Is Your Sales Onboarding Giving Your New Hires Buyer’s Remorse?

Lauren Comer on October 4, 2022

Seventy-two percent of the respondents in one survey expressed they have felt remorse or regret in accepting a new job that didn’t live up to their expectations. That’s the opposite of what hiring managers want to hear after spending time, resources, and money finding the perfect candidate. Buyer’s remorse is real and it’s not something sellers should feel after just a few days on the job.

Your sales onboarding process has a direct effect on the perception new hires have about your company. Understanding how to improve the ramp-up process will increase new employee satisfaction and engagement and reduce employee churn. Here are six expert tips for making sure your new sales reps don’t feel buyer’s remorse once they’ve joined your team and begun the sales onboarding process.

Mindtickle Ramp Time EBook

Spark curiosity with engaging sales onboarding content

A pile of text-heavy learning material is not only intimidating, it’s also boring. It won’t get a new hire excited.

As Rahul Mathew, a product marketing manager here at Mindtickle, says: “If there’s too much text or assets that they need to go through, they’re just going to feel disengaged. But then how can you make it interesting for them so they feel like it’s not something being pushed down their throat, but more like something they want to do?”

The learning material must be as fun and engaging as possible to defeat new hire remorse or boredom. That can look like courses where new hires are required to interact with call recordings, practice pitches, or give feedback to colleagues as part of a process where team members learn from each other.

It’s a good idea to employ real-world use cases in learning material, so new hires can learn from past scenarios. And replicating sales situations through video recordings, audio conversations, and checklists helps new hires embrace the selling approach of your company.

Lastly, have new hires test themselves on course material via quizzes and skill assessments. This helps them practice their new skills before conversing with real prospects.

Personalize training to your new hires’ needs

Each new hire will come with a different industry background and experience. To create an exciting and relevant onboarding experience, give tailored learning according to their skill development needs.

To understand your new hires’ skill level, use assessment tests and discovery exercises during the onboarding process. This will help you acknowledge and recognize each candidate’s strengths while also developing a personalized plan to improve their weaknesses.

As Mathew puts it, “Each rep is going to have a different set of learnings. There’s gonna be a different learning curve for everybody, so there’s a need to provide individualized training. If, for example, someone is good at communication, having to go through the training again and again becomes monotonous; they’re going to disengage.

“But, of course, there are also things that same rep may not be good at and may want to focus on. That is why we’re talking about providing individualized training. And then once you’ve done this, you need to reinforce and ensure that what they’ve learned is being tested.”

In practical terms, this means developing bespoke onboarding plans that focus on strengthening a new hire’s weaknesses with the right learning material.

Avoiding redundant or unrelatable content using personalized sales training helps new hires feel less regret about their new job.

Give your new hires a vision to work toward

Clear expectations and a detailed roadmap of how to meet goals battle new hire remorse by helping new hires understand what is expected of them and how to achieve these goals. That’s where an Ideal Rep Profile comes in.

With an ideal rep profile (IRP), you’re able to formulate a “north star,” an ultimate goal to show new hires the behaviors and traits that’ll guide them toward success in their new role. This also helps new hires direct their learning efforts toward becoming an ideal rep and curtails feelings of regret when adapting to a new role.

Ideal rep profile competencies

When it comes to introducing the IRP in onboarding, Mathew gives helpful insights: “Sales leaders and managers identify all the competencies. This is the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that define what makes an ideal rep. And that can be codified within our platform. So, once you have the IRP, then you’re able to go ahead and curate or build programs around that.”

Onboarding courses and materials can then be created to replicate the strengths and strategies new hires should learn. They’re able to visualize the end goal of their efforts and understand the impact their new skills will have on sales performance.

And by having a figure to envision and achieve, employees can compare and contrast performance to pinpoint skills and strategies that need to be strengthened. As well, they will fully understand why it’s important to execute their duties in a certain way.

Guide your new hires through onboarding

New roles, tools, and company goals are overwhelming to new hires who may already feel a stark difference from their previous job. A clear roadmap to perform well in their role includes the materials each rep will need to learn and helps them overcome any feelings of confusion.

This helps sales reps control their time and understand how much should be dedicated to each learning course.

Mathew highlights the importance of time management as a key factor for onboarding success: “Let’s say you’re a learner; when you are given access to a course, you need to know how to navigate the platform. So, you need, for instance, a course map. As a learner, I know I’m expected to do five of these modules. And it’s going to take me this much time. And I need to allocate this much time towards doing this. So, that way, it’s not just that I start the course and then suddenly realize that this is taking more than four or five hours. And I honestly have just two hours to do this. So, you’re able to be in control. Do this in such a way that you’re taking it seriously, and not just stopping midway and losing that flow.”

Each course must come closely tied to a reason why and metrics that show the difference the learned skill or behavior can make to sales closing rates.

With clear onboarding guidelines and expectations, new hires won’t experience regret or be overwhelmed because they have clear next steps and are supported by their manager throughout their learning plan.

Moreover, having guided onboarding material helps your sales enablement team and managers see the progress of new hires and lets them intervene when they see any disengagement or struggles.

Encourage peer support and collaboration

Company culture plays a big role in making new hires feel welcomed and part of a team. During the onboarding process, it’s important to set the standard and show the importance of teamwork.

With peer support and collaboration, new hires can lean on their coworkers for help and get tips and resources that build trust and cooperation.

During the onboarding process, it’s important to encourage team members to learn from one another with peer reviews and personalized feedback. Creating a culture of this nature is crucial to stop new hires from feeling like they are failing at their new job and instead see feedback as an opportunity for improvement.

As cliché as the saying is, practice makes perfect, and Mathew sums up how feedback can improve performance:

“When you practice a pitch; you may want to do a few takes. You may want to correct some things, recording your attempt multiple times, and then say, ‘Hey, this is the actual pitch that I want to be judged on,’ and have that shared with an expert or a senior rep who can provide the right set of inputs.”

