Your Guide to Sales Analytics + The Best Sales Analytics Tools for 2024

Lindsey Plocek on January 18, 2024

Imagine asking a room full of sales leaders what their top two priorities are for the coming year. Chances are, every single person in that room would cite growing revenue and improving sales team performance as top priorities.

Sales analytics is critical to achieving those goals.

The good news is, you don’t have to be a statistics wiz to benefit from sales analytics. With a bit of knowledge – and the right tools – you’ll be well-equipped to leverage sales analytics to improve seller performance and grow revenue.

In this post, we’ll answer the question, “What is sales analytics?” We’ll also explore how sales analytics benefits sales teams and which sales analytics metrics are most important to track. We’ll close out by sharing some of the top sales analytics software options available to sales organizations.

What is sales analytics?

First off, what is sales analytics?

According to Gartner, sales analytics is “used in identifying, modeling, understanding and predicting sales trends and outcomes while aiding sales management in understanding where salespeople can improve.”

Let’s break that down.

Sales analytics describes the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting sales data. These insights can be leveraged to optimize strategies, make data-based decisions, and plan for the future.

For example, sales leaders leverage sales analytics to determine goals, optimize processes, and more accurately forecast future sales.

In addition, they help sales managers and sales enablement teams to better understand seller performance. Then, they can deliver personalized training and coaching to strengthen weak areas and improve sales performance. They can also measure the impact of those initiatives.

Four types of sales analytics

There are a few different types of sales analytics:

Describes what has happened. For example, you can see how much revenue was generated during the fourth quarter of 2023 – or how a particular sales rep performed during that same period.

Examines data to determine the “why” behind what happened.

Takes what’s happened in the past, looks for patterns, and makes predictions about what will happen in the future.

Takes the data that’s available and recommends the best course of action based on that data.

The benefits of sales analytics

Sales analytics can have a significant, positive impact on countless factors that contribute to sales success. Let’s take a look at a few.

Revenue growth
Shorter sales cycles
Training + enablement
Seller performance
Sales planning
Customer experiences
Marketing impact

Revenue growth

By understanding seller performance, you’re better equipped to improve it. When sellers close more deals, your revenue will grow.

Sales cycle

The shorter the sales cycle, the faster you can generate revenue. As such, many organizations are focused on how they can optimize the sales cycle to accelerate sales.

Sales analytics enables teams to understand how customers progress through the sales cycle – and how long it takes them to do so. Teams can identify problem areas. For example, there may be a particular stage of the sales cycle where prospects often drop off. Then, teams can make data-based optimizations to streamline (and shorten) the sales cycle.

They also enable teams to understand how customers progress through the sales cycle – and how long it takes them to do so. Teams can identify problem areas. For example, there may be a particular stage of the sales cycle where prospects often drop off. Then, teams can make data-based optimizations to streamline (and shorten) the sales cycle.

Sales training and enablement

Sales onboarding sets sellers up for success at the organization. Ongoing training and enablement ensures they are always ready to sell.

Sales analytics can inform more effective training and enablement. With sales analytics, teams can better understand how (or whether) training and enablement initiatives are impacting sales outcomes. They can use these insights to optimize programs to drive impact.

Seller performance

Sales reps need to master a certain set of skills and competencies to be successful in the field. Sales analytics can help sales leaders understand the strengths and weaknesses of each seller. Then, they can deliver training and coaching to strengthen skills and improve performance. Finally, they can measure the impact of their training and coaching efforts and optimize accordingly.

Sales planning

In the world of sales, planning is key. Planning must be based on data – rather than hunches.

The right revenue intelligence enables sales leaders to more accurately forecast sales. In addition, sales analytics enables sales leaders to make other, data-based planning decisions – such as adding headcount or realigning sales territories.

Customer experiences

In today’s world, experiences matter as much as products and services. But one-size-fits all experiences won’t cut it. According to Salesforce research, 78% of business buyers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences.

According to Salesforce research

of business buyers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences.
0 %

With sales analytics, you can better understand customers’ needs and behaviors. Then, you can create sales processes that address those needs and behaviors. Customers will have better experiences – which will increase their likelihood of making a purchase.

