G2, the largest software marketplace and review platform, announced the 2020 winners of its annual Best Software Awards this month. And we were very honored to have received the #1 ranking for Enterprise Products! This is a massive achievement and a testament to the value we bring to our customers around the globe.
A big thank you to the hundreds of Mindtickle customers who, in their own voice, provided reviews in the G2 platform about how they count on us every day to keep their customer-facing teams ‘remote and ready’, especially in these uncertain times. We thank you for your partnership. We remain committed to your success.
And the #1 ranking for enterprise software wasn’t the only accolade, so here are all the lists that prominently featured Mindtickle.
In Best Software Products, Mindtickle earned:
#1 of the Top 50 Products for Enterprise beating out other products from some of the worlds’ largest and most well-known enterprise software companies; To bring some additional context for how huge this is, last year this spot was held by Tableau which was recently acquired by Salesforce for $15.7B
#5 of the Best Products for Sales as the only Readiness platform listed; Salesforce CPQ held this spot in G2’s 2019 list
#17 of the Top 100 Software Products
#27 of the Top 50 Products for Mid-Market
And in the Highest Satisfaction category, Mindtickle was ranked #32 beating out products from many highly regarded companies.
G2’s Best Software Awards rank all 57,844 software companies and products on G2 using authentic, timely reviews from real users. This isn’t a subjective list based on a few peoples’ opinions, it’s actual users of the Mindtickle platform who have experienced first-hand the value and benefits of a systematic approach to building, reinforcing, and measuring the desired knowledge and behaviors through sales readiness and continuous learning programs.
We have been in leadership positions on several of G2’s category rankings over the years but this is our first time earning a #1 rank, keeping company with some of the biggest names in Enterprise software. We have come a long way and we couldn’t be more proud! Sharing the stage with some of the best and biggest software companies in the world is a great feeling and I am truly grateful to my co-founders, team, customers, and investors who have been with us through this journey. We have all worked together for the last five years to define and create a completely new solution and category of ‘Readiness’ designed from the ground up to help organizations increase the productivity and effectiveness of their customer-facing teams.
And lastly, a special round of applause to the Mindtickle teams from every corner of the company — from the Product team for a relentless focus on software that works to Customer-facing teams across Success and Enablement, Support, Services, Sales and Marketing that embody the Mindtickle principle of delighting our customers at every stage of their journey!
The sales environment is constantly evolving as new strategies, markets, and products are introduced, reintroduced, or changed. In fact, according to a study of over 100 B2B organizations, 75% of firms have a refocused sales strategy, 70% have entered a new market, and 82% introduced a new product or service over the past twelve months.
In fact, according to a study of over 100 B2B organizations, 75% of firms have a refocused sales strategy, 70% have entered a new market, and 82% introduced a new product or service over the past twelve months.
With the sales function constantly evolving, it’s critical for sales teams to have up-to-date support and the tools they need to sell. This is where data driven sales enablement comes in.
Sales enablement is the strategy you use to ensure sales reps have the information, content, technology, and tools they need to sell effectively. An integral part of your overall sales readiness program, sales enablement focuses on providing everything your reps need to be successful, at every step of the sales journey. When you incorporate elements of sales training, asset management, ongoing coaching, and continuous development—all in a platform that supports a variety of content formats and learning styles—the results are amazing:
Achieve a win rate of 49% on average, which is 12% higher than those without an enablement strategy.
Hit their quotas 35% more often than those without a formal sales enablement strategy.
Experience 15% less turnover than those that approach sales enablement as one-off projects.
Collaboration is twice as likely within organizations that use a formal sales enablement strategy vs. those that use an informal or one-time initiative.
But while 61% of organizations employ some type of sales enablement program, only 34.4% feel it meets their expectations. That number has only improved by a small margin, about 3%, over the past few years. Choosing the right enablement program with intuitive tools is just as critical as not having one at all.
So, why are most organizations struggling when it comes to sales enablement?
Perhaps the topic is misunderstood as a whole—as a one-time project that, once complete, results in a new and improved sales function. Rather, sales enablement must be an ongoing initiative that involves content, training, coaching, and performance measurement.
