5 Types of Sales Metrics to Understand and Improve Performance

Sales performance metrics tell the story of your business and its role in customers’ lives. These metrics don’t just empower your sales team and help them improve; you can also use this information to increase visibility for planning and reporting.

Once you’ve started using metrics to track sales performance, there’s only one question: How do you use those metrics meaningfully? Fortunately, there are several best practices for tracking and analyzing this information.

Here’s a look at the five most important types of sales metrics and how to use them to your advantage.

What are sales metrics?

Sales metrics are data points that represent the performance of an individual salesperson or a full sales team. Management and other leaders use different types of sales metrics to track progress, identify issues and prepare for future growth.

Sales management metrics aren’t just for visibility. They’re also a great way to incentivize sales teams to hit targets consistently. Sales leaders can use metrics to fine-tune training and make any necessary adjustments to individual learning, contributing to better overall performance.

Essentially, sales performance metrics aim to steer sales teams in the right direction. This information helps identify problems in the sales process, grow revenue, and increase competitiveness in today’s marketplace.

How to choose the most important sales performance metrics to track

Different businesses need to track different types of sales metrics. It’s up to you to decide which are most important for your industry, customer base, and individual teams — but it’s always smart to keep these ideas in mind:

  • Have a goal: Every tracked metric should have a purpose, such as supporting sales enablement or providing insight into your sales onboarding process.
  • Unite your data: Sales metrics don’t exist in a vacuum. Ensure they work together to create visibility into your entire sales process and customer journey.
  • Skip the vanity metrics: Vanity metrics, such as views or attendee numbers, don’t actually contribute to your sales performance or revenue. Don’t get too caught up in this information.
  • Stay consistent: You don’t have to track the same metrics all the time, but always use a single method for tracking and recording data so your numbers remain consistent.
  • Learn: When choosing which sales metrics to track, remember that you’re supporting your sales team, sales forecasting, and more. Learn from your data and put those insights to good use for your business overall.

The 5 most important types of sales metrics

Since there are a plethora of sales metrics available, it can be difficult to figure out which ones to track. Let’s take a closer look at five of the most important sales metrics:

1. Sales KPIs

Sales KPIs are connected to company-wide goals or objectives, which means this data allows organizations to measure overall performance. Managers often depend on sales KPIs to make informed business decisions. That’s because sales KPIs help identify key gaps related to product-market fit, sales team efficiency, and more.

The most important sales KPIs include:

  • Customer lifetime value (CLV): The amount of money a customer will spend during their entire relationship with your business.
  • Revenue from new customers: The revenue you get exclusively from new business or first-time buyers.
  • Revenue from existing customers: The revenue you earn from up- or cross-selling to current or previous customers.
  • Year-over-year growth: Your sales performance compared to the same time period last year.

2. Hiring and onboarding metrics

With the right hiring and sales onboarding observations and metrics, managers can fine-tune job descriptions and reduce the risk of future hiring mistakes, which can cost a great deal of time, money and headaches down the road. Sales leaders will also have valuable data that informs them of when and how to recruit new candidates.

The top hiring and onboarding metrics include:

  • Sales ramp-up time: Average time for new sales representatives to be completely productive.
  • Productivity: The ratio of sales to quota capacity, and the actual monetary impact of an increase or decrease in this productivity.
  • Retention: The number of new hires who stay with the company.

3. Training and coaching metrics

Without a strong sales enablement strategy, it’s nearly impossible to create and maintain a successful sales team. Therefore, training and coaching metrics are invaluable to those in sales, marketing, management, and just about anyone else involved in sales enablement.

These metrics include:

  • Efficiency: Time spent on training compared to time spent answering team member questions during sales processes.
  • Satisfaction: Sales representative satisfaction and engagement during onboarding, training and coaching.
  • Manager effectiveness: Quality of interaction in shadowing, ride-alongs, 1:1 reviews, two-way feedback loops, and more.
  • Cost of training: Average cost per sales representative in both money and time.

4. Outreach metrics

If your sales representatives focus on closing deals via phone, email, and social media, outreach metrics can be very beneficial, particularly when tied back to training content (learning) and skill-building activities (practice). Managers and trainers can use them to determine which outreach methods require greater attention.

Email

  • Open rate: How many customers open an e-mail.
  • Response rate: How many customers reply directly to an e-mail.
  • Engagement rate: How many customers click a link or otherwise engage with content in an email.

Phone

  • Call-backs: Percentage of prospects who call back to follow up.
  • Conversations: Percentage of prospects who agree to talk with your sales team.
  • Conversions: Percentage of prospects who move to the next steps.

Social media

  • Requests: Percentage of LinkedIn connection requests accepted.
  • Interactions: Number of likes, shares, and comments on social media posts.
  • Meetings: Number of meetings set through social media.
  • Opportunities: Number of qualified opportunities generated.

5. Pipeline metrics

Through pipeline metrics, sales managers can thoroughly understand their success throughout the entire pipeline. They can also provide insights into how their organization is dominating the market and what kind of demand there is for their products or services.

The most important pipeline metrics are:

  • Sales cycle length: How long it takes to move from prospect to customer.
  • Sales per rep: How many sales each representative makes in a given time period.
  • Sales by region: How many deals are closed in each area.
  • Average deal size: Average amount of revenue per sale.
  • Churn rate: How many customers are lost in a given time period.
  • Quota attainment: The average percentage of quota completion.

The importance of tracking and analyzing sales metrics

By making it a priority to track sales performance metrics, sales-driven organizations can:

Better optimize the employee experience

There’s a direct correlation between employee experience and customer experience. By tracking and analyzing sales metrics, organizations can gain valuable insight into what is working for their employees and what isn’t.

Provide insightful training feedback

While sales leaders can ask their new sales representatives how they feel about their training, the answers likely won’t be thorough enough to accurately gauge how they’re doing. With sales metrics within reach, however, teams can figure out exactly how effective their training program is and where they need to improve.

Increase customer retention

Retention efforts increase customer lifetime value and boost revenue as a result. To increase customer retention, sales representatives must engage existing customers to continue to buy an organization’s products or services.

There are a number of sales metrics such as customer churn, time between purchases, and loyal customer rate that can give sales leaders and the management team a close look at how well their organization is retaining clients.

How technology can help

An analytics interface is one of the easiest and most effective ways to track and manage key sales metrics. When shopping around for sales enablement analytics software, organizations should be on the lookout for the following important features:

  • Real-time alerts: An interface should offer data on real-time changes in the market.
  • Filters: Whether it’s a high-level view or a highly specific look at particular metrics, filters should allow you to customize your parameters for any given goal.
  • Sharing: Data, tools and tasks should be easy to share via email for internal parties or through public URLs for external users.
  • Collaboration tools: Dashboards should allow users to make comments, share key metrics and create slideshows. Automation features such as report scheduling and program notifications are important, too.

Mindtickle helps you make the most of sales data

Finding a sales metrics example that resonates with your team is one thing. It’s another thing entirely to use that sales metric to your advantage — and to combine it with all the other data you have at your disposal. You need a way to keep this information in one platform — a shared workspace that sales teams and other departments can access, contribute to and utilize at will.

Mindtickle’s revenue productivity platform is designed to help you understand and quantify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team, then take data-driven steps to improve sales capabilities. With Mindtickle, you can leverage built-in reporting and analytics to measure seller effectiveness and track progress against KPIs.

Sales Performance in Mindtickle

Learn more about how Mindtickle helps you track sales performance and all sales metrics.

Request a Demo

This article was originally posted in April 2020, updated in March 2023, and again in February 2024. 

The 8 Essential Features Your Sales Enablement Tool Should Have 

In 2022, only 26% of sales reps reached 90% or more of their quota. That’s not a very successful win rate, considering new sales revenue streams are the bread and butter of an organization. So the question is, how can we empower our sales teams to successfully reach their sales quotas?

Percentage of reps who hit quota in 2022
0%

The simple answer: introduce sales enablement tools.

With sales enablement tools, you can train your sales reps to effectively target new customers, tackle difficult negotiations, close more deals, and increase your company’s bottom line.

Once you’ve read this article, you’ll have learned about:

  • The advantages that the right sales enablement tool can give your company
  • The essential features to look out for in sales enablement tools — and why
  • The top five sales enablement tools
  • Our helpful recommendations

Why are sales enablement tools important for your business?

The most powerful feature of sales enablement tools is their ability to centralize knowledge between the sales and marketing departments.

This has a butterfly effect that increases revenue, boosts quota attainment, and solidifies brand identity across the company.

When sales and marketing departments have centralized access to content, insights, and approaches, it impacts sales revenue due to streamlined processes, provides successful strategies, and shapes sellers with winning behaviors and skills.

With sales enablement tools, your business can:

  • Align sales and marketing teams with clear goals, tasks, and knowledge sharing. This is important, as 50% of teams feel they need additional resources to properly execute enablement tasks.
  • Learn winning attitudes and skills from top-performing sellers, and transform those behaviors into skills for other sellers to learn and replicate.
  • Optimize material for better win rates with content insights.
  • Accelerate the onboarding ramp process for new hires. In turn, this sets up new hires for success, with almost 79% of companies that have effective training meeting 100% of their sales quotas.
  • Keep sellers up to date on new strategies, product launches, and market approaches. In fact, 90% of sellers who hit more than 75% of their quota participate in sales training monthly.
  • Keep track of KPIs and goals. Over 71% of companies that have clear sales KPIs reach 100% of their sales quotas.

The benefits that sales enablement tools bring to your team

Modern sales enablement solutions make all of your sales processes simpler, more measurable, and more actionable.

1. Centralize access to content

Sales enablement tools help reps know what content is available to them and how to use it in their sales interactions.

With half of all customer engagement coming from only 10% of a company’s content, reps need to quickly find relevant sales material to nurture leads, follow up with prospects, and convince important decision-makers of the value of your products.

But Forrester found that “not having the right content” is one of the biggest challenges for sales teams. Sellers reported that finding content and information is a significant productivity obstacle, affecting their daily work.

With a sales enablement tool, your enablement team can tag content to categorize it based on buyer persona, stage in the sales funnel, customer outcome, or the stakeholder it’s most relevant to. This includes:

  • Case studies
  • Whitepapers
  • Sales playbooks
  • Competitor comparisons
  • Microlearning modules
  • Training call recordings

Then your reps can search for key content terms and easily find relevant sales enablement content. This system equips sellers with the knowledge and content they need to progress conversations with prospects, helping them improve their win rates and close more deals.

2. Increase collaboration between sales and marketing

LinkedIn found that 85% of survey respondents believe that better marketing and sales alignment would provide major business growth. Unfortunately, sales and marketing teams often fall into silos with little communication between them.

Sales enablement improves alignment between these teams and gives better visibility into the effectiveness of their processes. Marketers can see how sellers use marketing content in their sales conversations and get measurable data on how different content types impact the sales process.

