Sales Readiness: Delivering a Superior Customer Experience in Financial Services

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on August 23, 2019

Once the bastion of stability, the financial services industry is now facing new challenges from every vantage point. Disruptive competitors, regulatory reform, fickle customer loyalties, changing employee expectations and reputational damage are stalling growth and increasing churn for traditional operators. While your organization needs to defend its ground, conventional weapons are no longer sufficient to maintain revenue or profits. The key to winning the battle is to change how your customer-facing people serve your customers.

There are five factors driving change globally in financial services

  1. Tech-fueled competitors are disrupting sales strategies:With a focus on personalization and self-service, modern platforms deliver superior customer experience quickly. They also use data to understand customer pain points and finetune how their sales teams deliver an effortless experience.
  2. Service excellence and seamless experiences set new benchmarks:In a digital world, customers expect their services to be delivered conveniently and effortlessly. Subscription models have also reshaped brand loyalty with customers needing to experience value or opting out.
  3. Reputational damage has affected consumer confidence:Over the past decade, events like theWells-Fargo scandal

    and the subprime mortgage crisis have left customers disappointed and frustrated. Lingering consumer sentiment continues to impact the industry’s reputation.

  4. The financial services industry is under a regulatory microscope:Laws surrounding risk management and compliance are constantly changing. This places additional pressure on your frontline to ensure they’ve met compliance obligations when dealing with customers.
  5. The workforce requires more flexibility:As baby boomers move into retirement, millennials and Generation X comprise the majority of the workforce. Organizations must take into account new preferences, like short bursts of information and digital solutions, when designing how people work.

 

While your organization can’t directly control market or regulatory responses, you can control how you deal with these challenges. By focusing on the skills and aligned behavior of your employees and the experience that they deliver to customers, your organization can have some control over how your customers respond.

Your people are key to delivering a superior customer experience 

With the financial ecosystem evolving so rapidly, customer experience is increasing in importance. It is no longer just about providing good service – it’s about fostering lifelong partnerships that require understanding, problem solving and engagement. This means customer-facing staff need to be ready to stand and deliver every time. By focusing on customer readiness drivers your people can execute a best practice experience.

There are five customer readiness drivers you can double down on to empower your customer-facing people:

  1. Align culturewith customer-focused value: At each level of your sales organization, the desired culture needs to be defined and implemented. For culture to be an effective customer-readiness driver, you also need to systematically test the behaviors you desire to ensure they are executed consistently.
  2. Adopt a solutioningapproach to customer engagement: Thanks to the internet, by the time a customer comes into contact with your salespeople they often know what solution they think

    they need. This can create friction in the customer experience that can be addressed by implementing a systematic way of providing salespeople with access to the right information and the capability to apply it.

  3. Facilitate compelling compliancebehaviors: Every back office process and customer interaction is guided by a constantly evolving framework of regulations, processes, and behaviors that must be met. Rather than being a roadblock, these can be an opportunity to reaffirm to customers that they’re in safe hands if compliance is seamlessly incorporated into your salespeople’s behaviors and skills.
  4. Implement agile transformationmethodologies: Most organizations have embarked on a process of transformation to improve and change how their business operates. To embrace accelerated change, your salespeople need to have the agility to keep up and engender confidence in their customers.
  5. Distribute campaignplaybooks to the field: Financial organizations often run multiple campaigns or new solution launches at any one time. Campaigns are only an effective customer readiness driver if they add value to customers, which requires salespeople to understand how it benefits their customers.

Arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience 

To deliver a superior customer experience and win and retain customers for longer, your sales organization needs to deliver on these customer readiness drivers. To achieve this, many look to traditional methods of training their salespeople, but these have not been designed to address the challenges facing organizations today. To build salesforce capability and meet customer needs your sales organization needs to be able to:

  • Build confidence with knowledge:In a digital world, your salespeople need to build more knowledge in a short amount of time. They also need to find new ways to stay one step ahead of their customers while creating a personalized experience. Coupled with generational changes in learning preferences, this requires knowledge to be packaged and delivered in new ways.
  • Test the ability to execute:While it’s important that salespeople have the right information at their fingertips, that knowledge is of no value if they can’t apply it to specific scenarios. New learning tools, from gamified testing to video practice, allow your salespeople to practice and hone their skills.
  • Coach for improvement:To be a significant driver of performance, coaching must be targeted and consistent. Smart technology solutions can help organizations create a consistent coaching cadence.
  • Certify and measure success:Data has the potential to take sales organizations from being reactive to implementing proactive and targeted skill development. Modern tools enable businesses to capture, correlate and apply data across their sales organization in a powerful way.