Nurture a feedback culture and encourage new hires to work with their team to learn from more experienced peers. The feedback, encouragement, and sense of community they receive will alleviate feelings of new job remorse.

Motivate employees with gamification

Eighty-nine percent of employees say gamification in the workplace makes them feel more productive. Gamification motivates and encourages employees to keep improving their skills in exchange for rewards and achievements.

Gamification diminishes new hire remorse by promoting status achievement and rewarding improvement. It helps new hires visualize their improved professional skills.

This is because gamification caters to the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of employees. On the one hand, they want to compete against their peers and, on the other hand, they want to feel like they’ve improved and achieved a degree of status in the company.

Mathew gives insight into the importance of gamification in the onboarding process: “In this era where we have short attention spans — how can you keep people engaged? One of the things to do is nurture engagement through encouragement. Show people where they stand; it’s a natural tendency that if I see my peers doing better, then I’m going to make extra effort to ensure I’m not at the bottom of the class and encourage competitiveness within the teams.”

Leaderboards are great tools for encouraging employees to improve their skills or for seeing which sales reps are leading so new employees can ask them for help, tips, and insights to improve their own performance.

Improve onboarding with data insights to keep new hires on track and avoid remorse

Mindtickle provides onboarding insights and readiness scores to help managers understand when it’s time to step in and check on new hires to understand their level of engagement or stress.

This can look like having a conversation to address any issues or providing new resources to make their onboarding smoother.

Mindtickle Readiness Index

Data insights help managers acknowledge employees when they’ve gained a new skill,. And with personalized data insights, managers can correlate new skills with revenue metrics to show new hires the impact of their knowledge. Each personalized approach makes employees feel appreciated and confident in their new job choice. Mindtickle delivers the data and tailored content to give new hires the relevant support needed to succeed in their roles.

Ready to learn more about Mindtickle and how to make sure your sales onboarding engages, educates, and excites your sellers? Request a Mindtickle demo today.

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

Nick Salas on April 5, 2022

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

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

Mindtickle Ramp Time EBook

What is sales ramp-up time?

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

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

How to calculate ramp-up time for sales reps

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

how to calculate ramp time

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

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

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

Method 2: Ramp-up time based on experience level

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 tips to reduce new hire ramp-up time

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

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

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

ramp up time plan

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

2. Plan your sales onboarding

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

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

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

plan sales onboarding

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

3. Provide effective sales training and coaching

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

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

Some examples of common on-demand training modules include:

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

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

4. Monitor and review progress

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

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

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

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

5. Provide training beyond your onboarding program

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support sales reps long term, not just in onboarding

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

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

Why Sales Enablement Is More Than Just Onboarding

Lauren Comer on December 28, 2021

There’s no denying that a good sales onboarding program is vital for new reps. A well-developed program will not only provide sales professionals with information about the products they’ll be selling, and the prospects they’re pitching. It will also equip them with the right questions to ask, and the likely objections they’ll face. Reps will understand the market and the best ways to deal with situations that may arise during the course of a prospect engagement. Onboarding is the foundation for success.

Onboarding is just the beginning, but too many teams stop there, neglecting the next step: sales everboarding.

If the goal of sales enablement is to equip sellers with the ability to sell, then it can’t stop at onboarding.

Every time a seller goes out into the field or picks up the phone to make a pitch, they face a fundamental problem: Which tools in my sales toolbox will help me close this particular client?

What sales enablement leaders are saying about onboarding

In today’s world, the modern seller has so many tools to use that they can struggle to pick the right one. Nick Salas, Head of Sales Readiness at Mindtickle, calls it the “moment of truth.” The point of sales enablement is to help sellers recognize that moment and prepare them with the tools to best respond to close the deal.

Salas sees two keys to closing. Sellers need to connect with the buyer, and communicate a value proposition that resonates and solves the buyer’s problem.

But they also need to handle the prospect’s objections and questions about competitors — and that requires quick-thinking and a good handle on the products and services they’re selling.

“Every second they’re in front of a prospect, they’re juggling a whole lot of stuff in their brain, and it can be hard to keep track,” says Salas.

Whether they’re newbies or veterans, sellers face these challenges every day of their careers. No matter how experienced they are, there is always a new product, new competitor, or new market change around the corner.

If these are the challenges for individual sellers, imagine how this problem multiplies for revenue leaders who may have hundreds or thousands of sellers to train, support, and keep productive.

This is why genuine sales readiness needs to be a continual process of learning, reinforcing knowledge, changing behaviors, and ongoing preparation.

“When that moment of truth comes, the rep is confident and ready,” says Salas.

Constantly equipping reps to succeed

Rehan Chishty, Enablement Platforms Manager at Okta, believes that the idea of sales readiness is to be constantly helping reps succeed in their current role, and prepare them with what they need to get to the next level — whether that be as a manager, an account executive, or whatever their career goals are. Chishty says with that in mind, onboarding is a good start, but it’s a bad place to stop.

Similarly, Damon Jones, Head of Global Strategy & Growth at Sandler Training, says sales enablement training needs to be delivered continuously to drive long-term success. For Jones, the best enablement programs incorporate repetitive activities designed to develop, test, and improve seller behaviors. At Sandler, he makes sure training modules speak directly to real-world interactions because sales enablement is about understanding the behaviors, techniques, and knowledge required to be ready to sell, no matter the situation.

“Sales reps learn what’s directly applicable to the job they’ll do out in the field — otherwise, why are we teaching them?” Jones says.

When it comes to working with reps, Michelle Dotson, Head of Sales Enablement at Zoom, starts with setting goals and then measuring their success over time. That means going beyond onboarding, because goals simply aren’t relevant unless they’re personal, actionable, and followed up on over time. Expectations need to be transparent and attainable, so she makes sure to give clear expectations from the start. But it doesn’t stop there.

“Telling someone about a goal once won’t help them achieve it,” says Dotson. “Training needs to be reinforced to be successful.”

