Keeping Your Remote Workforce On Message with the 2 C’s of Readiness for Remote Managers and Coaches

Albert Fong on June 19, 2020

A remote workforce can be difficult to navigate especially for sales enablement leaders. And as some employees begin to return to an office, the ‘new normal’ of a hybrid environment will continue to increase these complexities. Regardless of location, sales enablement leaders must keep customer-facing teams actively engaged. In this context, the 2 C’s of readiness enablement, Communication and Coaching are critical to get right. 

Personalizing and adapting two-way communication, enabling new and upgraded remote selling skills while enabling visibility and the ability to intervene with proactive coaching (even at a distance) is a North Star for the emerging normal. Although challenging, working remotely is no excuse to pull back on training and coaching investments because it can be done just as well as in the office. 

Before further discussing how to effectively facilitate remote training and coaching, sales enablement leaders must first make certain that all pertinent information and content are specific to the markets, segments and customers that your team is contacting. It needs to be closely aligned with the steps and activities sales reps execute as part of the process. Finally,  it must be in line with the sales methodology and expectations for customer-facing interactions and be designed to deliver visibility on delivery, engagement, usage and satisfaction for managers. This last point is critical as remote coaching programs and initiatives become critical in the emerging virtual everywhere environment. While self-service and 2-ways communications are a basic first principle for remote enablement, ensuring managers participate as recipients and coaches ensures that updates are resulting in updated teams. . 

With that in place, let’s dive into how to ensure sales enablement delivers value for remote workers. First, every content asset and communication designed to align with and keep the sales force highly engaged must deliver ROI. Enabling this requires the following: 

  • Frequent push and pull-based, personalized communications sent in a rep’s preferred channel that will draw greater interest in training. For example, communications that pop up in the flow of a sales rep’s daily work life — such as in an email or app, through the Salesforce dashboard or other CRM, or in newsletters — drive higher engagement.
  • Reps must be able to consume content on their own schedule and modality. Never has this been more important than now, with an often-unpredictable work environment and work hours. Understanding engagement trends – what modules or learning is most revisited, offline vs. online consumption trends, mobile minutes, responsiveness to digital reminders are just a few of the compelling metrics afforded by modern platforms that should be embraced by managers and executives for coaching engagement as much as administrators of platforms. 
  • Learning delivered in different formats caters to different learning styles. Microlearning in the form of videos, polls, quizzes, podcasts and gamified content tends to drive higher consumption and retention among reps. Video is also a powerful tool for practicing and polishing pitches through guided role play. With it, reps can practice interacting with customers in simulated sales scenarios to improve their presentations and get real-time feedback from managers or coworkers. 
  • Don’t overlook remote coaching engagement. With regular video coaching sessions and use of shared competency assessments, reps and managers can prioritize, build and track skills incrementally while also providing valuable inputs to readiness and enablement teams. And, when it has structure and regular cadence, virtual coaching can be as valuable as in-person coaching while being cost and commute efficient.

Keeping remote employees engaged and active isn’t a challenge relegated only to sales enablement leaders. CMOs and CROs alike are indirectly impacted by sales enablement’s success too, because hitting their numbers depends on reps’ active engagement with sales training. With CMOs heavily involved in driving leads through the sales pipeline, they must engage, motivate and align customer-facing teams with new, innovative messaging, the latest content and other assets, and new and ongoing campaigns. CROs need to equally be involved in engagement, adoption and effective tactics in order to achieve revenue targets.

With that in mind, CMOs and CROs can help their team stay aligned in this remote setting and confirm that they’re retaining information in the following ways. 

  • Monitor updates in activity logs in the CRM
  • Conduct one-on-ones with managers and engagement reporting
  • Gather feedback from the field
  • Measure the amount of content consumption

By monitoring whether their teams are seeing an uptick in deal velocity across stages and over time, driving better engagement with buyers, and securing more ‘solutioning’ activities like workshops and proofs of concept, CMOs and CROs can identify problem areas and develop plans of action to address them. And finally, by maintaining open lines of communication with marketing, revenue and marketing leaders can ensure the most impactful content is pushed out in the most effective ways. After all, we know what messaging will resonate with which channels to drive revenue.

It’s unclear when we’ll be able to get back to business as usual, but that doesn’t mean that sales training and coaching initiatives should be put on hold. In fact, the 2 C’s of readiness enablement – Communication and Coaching – are more important than ever to ensure that sales teams are engaged and on message. Customer-facing employees can keep some sense of normalcy and continuity in their day-to-day by continuing to develop their skill sets from home, the office or a combination of both. Companies with an understanding that training, coaching and microlearning are the key to driving consistent customer engagement and messaging will be poised for success in today’s ‘new normal’. 