Additionally, sellers can see what content the marketing team has produced and get updates about new case studies or product sheets that they can use in their nurturing flows.

Both teams can see which messaging, content, and campaigns are working, so they can collaborate to improve overall sales performance.

3. Improve visibility into team performance

Sales enablement gives sellers access to content, resources, and training materials to help them build the skills and knowledge they need.

Sales leaders, can see their reps’ performance data alongside insights into their content usage and training completion.

This helps managers understand how the content, resources, and training provided affect the sales team’s performance.

With access to data on how training content and exercises affect team performance, managers gain insights into providing a data-informed and personalized approach to sales coaching programs for each team member.

8 features you need in your sales enablement tool

Organizations in the market for a sales enablement tool should look for the following key features:

  1. Insights and analytics
  2. Onboarding management
  3. Gamification
  4. Automated workflows
  5. Program management
  6. Content management
  7. Integrations
  8. Governance

1. Insights and analytics to optimize sales efforts

Most organizations spend a great deal of time, money, and resources training their sales teams. But without a way to measure those efforts, it’s hard to understand what’s working and what parts of the training process need improvement.

With sales enablement tools, you get detailed analytics and insights into what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve.

With data and insights from your sales enablement platform, you can make data-driven decisions to improve sales initiatives or develop a specific skill in individual reps.

For example, managers can benchmark a sales rep’s performance in a key area, like closing. After training sessions and 1:1 coaching designed to improve closing skills, the manager tracks the close rate and other closing-related KPIs to see how the rep’s performance changes. Based on those measurable results, the manager can adjust the training program accordingly.

Also, sales enablement tools show how much time and money it costs to train each sales representative. If costs are higher than managers would like them to be, they can take steps to reduce inefficiencies and improve productivity.

2. Onboarding management and accelerating ramp time

Sales enablement tools help onboard new sales hires with the knowledge and training they need to succeed in their roles.

During the sales onboarding process, it can be a challenge to keep reps engaged, track their readiness, and provide them with easy access to forms, manuals, and other onboarding materials.

 

However, using sales enablement tools for onboarding helps teams to:

  • Improve learning and testing through automated training paths that get reps ramped up faster.
  • Ensure better communication by keeping reps constantly updated and thoroughly engaged, leading to higher productivity and fewer turnover costs.
  • Enhance coaching by leveraging the tools and content that empower reps and managers to identify and address any areas — like knowledge and skills — requiring improvement.

3. Gamification to motivate sales reps

It’s not easy to keep sales representatives engaged during sales onboarding and continuous training.

That’s where gamification comes in.

Through gamification, organizations can turn routine tasks into enjoyable activities that motivate and incentivize sales reps to develop their skills.

 

Through gamification, managers encourage friendly competition, break learning into bite-sized segments, offer relevant games and quizzes, and introduce real-life scenarios.

Gamification can also add a social element to onboarding and training and promote open communication among sales representatives.

Gamification can be used by new reps during the onboarding process and by seasoned reps who need to build upon their skills and experience consistently. It can assist with continuous training and the fine-tuning of skills, all in a fun environment.

4. Automated workflows to streamline sales strategies

Collaboration and accountability are common struggles for organizations. Not only do automated workflows make it a breeze to collaborate — but they also hold all the right people accountable.

For example, you can use automated workflows to create a seamless feedback loop between managers and sales reps. Here, audio or video recordings submitted by sales reps are sent automatically to sales managers who can offer qualitative and quantitative feedback. This removes manual reminders and a continual back and forth, streamlining the learning process.

Automated workflows help managers and sales representatives tackle tasks instantly and through a centralized process that tracks progress.

5. Program management to reach strategic goals

Program management helps sales teams reach their targets through strategic initiatives, such as voice of the customer programs or sales onboarding programs.

These initiatives include multiple connected projects, with a project manager overseeing the team members who are focused on different projects.

These projects are bigger than the individual sellers working on their deals. Instead, they involve different teams, such as leadership for strategic direction, marketing for content creation, and IT for technical implementation.

If your sales enablement tool doesn’t have a program management feature, it’s difficult to manage and execute these strategic initiatives, and this can negatively impact your sales enablement efforts.

But with a program management feature, program managers can ease some of the stress they face by creating and structuring programs, adding and managing collaborators, creating and publishing relevant content, and automating communication.

6. Content management and centralized resources

Throughout the sales cycle, sales representatives depend on a variety of content to increase buyer engagement and understanding.

The challenge with all of this content is that it must be well-organized so that it can be easily located and fully utilized.

A content management feature makes it simple for sellers to access sales material quickly. By having a simple and accessible content management system, you empower sellers to utilize the correct content at the right time within the sales journey.

Additionally, enabling multiple people to collaborate in the content authoring process, whether in PowerPoint, PDF, or video, empowers teams to bring shared experiences and best practices into play.

An effective sales enablement tool helps your team track content usage and gives insights into the content with the highest engagement rate and how to properly use and introduce content resources.

7. Integrations to facilitate organizational planning

As sales enablement practices evolve within organizations, new tools are purchased. This can overload users with numerous platforms and multiple logins.

The solution for consolidating disparate tools is to integrate them with a sales enablement tool.

A sales enablement tool that offers integrations helps organizations keep their communication, calendaring, CRM, reporting and business intelligence, content management, and other tools all in one place.

Integrations allow sales representatives to spend less time digging through multiple platforms and more time doing what matters: selling and improving their skills.

8. Governance to organize tasks and data insights

Sales enablement programs have a lot of moving parts. Therefore, you’ll need to operate under complete confidence that your organization is using its resources efficiently and securely at scale.

Platform governance allows you to set up different access levels across multiple user roles and locations.

This helps you simplify coaching workflows and roll-up reports based on organizational hierarchy and define custom roles for those who need special access.

The 5 best sales enablement tools to improve revenue

Tech marketplace and review site G2 lists over 160 tools in the sales enablement category. So, if you’re looking for sales enablement software, you have plenty of options.

We’ve picked out five top-rated tools to help you find the best one for your sales team.

A powerful and comprehensive sales enablement tool

Mindtickle’s platform increases sales rep revenue by 64%. This is because Mindtickle’s strong combination of sales enablement features with advanced insights continuously works to improve seller and content performance.

Mindtickle’s sales readiness platform provides tools and processes to help sellers increase their knowledge, enhance performance, and go into every customer conversation ready to succeed.

One of the biggest challenges of traditional sales enablement is that reps forget their sales training quickly, so they aren’t able to make the best use of the content and resources available to them.

Mindtickle helps reps build and maintain their knowledge and skills through gamification, reinforced training, continuous skill assessments, and coaching exercises.

Our platform combines sales enablement, content management, conversation intelligence, sales training, and manager-led coaching. It provides continuous training, content, and enablement to ensure that sellers remember — and use — the knowledge and skills they’ve learned in their training and coaching sessions to move sales conversations forward.

Sales enablement is an essential part of Mindtickle’s comprehensive sales readiness framework. We make sales enablement best practices an ongoing part of the sales process rather than a siloed additional tool or exercise that sellers only think about a few times a year.

Notable Mindtickle features:

  • Centralizes content management and provides content insights to personalize materials to mimic winning strategic approaches
  • Records phone calls and interactions and, using AI, provides feedback on tone, sales opportunities, and future insights
  • Identifies winning behaviors from sales reps across the company to propose skill development and training
  • Analyzes real-world data to suggest relevant training and role-plays to improve the sales approach
  • Centralizes the sales stack with CRM integrations and APIs
  • Creates an Ideal Rep Persona to track KPIs and training progress
    Includes a mobile app for sellers to always be prepared — even on the go
  • Mindtickle G2 rating: 4.7

To break down marketing and sales silos

HubSpot is best known for its CRM and inbound marketing platform, but it also offers a Sales Hub to help companies already using its marketing tools break down the silos between their sales and marketing departments by getting everyone on the same platform.

HubSpot Sales Hub is primarily an easy-to-use CRM, giving sellers and their managers greater visibility into their deal pipeline and task list.

However, its free plan includes content management to give sellers easy access to sales content. Enterprise customers can use sales management playbooks such as battle cards and call scripts to better enable sellers to close deals.

While the most robust sales enablement features aren’t available to all customers, HubSpot integrates with more than 148 other sales enablement tools, so it may work well in combination with other instruments in your tech stack. Additionally, HubSpot has a vast library of training content and certifications to help sellers master best practices and essential skills.

Notable HubSpot Sales Hub features:

  • Email templates that can be personalized to prepare your team for success
  • Email tracking to keep up to date on lead health and opportunities
  • Document management and content tracking that can be directly sent through email inboxes
  • Automated sales workflows to keep sellers on top of tasks
  • Phone calls logged in your CRM
    Conversation intelligence to find opportunities for improvement in phone calls
  • HubSpot Sales Hub G2 rating: 4.4

For personalized and engaging content materials

Seismic is one of the leading dedicated sales enablement platforms. Its standalone platform provides a centralized hub where sellers can access the content and resources they need to engage with their prospects.

It recommends content and training at the time when they’re most relevant to your sellers. For example, when a prospect moves from a sales-qualified lead to an opportunity, it shows content and resources relevant to that stage of the buyer journey.

As a dedicated sales enablement platform, it’s a better choice for sales enablement teams than a tool that’s a CRM with enablement functionality added on. It has a great reputation and established customer base in the finance industry — particularly for wealth management, asset management, and banking organizations — which makes it a trustworthy option for companies operating in those spaces.

Notable Seismic features:

  • Offers resource personalization with advanced content management
  • Provides learning and onboarding courses to train new hires
    Integrates with almost all platforms
  • Connects and logs prospects through social media, email, and phone

 

  • Seismic G2 rating: 4.7

For sales enablement with strong CRM features

Salesforce is one of the best-known sales tools available. There are split opinions in the sales world: some companies love it, and others find it has a steep learning curve and is difficult to implement for their business.

Like HubSpot, Salesforce is a CRM first, with additional features and functionality built on top. The Salesforce sales enablement tool is a paid add-on for its Sales Cloud product at the cost of an extra $25 per user per month on top of the original subscription.

If your company already uses Salesforce for its CRM, then its sales enablement add-on may be the simplest option for your team. However, it probably isn’t worth switching to Salesforce just for its sales enablement tool.

Notable Salesforce features:

  • Forecasts pipelines with the help of KPI management and logged interactions
  • Manages accounts through logged communication history and internal notes
  • Uses process workflows to automate business processes and save time
  • Mobile app for ease of use outside the office
  • Salesforce G2 rating: 4.3

To understand prospect health and upsell approaches

Showpad is a revenue enablement platform that helps sellers prepare for each sales conversation and gives them the resources to ensure each call or sales interaction makes a positive impact on the customer.