Sales enablement requires understanding how to make reps successful

Gopkiran Rao, Chief Strategy Officer at Mindtickle, says the best sales everboarding comes from having a true understanding of what it means to be a successful salesperson and building training around those qualities.

“For any given role, start by interviewing top performers. Look at the patterns of what they do at every stage of a winning customer engagement,” says Rao.

He says sales excellence starts with a basic premise: Don’t rely on assumptions. Prepare, test, train, and repeat.

Sales enablement training can’t be a one-off, and it can’t be done on the fly. Sales leaders need to break down what reps need to know into discrete learning outcomes, then develop an ongoing curriculum to teach, test, and reinforce those outcomes over the course of the rep’s career. These learning outcomes need to be understood in terms of what a rep needs to exhibit and accomplish. And it’s important to remember that everyone learns differently, so managers must provide varied ways to learn the same thing.

For Mindtickle’s Salas, sales readiness starts even before the rep starts their first day. It’s about collecting as much data as possible to understand a sales rep’s individual training needs, and developing a long-term program for them. In fact, sales enablement data is the most valuable tool for sales excellence, says Salas. It not only helps everyone understand the progress of individual reps, but it also helps managers determine what areas of their training program require the most attention across the board.

How does your team compare to these best practices? Help your sellers be the best sales professionals they can be by using continuous learning and data driven sales enablement to be ready for anything.

When that moment of truth comes, will your team be ready to meet it? To learn more from these leaders, download our eBook, “Ramp Time to Productivity: Why Sales Everboarding is the Secret to Your Success.”

Sales Onboarding: 6 Tips to Help You Ramp Up Your Sales Reps and Accelerate Revenue

Lauren Comer on January 29, 2021

It’s been reported by the Sales Management Association that the average sales new hire spends 10 weeks in training, only becoming productive after 11.2 months. Onboarding new sales talent is a huge investment for most organizations, and getting it right can be a make or break for your business.

It’s not surprising that effective onboarding services that meet or exceed sales reps’ expectations can improve quota attainment by 16.2%, but what is surprising is how many organizations aren’t truly maximizing their reps’ time during their onboarding phase.

In this post, we wanted to share our tips for getting your sales reps ramped up quickly and enabling them to start crushing revenue targets sooner.

1. Put people before processes

It may sound simple, but in order for your onboarding efforts to be truly effective, you want to make sure that you have the right people in the right roles. When you’re hiring new reps to join your team, it’s important to evaluate based on performance metrics from their previous roles, but also soft skills.

Your reps are the faces of your company in the market, so it’s important to ensure that on top of having role-related knowledge, you’re screening reps for qualities like empathy, grit, and creativity. Having the right people on your team will make them a lot more receptive to your onboarding efforts — and help you reach your revenue targets faster.

2. Establish what success looks like for sales onboarding

When we talk about success in the onboarding phase, we’re looking at two key outcomes. Firstly, a successful ramp-up period that gives reps a complete understanding of your business and how it operates. This can include sales processes like identifying qualified opportunities and market knowledge. Then, there’s long-term success. This includes things like revenue targets and quotas — the things your reps will be measured by when they’re fully on board.

If you’re not sure of what your targets are, there’s no way you’ll be able to empower your reps to work towards them. Make sure to take the time to set measurable goals so that your team has a clear understanding of your expectations from day one. Doing so will also help provide context as your reps move through the onboarding process.

3. Build a blueprint for sales onboarding

After establishing a clear set of goals, it’s important to ensure your onboarding program maps to the skills, processes, and content that will help your reps achieve those goals — both short and long-term. Organizing your onboarding program in this way helps to clearly define the competencies that are needed to succeed as well as helps you and your reps understand how far along they are in the onboarding process.

Within your blueprint for your sales onboarding, make sure you’re focusing on the knowledge areas that are most important to your business. These might include:

  • Addressable market (revenue opportunity available)
  • Your customers (who you’re serving)
  • Product (what you offer based on customer needs)
  • Sales motion (methodology, tools, and process)

Mindtickle-6-tips-for-onboarding

4. Enable your reps with on-demand learning

By adopting an on-demand learning approach, you give reps the opportunity to learn at their own pace, rather than waiting around for calls to shadow or for a supervisor to walk them through a particular selling approach.

Enablement courses and role plays

Having on-demand resources available to your reps to review and even use for virtual role-plays will help your sellers get up to speed faster. It will also give them more confidence in their skills as they can be honed and evaluated in a virtual environment!

Some examples of common on-demand training modules include:

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

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

5. Test and measure key competencies

When a sales rep isn’t fully prepared to answer questions and address the needs of prospects, they will struggle to hit their sales targets and quotas. In fact, in the last year, 57% of sales reps were expected to miss their quotas.

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

As a manager, some key knowledge areas you’ll want to test for include:

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

Using data is really the only concrete way to determine how prepared your reps are to sell. A Readiness Index is a great way to get a holistic view of reps’ sales readiness, factoring in coaching, knowledge, and skill.

Mindtickle Readiness Index

 

6. Implement a sales everboarding strategy

On-the-job learning shouldn’t stop with onboarding. In the sales world especially, messaging, techniques, product offering, and strategy are constantly evolving. So it’s integral to ensure ongoing sales readiness with continuous learning programs.

There are a number of different ways you can promote ongoing learning within your sales organization, but some of our favorites include:

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

As a sales leader, it’s important to recognize that the way you structure your onboarding program and enable your reps from day one has a huge impact on your bottom line. Taking these considerations into account will help you ramp up your sales reps faster and accelerate your time to revenue. Who doesn’t want that?

For more information, download “5 Must-Haves for Any Sales Everboarding Strategy Checklist.”

How Gamification Engages Millennial and Gen Z Employees

Albert Fong on April 30, 2020

As more tech-savvy employees enter the workforce, businesses must think about how to engage Millennial and Gen Z employees during the onboarding process. After spending months finding the right person for a job, you don’t want to lose them due to a corporate onboarding process that doesn’t resonate or set them up for success. You risk shrinking that new-employee honeymoon phase with boredom and disillusionment.