Sales enablement as part of your readiness strategy can have a significant impact on an organization’s bottom line. 52% of sales organizations who have a specific sales enablement function claim overall sales training effectiveness 29% higher than those who don’t. A sales enablement strategy makes it easy to gauge sales readiness with continuous, accessible training, trackable performance and outcome measures, and a modern approach geared for improved results.
52% of sales organizations who have a specific sales enablement function claim overall sales training effectiveness 29% higher than those who don’t.
There’s myriad data that demonstrates just how valuable a successful sales enablement strategy can be in driving revenue. And understanding what to do with those stats can help you build a better sales enablement program and overall environment for your sales teams. Whether you’ve yet to implement a sales enablement strategy or are looking to make improvements to your existing program, these statistics should be used to inform your next steps.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
A key best practice for any sales enablement strategy requires sales and marketing teams to work in harmony. Sales and morale suffer when knowledge isn’t routinely shared. That becomes a significant challenge for departments operating under differing definitions of the market or specific products.
It’s a foregone conclusion that the two teams should be aligned, but is often not the case. In fact, only 8% of marketing and sales teams of B2B companies say they experience strong alignment.
These two unique areas may have different roles, but should share the same goals and a clear roadmap that leads to them. So how can sales enablement turn the tables?
Debunk long-held beliefs within a company’s culture that sales and marketing are separate entities.
Demonstrate buy-in by leadership and build an open, collaborative relationship between the two departments.
Establish a modern marketing department that drives revenue, just like sales.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Key Stats
Why does sales and marketing alignment matter? Here’s what the data show:
36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher overall sales wins are reported by marketing- and sales-aligned companies.
Over 75% of companies that use a sales enablement tool saw a sales increase over twelve months. 40% of those organizations reported growth over 25%.
59% of companies with established sales enablement functions surpassed revenue targets, and 72% of those exceeded them by 25% or more.
Making up-to-date content available to sales reps is a crucial part of sales and marketing alignment. Here’s how content management affects the sales team:
On average, only 47% of salespeople feel they are provided with relevant and effective content. Either they don’t know what’s available, or they don’t have the time or resources to seek it.
57% of businesses say high-quality contentis their top driver of sales. Sales reps shouldn’t have to make their own content. Sales enablement ensures sales and marketing are working closely together to provide up-to-date, valuable content and collateral specific to each customer.
60% of quality sales content goes unused, without a good process for distribution. That means wasted time and resources that could otherwise help drive the sales initiatives.
Just 20% of sales reps use content during a sales conversation, yet, a buyer usually requires touching more than five pieces of content before making a purchase.
First impressions are crucial. Successful sales reps require education, and undertrained reps can cause irreparable damage to customer relationships and sales.
A sales enablement strategy should include an effective onboarding program that ensures new hire progress and performance is measured, supported, and consistently improved upon based on firm metrics to enhance your organization’s readiness.
Sales-specific onboarding provides new hires with information about company values, corporate and product knowledge, and how to use company tools to improve quotas. The most successful onboarding programs help reps learn with smaller, easy to digest modules, clear objectives, and accessible materials.
Sales Onboarding & Training: Key Stats
A poorly trained rep is not equipped to sell, and may not choose to stay with your organization. That’s revenue lost on two counts: loss of sales, and cost of onboarding. Maybe it’s not the rep that isn’t prepared, but instead, materials used for training aren’t up to the task. Sales enablement provides tracking and options for each sales rep to achieve their best outcomes.
Here’s how proper onboarding affects overall performance and success:
Training improves retention rates for new hires and products with an early, effective, onboarding information: The best companies are 53% more likely to undertake pre-boarding and begin onboarding early, often before the first day.
Most companies feel their onboarding efforts are subpar: 62% of companies consider themselves ineffective at onboarding new sales hires, despite leadership with an eye one sales enablement.
Employee turnover is expensive: The average economic cost of turning over a highly skilled job is over two times the salary of that role. 20% of staff turnover takes place in the first 45 days of employment.