Upskilling Solutions Consulting for Virtual Demos: Best Practices for Pre-Sales Effectiveness

Gordon Thompson on May 2, 2020

Now more than ever, our homes have become our world. And for the foreseeable future, sales calls and product demos will be conducted from home, virtually. It’s a major adjustment and the challenges typically faced during in-person meetings (such as ensuring and maximizing knowledge retention) are made all the more challenging by additional complications that arise from virtual meetings. This means sales readiness and enablement leaders need to rethink how they can partner with pre-sales leaders of solutions consulting / solutions engineering (SC / SE) teams to upskill and reskill their teams for this new normal.

When your SCs are not in the same physical space as their meeting attendees, they’re not able to read the prospect’s or customer’s body language and adjust their presentation accordingly. However, while meeting virtually lacks the personal connection more easily achieved in face-to-face meetings, they still must strive to achieve the same goals — professionalism, making an impact, and closing deals.

The following are 10 best practices pre-sales leaders and enablement practitioners should focus on when looking to onboard, develop, and maximize the knowledge and skills of solutions consulting and sales engineering teams.

  1. Do the pre-work. When SCs come prepared with a basic background on the prospect/customer and an idea of how the meeting will flow, they’re already at an advantage. Ahead of the meeting, research about the attendees should be conducted so that they can make a connection and build rapport early in the call. Things like looking for a colleague in common, similar hobbies, or previous work experience. Then, the SC should gather the participants on their team to conduct a dry run of the meeting (not just a demo dry run) and go through each part of the agenda to ensure alignment with the allotted time.
  2. Keep them on their toes. SCs should call someone by name early in the meeting. This not only engages the remote audience but also shows that they remember the names of the attendees. They need to also be prepared to pivot away from the defined agenda even if they went through it to confirm that everyone was on board with the flow of the meeting. An additional way to keep the audience engaged is by recapping any prior discussions using their names.
  3. Break up the flow. When people are on a virtual call, they tend to tune out. To avoid this, SCs should take intentional breaks every 5-7 minutes. During the presentation, they can ask for questions or even call out the champion in the room by name. Knowing and using the “tell-show-tell” approach multiple times over the call helps to break up the flow and reinforce points that need to be conveyed.
  4. Leverage third-party tools. The mouse pointer is not a demo tool, and circling a region on the screen is not ok. To make demos more professional using boxes and arrows, SCs should know how to use ZoomIt (for PC) or DemoPro (for Mac). Additionally, Poll Anywhere can make calls interactive and memorable. Your current tool may also have some of these capabilities too.
  5. Rely on the AE. The AE is the SC’s ‘wing-person’ and an invaluable asset during these calls. They can monitor the chat, record prospect questions and who asked the questions to review after the call, and even jump in on tough questions as needed. An open and private channel to communicate with them (e.g. Text or iMessage) may be needed during the call. Likewise, keeping their coach updated on how the meeting is progressing is important for guidance and feedback.
  6. Maintain a steady pace. Without body language or paralanguage to help in an in-person meeting, it’s difficult to perceive subtle cues that may indicate that a rep might be speaking too fast and that they’ve lost their audience. To help you stay on pace, they can take deliberate breaths.
  7. Turn on the video. SCs absolutely need to know how to work their video tool, including advanced features like surveys, notations, or whiteboarding. Even basic features like how to mute and unmute are important for a successful demo. Similarly, they should think about how they appear to the audience. Conducting the meeting from a bedroom is less than ideal. Knowing how to use and incorporate a green screen to mask surroundings can be helpful here. If you are using video and have limited network bandwidth, you may need to dial in for voice.
  8. Manage the time. SCs should plan for meetings to last 45 minutes for an hour meeting. Being mindful that attendees may have a hard stop, it’s important to try and not go over the allocated time. It can be much more difficult to stay on time with virtual meetings, so the meeting prep and taking extra care during the call will help them to finish on time.
  9. Be memorable. Another thing SCs can do to continue to build rapport is to present as if they were in person and make a connection by sharing something personal upfront. To avoid sounding robotic, they should use voice inflections to differentiate areas of importance. And to keep the focus on the rep and the demo, they need to minimize the words on their slides. Otherwise, the audience will be reading the slides instead of listening to the demo. And, if the rep isn’t speaking, they need to stay on mute (check and double-check this!).
  10. Close strong. Again, SCs need to employ the “tell-show-tell” approach. Before creating next steps together, they should remember to recap the entire flow and the business outcomes. It doesn’t hurt for them to ask their attendees if they were satisfied with what they saw, for situational awareness.

We’ve survived a number of events — the dot-com bust, Y2k, 9/11, the ’07-’08 recession — and we’ve come out on the other side with a new definition of normal. With a few bruises and a whole lot more experience, we readjust and continue progressing forward. No one knows what our new normal will look like in six months, 12 months or two years from now, but what is clear is that more and more commerce will be done remotely, virtually, and not face to face. With that in mind, these best practices will stand the test of time to help pre-sales leaders and enablement practitioners develop the knowledge and skills SCs need to have impactful virtual meetings now and in the future.

The Art of Field Communications in 2020: A CMO Perspective on Updating and Aligning Remote Teams

Gopkiran Rao on April 26, 2020

6 weeks ago like for every other profession, what it meant to go to work changed for marketers too. We gave up commuting, dress shirts, dropping by unannounced to ask our sales friends how the quarter was going, and worrying about expo hall logistics.