Marketing impact

Marketing teams spend plenty of time developing campaigns and initiatives to attract prospective customers. It’s important to measure the impact of those efforts.

Sales analytics can shed light on the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. Then, the team can optimize their efforts to improve performance.

For example, a marketing campaign may generate a high volume of leads. But with sales analytics, you’re able to see that a majority of these leads drop off – usually because they aren’t a good fit for the company’s products or services. Marketing and sales can leverage these insights to create campaigns that more effectively target good-fit prospects.

11 key sales analytics metrics revenue organizations need to track

Data is foundational to sales analytics. As such, it’s important to track the right key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s also important to understand why you’re tracking those metrics.

What metrics should you track to fuel your sales analytics? It varies from company to company. However, there are some KPIs that are important for just about any company to track. Let’s take a closer look at a few.

Revenue is perhaps the most obvious metric to track. You can track the total amount of revenue for a specified period of time – such as a month or a quarter 

Of course, it’s important to track how much revenue your organization is generating. It’s also important to measure how much your revenue increases or decreases over a given period of time. For example, you may measure growth year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter.

You likely track sales overall. If you have multiple offerings, it’s also important to track sales by product or service. 

That way, you’ll understand how specific products are performing. Then, you can make decisions to optimize your product mix. 

Your conversion rate is the portion of prospects that end up making a purchase. A low conversion rate may indicate a problem (or problems), but it’s important to dig deeper.

For example, it’s easy to assume a low conversion rate is due to the ineffectiveness of sellers. But it could also be due to the fact that sellers are often interacting with leads that aren’t a good fit for what they’re selling.

This is a measure of how long it takes for buyers to move through the sales cycle – from initial contact to close. It’s a good idea to measure the average sales cycle duration across the entire team. However, it’s important to remember that this incorporates data from your very best sellers – as well as your very worst. As such, it’s also a good idea to calculate the average sales cycle duration for your top sellers.

This is a measure of how much it costs to acquire a new customer. It’s calculated by taking the total cost of sales and marketing for a specified period (for example, a quarter or a month), and then dividing it by the number of new customers that converted during that same time period.

If CAC is high, look for opportunities to optimize your sales and marketing efforts.

Average deal size is a measure of the value of sales. You can calculate your average deal size by dividing total revenue by total number of deals for a given period.

This metric provides valuable insight you can leverage to improve sales performance. For example, if you notice deal size decreasing, it’s time to dig deeper. Perhaps you have an influx of newer sales reps – and they struggle to convert larger deals. By addressing this challenge, you can start to increase average deal size – and overall sales.

Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you during a specified time period. For example, let’s say you have a 10% customer churn rate for 2023. 10% of your customers have stopped doing business with you – while 90% have stuck around.

High customer churn is problematic. It’s important to examine the reasons customers churn – and then work to address them.

In addition to measuring the aforementioned KPIS across the entire organization, many should also be measured by team. For example, a sales organization based in the United States may measure sales performance based on territory. A global sales organization may measure sales performance based on country.

Measuring performance by team can provide a lot of valuable insights. For example, you can see which areas your products and services are resonating most. You may also uncover a need to deliver additional training and coaching to sales reps in specific regions.

It’s important to track company and team sales. However, it’s also important to drill down even further to measure sales performance for each of your individual sales reps.

Rep performance can be measured for a specific time period, such as monthly or quarterly. For example, you might measure both the number of closed deals – as well as the total value of those deals – for each agent in January 2024.

Individual rep performance data can shed light on the need for additional training and coaching for a specific rep. It can also provide insights on who may be eligible for a promotion or other reward.

Sales training and sales enablement help ensure sales reps always have the skills and information they need to be successful. It’s important to track completion metrics for sales training and enablement efforts. 

 

However, it’s even more important to track the impact of your sales training and enablement efforts. For example, is a seller actually using the skills they learned in training when they’re out in the field? Conversation intelligence tools can help you determine if that’s the case. 