Sales Efficiency
It’s easier to access the numbers associated with your organization’s revenue than to know what it’s actually costing to get your sales team up to speed and keep them there. The relation between those two things is sales efficiency. It includes the important task of streamlining sales operations to produce the highest return on investment.
That’s where an effective sales enablement strategy ups the game. It enables your team to implement a consistent measure of those numbers over time and ensure your organization stays profitable. Insight from specific metrics provided by sales enablement helps a business develop and evolve overall strategy, sales training, product direction, and even qualified leads.
Sales Efficiency: Key Stats
These data points demonstrate just how essential sales enablement is for the efficiency of your reps:
84% of sales reps can achieve quotas when their employer engages the best sales enablement strategies available.
Quota attainment was doubled among companies that adopted best practices for sales enablement, compared to those that did not.
59% of companies surpassed yearly revenue targets as a result of a well-defined sales enablement strategy.
Software that allows easy access to a sales enablement strategy and tools seamlessly connects operations, marketing, and sales. Sales enablement technology improves onboarding, coaching, and ongoing training by delivering engaging content in a measurable platform that can track progress.
Technology-based sales enablement solutions help sales reps learn new skills, improve existing skills, and track progress toward development goals. The right sales enablement technology offers:
Automation: Data feeds, updates, and integration solutions for software like Salesforce, Excel, and industry-specific sources.
Customer insight: Customer details are tracked and accessible while reps are in the field. Make account updates. Note specific sales or company requests.
Rapid mobile access: No need to get back to a customer later with more information — account and product information is available via mobile devices, fast tracking answers to customer questions with actual company marketing or sell information.
Analytics: Users and managers can choose onboarding and learning materials relevant to individual needs. Outcome metrics about which tools are used most often with the best results help predict the best resources for the future.
Real-time updates: Collateral materials are automatically updated and available immediately. Relevant content is available to sales teams upon request, and product line information can be organized according to customer, location, or other specifics.
Sales Enablement Technology: Key Stats
The numbers prove how just how imperative technology has become among sales initiatives:
86% of sales managers believe the use of digital tools improves job performance.The opportunity to use mobile devices in the field allows easy access to those tools and can be used to significantly enhance the sales process, providing access to remote customer data, a CRM platform, continually relevant information, and the ability to complete menial tasks on the run.
Technology makes any environment a functional learning opportunity with continuous access to video, role-play opportunities, and even digital social learning environments.
Your Future with Sales Enablement
Choosing a sales enablement solution is a personal journey for your organization on the path to overall readiness. Consider a technology platform that balances your specific needs for marketing and sales collaboration, content management, sales onboarding and training, and a convenient, relevant use of automation.
Review MindTIckle’s Readiness Value Assessment to determine how sales enablement can contribute to your ROI. Or schedule a demo to see the Mindtickle Sales Readiness Platform in action today!
In a highly competitive environment, enabling your salespeople to be at their best—and giving them the right tools to do so—can make all the difference.
Sales enablement refers to the training, tools, content management, and resources provided to the sales team to help them successfully close more deals. The ultimate goal of sales enablement is to equip sales reps for every conversation to help them build strong relationships with prospects and ultimately close more deals.
While sales enablement is really an ecosystem of work that involves sales, marketing, and operations working together, technology is a critical part of getting sales enablement right. Marketing and operations provide case studies, documentation, and other resources that the sales team needs, and a data driven sales enablement platform makes it easy to access those resources and track how reps are engaging with them.
When sales, marketing, and operations work together in this way, reps can onboard more quickly, upskill in key areas, and spend more time selling. But this requires a platform that not only delivers content to your sales reps, but also supports the larger goal of sales readiness.
Sales enablement today
When done well, the benefits of sales enablement speak for themselves:
Companies with a focus on sales enablement see overall sales training effectiveness 29% higher than those without.
Of companies with established sales enablement functions, 59% surpassed revenue targets, and 72% of those exceeded them by 25% or more.
95% of customers buy from a sales rep who provides content at every step of the sale.
Of companies with established sales enablement functions, 59% surpassed revenue targets, and 72% of those exceeded them by 25% or more.