COVID-19 also had an unexpected, positive side effect. It has reinforced the importance of marketing as a function to coordinate the GTM response across different field organizations as we move to a new normal in which remote or hybrid-remote is here to stay. This makes three GTM priorities even more critical than usual.

  • Ensure the category, company and its solutions are more relevant than ever
  • Ensure company executives, customers, frontline personnel and partners are staying up to date on market changes and the company’s response
  • Leverage expertise across the business to rapidly roll out initiatives to reskill, re-message, and engage customer-facing teams.

This makes regular field communications and updates one of the most critical initiatives marketers can execute to engage their increasingly remote and virtual field teams. For those of us in the community sharing notes on emerging best practices for updating the field, three common, positive trends have emerged in the first wave of response to the new normal.

First Principles for Field Communications in the remote-hybrid environment

The best marketers in the business have quickly pivoted to:

  • Agile re-planning and management, manically focused on bite-sized updates produced through cross-team collaboration, while pushing urgent and transparent communications to the field
  • Continuous 1:1 feedback loops and micro-updates with individual sellers and other representatives to inform and prioritize efforts including new messaging and demand gen mechanisms like virtual events
  • Setting the expectation for scheduled, consistent field updates delivering usable information and tools with lower emphasis on ‘video perfect production values
  • Making the sensible pivot to a single cost-efficient platform like Mindtickle for communication and updates
  • Already familiar with product marketing, enablement, and content teams, as well as their audience in pre-sales, sales and services for learning, skill development, coaching and updates, the delivery platform, became a non-issue

My own team and I have been fortunate to learn from, adopt and implement many of these first principles for our own field updates and communication. It has been one of the most strategic projects we have undertaken in the last month. The result has been consistently positive feedback and demonstrable value in the field. There are a few reasons for this, many of which are core principles that we talk about in sales readiness and enablement.

 

(Engage, Motivate, Measure Effectiveness with customer content and social sharing)

Principles Driving Mindtickle’s Effective Use of Mindtickle for Field Communication and Updates

  • An agile mentality and personal commitment from every member of the extended marketing team to focus on usable deliverables
    • Enabling our SDRs, AEs, CSMs and other colleagues to get meetings and drive value-added conversations with customers is the single filter we use to define and execute content.
  • Load sharing, cross-training and democratizing the ideation and feedback-loop
    • Implementing a tiger team, sponsored by me and led by product marketing and enablement has allowed us to draft campaigns and roll-out across pre-sales and sales initially, then to customer services and now the entire company.
  • Using multiple tools, but focusing on Mindtickle for Mindtickle as the defining authoring, consumption and tracking mechanism as the measure of effectiveness. This has been possible because of our approach to
    • Integrating our corporate collaboration hub and channels, content repositories, email, web conferencing and work management platforms with Mindtickle.
    • Enabling the marketing team to be power users of the platform across basic features such as native content collaboration and authoring tools, as well as interactive elements like gamification, social learning, surveys and polls.
    • For the first time, getting direct insight into how the messaging updates and tools are translating into improved field capability from advanced Mindtickle capabilities like call and web-presentation intelligence (integrated AI-evaluation) and coaching feedback.
  • Constant outreach to customers, partners, analysts, board members and industry colleagues to share and validate ideas on how to best position and deliver new messaging, virtual field campaigns and tools.
  • The support of an executive team that is open and welcomes being measured on their participation and completion of certifiable materials in these updates.

Our Implementation and Experience

Finding an agile approach, cadence and a structure that works for us has been an important aspect of why the weekend update, as it’s often referred to, has become something looked forward to by the marketing and consuming teams alike.

A few highlights include

  • In Mindtickle’s case, we push out our updates every Sunday evening. After 3 weeks of waking up to the Monday morning ‘ping’, we have noticed seller participation and completion rates in excess of 50% within 2 hours of the first digital notification
  • In our working meetings we iterate on the coming week’s update and key dependencies and resources with the help of a lite Kanban board
  • Consistent content includes links to an information-packed marketing calendar, mini-customer podcasts, videos or information snippets, content, PR and analyst air cover or wins as well as competitive snippets
  • Using inputs from field surveys pushed out to the field teams; Since we started using Mindtickle’s native survey tools we have seen field input go up 100% to nearly 90%
  • While the priority is quality and speed of execution, we engage our Content as a Service team (CAAS) as a secret weapon for design, videos and graphics for market-facing content
  • Our head of strategic ops coordinates the schedule and team member submissions; By working closely with sales enablement we are now able to create a curated, sub-experience for our sales and pre-sales team while using the same content for the rest of the company
  • We use one of our most popular modules called the Quick Update to deliver the weekly update; This powerful feature allows the team to use the best possible combination of personal videos, slideware, documents as well as linked materials from customers or partners to serve up content; We are also incorporating simple assessment and certification features like quizzes, exercises and assessments to ensure retention in addition to completion
  • We regularly meet with the sales enablement and management team to share and receive feedback on completion and engagement blockers and understand how assets and tools are being perceived by customers as well as their teams

 

(Simple quizzes and polls reinforce key talking points and drive interactivity)

There is more to be done. Content across updates must be ever more relevant and usable, meet higher production standards and we are figuring out how to keep up the pace of producing 3-4 quality assets each week ranging from market-ready content like from how-to guides to fire-side chats with customers. This challenges our nimble, but small team–but the feedback and receptiveness from the company (and hopefully soon our partners) has been compelling and inspires us all to keep aiming high.