Or, did a particular training module have a positive impact on deal outcomes?

With these insights, you can optimize your efforts. Then, your optimized sales training and enablement initiatives will more effectively prepare your sellers for success in the field.

5 top sales analytics tools

Sales analytics is a key ingredient to improve sales performance and growing revenue. But for many people, it can be overwhelming.

There are many types of data coming in from different directions. It can be challenging to streamline this data, analyze it, and determine what actions to take based on it.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The right sales analytics tools will do the heavy lifting for you.

There are many sales analytics tools in the market today. But they’re not all the same. It’s important to find the sales analytics tools that fit the needs and goals of your business. When weighing your options, you’ll need to consider factors including data requirements, integrations, visualizations, use of use, and cost – among others.

There’s no single sales analytics tool that’s the right fit for every need and business. However, there are some top sales analytics tools.

Mindtickle

Sales enablement is essential to sales success. It’s important to measure and analyze sales enablement effectiveness on an ongoing basis.

Mindtickle’s revenue productivity platform incorporates robust sales enablement analytics. Of course, you can measure usage data. However, Mindtickle goes beyond usage data to help you understand how training and enablement programs are actually impacting sales team performance. Then, you can use these analytics to optimize your sales enablement programs and prioritize initiatives that are proven to improve outcomes.

Other sales analytics tools

Some other top sales analytics platforms include:

Hubspot’s platform provides sales leaders with the sales analytics they need to make strategic decisions. Users can access insights related to pipeline, performance, deal status, conversion, and other key areas.

The platform incorporates a feature that allows sales leaders to not only understand the data – but also the reasons behind the data. Then, they can use these insights to make optimizations.

Clari brings key sales data from the past, present, and future into a single platform. These insights can help teams improve performance and accurately predict future revenue.

Gong equips sales teams with sales analytics about what’s working and what’s not. Those analytics inform recommendations that can help sales reps close more deals.

Leverage sales analytics to improve your sales process

Sales performance and revenue growth are top priorities for every sales team. Sales analytics is key to achieving these goals.

The right sales analytics tools enable revenue organizations to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what they can do to improve outcomes. These insights empower sales leaders to optimize strategies and make data-based decisions that grow revenue.

Sales enablement is essential to getting your reps ready to sell. But it’s important to have the right sales enablement analytics to optimize your program.

Sales Analytics in Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle delivers the sales enablement analytics you need to increase the impact of your program?

Get a Demo

Effective Sales Coaching That Actually Saves Time: The Sales Rep Analytics & Insights You Need

Rahul Mathew on March 25, 2022

Effective sales coaching and skills development usually come down to one thing: time.

In an in-person office setting, you can observe some rep behaviors firsthand. You know when sellers make calls, meet with customers, and practice pitches.

But even though you were physically there, sales managers still couldn’t sit in on every meeting or call with each rep. Our State of Sales Readiness Report 2022 shows that, on average, managers oversee eight sales reps. With time stretched across the entire team, skill coaching often falls to the wayside. Our research also found that manager-led coaching sessions with each rep happens just once a month.

Now that hybrid working is the norm, effective coaching can’t rely on in-person time with sellers. More than ever, sales managers now need to rely on data to drive and support business decisions—including training and coaching reps to boost performance.

What metrics do you need to measure performance and effectively coach? We break analytics down into three categories: knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Keep reading to learn more.

Knowledge

Knowledge informs mastery of skills as well as behaviors practiced. To effectively communicate your product’s benefits, a seller must know the features and capabilities of that product. To engage a buyer, a seller needs to know the buyer’s industry and pain points. And the best way to disseminate this information is through onboarding, training, and ongoing enablement.

Onboarding is an introduction to your organization and a new sales hire’s role—presenting the perfect opportunity to educate them on product, processes, competitors, and much more. And likewise, training beyond onboarding is particularly useful to reinforce learnings and expand knowledge.

But what should you be measuring to ensure sellers are actually learning? Start with these:

  • Onboarding and training completion
  • Onboarding and training engagement
  • Certification achievement

Offering microlearning opportunities with the right enablement tools makes it easier for reps to access and participate in training — and easier for managers to track these knowledge metrics.

