Mindtickle Raises $40 Million in Series C Funding to Accelerate Customer-facing Capabilities of Global Organizations

JT Eger on July 29, 2019

Norwest Venture Partners invests in leader transforming sales enablement and readiness

SAN FRANCISCO—July 29, 2019—Mindtickle, the leader in Sales Readiness technology, today announced that it has secured $40 million in Series C funding. New investor Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from all existing investors including Accel Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, a spinout of New Enterprise Associates, and Qualcomm Ventures LLC. In addition, Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners and former Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce Service Cloud will join Mindtickle’s Board of Directors. This round brings Mindtickle’s total raised to more than $81 million.

“Sales and service organizations are facing a perfect storm on many fronts and company representatives that are not equipped to handle complex buyer needs and competitive challenges are being left behind. Mindtickle is empowering companies to grow revenue and build their brand value by transforming customer-facing teams preparing them to be on message and on task every time they engage with a prospect or customer,” said Krishna Depura, co-founder and CEO of Mindtickle. “Our Series C funding will fuel our strategic, long term growth plans while supporting on-going investment in our expanding products and services. We’re thrilled to have Scott join our board and welcome his insight and expertise as we embark on this new stage of rapid expansion.”

Mindtickle has experienced rapid growth by many business measures, including expanding its Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customer base by 200 percent and increasing annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent year over year. The funding news comes just recently after Mindtickle announced that they’ve hired Jeff Santelices as Chief Revenue Officer, adding an experienced and proven leader with a track record of building customer-focused sales organizations. In addition, Mindtickle has expanded that sales leadership team with the two additional hires of Ahmed Hedayat and Dan Coady. Ahmed has joined as Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, West and APAC, while Dan has joined as Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, East. 2019 has also been a year of validation and achievement for Mindtickle having recently been recognized as one of the 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies To Work For, named a ‘Best Sales Enablement Solution’ winner in the Stevie® Awards For Sales & Customer Service, and positioned as a Leader in the Aragon Research Tech Spectrum™ for Sales Coaching and Learning.

“At Snowflake, the sales experience has become as significant a differentiator as the product,” said Steve Hallowell, Vice President of Sales Productivity at Snowflake.  “When companies under-invest in training their sales teams, a few exceptional sales reps drive a disproportionate share of bookings. Worse, account executives are not prepared to answer tough questions or lead customers through often-complex buying decisions. We use Mindtickle to scale a high-quality, high-impact training experience for our sales organization, our partners, and our customers. They have been a great partner and collaborator enabling our teams to be more effective in the field.”

“Mindtickle is successfully confronting one of the most complex issues facing today’s organizations — the ability to train and upskill customer-facing employees,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Mindtickle has proven product-market fit for its mobile-first, readiness platform that engages employees and delivers perpetual micro-learning experiences. As organizations continue to look beyond traditional learning management systems for  new technologies to make their teams more effective in the field, we see a tremendous opportunity ahead for Mindtickle to lead this movement.”

For additional information:

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]

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.

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

Simona Galant on April 1, 2019

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

This was the challenge Viewpoint faced in 2017

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Sales Enablement in Real Time: How to Deliver Learning When it Matters

Simona Galant on March 27, 2019

 

In a recent webinar with Mindtickle and SiriusDecisions

,Peter Ostrow, Senior Research Director, Sales Enablement Strategies for SiriusDecisions, and Paulette Greene, Vice President of Professional Services for Mindtickle discussed how high performing organizations are approaching their sales knowledge transfer strategy.

In the webinar, they presented tips and action items on how to build an enablement model that takes into consideration the needs of the sellers, leverages the appropriate selling motion, and is integrated with a top-down sales learning strategy.

When it comes to delivering information and insights to buyers that help them make informed decisions, your sales team is probably your biggest and most valuable resource. Far too often, ad hoc approaches to educating sales reps result in knowledge gaps, and non-systemic learning approaches often don’t resonate and lead to a lack of scalability across the team. As you grow and adapt to changing market conditions, your company’s product messaging can develop and change. Your sellers should have the know-how to mold their approach and message in a systematic, deliberate way. The key to providing useful and ongoing learning opportunities comes down to methodical knowledge transfer.

SiriusDecisions defines knowledge transfer as “the process of enabling sales reps with the knowledge they need to apply during the buying process to accelerate deals in the pipeline and increase overall sales”.  So, how do you go about figuring out the best practices that apply to your specific reps?

Without an emphasis on personalization that addresses the scope of experienced sellers versus those who are just starting out, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t result in successful sales knowledge transfer. A lack of customization for sales teams can create hurdles when it comes to buy-in and long-term motivation. Additionally, the lack of structure can interfere with collaboration across teams as messaging and knowledge transfer programs become lost in translation.

SiriusDecisions suggests managers tackle this by “promoting rep knowledge retention by demonstrating application, allowing reps to practice applying it, and arming coaches with criteria for feedback and monitoring results.” It’s important to keep your team engaged in consistent learning, and by committing to a sales enablement and readiness program, you can avoid those potential pitfalls.

Here’s the good news: you may actually already set up for success. The webinar goes into the details of SiriusDecisions research which shows that reps believe they should, in fact, spend more time learning. In the recent surveys by SiriusDecisions, findings indicated that reps want to spend more time on personal and professional development – so the buy-in is already there. Sales reps know the importance of fully understanding the products they sell but feel that they often lack resources beyond foundational knowledge. As a sales enablement leader, how do you provide your team with the right sales coaching support?