 

(Content and Tools are only as good as the engagement they drive)

New Tools for Remote and Ready Initiatives

This week, with the benefit of not just these outside best practices, but our own evolving experience we are pleased to publish this blog post as well as a comprehensive guide for field communications and updates and a quick how-to video to our remote and ready resources repository.

Whether you are a marketer, in the business of working with customers or an executive I hope you find these resources worth your time and will reach out to learn how I or my team might assist you in your own journey to engage and up-level your customer-facing teams with or without Mindtickle.

Sales Replanning without Anxiety: An Enablement Leader’s Practical Perspective on Executing an Effective Virtual Business Review

Nick Salas on April 16, 2020

Business reviews are especially critical at the moment in aligning sales and management teams to adjusted targets, current quarter forecasts as well as a unified and standardized message. With no options to meet face-to-face, it is imperative that your virtual replanning and review strategy be one that is inclusive and prescriptive, including collaboration with internal departments that have a stake in ensuring messaging and sales execution is done correctly. Getting the same level of involvement and team participation from collaborators (now in different zipcodes and timezones) can be impossible if you rely on a multi-hour or multi-day live streaming session or default to passing documents back and forth over content channels. 

Luckily sales readiness technology such as Mindtickle can assist with soliciting feedback from the field team and managers, account planning and pre-meeting territory reviews. By enabling video or screen share submissions, auto- and manager-driven, 1:1 reviews, sellers benefit from  proper preparation and are impactful. Activities such as pre-work and video role play are great tools to include to increase participation, while gamification drives engagement that’s fun and effective. In my experience there are two key elements common to every successful QBR or business review I have been part of that I believe are critical in today’s environment.

Consideration #1

Business reviews should not be an anxiety-inducing exercise for sellers…far from it.  Sellers should look forward to receiving feedback from leaders and cross-departmental stakeholders to increase their skills and tactics. 

Tip:

  • Sessions need to be upbeat, positive, and encouraging for sellers, and more importantly, this keeps them engaged and involved. 
  • Sales enablement leaders should ensure that the content being presented at business reviews correlate back to competencies and skills that have been identified as key to an individual seller’s success. For sales leaders, this can help in better evaluating skills gaps and learning opportunities that either hindered or helped in driving sellers to get their prospects converted through each stage of the sales process.

Consideration #2

Business reviews shouldn’t be an overwhelming experience in the amount of information that’s presented.  Consider the requirements and venue of your remote workforce since the business review will be done via video conference.

Tip: 

  • Enablement leaders will have to reinforce a lot of the messaging, so keep it to just the essentials. If there is content that would be better delivered post business review as a follow-up, don’t include it in the core content. To encourage further engagement, include as much content from the field as possible. No one understands better what is happening in the field than the sellers so learning from each other is key to a seller’s success. 
  • Keep content as applicable as possible. Sales theories and methodologies are important to any sales strategy, but business reviews are a time to put those theories into practical application that lead to closing more business for the sellers. 

I hope you enjoyed my thoughts and that you can benefit from the strategies and tactics I mentioned above. Learn more by downloading our Complete Guide and watch our demo video for running a virtual business review that inspires your organization.

The Virtual Business Review as Your Strategic Cornerstone for Driving Revenue: A CRO’s Perspective

Jeff Santelices on April 12, 2020

According to a recent Gartner CSO report, customer engagement remains critical in addressing both market downturns and demand rebounds. Because of this, executing a scheduled or emergency Business Review (e.g. QBR) is one of the most powerful strategic actions sales, marketing and service line leaders have to strategically re-plan, communicate and set focus on the activities that will drive revenue outcomes for their organization.

Unfortunately, there is typically a disconnect between the strategic intent and the actual execution of a QBR. Sellers oftentimes view the session as a management task, lazily filling out a template the night before their session, and disregard the content and takeaways immediately afterwards so ‘they can get on with their day job’. Presenters drone on, leaving their sales audience glossy-eyed and multitasking. And leadership oftentimes struggle to remain focused and provide consistent, detailed and actionable feedback as the parade of territory and opportunity reviews span multiple hours or days.

So, we all need to flip the script to make your next QBR as strategic as we intend, whether its delivered in-person, remote, or some combination thereof.