 

To address the challenges you are facing in the digital age, your sales organization doesn’t have a minute to lose. You need to arm your people with knowledge, capabilities, and processes that allow them to put their customers at the center of everything they do. To create a best practice customer experience, your salespeople need tools, platforms and services that can help them achieve this. Get in touch with Mindtickle to find out how you can arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience.

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

Three Secret Sales Skills to Look for When Hiring

Abby Vietor on May 20, 2019

*Editor’s Note: In this blog post, guest author and Global Sales Enablement Leader, Abby Vietor shares the three skills sales enablement leaders should look for when hiring.

Whether you’re operating within a growing business or trying to improve sales performance at a large organization, at some point shared tribal sales knowledge is no longer scalable, detailed, or accurate enough. Organizations seeking to outperform their market require the “next level” thinking that a strong sales enablement team can bring.

To build out a team dedicated to enabling and readying a sales team to drive more revenue and brand value, you need to ensure you’re looking for and hiring candidates with the right set of skills.

Broadly speaking, a solid sales enablement candidate will have a strong background in making sales teams efficient and effective, which directly affects a company’s growth and success. But for organizations seeking a “next level” enablement team, the ideal candidate possesses skill sets that are often not recruited for, but provide a tremendous benefit to your field. We can break these skill sets into three distinct, yet connected, personas: the psychologist, the social butterfly and the filmmaker.

The psychologist

The psychologist persona incorporates skills that go beyond curriculum design. All too often, large volumes of content are created without keeping in mind the audience — the seller — and how the seller feels about the type and frequency of enablement content they are consuming. We know that poorly designed curriculums reduce engagement by sellers, as does asking sellers to do too many things, too often. A candidate with a background in psychology, when networked close to the field, will be well-positioned to provide perspective beyond what a seller empathy map can provide. Enablement needs to be marketed to the field in the same way your product does. A candidate that asks “how does this make you feel?” will be more likely to create compelling and interesting content that will be absorbed and understood.

For more information about how high-performing organizations are approaching their sales knowledge transfer strategy, check out this webinar with SiriusDecisions: Sales Enablement in Real Time: How to Deliver Sales Knowledge When it Matters.

The social butterfly

The social butterfly persona speaks to the ideal candidate’s ability to interact with and earn the trust of sellers in a meaningful way, and subsequently pull valuable information about their day to day. The social butterfly collects intelligence about a seller’s cadence, whether they feel overwhelmed or poorly managed, what’s transpiring in their world in terms of a deal — deeper feelings that can be leveraged to drive enablement that suits that level of need. It’s important that this information be gathered in social interactions, rather than through surveys. Impromptu, casual conversations yield more transparent and honest insights; carefully crafted surveys and interviews yield carefully crafted responses.

The filmmaker

Finally, the filmmaker persona is important for teams that want to incorporate more video-based enablement, which has been proven to drive strong engagement. Many organizations lack the budget, talent, or bandwidth to produce any videos, let alone world-class training videos. As a result, companies either produce sub-par, uninteresting, and unpolished video content; or miss out entirely on producing any kind of compelling visual content at all. Of course, companies can contract with professionals, but this typically comes at a steep price. (Then again, sales readiness and enablement platforms like Mindtickle can make anyone a video whiz.) The ideal candidate will have the skills to produce compelling video content that will drive engagement and help to market enablement to sellers.

You’ll notice that each of these personas leverages the same two elements to connect with the seller: feelings and emotions. The psychologist is concerned with what kind of content will best resonate with the seller’s psyche. The social butterfly takes an active interest in how the seller is operating. The filmmaker creates quality video programming that emotionally engages sellers.

To see research from the Sales Management Association which explores the sales enablement function and its impact on the organization, check out: Research Brief: Sales Enablement Best Practices.

Given these requirements, your search for the perfect sales enablement hire might take more time. But don’t give up. Finding the right people is a key component to supporting your company’s growth, and will enable your sellers to be as effective and successful as possible.