With a sales enablement function to organize and track content, combined with a sales readiness function that continually equips sellers with the right training and coaching for their needs, everyone is more effective. With the right technology, sales departments can use elements like virtual sales training, gamified onboarding activities, and coaching templates to continually improve and empower sales reps.
Today’s sales enablement data helps sales reps in other ways, as well. Here are just a few:
Standardized reporting: allows for easy comparison, access by leadership, and targeted changes when needed.
Sales process review: automated processes makes sales information and materials accessible for reps to review and revise as necessary for more targeted customer contact.
Qualified leads: allows leads to be categorized according to demographics and behavior. When teams have content that is tracked for effectiveness and optimized for efficiency by category, improvements can be made that result in qualified leads, and readiness to purchase.
Optimized content: organized, updated, and targeted resources positively impact the end result.
A quick online search shows just how many sales enablement options there are. To achieve your end goal—a better-equipped sales team that drives more revenue—you need to find the right tool (or integration) for your team’s needs. The right sales enablement platform is tailored to specific business needs, connects sales and marketing, simplifies the content library, and offers powerful sales metrics.
Today’s smart technology provides opportunities for learning tools, formats, and modalities that connect reps online, and even offers interaction through social media platforms. It improves timeliness and effectiveness for resources, training, analysis, and ongoing support. Sales reps are more confident when they have all the resources they need, literally at their fingertips, and customer leads are targeted by the products and solutions they seek.
How sales enablement drives sales readiness
As part of a cohesive program, sales enablement tied with sales readiness results in a more effective sales team. Sales enablement ensures reps have the tools and resources—like ongoing training, coaching, and development—it takes to deliver the message, close the sale, and maintain strong customer relationships.
Sales readiness, on the other hand, is a critical part of a sales enablement program, as it focuses on outcome- and data-oriented results. It gives managers, teams, and organizations insights into performance, outcomes, and gaps in the sales team. Further, sales-ready reps have the confidence and tools necessary to think outside the box while delivering on the goals of the sales, marketing, and operations teams.
Organizations that employ modern sales enablement programs reap myriad benefits. Here are just a few:
Peak performance: a modern sales enablement and readiness program helps sales reps meet quotes sooner with access to tools for efficiency and effectiveness.
Improved time to sell: a sales enablement tool helps reps spend more time selling by providing qualified leads, content, and learning opportunities in small doses over time.
Continuous training: continuous training and accessible learning materials, up-to-date product and industry information, and a sales team that is ready means that increasing quota demands are met.
Marketing and sales in sync: all marketing efforts are regularly updated for easy access by sellers—sales enablement bridges the gap between the two departments.
Sales ready reps are able to capitalize on these sales enablement benefits for successful outcomes:
Access
Provide timely access to information related to the most up-to-date resources, like CRM content, via systems often used by reps in the field, like laptops or mobile devices.
Alignment
Combine the power of your sales team’s knowledge with information about the customer journey throughout the sale process. Content, by way of collateral materials, video, or blogs are available at the touch of a button depending on need. Agility is accessible whenever it is needed.
Education
Organize product and service knowledge across your organization in an accessible format that answers any customer question. An enablement platform makes information available for use in similar situations, with intuitive access.
Presentation
Offer tools to personalize marketing content for clients on-the-go to ensure documents that are customized, updated, and approved for compliance.
Tracking
Provide tracking that reports how well resources are performing, as well as information on inconsistencies, and where additional content could be helpful. No more wasted content, knowledge, or resources.
Must-have features in a sales enablement tool
What’s the difference between the variety of sales enablement tools on the market and how do you choose?
Remember that sales enablement is not a one-size-fits-all—if a tool claims that, it might not be the one. Focus areas of sales enablement tools can include sales content management, coaching and training, sales engagement, sales intelligence, sales management, and customer relationship management (CRM). The process of determining the specific tools your business needs will clarify the best fit for your company.
Before you make that decision, consider the sales enablement best practices you need the platform to support. Then, match those best practices to some specific features that work best for your organization. Let’s take a look at some of the must-haves of a successful sales enablement tool:
Feature: content management
Content, tools, and resources are created based on intel from sales enablement and accessible from a single source, no matter where they were originally stored, for quick discovery and real-time updating.