It combines training and coaching functionality with content management, ensuring sellers have access to the content they need. Its platform is split into two parts: Content and Coach.

Each is an essential part of sales enablement, but the two parts of the platform are priced separately. This means companies need to pay twice to benefit from the full sales enablement functionality they can get from other tools.

Notable Showpad features:

  • Tracks content ROI and enforces brand compliance in content creation
  • Lets users identify upsell and cross-selling opportunities as well as in-deal coaching
  • Share information through brand microsite for prospects to share content with their internal stakeholders
  • Gauges and tracks prospect interest to understand next steps
  • Showpad Coach G2 rating: 4.4

The tool you choose needs to support your team’s growth for ongoing success

The best sales enablement tool will be the one that your team will find the easiest to adopt in their everyday tasks and responsibilities.

It’s important to keep in mind your company’s growth as you choose your sales enablement tool. You want to be sure that it’ll continuously grow and adapt to your business needs, market changes, and new product releases.

This support comes with insights and data that continuously update with each interaction and sales training that prepares your sales team for success through engaging and motivating material and courses.

Mindtickle can help support your team with its comprehensive sales enablement platform that provides direction and new skills to your sales team.

Learn more about Mindtickle’s sales enablement tool, or play around with our demo and take a peek into how we continuously help companies reach their revenue and growth goals.

Find the sales enablement tool that works for you

Talk to our team about your challenges and we'll show you how Mindtickle can scale and grow your sales enablement efforts so your team is hitting quota every quarter. 

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Sales enablement tool FAQs

What is sales enablement software?

Sales enablement software provides a centralized place for the training, resources, and data needed to help salespeople sell more effectively.

Sales enablement software:

  • Helps sales reps easily access training materials, product documentation, and other content (no matter where it is stored)
  • Records key sales metrics, so managers can identify opportunities to improve certain skills through coaching
  • Tracks reps’ progress against development goals
  • Improves visibility and alignment between sales and marketing teams
  • Enables micro-learning and virtual training to teach and reinforce key skills

At its core, a sales enablement tool does much more than just support a more efficient and effective sales team. With the proper tool, all types of organizations can boost their sales processes to enhance every step of the sales journey. And, what’s more, the right tool supports sales teams by providing them with the content and information they need to successfully engage with customers the first time and every time.

What are the best sales enablement tools?

The best sales enablement tools that have the most impact on your company are:

  • Mindtickle
  • HubSpot Sales Hub
  • Seismic
  • Salesforce
  • Showpad

For a full list of all the sales enablement tools and features, read our guide.

What are the essential features of a sales enablement tool?

The features that your sales enablement tool should have are:

  • Integrations
  • Content management
  • Program management
  • Automated workflows
  • Gamification
  • Governance
  • Onboarding management
  • Insights and analytics

How much should I spend on sales enablement tools?

Every company’s budget is different, as are their definitions of success. To understand how much you should be spending on sales enablement tools, you need to understand how the ROI of sales enablement can be measured. This will give you a better understanding of the benefits a sales enablement tool will have on your company.

Now with all of this knowledge, you’ll be empowered to make an educated choice on the best sales enablement tool for your team.

Sales Enablement in Action

Connect with our team to learn more about how Mindtickle helps you prove the ROI of your sales enablement efforts. 

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(This was originally published in May 2022, updated in December 2022, and re-published in November 2023.) 

7 Reasons Why Your Quota Attainment and Sales Productivity is Slipping

Our 2022-2023 State of Sales Enablement Outlook Report found that only 26% of sellers achieved above 90% of their quotas. With so many sellers missing quota, leaders are often asking themselves:

Reps who meet 90% or more of quota
0%

 

What’s going wrong?

Before you can identify a solution, you first need to identify the root of the problem. This blog post will help you diagnose why the majority of sellers are missing their numbers each quarter.

And even though these issues might ring a little too true for you and your team but don’t worry. Now that you know why quota attainment is a problem, you’ll be able to determine a solution and the next steps.

Read on to explore seven of the top reasons why your quota attainment and sales productivity may be slipping – and what you can do to turn things around.

  1. Reason #1: You’re only focused on onboarding
  2. Reason #2: Your reps can’t find the content they need — or they don’t even know it exists
  3. Reason #4: You’re taking an ad hoc approach to sales coaching
  4. Reason #5: You’re using the wrong metrics to measure readiness (or not measuring at all)
  5. Reason #6: Your training program is all over the place
  6. Reason #7: You’re using point solutions that focus on a single piece of the readiness puzzle

What is a sales quota and why is it important?

A sales quota is the sales performance target sellers must achieve during a certain time period, usually a quarter.

When a seller achieves their quota, they’ll also receive their incentive target pay. Sales quotas are set by sales leaders and are an incentive for sellers to perform. Sales enablement teams work closely with sales leadership to monitor quota attainment to ensure enablement efforts are focused on helping every seller meet and beat their quota each quarter.

Reason #1: You’re only focused on onboarding

Often, sales organizations invest a lot of time and resources into developing a great onboarding program. And that’s certainly not a bad thing. A solid onboarding program can serve as a great foundation for sellers’ success, familiarizing them with the company, its products, goals, and how sellers will play a role in achieving those goals. What’s more, great onboarding is proven to get you closer to your revenue goals.

According to the 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report, on average, sellers at winning organizations take four weeks to complete an onboarding program and are fully ramped in four to five months. 

4 weeks

4-5 months

 

This 40-50% decrease in industry average ramp time ensures sellers can start generating revenue earlier.

But the thing is, new reps are bombarded with information during onboarding — and unlikely to retain it all. In fact, research from Ardent Learning shows that the most significant loss of knowledge happens within the first day and within three months, most people have forgotten between 84% and 90% of the information they learned during training.

Instead, organizations must also incorporate continuous learning (what we refer to as sales everboarding) if they expect reps to absorb and retain information — and then apply that information in the field. Our research with Heinz Marketing found that 78.6% of companies that have an effective training program meet 100% of their selling quota. And 90% who hit 75% or more of their quota participate in sales training on a monthly basis. If you’re not there already, now’s the time to transition from onboarding to sales everboarding.

Companies with effective training that hit 100% of quota
0%

 

Reason #2: Your reps can’t find the content they need — or they don’t even know it exists

We’ve all heard the adage about content being king. For revenue organizations, the sentiment is certainly true. Sales content — both internal and external — plays a key role in selling success.
Most organizations understand the importance of content and devote time to creating plenty of it. This normally includes internal content (such as a just-in-time training piece or a recording of a top seller delivering their sales pitch) and external content (such as pitch decks and sell sheets).

The goal of content is to ensure sellers are always ready – and have what they need to move deals forward. But even the greatest content is completely useless if a rep doesn’t know where to find it — or that it even exists. And this happens… a lot. Our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report found that 50% of all engagement is generated by just 10% of content.

The most successful revenue organizations house all content — both internal and external — in a single, easily searchable platform. That way, reps have easy access to the content they need, when they need it, so that they can spend less time hunting for content (or — gasp! — creating their own) and more time moving deals forward and hitting revenue targets.

 

Reason #3: Your reps don’t know why deals go south

A rep shares the news that they’ve lost a deal they thought was in the bag. You try to dig for more information, but the rep can’t seem to articulate exactly why the deal was lost. And that makes it pretty difficult (if not impossible) to coach that rep toward better outcomes in the future.

Of course, frontline managers are busy. They don’t have the time to sit in on every rep call to understand what’s going right or wrong.

But the good news is that conversation intelligence solutions, such as Mindtickle’s Call AI, allow managers to understand what’s really happening in the field. With conversation intelligence, sales managers can identify competency and knowledge gaps that might be standing in the way of a seller closing more deals — and then work to deliver coaching that’ll diminish those gaps and empower the rep to close more deals.

 

Reason #4: You’re taking an ad hoc approach to sales coaching

Sales coaching — when it’s done well — can have a tremendous impact on rep productivity and quota attainment. Research tells us eight out of 10 teams who have effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of sales quotas.

But sales coaching often isn’t done well. Often, there’s no top-down agreement on coaching goals and methods. Instead, frontline managers are left to their own devices to coach as they see fit. This means many of them take an ad hoc approach that involves purely tactical efforts like deal reviews, and they don’t have the time, sales coaching tools, or training needed for effective coaching.

The ad hoc approach to coaching isn’t effective. In fact, it’s downright counterproductive. Research from CSO Insights tells us that 75% of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching approaches.

Instead, an organization must build a culture of coaching if it expects to see improvements to quota attainment and productivity. And this has got to start from the top, with the chief revenue officer.

But how?

Start by defining what you hope to achieve by building a culture of coaching. Then, there must be alignment on a standard coaching approach that’ll help you achieve those goals.

In addition, if it’s going to be effective, coaching must be individualized for each rep. Organizations should first define their ideal rep profile (IRP).

Ideal rep profile competencies

 

This is the set of skills and competencies a given rep must have to succeed at the organization. With the IRP in place, it’s easier for managers to identify skill gaps — and then provide personalized sales coaching to address those gaps.

Reason #5: You’re using the wrong metrics to measure readiness (or not measuring at all)

The same CSO Insights report mentioned earlier found that a mere 24% of enablement teams are able to measure the ROI of their programs. That’s a big problem. Without consistent measurement, you can’t understand how your efforts are impacting sales readiness — and how to optimize programs for better results.

A lot of organizations say they measure impact. But often this involves tracking metrics like adoption and engagement. Sure, usage data matters — but it only tells a small part of the story. A rep might consume all the training assigned to them, yet continue to miss quota every quarter.

Instead, organizations must regularly track a wide range of data on sales performance to understand how their programs are actually impacting productivity and quota attainment. Of course, these metrics vary from organization to organization, but there are some core metrics that should be tracked by all. For example, organizations can (and should) track each individual’s performance against the company’s ideal rep profile. They should also leverage data from sales conversations to measure how training is (or isn’t) applied in the field.

The right technology equips sales leaders with the right data at the right time — presented in a way that’s easy to consume and take action on.

 

Reason #6: Your training program is all over the place

With everything else on your plate, focusing on building out ongoing sales training programs sometimes falls to the wayside. However, there’s a case to be made for making sales training programs a priority project in the year ahead. Our research with Heinz Marketing found that 78.6% of companies with an effective program meet 100% of their selling quota. Outside of that, organizations have seen improved seller engagement and retention. To build a sales training program that works, make sure you’re:

  • Going beyond onboarding
  • Defining what good looks like
  • Making it personal
  • Reinforcing it
  • Mixing up the format
  • Measuring the impact

Reason #7: You’re using point solutions that focus on a single piece of the productivity puzzle

The revenue technology landscape is complicated. There are quite literally hundreds of vendors that promise their solution will solve the problem of sales productivity and quota attainment.