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

TOPO Summit 2019 Learnings: How Effective Sales Enablement Allowed Procore to Successfully Scale Their Sales Team

Gopkiran Rao on April 24, 2019

Alex Jaffe, Director of Sales Enablement, Procore

I spent two days last week at the TOPO Summit, meeting with and hearing from leaders at some of the world’s best marketing and sales organizations. Based on the conversations with these industry leaders, practitioners, and TOPO analysts, it’s clear we’re making some progress toward creating better and more engaging experiences for prospects and customers.

One of the most interesting sessions, Operationalizing Sales Enablement, was from one of our customers, Alex Jaffe, a leader on the Procore Sales Enablement team. In his session, he highlighted their holistic program focused on organizational buy-in, the virtues of starting small and scaling enablement as a process, function and integrated tools, communication, onboarding, certification, and more. His story started with the fundamental question of how the organization was going to scale their organization quickly after their $15M round of funding from Bessemer Venture Partners in 2015. At that time, their core challenge was how to scale a small sales team with a lot of institutional knowledge to a much larger and more diverse sales force.

Read the Procore Case Study here.

During this transition, they developed a sales playbook after meeting with all the stakeholders from the head of sales, CEO and president to marketing and more with one, simple goal in mind — help reps sell more, faster while protecting the reps time and productivity.

As Alex noted in his TOPO Summit presentation, he and his team recognized that all the reps would need to know all relevant product information and campaign-specific information, just not all at the same time. They also realized that this process of setting and aligning expectations should begin during the sales bootcamp experience and then roll into the 30-60-90 day plans of their sales reps. As that program has developed over time, it has expanded to the point where after three to four days of intensive learning, reps go through various levels of certification. Role-playing is especially critical to ensure brand new reps have the ability to conduct an effective and engaging initial conversation with a customer right after coming out of their bootcamp. Based on the levels of the certification and their specific roles, like an SDR or an AE, they have built specialized learning paths for each of these scenarios.

The end result of these sales enablement and readiness efforts has led to Procore becoming one of the fastest growing software companies in North America.

To learn more about how Procore set their sales teams up for success and readied them to have impactful conversations with customers and prospects,

read the Procore case study: https://www.mindtickle.com/about-procore/.

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

JT Eger on April 18, 2019

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

Engaging Executive and Sales Management in Sales Readiness Initiatives

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

The Return on Sales Readiness Investment


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

The Journey to Picking a Solution that Lasts


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

What’s Next for Sales Readiness and Sales Enablement


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

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

JT Eger on April 15, 2019

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the entire

case study

to learn more about how SevOne is using Mindtickle.

Augmented Sales Readiness: What Sales Success in the Financial Services Industry Looks Like Today

Oscar Collingwood-Smith on February 28, 2019

Financial service institutions looking to thrive shortly should look to augment sales readiness methodologies of technology companies – here are some of their proven practices we’ve observed that yield high ROI.

It’s no secret that we’re approaching an inflection point in the investments industry: for over a decade now we’ve been running with the most extended bull market ever, but as history tells us, all good things must eventually come to an end. Firms are on the edge of a precipice – not only because of the cyclical nature of the market – but pressures that they were historically immune to, are finally catching up. Automated robotic competition and self-service platforms, better-informed buyers, ETFs, regulatory changes, and cost adjustments just to name a few. Fundamentally, it’s become almost impossible for associate sellers to stay informed and ready to put their best foot forward when interacting with clients.

So, what do you do if you’re a financial services institution selling complex financial planning solutions like fixed income strategies, business banking, or alternatives?

There’s another industry that has been dealing with these pressures for over 30 years – from complex products, stiff competition, waves of automation and changes in buyer behavior – that can provide us with lessons learned, and, subsequently, proven practices.

Technology sales are dynamic and highly competitive: often you’re in a crowd of many fighting for buyer attention. Deals are rarely won based off the feature and function of your solution, and often, it comes down to the salesperson’s ability to demonstrate their value in the process and become a trusted advisor to the customer.

To help their sellers, technology companies birthed the concept of sales enablement or “readiness,” a methodology (usually facilitated by platforms) that proactively arms sellers with the right knowledge and behaviors to consistently out-smart, out-skill, and ultimately out-win the competition.