Here’s what sales leaders need to do now:

  • In a virtual setting, the break-out of the focus and effort should be as follows: 3/5 for pre-work, 1/5 in-session, 1/5 follow-on, and keep your in-session review to a maximum of 1 day, with 50% of that day spent on ‘state of the union’ and other important updates, and 50% of the day on upskilling and up-leveling your team.
  • Move your account and territory reviews into pre-work two weeks prior to the business review. Having your sellers record their presentations and talking points will force them to prepare and helps identify gaps in critical thinking. Mindtickle’s video role play capability provides a forum for practicing, getting automated feedback, and submitting a final presentation that hits the mark while staying on-time.
  • Plan ahead and ensure your reviewers explicitly carve out time to complete the reviews at least 1 week before the live session. This ensures ample time to provide quality reviews. Mindtickle accommodates reviews on web or mobile, making it convenient for reviewers to squeeze in the time they need to complete quality reviews. Mindtickle also allows for in-line comments with the video recording to deliver targeted feedback that emulates live-session interaction. Pre-built reviewer forms and templates also promote consistent, in-depth, and personalized feedback.
  • For the live-session QBR – implement a 3/5 presenter rule: push presenters to condense their presentations to 3 slides and a maximum of 5 minutes which forces them to tailor crisp and concise messaging specifically to the sales audience. Also ensure that each presenter outlines a maximum of 3 takeaways or action items. Use these to formulate post-presentation quiz questions to ensure these items are internalized by the sales team.

At Mindtickle, we’re keen practitioners of the concepts I’ve laid out in this blog–regular business reviews like QBRs are an anchor of our revenue planning and alignment processes. Whether you’re a front-line sales manager responsible for a small team or a seasoned CRO managing a global sea of RVPs and seasoned enterprise account executives and have wondered how you can optimize your upcoming virtual business review initiative, I hope you found the read worth your while.

The Mindtickle team has prepared a comprehensive guide to assist enablement, marketing and sales teams in executing an effective virtual business review. For more information, download our Complete Guide and watch our short video demo to learn how to run an effective virtual business review.

The Best Sales Training Ideas: Techniques to Ensure Success

Albert Fong on January 28, 2020

We’ve entered a new era of sales training. For many decades, long presentations in classroom environments were the only form of career learning available. But today, sales reps expect more creative and comprehensive career development tools, and customers expect salespeople to be valuable industry experts.

As technology evolves, attention spans decrease and customer knowledge skyrockets. Sales instruction must now include new methodologies that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. Today’s training is fueled by sales enablement technologies, and it’s bolstered by innovative coaching methods.

What is Sales Training?

Sales training is the ongoing process of teaching sales teams how to create profitable, deal-closing interactions with buyers. This may include in-person learning, e-learning, micro-learning, gamification, or other training techniques to help salespeople improve.

Sales training is designed to help sales reps close more deals, of course. But it’s also about teaching reps to build long-term relationships with buyers and guide them to buying decisions that best benefit their organizations as well.

Although the terms are sometimes used synonymously, sales training is not the same as “sales enablement” or “sales coaching.”

Sales enablement is a wide umbrella. While it includes training, it also involves tools, content, processes, and other resources that enable sales reps to be at their best.

Sales coaching is a crucial reinforcer of training. It’s the continuous, one-on-one guidance given to salespeople to fill each individual rep’s specific knowledge gaps.

The Best Sales Training Techniques

There’s no single training plan that works for every sales organization, and it’s beneficial to use a mix of different methods to keep things interesting. There are, however, several training techniques that, when implemented correctly, boost the performance of sales teams. Here are key sales training techniques to consider:

E-learning

Technology and flexible work arrangements continue to change how and where work is performed.

Over 40% of U.S. employees worked remotely for at least part of the time in 2017, up from only 23% in 2003.

and salespeople are no exception. Even when employees are in the office, sales teams are often dispersed throughout different cities, states, and even countries to serve different markets.

Traditional, in-person training is challenging to coordinate, expensive to execute, and requires taking the sales staff away from valuable customer-facing activities for hours or days at a time.

E-learning can take different forms, such as instructor-led classes vs. massive open online courses (MOOCs). These are most commonly used to teach several new concepts in a short span of time, such as during sales rep onboarding or training on a new system.

E-learning eliminates many of the pitfalls of traditional sales training by providing:

  • Anywhere/anytime access: By offering training courses online via the cloud, sales reps can access training materials wherever and whenever is convenient for them. The best e-learning technology also enables learners to take courses from any device, whether desktops, laptops, tablets or phones.
  • Increased sales-rep productivity: The downtime required to travel to a conference center and sit through training would be better served on the front lines with buyers. Because e-learning enables salespeople to take courses whenever their schedules permit, they gain more time to focus on customer relationship building and revenue-generating activities.
  • Cost reductions: Although e-learning requires up-front investment, it ultimately leads to steep cost reductions. Virtual learning reduces the costs of travel, training centers, physical learning materials (like training guides), and the expenses associated with bringing in dedicated trainers.
  • Many engaging formats: E-learning can be as creative and engaging as you want it to be. And in our era of shrinking attention spans, engagement is important. The best e-learning training offers a mix of presentation formats that boost engagement. Examples include video, interactive infographics, whiteboard-style free animations, kinetic text, and challenging-yet-fun assessments to test the learner’s knowledge.
  • Attractive perks for top talent: Companies with the most convenient and robust learning opportunities can win top talent better than competitors. Sales training offers career and skill development—something that millennials want and expect from their employers. A sales organization that offers 24/7 access to industry-leading training materials can highlight their commitment to ongoing improvement in the recruiting process.