Skills

Beyond tracking knowledge, it’s critical to understand how reps are applying what they’ve learned after their training. Skills assessments provide insights into whether the learning sticks and is being used properly.

These assessments can be done through simple quizzes, or as a collaborative effort in role-playing exercises. Reps can practice and record their pitches for you to evaluate. Assign a ranking of certain skills tied to role-plays to get an idea of where each seller is at, and where there are gaps.

Skills metrics can include:

sales skill metrics

Sales readiness platforms that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) analyze recorded role-plays to do most of the analysis for you. Such tools can provide a snapshot of the skills listed above (and more), which you can then use to inform additional training, personalized for each rep’s unique needs.

Behavior

Lastly—and perhaps most importantly—is how skills and knowledge translate to behaviors in the field. It’s one thing to know the ins and outs of your product, but are your salespeople able to communicate that to buyers in a way that demonstrates true value?

As helpful as it would be, managers can’t be in multiple places at once and have limited time each day. Further, they’ve got daily responsibilities beyond rep performance, like managing relationships with other departments, meeting with other leaders, and ensuring sales goals align with those of the larger business.

Behavior-centric metrics can be divided into three segments: call metrics, performance metrics, and coaching metrics.

Call metrics measure a seller’s behavior as it pertains to customer calls. A conversation intelligence tool records and transcribes calls and uses AI to provide deep analysis. Managers can view the following metrics for individual reps:

  • Use of filler words
  • Use of pre-established keywords
  • Questions asked by reps
  • Questions asked by buyers
  • Length of monologues

Performance metrics focus on your sellers’ and team’s overall sales performance. These are the numbers you are likely already tracking:

Coaching metrics focus on specific behaviors discussed in one-on-one coaching sessions between rep and manager, and how those behaviors are trending. An effective coaching platform enables managers to easily schedule sessions and follow-ups, seamlessly integrate training and coaching opportunities, evaluate manager coaching performance, and track improvement on reps’ lagging skills. Related to coaching are two other considerations: rep tenure and turnover. Sellers who feel supported are likely to stay longer, saving your organization significant time and money to bring in new hires. If you aren’t tracking rep retention, and correlating it with training and coaching efforts, start now.

Ensure managers and reps are ready

The Mindtickle Readiness Index is the best way to analyze and improve sales performance. With tools for benchmarking, training, and coaching, you can connect sales readiness with revenue — all in one platform. Our Call AI conversation intelligence solution gives managers a firsthand look at how sellers perform in buyer interactions. Training and virtual role-play opportunities provide ongoing and reinforced learning, solidifying skills that are essential to field success. And the Mindtickle Asset Hub means reps have access to all the latest training and customer-facing content needed to stay on top of their game and engage buyers.

Ready to get started? Request a demo of Mindtickle today.

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

Nick Salas on February 15, 2022

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

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

AI in sales streamlines lead prioritization

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

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

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

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

AI in sales analyzes customer conversations

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

Mindtickle Call AI

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

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

AI analyzes rep behavior to personalize coaching

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

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

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

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

AI improves close rates across the sales org

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

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

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

AI helps set your sales team up for success

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

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

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

Manager-focused Analytics and Reporting: Boost Sales Manager Effectiveness

Harshal Maniyar on November 6, 2020

Sales leaders at most high-growth companies are constantly training and upskilling their teams to be more effective in the field and/or hiring new talent and ramping up them faster so they can start selling and closing deals as soon as possible. Sales Leaders can drive better effectiveness in sales and achieve their team quotas faster by leveraging readiness data to assess the readiness of their reps and then working to drive the right knowledge, skills, and behaviors. In fact, Gartner studies show that coaching effectiveness leads to a 19% improvement in sales performance. Informed by its comprehensive data-driven readiness platform and years of experience in helping to build world-class readiness and enablement programs across multiple industries and Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies, Mindtickle has recently developed more effective and impactful sales manager analytics and reporting to help Sales and Enablement leaders drive sales efficiency.