Instead of leaving your new hires to read a manual or watch videos of company presentations, consider using gamification to create active challenges and track progress with shared metrics.

What is onboarding gamification?

Onboarding gamification is an approach that engages workers in corporate training and other learning activities using entertaining activities, rewards, gratification, and feedback. As a set of techniques, gamification uses tools refined in video games and apps to drive engagement with onboarding content.

There’s a good reason gamification works. Video game and app developers discovered decades ago that by asking social scientists to analyze user behavior, they could refine the software to encourage engagement—even addiction. Thank a social scientist every time you smile when your post gets liked, or your iMessages “ping” for attention. The techniques of behavioral design apply as directly to training as they do to entertainment. Instead of focusing on keeping a gamer on an ad-supported platform, HR managers might apply these same techniques to progress a worker through a structured program to learn a defined set of skills.

To demographers like Pew Research, 1996 is the birth year that defines the border between Millennials and Gen Z. As digital natives, today’s young Gen Z and Millennial workers have high expectations for engaged learning. If you were born in or after 1996, you never knew a world without high-speed internet access. You know you can look up almost anything you’ve ever wanted to know. Chances are, you’ve been using apps and playing video games for most of your life. To this generation, gamified onboarding is more natural, more fun—and more effective—than any passive alternative.

Why change your strategy for Millennial and Gen Z workers?

You’ll need to change your strategy because, simply put, gamification works better. Materials designed for the Post-War and Boomer generations might depend on videos, slideshows, and manuals, but they will never be as effective for this new cohort. And it’s not just about technology, either.

Current events, social changes, and other forces have left new Millennial and Gen Z employees with very different motivational and behavioral patterns than their Boomer and Gen X parents. While everyone is shaped by their parents to a certain degree, generations as a whole are shaped to some extent by opposition to the previous generation.

Members of both generations are typically comfortable with technology. Smartphone apps, collaboration software, and messaging are as familiar to these generations as jets and TVs were to Boomers. With their social relationships forged online using social media, texting, and other tools, these cohorts seamlessly communicate across time zones and physical locations. Similarly, technical gamification elements like unpredictability and social influence feel natural and make engagement interesting.

Why gamifying the process is effective

Gamifying the process is effective because “fun” is fundamentally a manipulation of behavior that leaves participants wanting more. The modern video game and social media industry have supported extensive social science research into human behavior. The result has been the development of social and interactive learning techniques, such as those described by Yu-kai Chou’s framework, that are much more sophisticated than the badges, progress bars, and notifications of the past. We’re already seeing tools like Slack and Workday take hold and apply the social engagement of Facebook into the serious business of project collaboration.

Applying the research of gaming and social media into gamified onboarding can lead to important progress toward corporate goals for new hires:

  • Improved productivity comes from better knowledge of how an organization functions. For example, setting employees on a “quest” to learn from other employees allows new reps to spend more time “doing” and less time finding out “how to do” tasks at their new company.
  • Increased retention rates for new employees are ensured because individuals feel empowered and productive as quickly as possible. Effective onboarding programs can get new employees past those critical first 6 months when an estimated 86% of new hires make the decision to stay or leave a company.
  • Aligning business goals with onboarding is easier with a structured program that builds content for new hires with key business goals in mind. Without structure, new employees will learn on the job, and the company has less control over how the worker perceives the company, their day-to-day-work, and overall goals. By aligning onboarding games and activities with key company goals, businesses can reinforce core values and instill the right habits from day one.
  • More consistent results come from a structured program, which can be measured and refined over time based on feedback and results.
  • Better understanding of progress and areas for improvement is possible through a more structured, goal-oriented approach to onboarding. Gamified onboarding (as part of a larger onboarding program) allows you to gather feedback and data, and use that information for evaluation cycles that are key to continuous improvement. Adding competitions and social connections, for example, generates data that can be used to track the progress of the program itself.
  • Support for continuous training requires onboarding new employees in a structured and gamified program, which sets up expectations for continuous training.

Effective onboarding programs can get new employees past those critical first 6 months when an estimated 86% of new hires make the decision to stay or leave a company.

How technology can help

Game mechanics don’t have to be derived from software, but it can help. At Deloitte LLP, for example, the onboarding program is very gamified. Early on, compliance, privacy, and ethics training materials were taught using a game board, modeled after the popular game “LIFE.” Today, the firm has expanded on the model to build an online game called The Chosen Analyst to teach professional consultants’ skills around a narrative of the coming Zombie Apocalypse.

Deloitte learned the power of game mechanics first, then applied technology to serve those objectives. The process pulled from storytelling the way traditional video games do. A story, like the Zombie Apocalypse, had to be compelling—and a little outlandish—to be fun. A good onboarding platform implements the best gamification elements so that corporate resources can focus on learning to be transferred to new employees. Best practices for gamification elements include:

  • Game mechanics like points for accomplishments, bonuses for special features, time-based tracking and a progress countdown, defined goals and levels, and an acknowledgment of status.
  • Engagement where participants develop stories, take on challenges and quests, and develop characters and avatars
  • Elements that give participants control over the game, the freedom to fail, and consistent feedback.

Recent disruptions caused by the novel Coronavirus pandemic have given firms everywhere an appreciation for virtual learning platforms and self-paced training activities that keep training moving even when participants can’t travel or interact directly. With cloud-based tools that can be continuously refined based on engagement and progress metrics, modern training platforms are applying these best practices to one of the biggest challenges in human resources: onboarding.

The revenue generated by billions of gamers and social media users has created a golden age for social science research into online user behavior. Mindtickle has now applied this research to onboarding as a way to optimize how Millennial and Gen Z digital natives learn when they join the workforce. Onboarding success has the potential to not only improve retention, but also drive productivity and predictable quota attainment. 

Ready to see what Mindtickle can do for revenue productivity at your org?