Micro-learning

https://joshbersin.com/

Micro-learning is the practice of offering bite-sized, always-accessible, individualized training content to employees. This practice uses small learning opportunities to reinforce key concepts and drive employee development.

Micro-learning is often focused on one topic or problem, and it is easily searchable so employees can find information on the right topic at the right time. Micro-learning may incorporate a range of content types, including quizzes, videos, games, simulations, audio clips, and more.

Micro-learning taps into a key principle of how humans learn: the more we repeat and use information, the more ingrained it becomes in long-term memory. Research also shows that information is retained more effectively when it is spread over a longer period of time, compared to when the information is presented all at once.

Not only does micro-learning aid in the learning process, but it also saves precious time and helps the learner absorb information in a way that’s fun and engaging.

Here are some important benefits of micro-learning:

  • Retain more training information: Conventional e-learning typically covers numerous training objectives in one lengthy course. This can create “information overload,” causing reps to struggle to retain a wide range of concepts. Micro-learning flips this tactic on its head by presenting the learner with short-and-sweet training modules.
  • Fit into busy reps’ schedules: Each training module is quick, fun, and engaging. It focuses on one learning objective, with one vital concept to remember, and then ends. The learner can then either take another training module or go about their day with that one newly-learned concept in mind.
  • Identify knowledge gaps and track progress: Advanced micro-learning platforms provide the ability for sales leaders to identify reps’ knowledge gaps, assign training to fill that gap, and track the reps’ progress in that area.
  • Customize and personalize training programs: With larger sales teams, there are numerous knowledge gaps to fill. Traditionally, the way to deal with knowledge gaps was to present dozens (or even hundreds) of reps with one lengthy training session in an attempt to cover every possible need. With micro-learning, sales coaches can assign the exact modules needed to fill every rep’s knowledge gaps. This approach boosts efficiency, saves time for the entire sales team, and gives reps a more customized approach to development.
  • Provide information that is relevant here and now: Sales training should be refreshed frequently to accommodate the latest product knowledge, buyer insights, and industry trends. Traditional classroom materials or even e-learning can take months to update. Micro-learning modules, on the other hand, can be updated within hours to ensure reps are getting the most relevant information.
  • Improve training completion rates: The longer and more challenging the training, the less likely your reps are to complete the entire program. With shorter, more approachable training that is easy to fit in with day-to-day activities, reps are more likely to start and complete their training modules.
  • Gain a competitive advantage: Companies can gain and cement their competitive advantage by using micro-learning techniques. Dynamic learning opportunities like micro-learning improve the onboarding process, increase productivity, help attract and retain top talent, and require less time to find and update than traditional training materials. All of these benefits together help you build a competitive advantage and deliver more value to customers.

Gamification

Gamification provides something that was once unheard of: training programs that are fun. Training that’s enjoyable and engaging helps the learner retain more of the material for longer periods of time.

When training and assessments are enjoyable, reps are motivated to complete modules even when they’re not assigned to them. This provides for more training opportunities and more reinforcement of key concepts covered in e-learning, micro-learning, or other training formats. When salespeople are motivated to complete more training, the result is a more highly skilled sales team that is prepared to drive revenue growth.

Some of the most effective gamification elements include:

  • Video-game components: Gaming is a familiar format to millennials, who make up the largest share of the U.S. workforce. The gaming format offers fun and engaging challenges to help apply and reinforce what is learned.
  • Leaderboards: Leaderboards and badges add healthy colleague-to-colleague competition to the training mix. Since their achievements can be publicized company-wide, reps receive more recognition and motivation than they did with traditional training courses.
  • Social elements: Newsfeeds and open communication between reps make the gamification experience even more rewarding. Social elements can promote new business connections and profitable interactions (like knowledge sharing and meaningful encouragement) within the sales force.
  • Gamified quizzes: Even quizzes can be fun when they’re turned into games. When reps don’t pass an assessment on the first try, they’re more willing and motivated to play the learning game again to pick up the information they might have missed.

