professionals think they're misaligned

This misalignment is costly. According to a Harvard Business Review article, misalignment between sales and marketing costs businesses an estimated $1 trillion each year.

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Sales and marketing pros feel that aligned messaging and initiatives lead to better customer experiences.

Marketing enablement facilitates better alignment between these two key teams. Sales and marketing collaborate to ensure that marketing initiatives are aligned with sales processes and goals. This alignment allows for better experiences for buyers. The same LinkedIn report found that 90% of sales and marketing professionals feel that aligned messaging and initiatives lead to better customer experiences.

Of course, when customers have better experiences, they’re more likely to make a purchase.

More effective lead generation

A key responsibility of many marketing teams is to generate leads for the sales team. All too often, lead generation efforts fall short. Maybe a particular campaign delivered fewer leads than expected. Or perhaps another campaign generated a high volume of leads, but the conversion rate was extremely low because the leads weren’t a good fit for what sellers are offering.

Marketing enablement empowers marketing teams to boost their lead-generation efforts. By aligning with the sales process and understanding how buyers are engaging, marketing teams can develop compelling campaigns and content that attract a high volume of good-fit leads. Then, marketing can serve up these quality leads to the sales team, who can guide them through the sales process.

Better buyer engagement

Today’s buyers are more informed than ever before. Generic will no longer do. Instead, they expect content, information, and experiences that are tailored to their specific needs.

Marketing enablement ensures marketing teams have the data, tools, and resources they need to develop content, campaigns, and messaging that resonate with buyers throughout the purchase journey. When buyer engagement increases, so too does purchase likelihood.

Increased content ROI

In the past, marketing teams would develop and launch marketing campaigns and content – and then hope for the best. There was no easy way to understand how buyers and sellers were (or weren’t) engaging with content – and how specific content and campaigns were (or weren’t) impacting sales outcomes.

With marketing enablement, marketing teams have access to rich data and analytics that help them understand how their initiatives are performing. This includes:

  • Whether a piece of content is being used
  • How a piece of content is being used by both sellers and buyers
  • How an initiative is impacting revenue

With this insight, marketers can make optimizations, prioritize their time and effort on what’s proven to work, and drive better ROI from their content, campaigns, and other efforts.

Tips for an effective marketing enablement plan

The importance of marketing enablement is clear. Marketing enablement – when it’s done well – can enhance marketing effectiveness and efficiency. Better marketing leads to better sales outcomes.

But what does an effective marketing enablement plan look like? There’s no easy answer. It depends on many factors, including size, industry, and marketing scope – among others.

However, there are some best practices for developing a successful marketing enablement plan.

Determine goals
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Collaborate with sales
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Conduct an audit
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Store content
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Partner with enablement
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Analyze & improve
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What are the goals of your marketing enablement efforts? Be sure to document them. For example, you might aim to increase lead generation or improve the ROI of your content.

Be sure your goals are specific and measurable. In addition, they should align with the goals of your sales team and the organization as a whole.

A marketing enablement plan shouldn’t be created solely by the marketing team. Instead, it should be a collaborative effort, incorporating input from teams including sales and sales enablement.

Sales teams know their customers best. They can provide valuable insight into what is resonating with buyers – and what is making it easier (or harder) to close deals.

Marketing should also collaborate with sales enablement. After all, sales enablement teams help ensure sellers understand how to use the content that’s available to them.

One of the foundational steps of marketing enablement is to take an inventory of all existing marketing assets. Once all content is accounted for, the marketing team can determine which assets need to be refreshed and which should be eliminated.

After your content inventory is complete, map your existing assets to the customer journey. This exercise can help you understand where there is a need for additional marketing support.

Taking inventory of content seems simple enough. But that’s not always the case.

Oftentimes, marketing content is stored in multiple, disparate systems. It can be challenging to get a handle on all content.

A best practice is to store all marketing content in a single system of record. A content management system within a sales productivity platform is an ideal marketing enablement tool.