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When No-Travel Policies Get in the Way of Sales Kick-off

Gopkiran Rao on March 6, 2020

Kick Off Productive Sales Bootcamps, Events and QBRs with Virtual Strategies

This is the story of a company like mine, maybe yours.  Perhaps you’re an enablement director, marketing or sales exec, sales ops leader, training director, field event owner or an executive admin. It’s March 5, so it’s that time of year or quarter when you’re on the verge of the multi-week showcase known as Sales Bootcamp, Sales Kick-Off (SKO), Quarterly Business Review (QBR) or Company/Global Kick-Off  (GKO). This means you’re in the throes of your evening job as the “chief sales-kick-off officer” – responsible for pulling together in a single location, corporate and field teams distributed near and far.

Then you have the mic drop moment. After all that really hard work – bad news goes viral! A no-travel policy is enforced or perhaps executive management makes the call. Employees are proactively asked to cancel all work-related travel as a precautionary measure. 

In this moment, it’s logical to pivot towards one of a few options:

Option 1: Panic 

Option 2: Cancel everything, reschedule, or worse just wait, hoping for a miracle

Option 3: Put everything, all content, all presentations in shared drives, your CMS and run long, boring web conferencing sessions, hoping against hope that something will stick

The good news is that there is a proven approach to getting a high ROI on the work that has already been done. 

  • Presenting Option 4: World-class companies implement a blended approach to sales events designed to withstand emergencies including outbreaks, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Over the last 7 years, Mindtickle has been working with these organizations to implement a readiness approach across their sales events.

Over the course of this post, I will review some of these best practices in the form of Do’s and Don’ts to help you go from a standstill to a winning virtual event in 2 weeks or less. (Scroll to the end for a link to connect with Mindtickle experts that are available for a 1:1 consultation on running great virtual sales events and kick-offs.)

Do’s and Don’ts for Moving from In-Person to Virtual in 2 Weeks or Less

Engaging Executives and Fellow Stakeholders – Build Your SWAT Team!

DON’T

  • Don’t assume you are in this alone and try to pull off the shift to an online or virtual event on your own. Continue to engage and communicate with people that worked to support the event.
  • Why: These folks have a vested interest in being consulted and playing a part in a successful follow-through. While it’s easy to focus on assuring executives and leaders that ‘something’ will happen, consulting with the end recipients, peers in product marketing, pre-sales, services, and other organizing teams will create a meaningful, engaging, and collaborative experience. 

DO

  • Do reach out to your existing telephony, conferencing, and readiness solutions partners to see what experience and insight they might offer to work with you on transforming your live event into a virtual experience. Talk to other industry peers on industry forums or in your network to incorporate their learnings.
  • Work with executives and leaders to inspire the troops.  From inspirational messages to short videos delivering and reinforcing key messages on themes, objectives, and the importance of virtual participation, the organization will feel supported and assured that business will not only continue but thrive amidst the uncertain business climate. Nothing delivers confidence like the message that business will continue as usual particularly with an event designed to make sellers and their supporting teams competitive. 
  • Virtual competitions, leaderboards and other fun activities like quizzes or polls, as well as micro-content formats on mobile to drip-serve long-form learning to pre-reading on mobile with gamification and rewards tied to completion, will also create an atmosphere of engagement with learning and reinforcement.

Transitioning Quickly from In-Person to Online 

DON’T

  • Don’t attempt to convert your live event to a live web-conferencing event on the same exact days and times as your original conference. 
  • Why: Locations, connectivity, time-zones, and home office settings are very different and not conducive to day-long sessions of one-sided content consumption in a vacuum.

DO

  • Do leverage live presentation tools in conjunction with a platform aligned with pre-conference planning and attendee preferences.
  • Do solicit feedback from sellers and attendees using surveys and polls on how they would like to participate in a virtual setting, consume content (real-time, online, offline, mobile, video/pdf, gamified, etc.) and provide feedback.
  • Use visual journey builders, social engagement like leaderboards, and gamification to build a sense of virtual community.

Keeping your Presenters and Experts Engaged Before, During and After the Event

DON’T

  • Make your presenters record every session in long videos using a web conferencing solution or video in PowerPoint and post them to a shared folder or file sharing service.
  • Why: Presenters are human too and the best presenters draw energy from participation and reinforcement from attendees. Allowing Presenters to experiment with new formats like polls and voice-over video or role-plays as well as micro-learning or spaced reinforcement modalities and feedback mechanisms like polls will engage them and create a feedback loop.

DO

  • Maximize the power of personalization to service every attendee based on their unique role. Survey reps online to collect ideas on topics that matter in the field.
  • Conduct online role-play competitions to find success stories.
  • Use a pop quiz to identify knowledge gaps.
  • Present your executive team with reasons to shift to a virtual model and get enthusiastic buy-in because of the better outcome it will offer versus simply shifting the in-person event to a series of web-conferences.
  • Take stock of and categorize your existing content and leverage internal teams or vendors like Mindtickle that have dedicated content services to help you quickly re-factor your content for consumption with modern modalities such as gamification, mobile micro-learning, virtual coaching forms, email-based reinforcement and role-plays.  

Orchestrate the Event as Series of Mini-Exercises, Each Designed to Maximize Interaction, Engagement, and Long-term Retention 

DO

  • Review my colleague Dhruv Markandey’s excellent post here on a practical action plan for implementing a quick virtual event in a few days. Our experience with our customers informs us that taking a micro-experience approach to sessions, content, exercises and a focus on personalization will drive the best possible outcomes. These include: 
    • Integrated pre-learning and pre-certification with instructor-led skill development workshops delivered via live streaming platforms. 
    • Short surveys after every micro-session to measure ROI and engagement.
    • Use of quizzes and virtual leaderboards to measure knowledge retention, engagement, and readiness.
    • Continuous drip delivery of bite-sized information updates like product and competitive snapshots from SMEs.
    • Online role plays for reps to practice their message during breaks or in between sequenced sessions on topics such as objection handling or elevator pitch.
    • Spaced reinforcement after the event to ensure reps have adopted product messages. 