Some of these vendors may even bill their wares as revenue productivity or sales readiness solutions. But in reality, these offerings only address a single component of true revenue productivity, such as training or content. On their own, they’re not enough to improve quota attainment and productivity. And investing in multiple solutions is expensive and complicated.

They often don’t play well together — and they require your reps to learn and use several technologies.

In order to truly increase quota attainment and sales productivity (and achieve sales readiness), sales leaders must be able to:

  • Define excellence
  • Build the knowledge their reps need to close deals
  • Equip sellers with content aligned to the sales process
  • Analyze what’s happening in the field
  • Optimize reps’ behaviors to improve outcomes

While you may have invested in products that address one of these, the most successful sales teams are those that use a solution that addresses them all — within a single revenue productivity platform.

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This post was originally published in January 2022, was updated in January 2023, and again in October 2023.

 

Mindtickle Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave(™): Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023

Earlier today, Forrester, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world, released its 2023 Wave for Sales Readiness, evaluating the 11 most significant sales readiness solutions providers. Mindtickle was named a leader in the Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023 Wave, with the top score in the Strategy category.

About the Forrester Wave(™): Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023

Forrester releases Wave reports on a variety of technology categories that are considered essential guides for organizations that are evaluating and purchasing technology. The Forrester Wave reports contain a graphical representation of Forrester’s call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments.

For the 2023 Sales Readiness Wave, Forrester evaluated the 11 most significant sales readiness solution providers. Sales readiness vendors, as defined by Forrester, deliver “advanced capabilities and integrations that empower enablement teams to correlate sales results data with learning program information to determine which efforts have a real business impact”.

“Mindtickle offers superior end-user experience, coaching support, and analytics.”
Forrester green logo
Forrester Research
Forrester Wave(™): Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023

 

Results of the Wave

Mindtickle was named a leader in the Sales Readiness Wave. According to the report, “Mindtickle has a robust feature set that exceeds expectations in standard readiness functionality and adds unique functionality that provides best-in-class visibility to measure the effectiveness of seller learning programs.”

Mindtickle’s road to a Sales Readiness Wave leader

As cited by the report, “Mindtickle has been in the sales readiness space since 2011 and has built a reputation for providing a strong sales readiness platform with customers’ continuous innovation. It has recently added sales content management capabilities and DSR functionality to augment its readiness platform, and has dedicated significant resources to achieving parity within the sales content market.”

Mindtickle has been delivering readiness solutions to leading organizations for over a decade and has invested heavily in adding key capabilities to the platform arming enablement and operations leaders with the ability to transform the performance of their go-to-market teams.

In recent years, Mindtickle has launched conversation intelligence and content management in the platform, completely revamped its coaching offerings, acquired the leading Digital Sales Rooms provider, and introduced a suite of generative AI capabilities.

As part of the Readiness Wave, Forrester also evaluates vendors’ innovation, strategy, and roadmap. Mindtickle achieved the highest scores in the Strategy category, noting, “The company will have to execute on its broad roadmap, but it has a long history of meeting development goals.”

If you want to learn more about how Mindtickle can elevate readiness and enablement at your organization, reach out for a tailored demo and discussion with our readiness experts today.

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See Why Forrester Named Mindtickle a Leader in its Readiness Wave. 

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Podcast: A Conversation with a CRO on Scaling a Successful Sales Team

 

Episode summary

When it comes to growing, scaling, and developing an excellent sales team, there’s truly a fine art to it that can’t be learned overnight. In a re-airing of this episode of Ready, Set, Sell, Hannah and Tony sit down with Stephanie Valenti, who was Chief Revenue Officer at SmartBug Media at the time of the original interview.

In her role, Stephanie led sales, marketing, and all client services and delivery departments at the company. She’s also spent more than 15 years learning the best strategies for fostering sustainable growth, leading a team, and helping B2B sales organizations scale up, so she has plenty of wisdom to share about leadership and the customer journey overall.

During the episode, Stephanie shares lots of insightful advice and plenty of actionable tips that you can benefit from, no matter your current role within your organization.

Keep checking back here to get more episodes of our podcast.

Listen and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts:

Get the full archive of previous Ready, Set, Sell episodes by clicking below.

The Ready, Set, Sell Podcast

Ready, Set, Sell focuses on sales performance, productivity, and continuous training to create entire teams of high performers. Check out our full episode archive below.

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The Magic of Bringing Your Technology Stack Under One Roof

Nearly every sales organization today is being forced to consolidate its sales tech stack to reduce burn rate, improve efficiency, and drive higher ROI.

Revenue leaders have long lamented that their bloated tech stacks are not leading to higher quota attainment, and are often creating organizational silos. While many of these tools were purchased with good intentions to help reps sell in a hybrid or mostly remote world, it’s not uncommon to hear revenue leaders realize that perhaps things have gone overboard.

It’s simple: too many tools create revenue chaos, and reps don’t know where to focus, or what to do each day.

With nearly 30% of sales teams using 10 or more tools in a given day, it’s obvious that the experience for reps to get onboarded and trained, work and win deals; find content, and personalize buyer experiences has grown quite complex.

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Number of tools sales reps use in a day

Now, though, there is a renewed urgency to consolidate. In this blog, we’re here to help you understand:

  • Benefits of consolidating your sales tech stack
  • What types of technologies to consolidate
  • Top use cases for consolidation
  • Questions to ask yourself before consolidating
  • DOs and DON’Ts of consolidating successfully

Benefits of consolidating your sales tech stack

There are many benefits of consolidating your sales tech stack.

Reps are trained faster

The biggest benefits are often felt by reps. Our customers who have consolidated with Mindtickle say their reps are trained 40-50% faster and improve their overall sales efficiency.

While reps in organizations with siloed tech stacks spend just 30% of their time actually selling, with consolidation, reps know what tools to use each day, and spend less time looking for content. They are also better able to work each stage of the sales cycle and match content and next steps to what that particular buyer needs.

Managers can coach more people at scale

Prior to consolidating its sales tech stack, one Mindtickle customer could count on a manager to oversee 4-5 people. After consolidating and improving the scalability of coaching and deal reviews, this same manager can successfully coach 8-9.

Reduced time and administration

Anyone who has ever participated in getting a sales technology off of the ground knows how time-consuming it is to:

  • Get to know the new tool

  • Implement it

  • Customize and support it

  • Drive usage and adoption

  • Continue justifying the investment and proving ROI

Working with too many sales tech vendors spreads teams thin, and makes it difficult for those organizations to partner together to truly help you drive a sales transformation. Rather than focusing on streamlining workflows, reducing clicks, and driving revenue goals, your time gets sucked up being courted by dozens of vendors who are often primarily thinking about how to keep their seat at the table in this precarious economy. That is not productive for you.

Reduced compliance and security risks

A goal of any good cybersecurity and compliance strategy is to reduce the sales tech stack. Why? Because every new vendor you add opens up risk. Not only do you need to constantly onboard and offboard employees, but there is another team of people with access to critical documents about your strategy and products. As much as possible, it is best practice to focus on fewer trust-worthy partners who follow best-in-class compliance protocols.

Create a culture of collaboration

When teams start to use too many different sales technologies, they inevitably adopt different sources of truth and workflows. This can lead to big discrepancies between how people think about business performance, people performance, and what to even do each day. In the world of revenue tech, RevOps might work in one platform and see issues with the forecast or pipeline that don’t properly get communicated to enablement.

Enablement might be looking at sales engagement and program statistics that show their efforts are paying off, but have little to no idea that a specific person, team, or sales stage is suffering so they can target and personalize their efforts.

Managers and reps might be completely misaligned on what deal risks even exist, how responsive prospects actually are, and the activity volumes that take place each day.

And CROs, who are responsible for reporting to the board, often get stuck finding problems, but not actually providing the team with strategic guidance on how to go beyond and fix those problems.

As much as possible, building a single data model for the sales org gets the whole revenue team aligned.

Positively impact cash flow and spend.

Here at Mindtickle, we know that the average 40-person selling team that consolidates its tech stack saves upward of $150,000 annually. For enterprise organizations, the potential financial benefits are much, much steeper.

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Annual savings with consolidated tech stack

While cost does not mean you have to sacrifice quality and results, it should not go unmentioned that organizations that do streamline their sales tech stack and eliminate redundant sales technologies reap big savings.

Tech consolidation is key to revenue productivity

Now that we know why organizations are consolidating their sales tech stacks, and why so many are urgently doing it now, what use cases exist? What types of technologies are they even consolidating?

There are many, but the biggest trend in consolidation right now is in connecting sales enablement and sales operations solutions with the goal of helping reps work and win more deals consistently and at scale. Another good way of putting this is that revenue orgs today are focused on helping reps know what to say, show, and do to win every sales stage.

At Mindtickle and other organizations, these new consolidated platforms are often referred to as revenue productivity platforms. The big idea behind revenue productivity platforms is that they not only help you identify people, deals, and teams that need your attention but actually drive change management at scale.

In a nutshell, revenue productivity platforms help you uncover insights on what deals, teams, and people need your attention but also go beyond to fix them with built-in enablement.

Here are some of the top use cases to consider when consolidating.

  • Reps can find top sales content easily

    With a unified user experience, it’s much easier for reps to find the content that best wins deals without much thinking. The ease of accessing sales content empowers reps with the knowledge and resources they need to effectively engage prospects, build relationships, and ultimately close deals.

  • Enablement can produce ROI-driven content and training programs.

    By connecting your content and sales training programs to revenue operations Platforms that do things like help you uncover issues with your forecast, pipeline, and quota attainment, organizations are also able to create more relevant, ROI-driven content and training programs.

  • Programs and content are rooted in data and real field evidence.

    At the same time, by empowering revenue teams to work in a platform where they can not only launch programs but deep-dive specific deals and calls, they are able to better root their programs in real field evidence.

Dead are the days when enablement teams would launch a program and cross their fingers that reps actually adopted it in the field. With a consolidated tech stack, the whole team works as one. It’s much easier to hold reps accountable for using the messaging and doing the activities you’ve prescribed as part of your new sales process or sales methodology. In fact, most organizations that consolidate their tech stacks are able to significantly scale deals and call reviews.

With a unified tech stack, not only can you decode what top reps do differently to win more, but you can also drive scalability and repeatability by rolling out things like templates and sales plays.

One of the top use cases is to encourage reps to build Digital Sales Rooms for customers and work deals diligently using Mutual Action Plans.

Better performance benchmarking and analysis of key sales outcomes

With a consolidated sales tech stack, organizations can start to get really clear about what their Ideal Rep Profiles and competencies look like. This means that instead of relying on manually input CRM data to predict who will hit quota or not, organizations can start to define the skills, activities, and in-field behaviors that make reps successful or not.