Gain a greater level of visibility and insights into your team’s readiness

Sales managers as well as sales leaders play a critical role to get teams ready and ramped up to sell. Greater visibility into their sales team readiness has allowed the sales leadership at one of Mindtickle’s enterprise customers to reduce rep ramp-up time by half, from 12 months to 6 months. Leadership buy-in and visibility into the progress and impact of readiness initiatives through their team’s reports were critical to their success. Mindtickle enabled leaders to share their strategic guidance for enablement programs and for Sales managers to show continuous, incremental improvement in their reps’ readiness performance. Sales managers were more able to quickly identify and remediate readiness gaps among their Sales reps to ensure they’re onboarding & ramping up faster. A faster ramp timer means they can start working on and closing deals faster to bring in revenue sooner and more efficiently.

This company found that while launching a new product across global markets to the existing salesforce, the real-time visibility into the progress and gap insights enabled leaders to take corrective actions. The leaders worked with the management teams of the specific geographies and drove adoption and certification on product knowledge programs. Simplified and contextual real-time reporting for sales managers and leaders helped them benchmark and track their teams’ sales readiness.

By using the new Manager team reports, Enablement teams can provide their sales and other organizational leaders a greater level of visibility and insights into their teams’ readiness with just one click. These actionable reports allow leaders to identify gaps, slice and dice the data across their teams, and take corrective actions as needed to help improve team readiness. What’s more, greater functionalities in Mindtickle’s Manager Reports make tracking enablement programs easier to view, filter, customize, and confidentially share as needed across the organization.

In short, Mindtickle Manager Reports provide Managers and leaders real-time access to roll-up reports covering contextual enablement and readiness initiatives so they can benchmark progress and quickly resolve any factors affecting the readiness of sales or customer-facing teams. Use cases include:

  • Reducing ramp-up time: Leaders get granular visibility into the progress of their teams’ onboarding to identify and resolve roadblocks or address any lagging deficiencies and ensure reps hit quotas faster
  • Gaining Insights to build a profile of success for your teams: Leaders and Managers can identify behavioral as well as soft and hard skills of the best reps and replicate that ‘profile of success” accordingly across teams
  • Making readiness initiatives successful: Manager reports automatically align to your organizational structure or org chart to help better drive readiness and enablement with real-time visibility into initiatives aligned with company strategy
  • Improving the effectiveness of enablement: Get contextual insights into gaps of enablement initiatives among both teams and individuals. This will help Enablement Leaders better understand which reps perform the best and why, as well help determine why other reps are lagging to offer them customized enablement programming to improve their performance
  • Driving a culture of coaching and accountability: Incorporate a culture of accountability through actionable insights into enablement initiatives, while also developing a culture of coaching for Managers to hone and improve their reps soft and hard skills
  • Empowering enablement teams: Give enablement teams the ability to easily customize and share their enablement progress reports with stakeholders across the organization
  • Ensuring teams are on message: Give leaders and managers insight into whether or not teams and/or reps are successfully completing Assessments, Missions, and Coaching sessions, which helps ensure reps are on message and able to have a meaningful conversation that brings value to customers based on the challenges facing their sales/customer-facing teams and industry.

For more information, check with your CSM or contact us to schedule a demo.

Five Things to Consider When Executing Your Client Experience Strategy

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on October 10, 2019

Recently, I spoke to Julie Zhang, Director of Sales Enablement for Russell Investments, about how they took their client experience strategy from inception to execution. They achieved this by empowering and enabling their client-facing staff, but it hasn’t been easy.

One of the most important things they’ve learned along the way is that taking an idealistic strategy through to execution is challenging. It’s inevitable that things will breakdown along the way and the end result won’t always look as shiny as the strategy anticipated. Here are five things that Julie learned along the way that can help you execute your client experience strategy effectively.

1. Don’t assume people will tell you everything

When you ask someone whether they understand something, human instinct tells them to say they do know it even if they don’t. This means if your salespeople tell you they understand how a new product works or they know what a good client experience looks like, chances are they really don’t.