The truth is that many sales team leaders struggle from something of a “not-it” syndrome. Overwhelmed with making sure their reps are hitting quotas, managers often don’t spend the time to make sure to coach their reps on an ongoing basis. According to SiriusDecisions, 85% of high performing sales managers recognize the value of their reps understanding the company offering and spend time and additional focus on offering reps specific sales coaching and sales training on buyer personas.

Ultimately, your goal as a sales manager is to figure out and provide an approach that is consistent – one that enables your sales team with the knowledge needed to maximize their buyer interaction. If you align the general, required knowledge to specific activities that teach appropriate responses and selling motions, it’ll become much easier for both you and your team to create and ensure actionable and relevant learning outcomes.

According to Peter and Paulette, you can begin implementing changes to your sales productivity initiatives with a few action items. When it comes to sales enablement, start by:

  • Clearly defining knowledge requirements and provide a learning strategy that supports the application of knowledge.
  • Developing tools and job aids specific to learners and managers to reinforce competency attainment.

And when you combine your sales readiness goals with other teams in your organization, make sure to partner with sales enablement early in the process to ensure alignment to rep needs. Try thinking beyond delivering tactics and begin targeting reps with programs in the same way that buyers are targeted.

For a deep-dive into sales enablement in real time, watch the recording of their webinar here.

Milaap Meets Mindtickle

Deepti Sundareshan on March 12, 2019

Milaap is India’s largest online crowdfunding platform. Founded in 2010 by a team of young and passionate entrepreneurs, Milaap has pioneered the vision to enable people to directly assist individuals in need.  They have changed the scenario of person to person giving in India and how Indians support a cause.

Over the past eight years, it has emerged as a preferred platform to fund medical emergencies. Online crowdfunding is now becoming accessible to more people across the country, backed by social media and the ease of digital payments. Today, Indians are effectively mobilizing support to face difficult situations through online communities across the world. This crowdfunding approach has applications in almost every domain.

While an increasing number of students are able to explore more opportunities for higher studies, people are more empowered to address local issues with help communities that connect with their cause.

“Over 80 percent of the funds raised on crowdfunding platform Milaap are for medical needs,” says co-founder and President Anoj Viswanathan.
Milaap.org has gone one step ahead and taken the ease of online fundraising a notch higher. They are moving away from conventional, mechanical forms to a more empathetic and conversational approach through chatbots. Based on intensive research, and feedback from their community of users, the platform has pioneered a way to make it easier for people to share their need with others.

With an overwhelming majority of funds raised for medical causes, the platform is now focusing on making quality healthcare affordable, and therefore accessible to more people in the country. The Milaap platform not only helps one share sensitive stories with greater comfort but also makes the process extremely easy for new users, who may be from extremely remote places. With all the required details in place, the verification process is much faster. This new feature is so unique that Milaap is in the process of applying to get a patent.

With the industry growing rapidly and the concept gaining more acceptance, the team at Milaap is striving to take crowdfunding to a broader audience. Especially, those who may be from the most remote areas of the country. This is indeed a big step into the future, where people can share their cause with the world over a simple conversation. As Anoj Viswanathan says, “Quality healthcare is becoming accessible to more people, without financial constraints.”

Milaap collaborates with hospitals and corporations and seeks to widen its network by going into smaller cities and carrying campaigns in local languages. With families being pushed into poverty because of medical expenses, the “tech-for-good” company’s initiative gives patients’ families an avenue to cope with massive medical bills.

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a global Sales Readiness platform which helps companies across industries build robust sales teams. Mindtickle’s core focus is on enabling companies to grow revenue and build brand by equipping customer-facing teams to be on message and on task.

At Mindtickle, we are always looking for ways to give back to society in various forms. We support social causes and try to help people during natural disasters and raise funds to help with relief efforts during a crisis.

“We have grown with the help and support of the Society, and every individual who is privileged and fortunate enough should help the less privileged and give back,” says Krishna Depura, Co-Founder and CEO of Mindtickle.

While some of our professionals have started their own dog shelter to rescue dogs, some reach out to orphanages and nursing homes to donate, celebrate, or spend some fun time while making artwork.

Milaap joins hands with Mindtickle

Mindtickle’s founders have always strived to support socially conscious organizations and activities. This support includes donating their technology to help organizations like Milaap train their team members to be ready to render help to those in need.

“When we heard of Milaap we thought what could be a better way to give back to the society while helping the process of connecting individuals to donors! Hence, we are helping Milaap to use our platform to train their team members and keep them posted on how they can enable individuals to avail and raise donations on the go,” said Krishna Depura.

The tool also helps train members to reach out to doctors, and with hospitals they collaborate with, to guide patients or their relatives to reach out to Milaap when in need.

Milaap runs several campaigns to help crowdsource funds for individuals and patients out of which came a campaign named “Feet on Street.” In this campaign, team members are stationed in every super specialty hospital across India to help patients know more about crowdfunding, and educate the hospitals about the help that Milaap provides.

The Mindtickle platform, in such cases, becomes a valuable tool to help them provide the right info and training material to help individuals without losing precious time.  The platform also helps them fast track the fund-raising process by training team members with regular updates and enabling people to create campaigns on the Milaap website to get timely help.

Mindtickle helps Milaap ensure the right distribution of resources required by the representatives, with up-to-date info on the go, efficient training to help the patients at the sensitive time of need and to address their issues with the right guidance.

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.