Once those Ideal Rep profiles and competencies are defined, organizations can better benchmark who is ready or not to hit quota. At Mindtickle, we call this the Sales Readiness Index. Dozens of our customers use it to know which teams and people need their attention.

This level of benchmarking is only possible when you unify your sales tech stack and begin to create a single data model around all of your buyer and seller interactions, as well as your sales competencies.

A culture of practice, reinforcement, and coaching

Sales coaching is essential, and it’s proven to drive bottom-line results. In fact, companies that provide quality coaching can reach 7% greater annual revenue growth. But why do so many fail to go beyond the one-way training provided through a typical Learning Management System?

A siloed sales tech stack is often the culprit.

By unifying your sales tech stack, you can enlist sales managers to participate a whole lot more. Finally, you can deliver insights like these to sales managers:

  • Deal health score
  • Deal risk insights
  • Visibility into calls, emails, and meetings
  • Visibility into buyer engagement
  • Adoption of sales processes and methodologies, such as MEDDPIC

Once sales managers have access to this data in one place, they can prescribe training programs and content reps should check out.

At the same time, features like AI video role-plays and reinforcements help reps overcome the forgetting curve by helping them practice and retain knowledge.

Questions to ask yourself before consolidating

Now that you know why businesses are consolidating redundant sales technologies, and the use cases they are pursuing, here are some questions to ask yourself.

  • When it comes to my current tech stack, what needs and pain points does my team have?
  • Where are we paying for redundant features?
    What tools are driving the most/least usage for us?
  • What tools are creating silos and misalignment between different departments?
  • Which of our vendor relationships are the most efficient and successful? Which ones are lacking, or taking up too much of our time?
  • Are our sales tech costs where they need to be?
  • Do the sales technologies we use integrate nicely?

Ready to see the magic of consolidating your revenue tech stack into a single platform?

Now that the benefits of consolidating your tech stack are clear and you’ve asked yourself if i makes sense for your organization, you might be ready to start evaluating a single-platform solution. If that’s the case, here are some dos and dont’s that will serve as a valuable guide when choosing a technology partner:

Dos

  • Do assess your current sales tech stack

    Take inventory of your existing sales tools and evaluate their effectiveness, usage, and integration capabilities.

  • Do define your objectives

    Clearly outline your goals and desired outcomes for consolidating your sales tech stack. Identify the specific functionalities and features you need to support your sales process.

  • Do prioritize integration capabilities

    Look for tools that seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM, marketing automation, or customer support software. Smooth data flow and automation are crucial for a consolidated tech stack.

  • Do involve your sales team

    Seek input from your sales team throughout the consolidation process. Consider their needs, pain points, and preferences to ensure the new stack aligns with their workflows and enhances their productivity.

  • Do choose scalable solutions

    Select tools that can accommodate your business's growth and evolving needs. Scalability is essential to avoid the need for frequent changes and migrations in the future.

  • Do consider user-friendliness

    Opt for intuitive tools that require minimal training and onboarding. User adoption plays a significant role in the success of your consolidated tech stack.

Don’ts:

  • Don't overlook data security

    Prioritize the security of your sales data when selecting tools. Verify that the vendors have robust security measures in place, including data encryption, access controls, and compliance with relevant regulations like GDPR.

  • Don't forget about training and support

    Plan for proper training and ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition and user adoption. Neglecting training can hamper your team's ability to effectively utilize the consolidated tech stack.

  • Don't neglect cost considerations

    While consolidating your tech stack can bring efficiency and cost savings, carefully evaluate the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, implementation costs, and any potential hidden expenses.

  • Don't overlook future needs

    Anticipate your future requirements and select tools that can adapt and grow with your business. Avoid short-term solutions that may become obsolete or inadequate as your sales operations expand.

Ready to learn more about how to consolidate your sales tech stack? Get in touch with our team so we can talk through your challenges and understand how a consolidated tech stack will help your sellers be more productive. 


This post was originally published in January 2022 and was updated in May 2023. 

How the Mindtickle Sales Readiness Team Makes Sure Reps Perform in the Classroom and in the Field

If your reps pass a quiz or even a certification, are they fully enabled? While it might be a tongue-in-cheek question, the reality is that most enablement organizations can only measure adoption and test scores to predict field performance.

But knowledge does not necessarily translate into behavior.

I know what a good golf swing looks like, yet I still struggle to lower my golf score. Just like my golf game, many reps “know” what good selling looks like, but that doesn’t mean they’re applying that knowledge in the field when it counts.

For enablement to be proven effective, there has to be a way to ensure sellers don’t just internalize what they learn but also demonstrate it in their buyer interactions. And for the sales readiness team here at Mindtickle, a key way to accomplish that goal is to collaborate with our frontline managers to check, score, and remediate skills in the field.

Mindtickle IRP generator

How to translate sales training knowledge into real-world selling

One of the reasons why we call Mindtickle a sales readiness platform (and why I’m the VP of Readiness and not sales enablement) is that we feel that making reps successful doesn’t stop when they pass an assessment or get certified.  Our team works hand-in-hand with our frontline sales leaders to ensure what sellers learn translates into real-world performance, and we use Mindtickle’s Readiness Index to score individualized seller behaviors against an ideal rep profile, or IRP. Here’s how we do it:

  • All new sellers go through an onboarding process that incorporates on-demand and live instruction, along with quizzes and assessments to confirm knowledge. Unfortunately, this is where enablement stops for some companies, but we take our process several steps further.
  • After that, they’re assigned role-play exercises in which they have to demonstrate the skills necessary to do their jobs effectively in the field. An AI-powered evaluation process enables sellers to practice pitches, presentation skills, objection-handling, and more before submitting them for grading by approved evaluators. At this point, we feel confident sellers have demonstrated both the knowledge and skills to be out in the field selling. But if we stopped here, we still wouldn’t know if reps are practicing the right behaviors in their day-to-day jobs.

How the Mindtickle sales readiness team engages frontline managers

This is where that frontline manager collaboration becomes especially important. One reason why sales enablers are left in the dark about sales behaviors is that there’s no way to check them. Fortunately, the Mindtickle platform gives our team two important tools to continue tracking sales behaviors long after sellers complete their training:

  • The first is Call AI, Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence solution that lets us listen in on real-world conversations between sellers and buyers. Both frontline managers and the readiness team can review calls quickly using features in Call AI such as call scores, key moments, talk and listen time, questions asked, and more. We share call snippets with each other, provide comments and suggestions, and create libraries of good (or bad) examples to share with other teams. By working together, we identify opportunities for remediation and act on them.

screenshot of Mindtickle Call AI

  • Second, we provide frontline managers with coaching forms that are integrated with Call AI or available for ad hoc use. These forms align with the key competencies we track as part of our Readiness Index. Each seller has a score that comprises applicable learning modules and coaching forms. Scores reflect how that person performs against the IRP, and can also be correlated against key metrics in the CRM like quota attainment, time to productivity, and more. Using coaching forms is really valuable to our company in two ways:
    • First, managers can perform evaluations against recorded conversations or live interactions using a coaching form that focuses on key competencies, so there’s an institutionalized process that gives our managers guidance on the key areas to evaluate.
    • Second, they can provide remediation either on a one-to-one basis or through recommended content that is curated for each of the more important competencies.

By performing in-field coaching, enablement becomes a continuous process that helps our sellers be more productive as soon as possible rather than waiting for lagging indicators like quota performance to trigger remediation after the horse has left the barn. And our efforts as a readiness team can be gauged against real-world outcomes rather than nebulous measurements like adoption levels or test scores.

I like the Mindtickle approach to readiness in many ways, but perhaps the most important is that our partnership with the frontline managers makes it possible to have a meaningful impact on sales performance. Although I spent many years as a B2B sales professional, the fact is that sellers are much more likely to follow the guidance of their managers than some readiness guy who claims to know what makes them successful. I’m not spiteful about that because I’d feel exactly the same way. So our approach gives us the best of both worlds: enablement that’s aligned with business goals, and a partnership with our frontline managers that fosters an institutionalized coaching culture.

3 Key Takeaways from the 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow

The 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow made its third US stop earlier this week. That can only mean one thing: the US stops for the 2022 roadshow are officially a wrap.

Throughout the month of June, we made stops in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At each stop revenue leaders gathered to network, discuss challenges, and swap best practices for creating an entire team of quota-crushing reps (yes, it’s very much possible). After more than two years of digital events, it was great to be in the same room with our customers again. We enjoyed meeting some new folks along the way, too.

Of course, no two stops of the roadshow were the same. Each event brought a different mix of attendees and speakers — which led to some really unique, interesting conversations. However, there were certain themes that were prominent at all three stops.

If you weren’t able to join us for the North American stops on 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow, here are our three takeaways.

#1 The best sales organizations are approaching readiness differently

Oftentimes, sales leaders accept the 80/20 principle, which is the notion that the top 20% of sellers will continue to drive 80% of sales. These leaders believe sales is an art, and a seller either has what it takes — or they don’t.

The most successful sales orgs don’t buy into this myth. They know that with the right sales readiness approach, it’s very much possible to get all sellers ready to close deals.

But what exactly are these winning orgs doing differently to get their sellers ready?

During the roadshow, we took a deep dive into what’s working (and what isn’t) for sales organizations by sharing key insights from our 2022 State of Sales Readiness report. We also heard how real-life organizations are applying winning strategies to drive revenue growth.

Attendees learned that the best sales orgs are:

  • Reducing onboarding and ramp time with templates and automation
  • Creating and iterating on high-value content that sellers know how to use
  • Sharing the mic on sales calls
  • Delivering coaching that improves skills needed for long-term success
  • Defining excellence for all customer-facing employees – not just sales

Check out the 2022 State of Sales Readiness report to dig deeper into these and more insights.

Mindtickle-2022-State-of-Sales-Readiness

#2 An IRP is the foundation of any winning sales readiness program

Any deal includes two key components: the buyer and the seller. If either of those components isn’t quite right, the deal’s not going to go through.

The vast majority of organizations have developed ideal customer profiles (ICPs), which outline the key characteristics that make a buyer the right fit for an organization’s solutions. But far fewer take the time to develop a corresponding ideal rep profile (IRP), which spells out the knowledge, skills, and behaviors a rep needs to be successful.

But how can an organization strive for great when they haven’t defined what great looks like?

The best sales orgs understand that the IRP must be the cornerstone of any sales readiness program. Sales leaders can then measure reps against this gold standard and deliver training and coaching to close gaps and create an entire team of sellers that are always ready to close deals.

At each stop of the roadshow, there were plenty of discussions about the importance of creating an IRP. During a collaborative workshop, attendees even had the opportunity to create their own – and hear how Mindtickle customers are using theirs to benchmark, track progress, and drive bottom-line sales results.