While there is no size fits all to define the perfect virtual sales or corporate event, platforms such as Mindtickle have evolved to help our customers address one overriding objective. Maximizing the capability of their people by supporting how they are onboarded, aligned and reinforced to deliver in the field. Bootcamps, SKOs, QBRs, and GKOs are perhaps the most important anchor events designed to achieve this objective in a single forum to deliver the executive vision, product launch training, messaging certification, competitive training and accreditation, coaching 1:1’s and feedback loop. 

I hope this blog post sparks some ideas for your own event and look forward to opening up a conversation as we all come to grips with doing business no matter where people are.

Driving Sales Productivity: Aragon Research Draws the Lines Between Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness and LMS

Gopkiran Rao on May 7, 2019

If there is one thing technology vendors have really nailed, that is content marketing. With each new white paper and e-book, the digital noise aimed at buyers expands. This has been no different with sales enablement and readiness. Vendors and consultants have fallen over themselves to assure prospective buyers that they have worked out defining and differentiating sales enablement, training, sales coaching, sales effectiveness, engagement, readiness and so on. What has been missing is the authoritative voice of an analyst that marries deep practitioner experience with an in-depth understanding of the technology landscape.

The recent Tech Spectrum for Sales Coaching and Learning Report by Aragon Research is a timely and insightful snapshot of the sales training and coaching imperative as well as the technology solutions landscape. It is timely because of a renewed effort by learning platforms to co-opt sales readiness as a learning initiative and insightful because it provides a valuable framework to separate point solution pretenders from proven platforms purpose-built for sales readiness.

While this report certainly validates Mindtickle’s singular focus on tying the success of our platform to measurable capability (what reps say and do), more importantly, Aragon Research’s report lays out the interplay between sales enablement, corporate learning, and sales readiness. And at the same time, it also highlights mission-critical priorities for coaching and applied learning in the flow of work.

Mindtickle is pleased to sponsor access to the report for anyone that doesn’t have access to Aragon’s library and I invite a dialog with fellow practitioners on what I thought were three key areas the report did a particularly good job of drawing out:

  • A rubric for evaluating enterprise-readiness offerings that are winning the battle for enterprise
  • A persuasive argument for why and how sales teams should break away from corporate learning standards
  • Sales capability indexing for real-time measurement and monitoring of revenue potential.

Defining the hallmarks of a good solution provider in the modern space

Aragon Research establishes specific evaluation criteria around company leadership, including proven customer experience, company viability, product vision, and delivery, and committed R&D as a percentage of headcount and spend. Simultaneously, it assesses the product offering itself, covering pricing and packaging completeness, performance, and awareness.
In reading through the report I was struck by the subtext of this section because it underscores observations of the companies that succeed on Mindtickle.

Before determining what an ideal solution might look like, these companies carefully profile their sales teams. For example, we are increasingly seeing the need to balance seller profiles demanding on the go readiness approaches. These sellers are:

  • Increasingly desk-less and remote
  • Focused on learning in the context and in the flow of work
  • Wanting to consume bite-sized information in context, in digital formats

Aragon notes that by extension, a successful platform must not only find new ways to engage sellers in the blocking and tackling of core content learning, but also step away from simply sequencing training, coaching and skill development in proprietary formats. To extend that thought, on personalization and adaptive engagement must become a core requirement. Thirdly, a modern approach must leverage different modalities, methods, and techniques: features like video-challenges, peer-coaching, repetition-based learning, microcontent, community competitions, and others. All of these build engagement, but also lead to a comprehensive, single data model.

How to break away from corporate learning and corporate content management

To maximize their quota attainment, companies should evaluate the potential of their people as customer-facing advocates first, employees second, and as individuals third.

Aragon Research has done the market a very important service by creating a clear separation between corporate or enterprise learning, which has its place particularly for compliance, technical learning and training, and sales learning. The latter of which needs to be acknowledged separately.

With the profile of the modern salesperson in mind, the report showcases why companies need a just-in-time approach. This is a new modality to engage and ready sales giving them the information they need before they realize they need it, as opposed to teaching it to them just in case.

Aragon Research examines why corporate learning and content management are not taking the application of capability in a specified business context, which is what’s really needed to address the problem of sales teams wanting to be better. In their report, they call out critical examples of these business scenarios such as sales onboarding, ongoing sales learning, sales skills development, and sales coaching.

There are specific business scenarios that play out within the lifecycle of the salesperson, and in each of these critical moments, sales needs to know how to tailor their approach toward specific situations. From the time they walk in the door as a new salesperson, to the acquisition of the basic set of skills and knowledge they need to engage the market, to then delivering in the field – salespeople need to be coached in the context of their specific role, business objectives, and everyday job.

As sales teams grow and develop, their learning should grow and develop alongside them.

Identifying capability as a real-time revenue measurement

Finally, the Aragon report sheds light on how identifying capability can be a real-time measure of the revenue power and health of a business.

The real-time aspects of sales productivity extend beyond the real-time experience of the end participant, the salesperson. They also extend to the manager – as well as the executives who are working from HQ. They all need to understand how the sales are performing in real time and how to make micro and macro adjustments when and as necessary.

From a manager’s perspective, they need to know how to get real-time insights into what the salesperson has learned, what customer-facing skills are being invested in and developed, and what how is this being applied in the real world. To get these insights, they might do ride alongs, for example,  so they have real world visibility. And they would be able to evaluate, reinforce, intervene, and remediate. Leveraging things like machine learning to assess and improve phone calls the rep is having with smart recommendations or prescriptive insights can help facilitate the coaching process and outcomes.

Having real-time insights – even if they’re evaluated on a staggered basis – into how the salesperson is responding to these inputs physically and virtually, is incredibly empowering for any team. This sets the stage for incorporating those insights into their engagement with the customer in context, and in time.