Accessibility
With customized, user-friendly search capabilities, content is organized, easy to find, and available for publication quickly for every step of the sales journey, including updates, new product features, competitive insights, and success stories.
Customized collateral
Sales materials can be immediately tailored to fit different demographics, products, customers, or stages in the buying process and are easy to access through a flexible interface with other formats like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Youtube.
Marketing and sales alignment:
Insights from content and collateral offer powerful sales effectiveness insights with feedback generating valuable changes that align the selling process to the customer’s path.
Customer interactions and data tracking for reports, dashboards, and planning improve the relationship between sales, marketing, and customer service.
Social selling
Social media channels, touchpoints along the customer path, provide access at a more personal level offering a clear path to potential sales.
Feature: onboarding and training
Time-to-productivity and win rates are improved with technology that enables automated training paths and adaptive learning.
Sale onboarding
Planned eLearning courses and training information are delivered in an accessible format.
Onboarding and learning progress is tracked, showing completion and identifying knowledge gaps.
Customer experience
Training via coaching, gamification, and micro-learning modules support sellers in delivering incredible customer experiences.
Video resources
Reinforcing training and assessing readiness via video coaching and other online sources meets reps where they are and allows them to access tools to address weaknesses.
Feature: analytics
Support accountability, identify gaps, and provide feedback to sales and marketing to refine objectives.
Content usage and reporting
Analyze use of content to evaluate its effectiveness as it works for both reps and customers.
Identify areas for content improvement.
Outcome alignment
Evaluate alignment with overall business goals and objectives as well as how initiatives are impacting revenue.
Receive alerts when prospective customers engage with content.
Engagement
Gain insight into how your sales reps are doing in the field. Help review and revise communication with customers through templates and suggestions.
Sales management
Track sales rep efficiency and provide actionable insights to facilitate more time spent selling.
Feature: engagement
Provide customer-facing employees with the necessary tools for rich, valuable conversations with customers at each stage of the buying cycle, and as part of the overall training process.
Customer relationship management
Provide reps with information that improves the ability to develop better long-term relationships with buyers.
Reps can sell more effectively with content, training, and analytics at their fingertips.
Today’s buyer is informed, often entering a sales interaction with research and other market knowledge. Reps come prepared to have consultative—rather than transactional—conversations to engage customers at a deeper level.
Feature: qualified prospects
Identify and target the right leads with actionable data that enables your teams to establish the right relationships.
Define leads
Analysis from website visits and other customer touchpoints helps determine target buyers, and what characteristics are most likely to convert.
Identifying where leads are in the buying process, from prospect to marketing qualified (MQL) to sales-qualified (SQL), helps produce content that drives customers forward toward conversion.
Target buyers
Content that is tracked and optimized provides information to target collaterals for specific buyers.
Score prospects
Sales intelligence assigns positive or negative ranking to potential customers based on data, including location, or other demographics that affect conversion.
Less qualified prospects are moved to an area that can be addressed over time.
Create sales opportunity
Technology is used to structure the planning process and create a step-by-step guide for sales reps.
Feature: sales integration
Sellers use numerous tools when completing a sale. Tools that are integrated simplify the workflow.
Incorporated solutions
Communications, content, storage, and automation can be used as a system that works together seamlessly so information is available across all platforms and accessible where your sales reps are working, even on the road.
Real-time updates
New information, resources, and updates are automatic and available.
Customer focus
The buying experience is customizable and reporting is simplified using existing customer information.
Sales enablement tools to consider
A sales enablement solution that handles all processes including content, management and distribution, training tools, sales and marketing performance, customer outreach, and reporting can help you take your sales productivity and performance to the next level. Here are a few examples of sales enablement tools with integrated software solutions to support your sales team:
Seismic
Seismic’s sales enablement solution focuses on sales and marketing productivity and effectiveness with tools to collaborate, automate, manage and distribute content. Seismic uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify the sales process for easy access to relevant information, updated insights, and program customization.
The Seismic program includes:
Easy access to relevant selling materials.
Automated creation of sales content personalized to its audience.