Real-world incentives

Salespeople are goal-driven and competitive by nature. Online training programs should leverage these traits. While many reps complete e-learning courses for their own career development, the right incentives can add motivational fuel to the fire. Here are a few important guidelines:

  • Make sure the incentives are desirable: Incentives can take many forms, like spiffs awarded after meeting a challenging training goal, or gift cards or concert tickets. Anything that will motivate your reps is fair game. Don’t make the common mistake of assuming your team will be motivated by company-branded giveaway items like pens and sport bottles—your reps are more valuable than that, so it’s worth putting time and thought into your incentives.
  • Incentives need to be achievable: If the incentive requirements aren’t attainable, such as earning 100% on all training quizzes for a month, reps will be discouraged rather than motivated. The requirements should be challenging, but reps need to believe they can actually win. Consider running “nearly impossible” incentives alongside achievable ones. For example, earning 85% or higher on all training quizzes this month will earn a standard (but desirable) reward, and landing 100% on all quizzes is worth an even more valuable reward.
  • Get input from sales reps: With larger sales teams, especially when they’re remote, it might be harder to anticipate what kinds of incentives resonate well with your reps. If you’re not sure what to offer, ask reps directly. Consider emailing a questionnaire with a list of rewards to choose from, whether gift cards, a donation to their favorite charity, etc. Then, when a rep earns an incentive, you’ll know their preferences.
  • Deliver the reward immediately: With remote sales reps, make sure the reward is mailed quickly. For reps working in the office, hand-deliver it the day it’s earned, if possible. To maintain the motivation, reps should see training incentives being received as promised.

How a Sales Training Platform Can Help

There are countless approaches to establishing effective sales training and onboarding at your organization. The right training platform can help your reps achieve quotas faster and improve new reps’ time to productivity. Look for a platform that enables you to:

  • Identify your reps’ specific knowledge gaps
  • Assign your reps the right learning paths based on their roles
  • Track onboarding progress with milestones and certifications
  • Provide training modules that incorporate gamification elements

Mindtickle is a trusted sales training platform that enables sales teams worldwide to become more competitive and profitable. Schedule a demo to see how Mindtickle can help you establish and refine your sales training program.

Building Sales Capability in Financial Services: Key Takeaways from the Sales Operations Institute

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on November 4, 2019

Recently, the Sales Operations Institute brought together industry and corporate leaders to discuss how to build and maintain a coherent and effective sales strategy for corporate advantage. Representatives from Mindtickle (including myself) attended and ran a session with sales operations leaders that focused on building sales capability within financial service organizations to deliver enhanced customer experience. 

 

The discussions highlighted that most organizations are facing similar challenges when building sales capability that drives customer experience. The key issues identified fell into three areas – readiness program effectiveness, content adoption, and sales personalization at scale. Here are my takeaways: 

 

Effective readiness programs require alignment with sales methodologies

 

The biggest challenge identified by many of the participants was in creating alignment between readiness programs and sales methodologies. While most highlighted that they had a significant amount of sales training content available, that content didn’t necessarily fit within their existing sales processes, which garnered poor adoption.  

 

To ready sellers effectively requires specialized knowledge of not only the products and services but also the sales process. This must also align with the strategic objectives of the organization, which is crucial to obtaining top-down buy-in. Some of the leaders noted that their strategy was sometimes inconsistent between cross-functional teams, which further impeded training effectiveness. This strategic disconnect again highlighted the importance of gaining top-down buy-in across the organization before adopting solutions to improve training effectiveness.

 

The group identified several solutions that they believed were necessary to deliver effective sales readiness programs:

  • Leverage product champions or a network of product excellence to build content and get buy-in across the organization. 
  • Understand the daily life of a salesperson and map out their process so training can be aligned to sales methodologies.
  • Put in place and communicate a leaderboard to promote success within the organization.
  • Standardize playbooks to ensure there is consistency in how information is presented to customers.
  • Measure what’s working and what isn’t. By identifying gaps and opportunities to add value, the effectiveness of readiness programs can be constantly improved. 
  • Wherever possible, look for opportunities to automate processes to save both time and cost.

 

Content adoption is crucial

 

Many organizations have created a plethora of sales content, but this is only effective in building sales capability if their people are aware of it, can access it, and know how to use it. 

 

To enable content adoption, some of the following approaches identified were:

  • Personalize and prioritize what content is pushed to salespeople.
  • Identify what readiness content is required at each stage of the sales process and surface them in the flow of work.
  • Leverage tools that are easy to use and add value quickly to encourage adoption.  
  • Track engagement and coach to the specific skill gaps of the individual.
  • When assessing tools, ensure that the sales stack is integrated so there isn’t duplication across tools. 

 

Customers demand personalization

 

One size fits all models are no longer acceptable. Customers (and salespeople for that matter) have come to expect everything to be personalized to their needs, which has created new issues when building sales capability. This is particularly problematic in financial services where risk management is paramount and consistency is essential. 

 

To personalize, organizations need to be able to develop content and use tools that are consistent and compliant while providing enough flexibility to adapt to individual customer needs. 

 

Some of the identified ways to enable personalization at scale included:

  • Enabling front line managers to improve how they coach sales reps. Coaching not only builds sales capability more broadly but can also help salespeople understand how to personalize a solution to individual customer needs whilst being consistent with the sales process. 
  • Leveraging technology to enable just in time learning opportunities. These may be tailored to specific customer situations so that salespeople can create a more personalized experience. 

 

These solutions each form part of an overall process of enabling and empowering salespeople. It’s human nature to sell within your comfort zone, but to build sales capability organizations need to expand the breadth and depth of each individual’s so that they can sell more effectively. 