Mindtickle ideal rep profile generator

#3 Sales coaching can have a huge impact — but only when it’s done right

By now, the impact of sales coaching is quite clear. Research tells us that 8 out of 10 teams with effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of their sales quotas. But claiming to have a coaching practice in place isn’t enough.

In many organizations, coaching is seen as just another box to check. What’s more, sales managers often take an ad hoc approach to coaching that’s focused on deal reviews. Per CSO Insights, nearly 63% of sales orgs take a random or informal approach to coaching.

Deal coaching is important. But on its own, it’s not enough to improve long-term behaviors and move the needle. Instead, the best sales orgs incorporate many types of coaching that lead to revenue generation and seller retention.

Of course, there are barriers that stand in the way of more effective coaching, one of which is time. While one-size-fits-all coaching isn’t effective, it takes a lot of time to deliver personalized coaching to an entire team of reps.

During the roadshow, we explored how sales orgs can establish processes and leverage the right technology to make coaching actionable, personalized, and integrated into the greater readiness strategy.

There’s plenty in store for Mindtickle customers

Sales isn’t merely an art. Rather, it’s a science. And with the right readiness approach, any organization can create an entire team of top sellers.

 

Here at Mindtickle, we’re focused on continuously innovating our platform to enable our customers to make readiness a reality. During the roadshow, we shared our vision for how modern revenue organizations can leverage data and science to streamline processes and scale results. We also gave attendees a sneak peek of what’s in store for Mindtickle, including upcoming capabilities, partnerships, and integrations. And we’re not done yet. We’re coming to London this fall so stay tuned for more details about registration. In the meantime, check out the Mindtickle blog to hear from more experts and customers on sales readiness trends, tips, and predictions.

Why Revenue Intelligence is Essential to Sales Readiness

Today’s sales leaders have two priorities:

  • Hit revenue goals consistently and hold themselves to a fact-based forecast
  • Build a revenue engine

And these tasks aren’t easy.

Many revenue organizations use disjointed platforms and spend significant time and money hiring and onboarding new reps. Reps can barely keep up. The industry average ramp time is six to nine months, according to CSO Insights. Even after they are considered officially onboarded, the majority of reps still miss their quotas.

So how do you get an entire team of people who support these priorities to create the “perfect storm” that will set reps up for success?

The first of its kind: sales readiness and revenue intelligence in one platform

We recently announced our partnership with BoostUp, an integration between our two platforms that utilizes insights on deal and account health to suggest relevant content and enablement programs. With revenue intelligence and sales readiness combined into one platform, teams go beyond just ongoing deal intelligence and can actually fix long-term skills gaps in reps through built-in onboarding, content, and ongoing enablement programs.

BoostUp and Mindtickle partnership

The joint solution, available in Mindtickle, provides revenue teams with complete visibility into seller readiness levels and deal performance. It also provides all of the workflows front-line managers and enablement teams require to effectively train and coach sellers.

screenshot of account intelligence in BoostUp

Within a single platform, revenue leaders are able to:

  • Make sense of all buyer interactions including meetings and call recordings and sentiment analysis coming from Mindtickle Call AI, combined with email analysis, buyer engagement, deal, and account health scores from BoostUp
  • Get a clear picture of pipeline health as well as overall sales readiness
  • Help reps know what deals and accounts need their attention while giving them the content and training they need to be successful in those deals and accounts
  • Visualize the entire history of a deal or account so that leaders can see all of the most important milestones such as competitor mentions, pricing conversations, and next steps
  • Empower frontline managers and enablement teams with insights that help them better enable and coach reps based on what’s happening in the field
  • See critical milestones taking place, such as competitor mentions, pricing mentions, deal health, and account engagement scores

At the same time, the unified platform gives visibility to reps, managers, revenue operations, and enablement leaders on activities that impact the bottom line:

table showing benefits of revenue intelligence

  • Reps see which deals and accounts need their attention and can immediately access personalized content and training that helps them win
  • Managers are empowered to coach better and get complete visibility into every deal and account
  • RevOps personnel get a clear picture of pipeline health and field readiness and benefit from improved forecast accuracy
  • Enablement leaders can run built-in, personalized content and training programs while helping frontline leaders elevate their coaching approach

screenshot of NPS score in BoostUp

So how, you ask, is this different from a standalone conversation or revenue intelligence solution? What does revenue intelligence and readiness in one platform mean for you?

Let’s walk you through the top revenue productivity gains you get from this combination.

Insights into rep performance

With revenue intelligence and sales readiness together, winning sales teams take insight a step further with Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Index. Leaders can see proficiencies and gaps by looking at how reps perform in the real world and adapt training to how they learn and practice.

Sales content that builds skills and closes deals

Sales content has so far not been connected to other systems of learning and operations. With the Mindtickle platform, sellers can capitalize on training content, internal talk tracks, battlecards, role-play videos, and recorded snippets from actual customer conversations in one single system.

Leveraging Mindtickle for an integrated content experience ensures that content can be deployed effectively where a deal can be saved or progressed as well as when a rep needs to learn a critical skill.

BoostUp and Mindtickle are bringing this fantastic joint solution to a city near you. Please check out the dates of our Road to Readiness 2022 Roadshow and come see the solution at work.

A Blueprint for Digital-First Selling with Jeff Davis

Our seventh episode  of Ready, Set, Sell recently aired featuring Jeff Davis, associate director of business and brand strategy at AbbVie and the founder and principal of Aligned Growth Strategies. In case you weren’t able to tune in, we’ve got a recap of the podcast below, covering major themes such as:

  • The importance of strategically aligning sales and marketing
  • Establishing a 360-degree view of the buyer
  • Using digital tools to seamlessly engage your customer
  • Retaining employee and customer attention
  • The eight steps to digital-first selling
  • Establishing a feedback loop from sales to marketing
  • Metrics that matter more than closing deals
  • NASA engineering and Dr. Suess

Who is Jeff Davis?

Tony: When it comes to finding success in any industry, pursuit, or discipline, perspective is everything.

Hannah: And, as today’s guest reminds us, having the capacity to understand multiple perspectives at once can be an invaluable skill in today’s market.

Tony: This is especially true for sales and marketing teams. In any organization, these two teams need to work together synergistically to produce the best results. But we all know that understanding the business through both a sales and marketing lens can be a challenge.

Hannah: That’s why I’m so excited about our guest today, who is Jeff Davis, the associate director of business and brand strategy at AbbVie and the founder and principal of Aligned Growth Strategies. Jeff has spent most of his career helping B2B leaders align their sales and marketing teams to optimize outcomes overall.

Tony: And he’s here with us today to share his top tricks of the trade when it comes to sales and marketing alignment, digital-first selling, and some of the key ingredients of accelerating revenue growth. You’re sure to walk away from this episode feeling more motivated than ever, inspired and knowledgeable more than ever before. Enjoy the episode.

Hannah: Hey, Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff: Hey, how are you? Thank you for having me.

Hannah: You need to bless the listeners with your incredible career journey and give everybody a bit of insight into how you went from being a mechanical engineer at NASA to transitioning into a technical healthcare sales role. I need to hear this.

Jeff: As you said, Hannah, I started my educational career at Purdue as a mechanical engineer. I always loved math and science. My mom actually was a math professor, so I couldn’t really be bad at math because that would look really bad. Right before I graduated, actually, I was interning at NASA and asked people what I should do with the rest of my life. Surprisingly, the two answers I got from the consultants we were working with was either sales or consulting, to which I said at the time absolutely not, because I just spent five years of my life getting this degree. I’m going to go be an engineer. But after undergrad, I actually took a leap of faith. I said, well, maybe they’re right. Right. You know, what’s the worst-case scenario? I can always go back to engineering. And so eventually ended up in healthcare sales. I’d always had an interest in healthcare and biotech and that sort of thing. And it actually stuck. Like, I really enjoyed it. I did well. I started my career at Pfizer as a rep here in Chicago. And I believe that a lot of the engineering process that I learned in school actually helped me be a successful salesperson. So, it all kind of came together.

Tony: Well, it’s funny, when I looked into your background, I got a little intimidated right away because I think you’re the first NASA engineer I’ve ever spoken to in person. I appreciate you joining here, of course. When you think about the world of B2B sales, what interests you the most and, in particular, about increasing revenue growth?

Jeff: It really does go back to the beginning of my journey. What I found as a rep is that there were many times that I felt there was a disconnect between us as boots on the ground and what marketing was doing. Back then — and industries have changed, and companies have gotten better at this— but it was very much an ivory tower. Like we said, strategy. If it doesn’t work, doesn’t happen. It’s the salespeople’s fault. And we’ll get to that in a second. But we would be frustrated because we’d be asking for things, and saying we really need to have these conversations. And, obviously, if you’re a seasoned salesperson, you can try to figure it out or you just make it on your own or whatnot but that’s not sustainable. At that time, that’s what motivated me actually to go back to business school because I didn’t have the language or the visibility to articulate what I was feeling. I knew something was off, I knew there was a disconnect. But at that vantage point, I’m only boots on the ground. I don’t see all the things that are happening, you know, behind the scenes. And so once I went back to business school, I transformed myself into a marketer, as I say, and then I joined the brand team as a brand lead.

And, you know, and I talk about this on my LinkedIn, I’m a marketer with the soul of the salesperson, right. Like I will always be at my core a salesperson. No matter where I go and what I do, I’ve been a marketer for years. But I got in selfishly to advocate for salespeople. I was going to go to the corporate office and tell them what reps needed and all that sort of thing. And when I got there and started working with super-smart people, I realized they just didn’t have the vantage point of being a seller. It wasn’t that they had like this goal to make our lives difficult or they didn’t care. They just didn’t have that last little step of like actually talking to a customer.

What I found was it wasn’t that sales and marketing hated each other. I believe they fundamentally don’t understand each other and that’s what causes conflict.

Hannah: Not everybody’s going to know who AbbVie are so I’d love for you to share a bit about your role at AbbVie and what drew you to that company in particular.

Jeff: At AbbVie, we’ve taken a really proactive approach to the fact that the industry as a whole has had to rethink what being patient-centric really is. Pharma tends to be a very conservative industry for many reasons. We’re making really significantly large investments in disease areas and therapeutic areas. But I think what we’re doing is rethinking what it means to be patient-centric — or customer-centric. Right. We have multiple customers. Their patients are the payers that we interact with.

So we’re looking at how do we leverage this kind of digital-first landscape in order to create increased intimacy with our customers and patients and really understand what they need and be able to engage them in a way that looks very different than we did a decade to three ago, because the world is different.

And if you really want to help people and you really want to get into their lives and help them understand what is out there that could potentially help save their life or make their life better. You’ve got to do it differently.

Hannah: I think it just goes much deeper when you start thinking about customer-centricity in general, something that we talk about a lot in the B2B space. So when you talk about patients and healthcare, it’s just much deeper. So thinking about your passion, your experience, and your love for counseling sales and marketing teams and creating alignment. Just, just go a little bit deeper. On why it’s so crucial for accelerating revenue growth.