Increased revenue per rep due to efficient and effective content and accessibility.
Seismic’s scalable marketing and sales integration is general enough for most organizations and have been used in industries like asset management, banking, business services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, technology and more.
Seismic created a system that moved a financial advising firm, 361 Capital, from manual work to automatic updates with total accuracy. That sped up the process by 33%. In another case, a banking and financial services firm, SunTrust, was able to access data and content relevant to closing deals in a more timely manner.
Highspot
With a focus on sales readiness, personalized sales content, and improved sales performance, Highspot’s sales enablement program uses artificial intelligence, guided sales training, and simple integration between marketing, sales, and workflows to improve the sales process.
Benefits include:
Connecting sellers to relevant contact information for each buyer.
Flexible delivery options for content.
Advanced analytics for sales pitch and content optimization.
Effective sales training and assessment accessibility.
Sales integration that incorporates other platforms including training materials, and customer information.
Providing a single source of truth for content is a game-changer for many companies. For example, Dun & Bradstreet was managing 6,000 pieces of content stored across 12 different locations. Highspot streamlined that content with a single source, allowing more than 500 sales reps to spend less time searching for the tools they need, and more time selling.
Likewise, Highspot helped Tripadvisor to consolidate and integrate workflows with content lingering in multiple systems into a single platform for all sales enablement assets. The entire system was built to make life easier for the sales and marketing teams.
Mediafly
Sales and marketing are the focus of Mediafly’s enablement tool with an emphasis on creating a modern selling experience. Using a single, intuitive sales application, the company gives sellers and marketers a simple process to create, deliver, and analyze the sales process.
Sales reps benefit from:
Training, coaching, and learning.
Access to interactive selling tools
Reports and analytic insights.
Easy creation and updating of dynamic content for distribution on any device.
Mediafly helped pharma company Dr. Falk equip its sales team with the right materials for every sales situation providing a simple, accessible source for resources that are seamlessly updated and maintained, with integration options. Mobile presentation apps, content management, analytics and feedback provided Dr. Falk with the ability to have more valuable sales conversations.
How Mindtickle ties it all together
Integrated solution partners make Mindtickle’s sales readiness and enablement initiatives run smoothly and successfully. These partnerships offer complementary solutions with a simple-to-use interface that works for the entire organization. With that in place, Mindtickle can do what it does best: accelerate onboarding and ensure ongoing readiness and training.
Partnerships like those with Seismic, Highpoint, and Mediafly are part of a natural evolution to ensure enablement in a multi-system environment. Integration with these initiatives helps align sales and marketing, organizing and updating content internally and externally to manage its lifecycle.
Seamless interface: curated content that is regularly updated, easily accessed, and personalized is critical.
Improved productivity: no need to go digging for content—it is delivered to sales reps intuitively depending on need and customer. That leaves more time for selling.
Outcome-oriented approach: data is used to predict and provide according to the capabilities of your reps, helping them grab more sales.
Enablement metrics: must be tracked and fed into your readiness strategy regularly to keep it fresh and evolving with the needs of your organization and sales reps.
How Mindtickle can work for you
Mindtickle’s platform enables customer-centric sales readiness and enablement strategies for organizations using proven technology to increase revenue and grow brand value. Take a Readiness Value Assessment to determine the return on investment of a partnership with Mindtickle.
If you’re ready to see it for yourself, schedule a demo with Mindtickle today!
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.
*Editor’s Note: In this blog post, guest author and financial Services and Go-To-Market leader, Cory Haynes (click for LinkedIn profile), shares his thoughts on building and growing a financial services team with the “IG Generation.”