Storing your content in a central location ensures your sales reps can always find the latest and greatest versions of the content they need for any sales scenario. In addition, a content management system makes it easy to update, delete, or add new content.

Once you’ve developed new content and campaigns, it’s important to ensure sellers know about it. Sales reps need to understand how marketing initiatives fit in with their sales process – and how they can use marketing content to move deals forward.

Be sure to partner with the sales enablement team to develop a plan for enabling sellers.

Data is a critical component of an effective marketing enablement strategy. Be sure you’re tapping into technology to measure the effectiveness of your messaging, content, and campaigns. Then, use this data to optimize accordingly.

For example, you can leverage your sales productivity platform to understand how buyers and sellers are engaging with a particular piece of content and how it is (or isn’t) improving deal outcomes. These insights can be used to optimize content.

In addition, ask for feedback from sales on an ongoing basis. Sales reps are meeting with customers all day. They have a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not.

Supercharge your marketing enablement strategy with Mindtickle

Modern buyers have high expectations for outstanding experiences. Generic marketing initiatives won’t cut it.

Today, a growing portion of organizations are turning to marketing enablement to deliver marketing that resonates with buyers throughout the sales cycle. It’s a win-win for marketing and sales alike. Better marketing leads to greater customer engagement. Engaged buyers are more likely to make a purchase.

Effective marketing enablement requires the right marketing enablement tools. Today, some of the world’s best organizations turn to Mindtickle to supercharge their marketing enablement strategy.

With Mindtickle’s integrated revenue productivity platform, sellers can easily access the content they need in any sales scenario. They can leverage training and coaching to better understand how to use the content and messaging that’s available to them.

Marketing teams turn to Mindtickle to understand how sales reps and buyers are engaging with content – and whether it’s impacting sales results. Marketing teams can use these insights to make optimizations that lead to better performance and ROI.

Enablement in Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle can boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing? Contact us to schedule a live, personalized demo.

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What is Virtual Selling and How Has it Evolved?

Vivian Batman on December 13, 2023

Ever since pandemic lockdowns inspired companies to think outside the box, virtual selling has been firmly in the spotlight.

It’s not a new concept, but as technology advances and customer expectations grow ever more complex, virtual sales — and the people, training and tools that enable it — must continuously evolve.

Learn more about virtual selling, how it’s evolved, and what your reps need to know to jump in.

According to McKinsey

of B2B orgs expect hybrid reps to become the most common sales role
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What is virtual selling?

Virtual selling, as you’ve probably guessed, is a sale completely orchestrated by technology. However, it’s not the same as simply making a sale online — so what is virtual sales and what does the term really mean?

The difference is that the former uses technology to complete a process designed for in-person interactions. The latter is built from the ground up to be an entirely virtual experience — one that reimagines sales rather than just repackaging it.

Part of this difference is due to evolution driven by B2C buying experiences and expectations. Virtual selling is a response to changing customer demands; for example, 56% of surveyed shoppers said they like the flexibility of shopping on their own schedule, while 50% noted they like the convenience of avoiding shopping trips.

What do B2C buyers like about virtual shopping?

Flexibility of shopping on their own schedule
56%
Convenience of avoiding shopping trips
50%

5 challenges of virtual selling

Although the right virtual selling software and skills can make digital interactions feel just as real as face-to-face experiences, there are certain drawbacks to this method. Here are a few key examples:

Sales reps may feel that their interactions are more limited and their ability to personalize service is reduced. This can leave virtual sales feeling a bit distant, hollow, or mechanical.

Many reps find it easier to build trust in face-to-face interactions where body language, proximity, and even a friendly handshake are all at their disposal. While connection over a distance is one of the biggest benefits of virtual selling, it can also be a drawback.

Virtual communication means there can be a lot of noise during a deal – whether it’s in the form of emails, Zoom meetings, phone calls, etc. Sellers have to rely on virtual-only communication with a prospect and it’s more likely that things can get lost (or go completely unseen) when shared digitally.

In some industries, demonstrating and showing a product in person is a huge differentiator. In-person product demos also allow sellers to give buyers hands-on experience and create a lasting impression. When everything is virtual, the power of the product can sometimes be lost.