Concluding thoughts

In my years of experience in enterprise software, I’ve come to see technology as a journey – not an end in itself. Strategic initiatives like sales readiness cannot be delivered by technology or applications alone. It’s a large-scale, long-term effort both for those actively participating in the space and for those trying to define it.

What reports like the Aragon Research Tech Spectrum help us do is put out a pulse check and a call to arms. While it was gratifying for Mindtickle to be called out as a leader based on our strengths in product, customer focus, and enterprise acquisition, it also calls out all us in the space are here because we perform a mission-critical service to the industry – empowering sellers and buyers to connect on value.

Click Here to Download Your Complimentary Copy of the Research

Sales Enablement Executive Q&A: In Conversation with Dynamic Signal’s Danielle Schaumburg

JT Eger on April 18, 2019

As the first installment in a series of interviews with Sales Enablement and Readiness leaders, Mindtickle’s SVP of Strategy and GTM, Gopkiran Rao, recently spoke with Danielle Schaumburg of Dynamic Signal to learn about her experience making her sales team ready to delight customers. As the Director of Global Sales Enablement, Danielle is passionate about increasing sales productivity by supporting reps with the content, training, and analytics they need to have more successful sales conversations. Danielle explains the ways she’s leveraging Mindtickle at her company to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in engaging customers and prospects.

Engaging Executive and Sales Management in Sales Readiness Initiatives

Gop:
To start, here’s a question that’s been discussed in numerous sales enablement forums and sales enablement societies. How do you pitch sales readiness and a platform like Mindtickle to the CEO as a direct driver of sales enablement and effectiveness?
Danielle:
Before I even started at Dynamic Signal, my new boss and I discussed how I was using Mindtickle at my previous company – what type of programs we were running, why we were doing it, how I brought in the platform. He bought into the philosophy, vision, and purpose from the get-go, so it was easy to bring it to Dynamic Signal. It also just so happened that our CMO had used Mindtickle before, so that was another easy win for me. We rolled Mindtickle out at SKO, so we even had a relevant and compelling event that created buy-in for the entire organization.
Gop:
That’s great! To continue along this line of thinking, how do you drive sales manager buy-in and accountability – particularly from tenured sales reps?
Danielle:
While it can be difficult, alignment with management is imperative. For example, it’s critical to prioritize alignment with the VP or head of Sales. Part of that is constant communication related to the why, what, and when of readiness approaches. Regular engagement and meetings with the sales team are a must. Another aspect is to provide continuity across efforts. At Dynamic Signal, for example, we will do a training session that’s followed by a Mindtickle reinforcement module. We try and stick to this level of consistency regardless of the topic or what we’re training on – it guarantees alignment and commitment that goes well past ad-hoc communication.
Gop:
And in terms of getting Mindtickle deployed in your organization, what kind of change management did you have to lead with?
Danielle:
Mindtickle is a straightforward tool to learn and distribute. I think the biggest challenge here is behavioral: you have to train your team on getting used to a particular type of execution and consistency, as well as provide them with essential reinforcement from management.

The Return on Sales Readiness Investment


Gop:
How do you measure the impact of your sales enablement program? More specifically, have you structured your readiness programs to align with on each stage of the sales funnel? How are you quantifying the impact of those activities, and showing that continuous value to leadership?
Danielle:
I try to keep my content specific to what my sales team genuinely needs. I try to make sure that sales training sessions are useful for my team: if I do one sales training that isn’t particularly aligned, I might re-engage them again the next week, but if I do two irrelevant sessions in a row, they’re likely to lose interest. It’s a matter of credibility and relevance, so everything I do has to have a direct correlation to the objectives my team has at that time.
As far as specific activities go, I like to use quizzes to drive participation. It’s imperative for me to make sure that my managers all know how their teams’ productivity and participation stack up, so I try and keep to the top 3 – 5 key takeaways that we want our sellers to learn from each session. Assigning regular quizzes creates all-around consistency for me and the team – they know what’s happening and they know when it’s coming.
Gop:
Tell me a little bit of some of the ways you’ve benefited from being able to view specific data-driven metrics with Mindtickle.
Danielle:
One of the metrics I typically ask of all my leaders is a training metric. Not only do they have to talk about what kind of pipeline they have, what they’ve closed, where they’re going, but I also have the manager go back and ask – how did you do in the last quarter around your training requirements? We can track all of that in Mindtickle.
Gop:
So, beyond training onboarding and certification, a core focus at Mindtickle is encouraging managers to coach on an ongoing basis. How are your frontline managers coaching your sales reps? Is this something, which is of near-term importance or long-term importance?
Danielle:
I think if everything becomes a coaching session, it’s too much, and you won’t get the buy-in. However, one-on-one coaching is fundamental in meetings; we need that engagement. Moreover, the coaching capability, especially when you have a diverse workforce, and they’re in different offices, is a handy tool.
If you seek to certify reps on everything, it dilutes the effectiveness of why and when you need to certify. Certification is also a big deal and is something that needs to be ingrained in behavior. It’s the same with coaching through a platform: use it when it’s necessary and when it makes sense. However, if you’re coaching through the platform the entire time, you’re losing that face-to-face interaction which is, and you need to have both.

The Journey to Picking a Solution that Lasts


Gop:
What keeps you coming back to Mindtickle?
Danielle:
One of the key reasons why I’m a repeat customer is because you guys genuinely listen. Here’s an example: my reps were having some issues with the completion function not correctly displaying their progress. When I sent in the request to your Product team, they addressed the problem immediately. You’re always there to listen for use cases to help my sales team continue to use the platform, and it shows.
Gop:
When you’re evaluating a sales readiness tool for the very first time, what is it that you’re looking for? What are your evaluation parameters, and to you, what is Mindtickle’s value proposition?
Danielle:
I’m looking for something that is straightforward and easy for all of us to use. I’ve used many learning management systems in the past, and they are too clunky and too heavy – salespeople don’t want anything to do with them. Quite frankly, I don’t want anything to do with them either. For example, if I have a Zoom session, I want to record it, upload it, and be done as quickly as possible. I don’t have time to cross-check and do a review every time I need to share content with my team, so it’s vital for me to have a solution where I can set it and forget it.