Rather than relying on your client-facing people to tell you what they know, test for it so you can objectively understand what they know and where their gaps are. This will give you a baseline to start with and help you put in place a roadmap for what you need to do to achieve your strategic vision.

For example, Julie asked the client-facing staff to record a video of themselves doing a pitch and send it to their managers. While this was uncomfortable for many, it was also a great learning experience because it highlighted to them very quickly that they didn’t know what they thought they did. As a result, there was no push back from the sales team when it came to executing the new strategic initiatives because they already knew they had a knowledge gap.

2. Remove friction points first

It can be futile trying to implement new processes, training or changes if your client-facing staff are distracted by other things. Before you start trying to execute on your strategy, identify and remove some of the areas of friction that are affecting how your people do their job.

For example, Julie identified that there were a lot of internal emails that were absorbing the time of their client-facing staff. These emails included sales collateral and other information that people needed to know. So Julie replaced these emails with bite-sized pieces of content, like a short video where a portfolio manager provided an update on a fund. This content was delivered to client-facing staff directly to the Mindtickle app on their mobile device. So rather than wading through emails, they could watch the content when it suited them.

This change not only gave people more time to focus on the client experience, but it also gave the sales leadership team important information. They could see who accessed the content and who needed to be followed up. Managers could also use quizzes and gamification to test who understood the information and drive engagement.

3. Don’t be afraid to rebuild

Unless you’re starting with a greenfield site, there will be processes and bad habits already in place. While change is hard, it can often be more difficult to try and work around existing processes. So don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and rebuild from the ground up.

4. Layer learning for retention

When you launch a new product or service, it can take up to six months before client-facing staff are comfortable talking about it with clients. To accelerate this process, Julie implemented a series of training that was layered and leveraged multiple mediums to improve retention. The training incorporated a blend of virtual testing, videos, integrated quizzing, pitch back videos and coaching. When combined, they found that this training accelerated the execution of their strategy and raised the bar on the skill levels of their client-facing staff.

Through this process, Julie found that knowledge retention requires a process of continuous improvement. Client-facing staff need to hone their skills and develop their knowledge on an iterative basis to execute consistently. Regular reinforcement and making training part of their day to day was crucial to layer learning so that it’s retained over the long-term. One way that Julie achieved this was by extending Russell Investment’s onboarding program from just two weeks to six months.

5. Work out what you’re measuring

While measuring sales results is, of course, important, Julie found that measuring engagement was actually more important to implement their strategy. That’s because they needed their client-facing staff to learn, and to learn they needed to be engaged with the process. So Julie focused on engagement metrics, like how often people accessed training and how long they spent on training each day. By doing this, she found that as engagement increased so did their sales results.

To determine what you should measure, she suggests analyzing your data at the outset to identify what things are preventing your client-facing staff from learning and retaining knowledge. For example, Julie found that the enablement software they were using wasn’t intuitive and the training was quite boring. So they addressed these issues by using software that leverages gamification, produced more concise training videos and introduced multiple training formats.

If you’d like to hear more about how to execute your client experience strategy effectively, you can watch the full interview.

Oscar Collingwood-Smith
Lead Market Manager, Financial Services
Mindtickle

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

ATD Conference Preview: Leveraging Customer Enablement Data for Sales Readiness and Enablement

Dimple Patel on May 2, 2019

It’s looking like Sales Enablement will continue to be a hot topic at this year’s ATD International Conference & EXPO (ICE) later this month. We are all looking forward to meeting with training and enablement professionals from around the world.
What I find most exciting is the increasing interest we’ve seen over the last couple of years in looking at sales enablement through a readiness-focused lens. With all the knowledge, skills, processes, tools, content, and coaching they are provided, how confident are we in our sellers’ ability to execute? Are they ready to perform or constantly playing catch up to prospects and customers who may be one step ahead? Working in Sales Readiness, we see these challenges first hand in our customer organizations.