Sitting at a lovely French-inspired restaurant overlooking the Napa River on an unseasonably warm day in Autumn, I spoke with a veteran financial advisor, whom I’ve known many years. I wanted to get his perspective on the Wealth Management Industry, as it has come through the 2008 global financial crisis, the onslaught of robo-advisors, and the greatest wealth transfer in history is taking place as baby boomers transfer their wealth to their children. “The average financial advisor acquired 1.3 net new households; however, our advisors acquired 5.2 net new households”, said Eric Gonzales, Senior Vice President at Merrill for over twenty years. In his time with Merrill, Eric has been quite successful managing a team of twenty advisors and his own book of business This is despite a crowded marketplace of generational wealth family offices, fiercely independent Registered Independent Advisors (RIA), cheaper and increasingly more sophisticated robo-advisors and zero-commission online brokers. Not to mention the demographic shift among his advisors to a younger generation. This shift aligns with the overall industry trend with millennials set to replace the 25% retiring by 2024, according to Cerulli Associates, a leading global research firm for financial services. The majority of advisers industry-wide at end-2017 were between 55 and 64, according to Cerulli. Only around 9% are under 35. For Eric and other leaders in the wealth management space, these statistics highlight a challenge faced by many financial institutions – it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain new talent.
Merrill Lynch, which is among the largest US wealth managers with 17,657 financial advisers and some $2.9 trillion in client balances, is a great case study for this broader theme playing out across the wealth-management landscape.
To be successful with the next generation, the secret sauce for senior managerslike Eric, is finding the right technology and incentives to recruit, train, and nurture current and new financial advisors into exceptional, client-trusted advisors. They need coaching and guidance that can evolve with them at their different career growth stages. “We want to model the behaviors of the best advisors and find the right formula so that others can replicate the behavior. We understand every advisor is different, and their clients and demographics are different but behaviors and actions can be controlled and replicated to produce consistent and positive outcomes,” said Eric.
Efforts to train and retain new advisers are hardly unique to Merrill Lynch, with rival wealth managers grappling with demographic shifts across the wealth-management space. Wells Fargo Advisors introduced their internal “Summit Program” earlier this year, which is designed to encourage retiring financial advisers to sell their books of business within the firm. High failure rates to be sure, churn is common in the classic wealth-management industry. Cerulli Associates’ research says that the industry attracted about 20,000 trainees in 2018, with a failure rate of approximately 75%. Large broker dealers can spend on average $85,000 on training and coaching, which underscores their laser focus to find the right candidate and retain them. Over five years, successful financial advisors can become extremely profitable to the firm. Merrill’s parent company, Bank of America, reported a third-quarter profit that topped Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The wealth-management arm reported record net income of $1.1 billion, a rise of 8% compared with the same time last year.
Most aspiring money managers end up failing early on as the pressure to take on new clients and generate sales burns out newcomers. A pattern among newbie advisers that’s unfolding in Bank of America’s wealth-management unit shows how traditional wealth managers are adapting to that reality. Financial-advisers-in-training at Merrill Lynch who exit its trainee program are now often transitioning to other roles within the firm instead of leaving altogether. This keeps the talent in the firm, but doesn’t erase the deficit of financial advisors.
Managers are clamoring for tools to enable them to coach and guide at scale. They want to employ repeatable and measurable methodology to help financial advisors on prospecting, lead generation, and closing deals. As Eric stated, “A successful financial advisor trainee lifts all boats, the customer is happy, the brand becomes stronger, the firm becomes more profitable, and I have yet another success story to share with new recruits.”
As a former financial advisor, I have found that enterprise platforms like Mindtickle can bridge the financial advisor skill gaps in knowledge, compliance and field execution to drive more sales at higher margins. Mindtickle’s Readiness platform enables sellers to develop their capabilities through virtual practice and coaching, empowering them to:
Speak with more authority to prospects by building credibility
Better handle common situations with video role-plays and simulated customer scenarios
Mindtickle leverages AI and Machine learning to personalize the training and coaching for the financial advisors through a patented data-driven Readiness platform. Nothing can be improved unless it is measured. Out-of-the-box reports can drive enablement with data to:
Understand the status of existing enablement programs
Easily report on effectiveness to management teams
Drive internal compliance
Eric and other wealth managers are grappling with the outsized margin pressures and the seismic demographic shifts in their business. So the demand for more technology is only increasing. Mobile-first tools that learn and evolve to train and retain might very well help stave off the fully automated solutions and the changing preferences of customers and incoming financial advisors alike. Leveraging mobile-based training and learning platforms of the future might even empower new financial advisors to simply pull out their phones to do augmented reality prospecting with geo-targeting and simulated financial planning with virtual clients. It’s this type of innovation that will attract and retain Gen Y & Z advisors, but more importantly, it will help them service their clients better as true fiduciaries – doing what’s in the best interest of the client, which is what the business is all about…serving the client.