What’s Next for Sales Readiness and Sales Enablement


Gop:
There’s much activity that’s been happening in the sales enablement and sales readiness spaces. We’ve seen some consolidation, different partnerships, and more. Where do you see all this heading?
Danielle:
Throughout my career I’ve wanted to be in front of sales, talking to sales, engaging sales, and making sales smarter. I did this so that sales could go out and spend more time in front of customers rather than behind the scenes trying to figure out how to learn to be in front of customers. I think we’ve made much progress to that end. However, I see a lot more attention paid and investments made in this space, and the conversations are becoming more and more pointed and frequent.
Gop:
What is it that you’re most excited about in terms of new things that you’re looking forward to in the sales readiness space?
Danielle:
What we do is so integral to the sales process, it’s just a matter of making sure that my sales leaders understand how necessary it is. As long as I can get them engaged in the platform to know how important it is for them to be a part of the learning, I think then it will be a huge win for all. My 2019 strategy is that they have to be an integral part of the sales learning and the sales process around training. They can’t look at it as noise but look at it as critical to them hitting their number.
Gop:
Thank you so much for sharing, Danielle. It’s always insightful for us to hear this kind of feedback so we can make sure our team keeps moving in the right direction to help empower you and your company. Good luck with all your ventures at Dynamic Signal!

SevOne Up-Levels Its Sales Enablement, Strengthens Sales-Marketing Relationship With Mindtickle

JT Eger on April 15, 2019

 

Opportunities abound for organizations who can branch out into new, overseas markets. Without the right Sales Readiness solution, however, it’s difficult for a geographically dispersed sales team to stay connected, engaged, and successful. SevOne’s initial attempt at creating a sales enablement strategy proved this to be true.

Initially, the SevOne product marketing team hosted long WebEx calls to keep the worldwide team abreast of industry changes and company positioning. For those that couldn’t make the calls, recordings were loaded onto SevOne’s portal system. Unfortunately, marketing had no way of tracking whether those who missed the call actually listened to it, or what type of content actually ended up being consumed. To make matters more complex, accessing the content proved to be a clunky endeavor.

Without a concrete way to measure engagement, test retention, or receive feedback on their sales enablement programs, SevOne finally turned to Mindtickle. After a triumphant initial rollout to one of the company’s sales regions, the cloud-based, secure Sales Readiness platform was introduced to the entire sales organization at SevOne’s 2018 sales kick-off (SKO). Each sales rep gained entry to the SKO by showing that they had downloaded the Mindtickle app, and they were required to pass a key messaging certification before leaving. In this way, SevOne drove awareness and adoption of the platform that extended company-wide.

With Mindtickle deployed and actively used across the sales organization, SevOne could finally forgo the hour-long WebEx calls in favor of shorter, bite-sized videos followed by quizzes and content ratings. Since the videos are available on-demand and are easily accessible through the app, sales reps can view and re-watch them at their convenience. SevOne has even created a game in which points are given to the sales rep and team that views the most content through Mindtickle. This friendly competition drives an even higher usage rate with the platform.

Today, Mindtickle helps SevOne generate weekly, data-driven reports to measure the performance and scores of each sales rep. Additionally, SevOne leadership can easily spot trends in individual performance and identify areas of improvement.

Alex Studd, SevOne’s product marketing manager, said, “It’s obvious to me just talking with sales reps that they’re more knowledgeable than a year ago, and that’s largely thanks to Mindtickle.” As SevOne wraps up its first year using Mindtickle, the company can quantify that claim with the platform’s built-in analytics.

Read the entire

case study

to learn more about how SevOne is using Mindtickle.

Viewpoint Accelerates Onboarding, Achieves Over 90% Training Completion with Mindtickle

Simona Galant on April 1, 2019

Business growth is a good thing — unless your sales team lacks the tools necessary to quickly and easily scale alongside it.

This was the challenge Viewpoint faced in 2017

. The global provider of cloud-based software solutions for the construction industry had just created a sales enablement department and found that its incumbent system of multiple siloed tools wasn’t effective enough to streamline sales readiness and enablement programs for the rapidly growing company.

For example, when it came to sales training, Viewpoint had been using a video conferencing tool and sharing recordings via an email blast or SharePoint. This approach lacked any kind of tracking for training and certifications. In addition, there was no clear cadence for enablement communications, and onboarding for new reps was not fast enough – delaying new reps’ contributions to the sales pipeline.

In search of a solution that would unite their sales team’s efforts, Viewpoint evaluated a number of sales enablement and sales readiness platforms before ultimately selecting Mindtickle. Once implemented, the platform was fully launched within three months and rolled out across the Viewpoint sales team. And, just a few months after the initial launch, Viewpoint extended the platform to its channel partners and Professional Services and Support departments.

With a concerted effort underpinned by Mindtickle, Viewpoint has realized its vision to systematize enablement and readiness in a number of ways.

  • By streamlining and consolidating sales enablement and readiness onto a single platform, Viewpoint gained better insight into training and boosted certifications by over 90%.This was driven, in part, by flexible options for ongoing learning via different channels like podcasts.

 

  • Mindtickle has simplified enablement communicationsat Viewpoint as well. Now, the team creates short videos once a week and conducts knowledge assessments through test questions.

 

  • Viewpoint has also accelerated onboarding, which was a key 2018 initiative for the company. Remarkably, Mindtickle helped Viewpoint reduce its new reps’ time to first booked deal from 130 days to 52 — a 60% year-over-year improvement.

“Reps have told us this is the best onboarding experience they’ve had at any company,” says Jake Boenisch, Senior Director of Integrated Learning and Field Enablement at Viewpoint. “I think a lot of credit goes to the Mindtickle platform and having the technology in place to differentiate us from our competitors.”

To learn more about Viewpoint’s success with Mindtickle, read the entire case study here.

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