33% of employees worry about what remote work can do to company culture, especially when it comes to connection, communication, and collaboration. That’s particularly relevant for sales, marketing, and customer success teams, who need to be on the same page to manage virtual selling tools and experiences.

A virtual selling environment may not be as engaging to some customers because it isn’t as immediate and all-encompassing. For example, shoppers in a conference room can’t exactly switch to another tab to check the weather or browse social media while a rep talks to them.

Distractions can include kids, pets, home noise, and all kinds of tech trouble. This can make virtual sales feel more disconnected for both the reps and the customers.

Research shows challenges with virtual selling

[Source: The RAIN Group Virtual Selling Skills and Challenges Report]

Gaining a buyer's attention and keeping buyer engaged
91%
Changing buyer's point of view on what's possible or how to solve a problem
89%
Developing relationships with buyers virtually
88%
Connecting with buyers and building rapport
87%
Overcoming objections and dealing with resistence
87%
Collaborating and interacting with buyers virtually
82%
Prospecting and filling the pipeline virtually
81%
Making the transition to virtual selling
80%
Leading virtual needs discovery
80%
Educating buyers with new ideas and perspectives
79%

Best practices for virtual selling

While there are certainly challenges in virtual sales, there are also plenty of remote-selling best practices to set your reps up for success. And virtual selling does work. According to McKinsey research, 75% of decision-makers think virtual engagement serves buyers equally well or even better than the shift to remote work.

According to McKinsey

of decision-makers think virtual engagement serves buyers equally well or better than in-person
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Here are some tips for making sure your virtual meetings are successful:

  • Have a professional setup: Good lighting and technology can make a huge difference, especially when it comes to eliminating distractions. Blur your surroundings or use branded background images to keep the focus on you — and don’t forget to dress to impress.
  • Take every virtual selling training opportunity: Virtual selling skills aren’t the same as in-person selling skills. Use training and coaching as a chance to learn more about the environment, customer expectations, best practices, and more.
  • Share data-driven sales materials: Different kinds of media can help grab and keep a prospect’s attention. Use videos, infographics, product images, and any data-driven material you can offer virtually.
  • Create follow-up and nurture strategies: Losing contact in the virtual world is easy. Make sure you follow up with prospects to stay top-of-mind — and always leverage nurture strategies to gradually reel them in over time.

4 best virtual selling tools

To capture all the benefits of virtual selling, you need a fully digitized environment, including sales rooms, enablement materials and more. Remember, you can’t just adapt existing sales techniques to the digital world; you have to completely reimagine them and build every step with technology in mind.

Here are some of the best virtual selling software options:

  • Zoominfo logo

    B2B database: Zoominfo

    Zoominfo is a business-to-business (B2B) tool that connects revenue teams to customers. It unites sales, marketing, operations and talent via data-driven software and interconnected platforms.

  • Video conferencing: Zoom

    Aside from being flexible, easy to use and full of additional features such as email and calendar integration, Zoom has the benefit of being familiar to just about everyone. This video conferencing platform enables virtual selling and a whole lot more through its connected solutions.

  • Document sharing: Google Drive

    If you’re looking for cloud storage and document sharing, you couldn’t do much better than Google’s suite of data solutions. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms — Google Drive enables you to share documents of all kinds and even integrates with the company’s email and conferencing offerings.

  • Virtual selling platform: Mindtickle

The above examples are great virtual selling tools, but you’d need to juggle more than one to succeed. Mindtickle eliminates the need to jump back and forth between different platforms.

With Mindtickle, all your sales and revenue activities are together in one place. From sales onboarding and virtual selling training to forecasting and analytics, you’ll have access to a full lineup of solutions. This enables all your teams to communicate and collaborate in a shared digital environment, allowing you to build digitally native processes tailored to your virtual selling best practices. (Check out the flipbook gallery below to see Mindtickle in action.)