Sales readiness has reached a critical point and organizations can no longer simply focus on the seller. They are working collaboratively with BDRs, Sales Engineers, Marketing, Customer Enablement, and Product. Each team is contributing to and learning from the customer journey. To prepare our teams to achieve our vision, we need to understand the complete customer journey – before and after the sale. We then need to integrate this understanding with our seller’s journey and our product and solution journey. These journeys are intertwined with multiple dependencies and overlapping requirements. To stay effective, we need a new approach to enabling our all customer-facing teams to be ready to perform.

As part of this new approach, insights from Customer Enablement must drive enablement and readiness capabilities across all customer-facing teams, and ultimately, be woven into the fabric of a value-driven revenue and brand strategy. Critical data from customer engagements can

and should

be considered in developing successful sales capabilities. These data points include:

  • How customers use the product
  • The value are they getting from using the product
  • The impact of Services engagement in accelerating adoption
  • The engagement level with the product, services, and other customer enablement resources
  • How customers are positioning value to each other

If you are planning to attend ATD ICE join me on Wednesday, May 22nd from 8:15 AM – 9:30 AM in Room 156 where I’ll cover four critical areas for optimizing readiness and enablement.

  • Why it’s time to re-think what sales enablement and readiness means in your organization
  • How to assess the impact of your customer’s journey on customer-facing teams
  • Ways to integrate Customer Enablement into sales readiness and enablement as a whole to drive long-term value and revenue
  • Practical tips from the field for evaluating technology solutions for readiness

And don’t forget to visit us at Booth #924 if you’ll be there!

Click Here to Learn More About Dimple’s Session at ATD Conference 2019

Click Here to Register for the Conference

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.

SalesHacker: Sales Training is Only One-Third of What You Need to Be Doing for Sales Enablement

Simona Galant on December 12, 2018

 

In a recent article by SalesHacker, Mindtickle’s Manager of Enablement, Ashley Philipps, discusses what sales training and sales enablement have in common – and how successful sales enablement can get you ahead of the game.

The key takeaway? While sales training is ideally suited for onboarding new hires and getting them up to speed, sales training alone can’t help to move the revenue dial. In the article, she writes, “At the end of the day, sales training in and of itself is only a portion of the overall solution that an organization needs to be adopting.”

Ashley outlines what sales enablement is, as well as what it isn’t, and cites some important statistics from a recent Forrester tech sales report. This discussion brings to light just what exactly you and your organization should expect from a successful sales enablement initiative.

Among the many functionalities and tools sales enablement should deliver are an overview of reps’ competencies and capabilities, as well as rigorous alignment with business goals. Some questions a successful program will help you answer:

  • What do my reps know?
  • How are they talking about the company and the offering?
  • How are they handling objections or concerns?
  • Are they capable of creating an environment conducive to selling?

After reading this article, you’ll be a step closer to equip your team with the skills, behaviors, and knowledge they need to succeed today.

To learn more about the do’s and don’ts of sales enablement, read on here!

McKinsey Quarterly Report: Why Data Culture Matters

Simona Galant on October 23, 2018

 

Bringing together data talent, tools and decision making is often easier said than done: many a company faces this challenge.

How do you incorporate data into your daily business model and strategy? What about your company culture?

With these questions in mind, the McKinsey report gathers and analyzes some key research that touches on seven fundamental principles that underpin a healthy data culture. In this article, McKinsey provides readers with 7 takeaways from industry leaders that help understand how to tackle the ever-evolving use of data analytics.

Some of the topics  include:

  • C-suite commitment through ongoing informed conversations
  • Drawing a  correlation between data analysis and decision making
  • Striking the appropriate balance between hiring new employees and transforming existing ones

“You develop a data culture by moving beyond specialists and skunkworks, with the goal of achieving deep business engagement, creating employee pull, and cultivating a sense of purpose, so that data can support your operations instead of the other way around.”

In addition to McKinsey’s comprehensive research, Mitsubishi managing executive officer Takehiko Nagumo, Boeing CIO Ted Colbert, and JPMorgan CDO Rob Casper, along with others, also provide thought leadership throughout the article.

Read here!

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