 

To learn more, download our full eBook: Driving Customer Experience from the Frontline of Financial Services

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

Come See Mindtickle at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference 2019

Albert Fong on August 29, 2019

 

Mindtickle is excited to participate in this year’s Gartner CSO and Sales Leader conference! The conference focuses on Chief Sales Officers and sales leaders who are tasked with delivering significant revenue and performance growth each year.  We’re especially looking forward to a special breakfast session on Day 1 led by Christi Moot, Global Director of Sales Readiness, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. For a detailed session description of this highly relevant topic, see below. 

In addition, Mindtickle will be available throughout the conference in the exhibition hall at Booth #321. Our expert booth staff will be offering Sales Readiness demonstrations, actual hands-on time with our mobile app, some exciting giveaways, and entertainment! We look forward to meeting you there! 

To find out if the conference is right for you, please read the reasons to attend and register here. Contact us for a limited-availability $400 discount code!

 

Speaker: Christi Moot, Global Director of Sales Readiness, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Date/Time: September 17, 7:45-8:30am PT

Location: Mount Royal Ballroom, The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas (conference registration required)

 

Session info:

To Incentivize Is to Motivate: Empowering Your Seller’s Revenue Edge

With a changing landscape that is highly competitive both for sales talent and for revenue generation, successful companies today are those that implement sales readiness initiatives to motivate and engage teams for measurable revenue outcomes. At LinkedIn, our culture incentivizes each employee to discover and develop the capabilities to power the next level of professional attainment – their growth edge.  Attend this session to learn how LinkedIn is building a world-class, high performing sales organization by linking measurable customer-facing capability to incentive practices.  

You will learn

  • How a more effective salesperson can lead to a faster deal/quota achievement time
  • Guiding principles that motivate and incentivize sellers to systematically build revenue behavior
  • How to delegate and assign ownership and accountability based on an individual’s specific learning and skill level
  • How to tie specific learning objectives with revenue goals based on each employee’s role
  • How to leverage and harness daily interactions between peers and leaders for social learning

 

Mindtickle powers the world’s most customer-centric organizations with the capabilities proven to grow revenue and maximize brand value. Visit mindtickle.com to learn more about our Sales Readiness solutions, customers, resources or to schedule a demo.

Sales Readiness is a Lifestyle, Not a Diet

Orbit Media on August 27, 2019

The concept of dieting has been the target of a lot of criticism over the last 10 years as experts expounded that drastic regimes aimed at quick weight loss don’t work well. Their research indicated that people eventually come off the diet and end up gaining back whatever pounds they lost. Instead, the experts and researchers say, it’s better to make the commitment to a healthy lifestyle. Exercising regularly, eating a variety of wholesome foods, and keeping your stress levels down will be much more beneficial in the long run.

While I’m no expert on diet or nutrition, this kind of thinking strikes me as a useful analogy between the “healthy lifestyle” idea and the kind of broad, balanced, sustainable approach to sales readiness that many companies are looking for. To that end, here are three analogous principles between healthy living and a healthy sales readiness program:

 

  1. Serve up content in moderate portions and spread it out over time.

    Too often, sales teams experience a kind of feast-or-famine content and training cycle. For example, a glut of content before an important initial presentation, with minimal support for the follow-up meetings. Or rigorous onboarding, followed by haphazard ongoing learning. Microlearning activities can help you distribute training over a manageable timeframe. It can provide “portion control” for your sales readiness and enablement program, so that reps don’t have to rely on ‘cram sessions’ for important meetings. It can help you build long-term, sustainable change and reduce the risk of sales teams crashing back into old habits.

  2. Stay active.

    Vigorous, sustained activity is one key to health and longevity that everyone agrees on. It’s crucial for sales readiness initiatives, too. Practice, practice, practice. Simply presenting information to your salespeople is like asking them to read a book about exercise, often doesn’t include actually doing exercise. It’s not just what you know – it’s how you apply that knowledge. This is where video role plays are hugely helpful, not just for polishing pitches, but for supporting active coaching and the ongoing conversation between reps and their supervisors or management. Virtual role plays and near-real-world simulations of sales scenarios can help your reps hone their skills and apply the knowledge they’ve acquired, in a supportive environment.

  3. Mix it up.

    Look for those different ‘colors’ on your sales readiness plate. People have different learning styles; give them a variety of content – polls, quizzes, bite-sized content, quick updates. Of course, with any healthy diet, there should still be room for dessert. Make it fun! You can sprinkle in gamification, rewards systems, leaderboards. Provide a variety of access, too, via desktops, mobile devices, or your CRM.

 

 

Mindtickle can help your business build a healthy, sustainable sales readiness program. At the same time, you’ll be helping your reps with a bit of stress reduction too! At the risk of mixing metaphors, you could think of our platform as your trusted personal trainer in your drive to sales readiness success.

To learn more about how Mindtickle can help your sales readiness initiatives, contact us!

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