Jeff: A lot of people will hang their hat on COVID and how that has changed things. And I absolutely believe that is true. But I think more than anything, it’s really brought to light some processes and things that were broken. It just made it worse. These themes, these issues that we’ve had have been brewing for quite some time, but a lot of us have relied on volume to mask the underlying infrastructure issues. Really today, because everything is so digital and because we’ve really been pushed into the future, it’s imperative that we change the way we sell and market. And a lot of companies are not realizing that the buyer is demanding a different experience.

And for some reason, we don’t look at our own personal lives, and interactions with B2C and see the parallel to B2B. We are humans buying from other humans. And while there are, there are unique things that are very B2C, right? I get that. But fundamentally, we as B2B should be looking at our B2C cousins and being like, how do we mimic that in our space?

Because people are getting more comfortable with buying larger purchases online. People do want more virtual human interactions. They don’t want traditional sales reps coming by as much, right? We have to take this hybrid approach. All of that stuff is happening. And I think a lot of revenue leaders and senior leaders that have been doing this for a really long time have been quite committed to saying yes, we fundamentally need to change the way that we go to market. That’s what’s causing some of this friction. And a lot of people seeing stagnant growth or declining growth are doing so because the way in which they’re engaging with the marketplace is out of date.

Tony: There are so many different things that you do, Jeff, from you know, you were a company founder, you’re a speaker, you’ve got a podcast, but you’re also an author. So in speaking about the book, you know, what is togetherness really mean to you and how can sales leaders use that to apply to their everyday roles?

Jeff: When I was in the early stages of my work, when I was just blogging, it hit me one day. And this is a\the true marketer in me, right? I was wondering about the ethos of what I’m trying to communicate. Togetherness can mean and does mean a lot of different things, but it is really beyond having skin in the game. It is a kind of omni joined presence where you always feel like you’re enmeshed with your counterpart. You can anticipate their needs. You have a strong sense of empathy because you know what their challenges are.

Tony: If you think about it, selling is a social event. I mean, people buy from people. And if you don’t take that concept to heart, you’re not really going to get to the next level of where you want to be in a successful organization.

Jeff: You are hundred percent correct. And we’re at a juncture where, as a revenue leader, whether it be sales and marketing, if you don’t fundamentally understand how much you need your counterpart, you are not going to be successful. Everybody is focused on the last 10, 20 percent of whatever it is of the buyer journey. Right. Some people say it’s 57, 75, 78, whatever, whatever the number is, we’ll say 57 to 75. If we’re all focused on that last 10, 15, 20 percent, we are just bombarding targets with the same stuff. And I said, There’s this open green pasture over here. Or they’re actually researching, they’re forming their ideas, they’re clarifying what their challenges are. And no one’s there. But you know who stereotypically is already there? Marketing. As a sales leader, your job is to get your people into the right conversations with the right type of accounts. That’s fundamentally your remit.

If you don’t understand what marketing is putting out into the marketplace and you don’t understand the messages and the story they’re telling, you are not doing your job as a sales leader.

Hannah: One thing you mentioned was that customers are demanding a different experience. And if I think about some of the conversations I have, I don’t even think they all know what that looks like. It just needs to be different. It needs to be more accommodating to their needs. Now, based on the fact that we are more virtual now, how would you start to define in your own words what digital-first setting is and why it’s important today?

Jeff: I look at it as using all of our digital tools, resources, etc. content to identify, target and really seamlessly engage today’s buyer. Right? To your point, we’re very much more enmeshed in digital. We’re always online. So we’re just using all these collective tools together to target, to identify, and then to engage with our buyers. Because the front end of this buying experience has become more virtual, more digital. People are starting their buyer journey with search. An estimated — I think — 80 plus percent or 90 percent of B2B buyers are starting their journey with digital search. Ninety percent is a lot. So think about that. If 90 percent of the people are starting there and this is just B2B. Ninety percent of people start on a journey digitally. If you’re not there, you’re not even making the shortlists companies are considering.

Finding one’s niche

Tony: So, Hannah, I talk to a lot of different salespeople. They’re always trying to find out what is the niche or what’s the market that I should be selling into or how should I do these sorts of things? So how did you find the niche in what you’re doing?

Hannah: That’s a really good question, actually. I think about this a lot because at the start of my career, I was, and you might have experienced this as well. There was a lot of structure. Like you had like one career path as a salesperson. It’s like you do some inbound stuff and you’re in the trenches and then maybe you have a little target and then you’re just on the road. That’s it. That’s what you do. And then maybe you’re a leader. And I think a lot of that’s changed. But I am I was following this path that was dictated by the industry for probably half of my career. I started to get a bit chill. I don’t know, something’s missing here. I don’t know what I should be doing, but I don’t know if I like this.

I started to transition more into mentoring and onboarding people and coaching and team leadership and leading a few teams. I like this, that this is what I enjoy. I kind of carved out that helping and enabling other people to be incredible sales individuals. This is really where my niche is but it took me doing everything. And I’m a massive doer. I’m like, there’s an idea. Someone says, try this. I just do it. I just do it and figure it out. So yeah, I had to do a lot of stuff and fail at some things to realize that actually, this is my sweet spot.

Tony: You know, it’s brilliant. When I graduated from college, I knew right away that I wanted to host a Ready, Set, Sell podcast someday. You know, this is well before podcasts were even a thing, but I fell into sales. It wasn’t anything that I thought was going to be my future career path. I started doing it to get beer money at the time. But I found out that I was empathetic, and I was good at it, and I was listening to what people wanted. I tried a couple of things that really didn’t work. And eventually, I found a niche that worked well for me. I was able to apply the things that I did well with my work ethic tied directly to it, and that just put me onto the path to where I am now — sitting here in a room with you. I couldn’t think of a better spot for me to be in my career right now.

Hannah: Tony, finding alignment between sales and marketing is an important step to take on the road to success. As Jeff reminds us, it’s really that simple.

Tony: Yeah, it is. And usually, a company’s senior leadership team, including the CEO, needs to be on board when it comes to major culture shifts and those that lag behind will ultimately lose out on opportunities for success.

Hannah: I think Jeff’s concept of togetherness really captures the need for greater empathy across the board and more effective communication among teams.

Tony: Absolutely. I think that’s key because, without a deep understanding of the organization’s needs, you won’t get far in the world of sales or marketing. Togetherness is about anticipating each other’s needs and recognizing the value of other roles within the organization… so we can really begin to view the company as a cohesive whole instead of as a fragmented jigsaw puzzle.

Hannah: And this has only become more important in recent years as the pandemic accelerated many of the shifts that were already in motion. Let’s hear what Jeff has to say about the shift to digital-first selling and how sales execs can make the most of the changes.

Eight steps to digital-first selling

Tony: Companies are still struggling to figure out their selling identity. You know, as people are starting to convert to this digital-first selling, what tips or strategies would you recommend people to think about as they’re really trying to develop this identity?

Jeff: I did an article for Selling Power where I go through the eight steps of digital-first selling. Can I bore your audience with these eight steps?

Tony: They will not get bored. I can guarantee.

Jeff: The first one is understanding the buyer-first mindset. Fundamentally as a leadership team, you’ve got to accept that the way that we buy is different. Like did a search first, digital-first, etc. The second one, which a lot of people overlook, is establishing a 360-degree view of the buyer. This means connecting all of your data sources. So that’s web, that’s email, that’s social, that’s your CRM. One of the reasons that we make very suboptimal decisions is because we have suboptimal data and we have a suboptimal view of the customer.

So if I’m a sales leader and I don’t really interact with marketing, I may not have visibility to all the touchpoints that we’ve had with that customer prior to my seller getting in front of them. All I have is what my seller has done, which is not the complete picture. We’ve got to connect all those resources. And whether you do it internally or you hire somebody out to do that, it’s got to be connected. Because today it is table stakes to have a full view of our customer interactions.

After we do that, then we want to develop a cross-functional ideal customer profile (ICP) because I’ve also seen companies have different ICP between marketing and sales. I’m like, That’s interesting. That’s not the same person. How is that working? So I need an aligned ICP across the organization and I don’t believe in creating that out of just how we feel. I want to look at your CRM. I want to look at closed deals. And I want to see proof that that is true because there are people that the ICP that we want to be true and there’s ICP that is true.

And then I also want to dig a level deeper and look at does that ICP provide us the most ROI? After we have our clarity in our ICP, then we need to develop a buyer’s journey. This is for marketers more so than salespeople. I don’t mean developing a buyer’s journey in a vacuum where we never actually talk to customers.

I mean, actually being really thoughtful and using all inputs like input from sales — like that last deal you closed, walk us through how that went. Where do you think that we can do things differently? And then actually talking to customers and saying like, tell us about your internal buying process.

You may get some people that love you and want to tell you everything. Others may not. But I want to talk to people that we love, that are amazing customers, maybe some mid-tier people, and maybe even those that we’ve lost so that we can start to understand how our buyer buys so we can adapt our sales and marketing to their process and not try to push them through what we want them to go through.

After that, I use what I call a buyer journey matrix where I actually put all of the info I collect for clients. I put all of the stages of the buyer journey. And then I want to litany what we have today that we can deliver on that so they get to the next level or the next stage. And that usually helps me find where there are gaps in your engagement with buyers. And they usually are clear. There’s usually a step. They’re like, “Oh, we really thought we had content or whatever around this, but we don’t.” Then we get to the tools and the tech.

So a lot of us are leading with tools and tech because there’s a nice shiny object in the room. And I say pause. Tech enables us to sell in market better. It is not sales and marketing. So after we get done with tech, then we create a digital sales playbook or a playbook for sales reps.

This is important because, back in my day, there was a very linear process. I did this and then I did this and then I did this and then hopefully close. That is not the case anymore because buyers are coming in from all over the place and sales reps today, in order to be successful, need to understand not the individual tools but how to orchestrate them together.

And then, last but not least, establishing a feedback loop from sales to marketing. Typically, I have seen marketing as a great feedback loop for sales. This is what’s working; this is what you’re doing right; this is what you’re doing wrong. But there’s usually not as robust a mechanism to get feedback from sales. And I don’t mean sales leaders, I mean actually front-line salespeople of what they need and then be able to take that in aggregate to say like, okay, here are the themes where we’re seeing from our sales reps as well as competitive intelligence. Because a lot of times I’ve had instances where you have a conversation with a customer and they tell you something like, “Oh, this starting to shift.” You get that back to marketing, we iterate, and then we can pivot in the marketplace.