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Mindtickle Sales Readiness Index screenshot
Mindtickle for Sales Kickoffs

Future trends in virtual selling

As more companies discover the benefits of virtual selling, the platforms necessary to enable it, and the skills that make it more profitable, the environment will continue to shift. Trends will likely include:

  • Personalization and customization: To overcome the inherent limitations of virtual selling, reps will find new ways to personalize interactions and build sales around customized digital experiences. Marketing and sales teams will likely need to keep conversations going across multiple platforms. For example, a prospect who reaches out on social media will want continuity when switching to email or video chat.
  • AI and automation: From workflow automation to AI chatbots, new tools will make it even easier to build digital-first processes and eliminate manual tasks that slow down your reps’ days.
  • Self-service: Self-service solutions enable prospects to do their own research, essentially letting them be their own sales reps until they need more in-depth support. This saves time and money while boosting customer satisfaction.

How Mindtickle supports virtual selling

If you’re looking for a way to bring it all together — virtual selling tools, skills, best practices, and whole teams — this is it.

Mindtickle doesn’t just put your processes in one place. It enables reps to do more and sell more by better utilizing digital tools, data, sales enablement materials, and even coaching opportunities. Top solutions include:

  • Sales training: Individualized goals, AI-supported lessons, practice opportunities, and consistent reinforcement — that’s all part of Mindtickle sales training.
  • Analytics: Role-based dashboards and customized insights help you track your teams’ progress and identify skills or knowledge gaps in real time.
  • Conversation intelligence: Help your reps sharpen their virtual selling skills by tapping into sales conversations, identifying best practices, and supporting growth across your team.

See Mindtickle in Action

Enable your reps to do more and sell more by better utilizing digital tools, data, sales enablement materials, and coaching opportunities.

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This post was originally published in June 2023 and updated in December 2023. 

8 Cold Calling Tips for Sellers and Sales Leaders 

Vivian Batman on December 5, 2023

Let’s not beat around the bush: nobody likes getting cold calls.

Buyers are already short on time, and the last thing they want is to listen to another sales pitch.

As sellers, you’re even more in the hot seat. Research from our 2023 State of Sales Productivity Report found that during a call, buyers asked an average of 18 questions, a significant increase from 13 questions in the 2022 report. This means customers are scrutinizing purchases more and are even more reluctant to take a cold call.

Number of questions buyers ask on calls
0

Because many selling orgs maintain call quotas for their sales reps to achieve on a monthly or quarterly basis, sellers need tips on how to make these calls less cringe-worthy and more effective at getting that meeting booked.

Here are our tips for both sellers and sales enablement leaders on how to make your sellers amazing cold callers.

First things first: Is cold calling legal?

Yes, cold calling is generally legal, although specific regulations may vary depending on the country and jurisdiction. In many places, cold calling is allowed as long as it complies with certain rules and guidelines. For example, businesses may need to adhere to laws governing telemarketing practices, such as obtaining prior consent from recipients or respecting “Do Not Call” registries.

It’s critical for organizations to familiarize themselves with the relevant laws and regulations in their region to ensure compliance and maintain ethical business practices. Seeking legal advice or consulting industry-specific guidelines can help businesses navigate the legal landscape surrounding cold calling.

8 tips to nail your next cold call

Use these tips to warm up your cold calls and have more engaging and impactful conversations.

#1. Do your research

Do you actually know who you’re calling? No, we don’t mean their title, company, and industry — while this is important, to really engage the buyer, you must understand their pain points and business needs. The more information you have, the better you can gauge their level of interest and engage them with relevant messaging right off the bat. The following are some of the most effective methods for research:

  • Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are keyword research tools that provide insight into what questions buyers are asking, what pain points they’re searching for, and what other brands are ranking for those keywords.
  • Posts on LinkedIn profiles and company pages can reveal what topics and challenges are most important to the buyer and their company/industry.
  • Search engines and social profiles provide insights into any events the company sponsored or attended, funding and other corporate milestones, and more.
  • Account intelligence tools like 6sense or UpLead dig even deeper to match online behaviors to certain IPs so you can identify a specific buyer’s activities and tailor your conversation based on them.