Here’s how:

1. Their “ambassadors” evangelize the brand and culture

When it comes to learning culture from technology companies, I’m not talking about bean-bags and craft beer. Employees consistently rate technology companies as the best place to work in the US, and that translates the satisfaction of their customers with some of the highest NPS scores in the world. These companies foster a community of “best” by regularly engaging employees on the latest wins, recognizing champions and obtaining feedback on perceived vs. actual performance with initiatives. They also recognize ALL their employees as “brand ambassadors” who need to clearly articulate the value proposition, arming them with the latest company/product updates to ensure the most accurate and up to date information reaches their customers.

Investment firms could augment this practice with ‘“just the right amount, just in time” market information to their associates. Imagine a world where we see a drastic drop in market capital, and there’s an influx of calls from customers and intermediaries looking to understand what’s going on and how it affects their assets. With the right enablement program and readiness platform, portfolio managers and market experts would be able to proactively prepare answers to these questions, distribute to their team, track who’s up to date and who needs to be followed up. All before the calls start rolling in!

2. They practice a coaching culture

Technology companies recognize that their products and services are only as good as their ambassador’s ability to find a customer’s problem and tailor a solution to fit their needs. To do this, they flip their customer discovery process around on their ambassadors and assess their capabilities and support requirements. This process is underpinned by a consistent operating rhythm that stretches beyond the onboarding boot-camp, focusing on incremental skill building, crowdsourcing best practice and leveraging peer-to-peer coaching. A recent study by Deloitte highlighted that a one size fits all approach to performance management was no longer sustainable, and that a shift to a data-driven, continuous coaching and development model was the best path forward.

Investment services could augment a coaching culture on two levels:

Advisor coaching. If it’s pitching a new fund, educating a broker, or handling difficult questions, set a clearly defined and consistent process to coach incrementally to the specific scenario or behavior. Firms could leverage their top associates to demonstrate the correct response or methodology to establish a baseline, build an observation or role play around the scenario and coach to that specific behavior. Determining what the core competencies are, where skill gaps lie and prioritizing training initiatives based on this data is critical to establishing a robust and meaningful coaching culture.

Intermediary coaching. One of the biggest challenges for investment firms is managing a high volume of intermediaries who sell their funds. Gaps in portfolio understanding cause an unwillingness to pitch it to a customer meaning brokers will often default to presenting alternate options they understand the best. Firms could solve this problem by engaging brokers with portfolio updates with an enablement platform that has engaging and interactive ways to explore fund information, supported by robust reporting. This method would allow for investment firms to understand which brokers are (and are not) interacting with what portfolio training materials at what time – correlate that data in real time against actual broker performance – and enable their associates to prioritize what relationships need the most attention and coaching.

Putting your best foot forward

For financial services companies looking to stay competitive and elevate their existing training programs, take a page from sales playbooks of the best technology companies in the world. They’re putting programs and technologies in place that enable and ready their customer-facing representatives to have differentiated, prescriptive and engaging conversations with customers and prospects. These reps can convey their company’s culture, brand and value proposition because they’ve they have the training, coaching and ongoing remediation to make them successful.

If you’re interested in learning more…

If you’re ready to take the next step towards improving your sales enablement strategy and learn how Mindtickle has helped our Financial Service Customers to drive results with a blended approach, schedule a demo with one of our Financial Service Industry experts below.

Mindtickle Partners with Healthcare Sales Performance for Sales Readiness in the Life Sciences Industries

JT Eger on February 26, 2019

Partners to showcase solution for Sales Readiness at 12th Annual Medical Device & Diagnostic Sales Training and Development event.

SAN FRANCISCO — February 26th, 2019—Mindtickle, the leader in Sales Readiness technology, today announced a partnership with Healthcare Sales Performance (HSP) to help medical device, diagnostic and life science companies increase gross sales, improve team productivity and reduce onboarding and training costs. Through developing, training, coaching and measuring selling behaviors, the partnership enables more efficient and effective sales coaching, boosts new hire productivity and enhances product launches, events and training programs resulting in field effectiveness for life sciences companies.