So those are the kind of the eight steps that I’ve thought through and identified and helped my folks with. I think it’s a really, really clean framework because there’s a lot to do. But what I really focused on making sure that we understand who we are targeting first, we kind of really build that, that their strategy, we understand how they buy. And then you start to put on the tech and the and all the other stuff in order to able to enable that. So hopefully that was helpful.

Hannah: Thinking about these things and this transition that a lot of companies are trying to make, what are your top suggestions for teams who may be encountering some bumps along the road as they try to make this conversion?

Jeff: I always start with the conversation between sales and marketing. Where can we work together better? How can we partner with each other? What do you do? What are your challenges? I think starting there and understanding what your counterpart does and how what their work affects you is a great way to start. It increases empathy and it also helps you identify ways that you can work together better. And it may not, in the beginning, be a hundred percent right. It may be to your point, maybe it’s just reconciling your ICPs to make sure that you’re at least targeting the right people that my sales rep needs to get in front of. It could be establishing a feedback loop between sales marketing so that they know how they can pivot. It could be getting feedback from sales on the content. Is this content resonating? There are many marketing teams that create and develop content in a silo, like they just don’t get any real feedback. So I think that’s where you start.

I think you also start by trying to think about your digital presence as an organization beyond your brand.com. Right. The majority of the people are not coming to your brand.com as their first step. This is more for marketing and sales, but I think sales should be involved. Looking at your SEO strategy. Looking at your perception in the marketplace and third-party sites.

So, obviously, for SaaS software, G2 is a great place to start, right. Like a lot of people will start with search, they may go to G2 to learn about like the class of products that you sit in and then they’ll learn more about you. But if again, if you’re not in that kind of initial consideration, it’s going to be hard for you to make the shortlist.

I think those are some things you can start with. You know, you don’t have to go fundamental like we’re going by all this new tech and then we’re going to just do digital disruption. That would be nice, right. But for companies that are just starting this journey, it’s not realistic. So it’s about starting to work together better, really thinking through like, what is your digital, what is your digital footprint? And starting to elevate those eventually starting to connect all those things and really map those to the buyer’s journey. I think those are ways to start this process.

Hannah: Like looking at the big picture, what motivates you day to day? What’s the overarching goal that sort of drives you and get you out of bed on those rainy, cloudy days that I see in England every day?

Jeff: Yeah, well, in right in Chicago, it’s about the same right now. At the end of day, it’s frustration and I know it probably doesn’t sound like the answer that most people give, but I still remember as a sales rep in the car, on the road, being frustrated. And it still motivates me today. I think what has evolved is that I now feel like I have a commitment and a duty to help other sales and marketing leaders do it differently and do it better.

I fundamentally believe, and it’s happening more and more now, but back in the day, making a transition from sales into marketing was like parting the seas. They’d be like, you’re a sales rep and you want to be in marketing, well, that doesn’t work. But now that I’ve made that transition and I’ve seen the inside of both, it just really goes back to a marriage concept. If you understood the power of when you guys get each other and you work together, you can’t create these kinds of results on your own. Like you just can’t work in a vacuum or a silo and outdo a company even if they’re smaller. That really is lockstep. I would say frustration motivates me.

Tony: Well, it’s funny, frustration is certainly an issue that I think a lot of salespeople experience. I think another one is distraction, especially over the last couple of years. You know, when people are working from home it’s extremely easy to get distracted. What would you say were some tips that you would give to retain customer interest? I missed all the distractions that are out there right now. There are so many different things out there. So how do you retain employee or customer attention at this point?

Jeff: Consistency always wins. I have seen over the years so many people start campaigns and then, you know, you don’t hear from the can. You can put out okay content. But if you put out that content ecosystem basis and customers start to see you as a good source of information and you’re educating them on a consistent basis and they know they can trust it, you’re going to be there. You will win over somebody that does an amazing, splashy campaign and then goes away.

Hannah: If we think about these things that people these myths and these really weird misconceptions that do exist in B2B sales, what are some of the main ones that you’ve heard or seen in the sales industry that you wish you could put to rest for good?

Jeff: I would say that B2B sales is easy, like anybody off the street can do it. What you’re starting to see is that B2B sales, specifically tech, has become extremely complex. And so, you know, my buddy over Northern Illinois University, Dr. Robert Peterson, is an example of this curriculum starting to pop up that is just focused on professional selling, which did not exist a decade ago.

I would say another one that I used to think was true is that you have to be an extrovert to be good at selling. At the end of the day, selling is really about educating your customers, providing value, and in some instances, depending on who you’re calling on. If you’re super extroverted, it can actually be a detriment. The other one, there always be closing. Did you close the deal? Close, close, close, close, close.

Especially in B2B, there’s a longer sales cycle, and people need to understand that. I would say we shift that mindset to are we getting closer, closer to closing. The question really is, are we providing value? Are we building trust? Those things and those metrics matter more than did I close the sale because that no one’s buying anymore. It just doesn’t work.

Sales podcast rapid fire quesitons

Tony: Jeff, this has been just amazing, probably one of the best podcasts we’ve done, but you’re not done yet. So we’re going to hit you with some rapid-fire questions. First thing that comes to mind, just throw some answers out there and I’ll let Hannah kick it off.

Hannah: All right. So what is your sales philosophy in just three words?

Jeff: Always provide value.

Hannah: And what would you say has been the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your career so far?

Jeff: Shut up and listen.

Tony: I’ve heard that so many times, but it wasn’t around sales. But that’s okay. What is your top productivity hack?

Jeff: Focus on the things that provide the highest ROI.

Tony: What’s your top prediction for the sales industry this year?

Jeff: I would say one around sales tech. We’ll see a lot of a lot more consolidation of tools, like these unified platforms. I think that’s probably one that’s top of mind.

Hannah: And if you can share just one piece of advice to all sales professionals, what would it be?

Jeff: Strive to become a trusted advisor in your industry. And, you know, a lot of people have a feeling about that. What I mean is that really know your industry and be able to provide value outside of your product. That I think will make you successful and your target customers will view you as a partner more so than a sales rep.

Tony: Where do you go to get your industry news?

Jeff: I’m always on LinkedIn and I have a couple of newsletters that are just pushing to me, so I’m a little bit all over the place.

Tony: What are the top three apps you could not live without?

Jeff: Okay, so Notion, I have to have. I’m a big music guy, so I would say YouTube and I have the unlimited version so I can listen to it when I work out. The third one, I would say, is probably LinkedIn.

Hannah: Are leaders made or born?

Jeff: Oh, you guys aren’t playing around today.

I would say the same way that people say, “Salespeople are either made or born.” I believe they can be made. I think that, if anybody is coachable enough and open enough to self-improvement, you can transform yourself into whatever you want to be.

Hannah: And last but not least, what books inspired you the most in your career?

Jeff: You know, so this can sound really crazy. What’s a book by Dr. Seuss? “Ah, the Places You’ll Go.” I got this book as a graduation present from a teacher of mine. And you would not imagine the emotional connection I had to that when I actually read it as a high school student. I really read it as going off to college and starting my journey and it just resonated in a very different way, which was to this day, to be honest with you, is surprising. And as I get older, it just means something very different. So that is probably not the answer you’re looking for.

Hannah: I don’t want this to end. I want part two. When are we getting part two on this? I’m learning a lot.

Jeff: Whatever you want part two is when it will happen.

Tony: I mean, how many podcasts have NASA engineers and Dr. Seuss all built into one. I mean, you can’t you can’t beat that. Jeff, thank you so much. This has been an amazing experience for us. We do hope to have you back but thank you again and all the best to you. And go get his book right away.

Hannah: Yeah, definitely.

Jeff: Absolutely. Tony, Hannah, thank you so much. Createtogethernessbook.com and I encourage people to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love having these conversations and let’s start, let’s make it happen, sales and marketing alignment all the way.

What did we learn?

Tony: So Hannah, I know you’re an elaborate content creator and it’s no secret that we’re living in an attention economy today. So with all the different things that you’re doing, what are some marketing tactics or maybe even sales techniques that draw you in and keep your attention for longer?

Hannah: It’s really simple. It’s people or companies that are keeping it very real. And they strip back the corporate jargon and they talk to humans because, hey, guess what, we’re all humans and we have normal conversations and normal interactions with one another. So I love to see companies start to develop their personality. I think retail brands just get it right, or some of the restaurant brands and they’re on Twitter and that their social media team and at teasing each other like this is this has drawn me and this has captured my attention. And if I think in the sales context, LinkedIn’s my playground, I love it. I, you know, I interact and engage and create a lot of content for LinkedIn. But I love when I come across people who are sharing content around things that are it’s like, this is a new perspective. This is a new way of thinking about a problem that we’re trying to solve and we’re trying to kind of brainstorm rather than the attention-grabbing headlines. So yeah, I’m just like, keep it real and share some new perspectives.

Tony: Well, even though my kids have probably accused me of not being human all the time, I think being human is the most important thing. Right. You really want to be able to be empathetic to someone. You need to establish that rapport and relationship. And especially since there haven’t been that many human interactions that are at least live over the last two years. You have to find a way to really get that connection right. I have problems, I have goals. I have things that I want to do. But, you know, if I can align them to things that are important to the person on the other end of the phone or on the other end of the camera, then that’s going to help me establish a rapport that will differentiate me from someone else I know. You know, over my career, I’ve had tons of customers that I’ve worked with at multiple companies because when you establish that relationship, it doesn’t just go away. When you leave a company or you leave a job, that relationship stays forever.

Hannah: Yeah, I that relationship piece and that connection piece. And for me, it’s also about how people and businesses are just trying to start conversations. Accepting that we don’t know everything and saying let’s have a conversation. How about we start that? I think I  maybe have about 11,000 connections or followers on LinkedIn now and the ones that stand out to me are the people who will trigger conversations with me around something I posted or will share stuff with me and say, “Hey, I know that you were talking about this a few weeks ago. I saw this perspective from this other person. What do you think about that?” And we go back and forth. I love those conversation starters because now I remember that particular person, that guy. And if I think of something, I’m going to go to him first.

Tony: When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, it’s not enough to ensure both teams are on board if you hope to make them stick. The changes need to come from a top-down approach involving members of the senior leadership team.

Hannah: Completely agree. And this is where this concept really comes in. The word helped to illustrate the interconnected approach sales execs should be taking in this fast-paced digital-first world.

Tony: Exactly. They really have to, because, you know, it’s become more important than ever that we all bring a greater sense of empathy to the table, regardless of our role or department. If we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes will be quicker to respond to the needs of others and see the business from a holistic bird’s-eye perspective.

Hannah: But Tony, another key takeaway from our conversation with Jeff involves making the shift to a true customer-centric approach rather than just paying lip service to the idea.

Tony: Absolutely. And you know, in today’s market, Hannah, buyers are craving a fast, easy and frictionless experience. It’s up to a sales team to deliver that turnkey experience if they hope to accelerate growth and retain customers in the future.