You may also find that the company isn’t a great fit for your product. In this case, you can cross them off your list and avoid wasting time for both parties.

Prioritize sales training that focuses on understanding buyer pain points and business needs for effective engagement.

Use keyword research, LinkedIn posts, search engines, social profiles, and account intelligence tools to gather relevant information.

#2. Don’t start with a sales pitch

In addition to knowing details about the person you’re calling, stand out from other vendors with a more conversational approach. Buyers are expecting a generic, robotic sales pitch — surprise them by aligning the value proposition to the research you’ve done. If your organization has a cold call script or template, try not to read directly from it — you’ll sound over-rehearsed as a result. Instead, use the script as a guide for staying focused and keeping the discussion on track.

Use a conversation intelligence tool to listen to calls to understand if sellers are immediately bombarding buyers with a sales pitch. Assign training to help them improve. 

If you sound like you’re reading from a script that pitches your product, your call will likely end sooner than you’d like. Simply use the script as a guide for the conversation to keep it on track.

#3 Keep things brief

Make sure you’re not disengaging the person from the outset by delivering a monologue about yourself and your company. Research from the 2023 State of Sales Productivity Report found that the average longest monologue delivered by reps is 2 minutes 43 seconds. The longest monologues happen when the rep either talks through a ton of content or provides a nervous response to a customer question that they were ill-prepared to handle. Talking in short snippets during cold calls is important to maintain engagement, convey key points efficiently, and avoid overwhelming the buyer with information.

Coach sellers on the art of orchestrating conversations rather than making presentations.

Don’t overwhelm the buyer by rapid-firing a monologue at them from the outset. Speak 1-2 sentences and then listen.

#4. Prove your value

You could talk all day about how effective your product is, but showing what your current customers have to say provides much more legitimate evidence of the value you can bring to the prospect. Share proof of the value of your company and products with the buyer, including first-hand customer testimonials and reviews on rating sites like G2. Awards and other professional recognition can also be testaments to how your organization serves its employees and customer base.

You can get valuable voice of the customer insights from a sales productivity tool. Infuse those learnings into your sales training so sellers can quickly and naturally mention those anecdotes during cold calls.

Real-life examples from customers tell the story better than you can. Make sure you have a few customer stories in your back pocket for every use case.

#5 Practice active listening

Just because you did some research upfront doesn’t mean you know everything about the buyer. In your first conversation with them, your focus should be on learning as much as you can about the team, company, industry, competitive landscape, existing tech stack, and more. This is a win-win: you get deeper, first-hand insights into this potential customer, and the buyer will appreciate you taking the time to understand the issues they’re facing and answer questions meaningfully.

Incorporate role-plays into your sales training program so sellers can practice cold-calling scenarios and get feedback about how well they’ve listened.

You’re there to learn. Give buyers the opportunity to talk about their pain points and make listening your main focus during cold calls.

#6 Find the best calling schedule

Don’t take advantage of a buyer’s time and be considerate about when you’re calling. They are likely tackling a long to-do list, and you will only irritate them if you call when they’re bogged down with meetings and other work. Calling closer to lunch or the end of the day, when people are preparing for a break, has a higher likelihood of success. Research shows that calls are most likely to be answered between 10 and 11am and 4 and 5pm. Remember, not everyone you call is in the same time zone, so be mindful of that before you dial.

Ask reps for feedback as part of your sales training program. If some reps have more success during a certain time of day, share that learning with the rest of your team.

Respect a buyer’s time by calling strategically only during optimal hours.

#7 Leave an impactful voicemail

Voicemails are tough. We know that only 11% of voicemails lead to a return call. Rather than giving up hopes of engaging the person on the other hand, leave them a message that will grab their attention. Demonstrate what you know about the individual, their company, their pain points, and how your solution can help. Avoid cramming too much information into the voicemail — keep it at a tight 20 seconds at most. Convey some energy and urgency and follow up within a week if you don’t hear back.

Use coaching sessions as an opportunity to coach sellers on how to leave an effective voicemail.