As the sunlight dances on the river and the din of the restaurant patrons increases, fittingly Eric’s grin widens. He can see a bright future ahead as he embraces this new frontier in technology, which will no doubt give him an edge in recruiting and retention. His KPIs to reduce turnover by 25% and reduce training expenses by 20% will take at least a quarter to realize. In the interim, he can envision his practice exponentially growing — outpacing his industry peers –while maintaining the highest fiduciary standards and trust with his clients. “It’s nice to be on the positive side of the wealth management industry trends and statistics,” smiled Eric.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $40M Series C round of venture capital funding led by Norwest Venture Partners as well as welcome Norwest Partner and former Salesforce executive Scott Beechuk to our Board of Directors. This is an exciting personal and professional moment for me, my cofounders Nishant Mungali and Deepak Diwakar, and for Mindtickle.
This occasion is an important validation in our collective belief that for today’s companies, every customer’s experience is only as good as the last interaction they’ve had with one of a company’s employees. This means that every customer-facing employee needs to be a steward for the values, culture, and product and service value propositions of an organization. At the same time, we saw that companies could be doing a much better job of engaging their employees while educating and equipping them to be successful by using a modern approach to learning, development and ultimately ready to have engaging and valuable interactions with customers. With a platform to support personal and professional development through employees’ mobile devices, gamification, and access to online learning for enrichment, companies could focus on and enhance the human experience in the workplace.
To this end, Mindtickle believes that in order to assess, implement and develop the demonstrable capability of customer-facing employees, a single data model must be built. The ultimate goal behind creating a data model is to find competencies that best correlate with activity metrics and sales performance, and ultimately optimize an organization’s readiness and enablement investments to develop the desired capabilities. By measuring data related to learning content engagement, assessed proficiency and demonstrated performance in near-real world environments, and then correlating these platform data sets to pipeline management metrics, we’re able to provide the leading indicators of real-world success. At the same time, the Mindtickle platform helps to identify gaps in competency or capability and provides a path to remediation. When engagement and proficiency data is combined with business outcome data and enhanced by AI and machine learning, organizations can surface insights, drive personalized recommendations and optimize sales performance.
Along this journey, we’ve also been fortunate to have supportive investors like Qualcomm Ventures, Accel, and Canaan who started with us early in Mindtickle’s development. In addition to seeing an opportunity to bring a leader transforming sales enablement and readiness to the market, they saw an untapped opportunity for Mindtickle to be at the forefront of India-founded companies that break the traditional Silicon Valley mold to drive greater innovation that would apply to a global audience.
That early foresight has proven accurate as we’ve expanded our mission from high tech, high growth start-ups to established enterprise companies while growing at a phenomenal pace. In the last fiscal year, Mindtickle grew its enterprise customer base by 200 percent and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent year over year. We’re proud to now count dozens of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, hundreds of the world’s fastest-growing and most recognizable technology companies as customers. Companies like AppDynamics, MongoDB, Unisys, Qualtrics, Procore, Square, Janssen, Cloudera, Wartsila, VF Corporation, Dexcom, Merck Group, and Benetton Group have recognized the power of a modern approach to readiness that includes microlearning in the flow of work, gamification, social and peer learning and coaching — all in context and just in time.
Together, we look forward to addressing this area that has been untouched but is critically important for today’s organizations — providing a systematic, repeatable and measurable way to prepare and assess customer-facing employees’ ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience. With Norwest Venture Partners joining the ranks of our esteemed investors, we’re collectively doubling down on the thesis that companies tackling this important problem of readiness will expand from sales to other customer-facing teams and ultimately to all teams across the organization and change the way we think about personal and professional development.
A heartfelt thanks go out to those who’ve supported us along this journey and welcome to those who have recently joined us as well as those who’ve yet to join us!
For more information about our Series C funding announcement, see the press release here!