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Mindtickle. As the healthcare market shifts, it puts pressure on sales organizations to adapt in order to be competitive,” Matt Switzer, co-founder and sales consultant at Healthcare Sales Performance. “That’s why we are so excited to be able to deliver a combination of healthcare-specific methodology, coaching effectiveness and performance analytics to our Life Sciences customers. Our customers will be able to impact sales results with relatively minimal resources and amazing speed of execution.”

The healthcare buying process has changed dramatically and manufacturers can no longer rely on sales relationships to navigate the healthcare buying process, as decisions are less clinical and more economical in nature. BioPharma and Medical Technology manufacturers and distributors must connect sales competencies, knowledge, messaging and skill, and align that with hospital structure, buying process, to reach healthcare customers. The partnership of HSP and Mindtickle offers an industry-specific commercial readiness solution for knowledge transfer, front-line manager coaching and reinforcement that allows reps to be competitive in the markets and close more sales

“There’s a perfect storm of market forces ranging from the increasing power of IDN and group-based purchasing to reliance on clinical evidence impacting the buying the hospital process. Reps must be continuously readied with online learning and coaching to have value-driven conversations tied to patient outcomes. This requires a modern approach blending technology and experiences to guide life sciences companies on the right mix of skills and behaviors to make salespeople successful,” said Gopkiran Rao, senior vice president of strategy and go to market at Mindtickle. “With HSP and Mindtickle, life sciences companies can measurably drive the knowledge, capabilities, and engagement required to drive better outcomes.”

Mindtickle is pleased to be a Gold Sponsor of the 12th Annual Medical Device & Diagnostic Sales Training and Development event, February 26-27 at the Sheraton Charlotte in North Carolina. Tom Griffin, Sr. Director, Commercial Strategy Execution at Endologix will be joined by Pam Switzer from HSP for a discussion on Wednesday the 27th entitled Blended Learning Best Practices That Boost Knowledge Retention. In this session, attendees will learn from Endologix about their journey in transforming key commercial readiness and related sales training initiatives across sales onboarding, product launches, field updates and how they put their sales training strategy on a modern footing. The presentation will showcase the programs, methodologies, and a new partnership that combines healthcare sales methodology with sales enablement and readiness technology.

For more information about the partnership and joint solution, you can learn more here.

About Healthcare Sales Performance

Healthcare Sales Performance (HSP), Inc. is a research, training and sales performance company committed to the advancement of healthcare through supporting the introduction of innovation to the marketplace. For over 25 years, HSP has consulted with the generators of healthcare innovation and healthcare providers to improve collaboration, adoption of change and outcomes for vendors, health systems and patients.

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle provides a comprehensive, data-driven solution for sales readiness and enablement that fuels revenue growth and brand affinity. Its purpose-built applications, proven methodologies, and best practices are designed to drive effective sales onboarding and ongoing readiness. With Mindtickle, company leaders and sellers can continually assess, diagnose and develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to effectively engage customers and drive growth. Companies across a wide range of industries use Mindtickle’s innovative capabilities for on-demand, online training, bite-sized mobile updates, gamification-based learning, coaching and role-play to ensure world-class sales performance. Mindtickle is a global, privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Visit them at www.Mindtickle.com.

Media Contact:
Public Relations at Mindtickle
[email protected]

Forbes: 4 Sales Trends That You Need To Know About In 2019

Simona Galant on January 4, 2019

Looking back at the last year, we’ve seen some exciting trends in 2018 – and as we kick off the new year, we’re excited to talk about some of the sales trends that are soon to come.
How is sales technology expected to change and expand? What new technologies should your company be gearing up towards in 2019? How are your key audiences and prospects going to shift and evolve? These questions are just some of the topics covered in the recent article by Forbes.
Recently, Forbes released an article on just this subject, discussing how technology has evolved and became more accessible to businesses and sales teams across niches. In their research, Forbes identified four main trends to watch out for this coming year.
In order to improve productivity and overall sales, Forbes pointed out that it’s important to stay on top of the following trends and implement new technologies and new tactics, such as:

  •      Learning how to sell to Generation Z
  •      Implementing a sales enablement strategy to help your sales team be more productive
  •      Leveraging new technology like AI and machine learning to improve sales and knowledge
  •      Integrating marketing and sales and developing more omni-channel experiences for your audience

To read more about how you can prepare for the upcoming sales evolution in 2019, read on here!

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