Leave attention-grabbing voicemails demonstrating knowledge, energy, and urgency. Follow up.

#8 Set proper next steps

You’re not closing any deals on the first call, so it’s important to establish clear steps agreed upon by both parties. These could include sending over additional resources, setting up a demo, or waiting a few months before touching base again. Rather than forcing them into your sales process, let the prospect bring you into their timeline and be respectful of how they would like to move forward. If they say they aren’t interested or ready, give them an appropriate amount of time before calling them again.

Coach sellers on how to create urgency with buyers so these cold calls lead to the next step.

Trust and listen to buyer’s process.

Other ways to reach prospects besides cold calling

Changing up your outreach methods helps relationship-building and engages buyers in a way that suits their preferences. Here are a few common ways to connect with buyers that don’t require picking up the phone:

Email marketing

Social media

Trade shows

Direct mail

 

Email marketing

Send your prospects personalized content that addresses their specific pain points. Make sure to use a combo of automated and personalized outreach but always ensure you’re sharing content that’s relevant to the buyer’s persona and pain points.

Social media engagement

Use LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks to connect with buyers. This is also a place where you can show off your creativity and personalize your outreach. Like email outreach, make sure you’re sharing content or ideas that engage your buyer. Groups and discussion forums are also a great way to position yourself as a thought leader without coming across as “too salsey.”

Networking events and conferences

In-person events might seem like an obvious one but it’s true: Take advantage of industry-specific events, conferences, and trade shows to meet buyers face-to-face. Meeting buyers in person allows for more meaningful connections and gives you a chance to show off your products or services.

Personalized direct mail

While direct mail might have fallen out of style as an engaging outreach tactic, it’s made a comeback. A carefully crafted, physical piece of mail can stand out in a digital world and leave a lasting impression.

How else are you building pipeline?

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This post was originally published in June 2023 and was updated in December 2023. 

How to Develop a Sales Training Program Personalized for Each Rep at Scale

Vivian Batman on November 27, 2023

Two sales reps walk into the office. (No, this isn’t the start of a joke — we promise.)

One has two years’ experience and has been with your company that whole time.

The other has decades of experience but joined a few months ago and has only recently completed their onboarding.

Companies need to develop personalized sales training programs for their sales teams at scale so they can achieve and maintain sales excellence across the organization. Otherwise, companies will see their sales teams living out the 80/20 rule, with the top 20% of their reps delivering 80% of their revenue and the rest of the team underachieving.

This blog is your guide to developing a sales training program that you can easily personalize for each rep — no matter the size of your sales team.

Given their different skills, knowledge, and experience, does it make sense for them both to go through the same sales training program?

Ad hoc sales training

Personalized sales training

  • One-size-fits all
  • Sporadic approach to training
  • Some reps benefit from your training
  • Low impact on overall team performance
  • One-and-done approach to training

 

  • Personalized to the needs of individual reps

  • Ongoing approach to developing skills 

  • All reps benefit from tailored training

  • Impact on overall team performance

  • Training is supported by reinforcement 

     

Define excellence for your sales team

Your reps need to master the right skills, knowledge, and behaviors if they’re going to successfully hit quota every month. Of course, you can train and coach reps to help them develop those abilities, but only if you’ve worked out what they need to learn.

Identify the skills and behaviors that correlate with positive sales outcomes. Then, use these to create an ideal rep profile (IRP) that documents the skills, knowledge, and behaviors your sales reps need to succeed. An IRP can be modeled on your top performers or based on competencies and skills you want to encourage in your sales team but don’t yet see in action.

 

Ideal rep profile competencies

 

Your IRP will combine product and industry knowledge, sales skills, and communication behaviors to build a detailed list of the competencies that will enable your reps to meet (or exceed) quota and improve their win rates. For example, you may want your sellers to excel at:

  • Using consistent product messaging on sales calls
  • Handling prospect objections effectively
  • Tailoring product demos to prospects’ needs or areas of concern
  • Using minimal filler words on calls so they sound confident
  • Getting the right balance of talk time and listening time, so they don’t dominate conversations with prospects

The examples in this list are some skills and competencies that make for a successful sales rep. But by looking at your recent deals, product, and reps’ skills, you can build out a more granular ideal rep profile that’s specific to your company and products.

Ideal rep profile key competencies

Define the outcomes for each sales training program

Once you’ve mapped out the IRP that your organization needs to succeed, you can plan out courses and programs that focus on each area. Start by defining the outcomes for each training program. The outcomes should align with the core skills, knowledge, and behaviors laid out in your IRP. For example:

  • Knowledge-based training programs based on role or different product features help reps manage the sales cycle and run product demos tailored to prospects’ needs
  • Behavior training programs help reps spot when they’re using filler words so they can reduce the frequency of using them on calls
  • Skills training programs on common objections help reps handle prospects’ objections confidently

Identify reps’ personalized sales training needs

Your sellers all have different levels of experience, skills, and knowledge gaps, which means they’ll get more out of personalized training programs than a one-size-fits-all training session. On small sales teams, managers may be able to assess their reps’ training needs by manually reviewing their work and listening back to their calls on a regular basis. But in large or fast-growing companies, managers can’t be as hands-on with their reps’ ongoing performance.

Instead, you can use technology to monitor performance, recording and analyzing customer calls and other interactions to understand how each rep conducts themself in real-world selling scenarios. A conversational intelligence tool like Mindtickle’s Call AI analyzes all your team’s sales conversations to identify skills and behaviors that need improvement, such as their tone, talk time, and use of filler words.

It’s easier to personalize training for your reps if you have multiple courses that map to different competencies rather than a single sales masterclass or lots of ad-hoc training activities without an overarching strategy.

Mindtickle Call AI with conversation intelligence insights

You can use that data to compare each rep’s skills, knowledge, and competencies against the standards set out in your ideal rep profile. This will help you identify areas where each rep excels and where they need to focus on improving.

Greg Myers, regional VP of sales at Turing Video, explained how Mindtickle helps him identify opportunities for his sellers to improve their messaging. “I can’t spend my entire workday listening to every single recorded meeting conducted by our sales reps, but it’s still important that I make sure their conversations are productive and on message,” he said.

"One of the best features of Call AI is its ability to search call transcripts for specific questions that should be asked. From there, we can start to refine reps’ questions to make sure we elicit the right information from the customer."
Greg Myers
VP of Sales, Turing Video

You can use the insights from call recordings and analysis to identify the key skills and knowledge each rep needs to develop. Identifying the skills gaps of each rep means you can determine the training programs that are most relevant to each person and will have the biggest impact on their work.

Topics for of sales training

  • Competitive intelligence
  • Sales methodology
  • Sales tools
  • Sales cycle processes
  • Product releases
  • Messaging & positioning
  • Onboarding
  • Campaign enablement
  • Marketing reports & resources
  • Pricing & packaging

Create a library of sales training materials

The most successful sales training programs combine self-guided learning with coaching to allow reps to learn the theory and then put it into practice. You need a library of training materials in different formats — educational content and interactive exercises — for sellers to work through for the self-guided part of their programs.

Your training library should include materials to help reps develop across all the areas defined in your ideal rep profile. Resources could include:

  • Datasheets on different product features
  • Video courses covering core skills like sales prospecting or outlining the different stages of your company’s sales process
  • Quizzes to recap courses reps have already reviewed to improve information retention through spaced reinforcement

Work with experts across your organization to build out training materials for your sellers. While sales training or enablement leaders may feel like they need to produce all the content themselves, they should engage other team members instead.

Your product team is an expert in that area, so they should help with modules about different features. Your marketing team can help you develop training on key messaging to help ensure there is consistency when sellers talk with prospects. And sales managers can help you put together courses to help reps learn about your sales process or ideal customer profile.

Using a revenue productivity platform like Mindtickle, you can set up a centralized content library in your sales content management system. You can build programs for different skills and topics, and your sellers can work through the programs that are most relevant to them. It is important that you can easily manage training content at scale, one where you can update or replace resources in just a few clicks.

Add dedicated sales coaching to self-guided learning

Traditionally, sales training has meant one-to-one coaching, where reps receive in-person training from their managers. But, in large organizations, remote companies, or fast-growing sales teams, your sales manager will become the bottleneck that holds back reps’ development because they don’t have enough time to train their teams and work toward the company’s revenue targets.

Technology like Mindtickle can help scale up your training and sales coaching by enabling reps to practice skills and sales scenarios on their own in a low-stakes environment. For example, they can complete virtual role-plays and record practice demos or training exercises on common sales scenarios like objection handling. Then they’ll receive AI-powered recommendations on their tone, length, pacing, and use of filler words to coach them on behavioral best practices.

Mindtickle Missions

The rep’s manager can then analyze their performance to identify skills and knowledge gaps without spending (at least) 30 minutes per rep watching their practice demo. After this analysis, the manager can compare the rep’s skills against the IRP. Then they can recommend specific training exercises or modules from your training library to any areas of weakness.

Sally Cox, instructional designer, global field enablement at Splunk, explained how using Mindtickle has helped them tailor coaching and training materials for their sales reps: “Managers can now create their own coaching content faster and personalize it to fit the specific needs of their reps.” Using technology to add coaching alongside self-guided learning makes it easier for managers to personalize training recommendations for their sales reps at scale.

Create ongoing training and coaching opportunities

Your sales training program shouldn’t just focus on teaching sellers new skills and sharing new information. If it did, you could get away with offering training once a quarter or on an ad-hoc basis. But sales reps need to have their skills, knowledge, and competencies regularly reinforced to ensure they retain important information and align with your company’s core messaging.

Companies need to think of sales training as a continuous process — something we here at Mindtickle call sales everboarding. The strongest sales teams (where all reps perform well rather than having a couple of top performers) have a culture of ongoing skills development and improvement through regular training and coaching.

You can develop a team culture of continuous improvement by providing ongoing training and coaching opportunities for reps and managers. Using a conversational intelligence tool like Call AI, you can analyze all your reps’ calls and sales interactions and automatically identify training opportunities and skills gaps. Managers can then recommend training programs and modules on an ongoing basis to help their reps improve.

You can also engage sellers with ongoing microlearning activities like live challenges and quizzes. These help reps improve information retention with spaced reinforcement and break their refresher training into bite-size chunks. And with an element of gamification, you can encourage some healthy competition between your reps to increase participation in your sales training.

Rethink traditional sales training with sales readiness

A structured sales readiness program is the best way for companies to change their traditional approach to sales training. The five-step framework encourages teams to pursue a continuous state of excellence across the whole sales organization by:

  1. Defining excellence
  2. Building knowledge
  3. Aligning content
  4. Analyzing performance
  5. Optimizing behavior

Instead of only providing reps with training during onboarding (plus your annual kick-off meetings), sales readiness creates a culture of learning through everboarding. By making training an ongoing process rather than an occasional investment, your sales team is always at its peak and ready for those high-value conversations with prospects.

Sales reps continually build knowledge through spaced reinforcement training exercises and microlearning activities tailored to areas where rep proficiency looks weaker. Then sales teams use AI-driven conversational intelligence to analyze reps’ performance on an ongoing basis. This enables reps (and their managers) to identify opportunities for improvement, where they can optimize skills and behavior with further personalized training.

Prioritizing sales readiness activities helps companies create a culture of sales excellence for their whole team, raising performance levels for all their reps, not just the historic top performers.

Build winning behaviors in your sales team with the help of Mindtickle

Personalized sales training programs help to set all your reps up for success and maintain a state of sales readiness. Mindtickle enables companies to move away from the cookie-cutter approach to sales training. Instead, you can build sales training programs that can be personalized to the needs of each individual rep — no matter how big or small your sales organization. 

Personalize Your Sales Training

See how Mindtickle helps you build and scale your sales training program. 

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This post was originally published in February 2022 and updated in November 2023. 

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