It’s that time of year when G2 releases its annual Best Software Products lists.

You may have gone to the G2 website in the past to see customer ratings and reviews for tools you considered adding to your tech stack. If so, you probably know that millions of customers across industries and geographies visit G2.com to rate and review thousands of software applications. In sales tech alone, there are hundreds of solutions for sales ops, sales enablement, sales automation, skills development, prospecting, social selling, and more — so the competition for G2 recognition is fierce.

Even so, our customers feel so strongly about the impact Mindtickle has had on their business that they have helped us reach the top of five key lists this year. In fact, we were in the top 15 in four of them, the top five in three of them, and in the top 100 in another:

• Best Software Products (#11)
• Enterprise Products (#2)
• Highest Satisfaction Products (#4)
• Sales Products (#5)
• Global Sellers (#66)

Here’s why we’re so honored to be included in each category:

• Best Software Products: In this category, leaders don’t just provide a great solution, they create fantastic customer experiences for their users. This position reflects our commitment to working with our customers to build innovative sales readiness solutions that drive meaningful change within their organizations. We’re committed to leading this category not just this year, but for many years to come.
• Enterprise Products: This recognition demonstrates that our customers have used Mindtickle to make sales readiness a mission-critical within their organizations — and a key component of their software portfolios.
• Highest Satisfaction Products: This is all about the number and quality of user reviews. It’s an important reassurance (and reminder) that delighting our users will continue to be a key focus of our work.
• Sales Products: We’re really proud to be the highest-ranked sales enablement solution in this category. With the array of tools sellers use every day, we appreciate the fact that our users recognize the impact of our solution on their businesses.
• Global Sellers: Microsoft, HubSpot, and Zoom have previously topped this list. Inclusion alongside these industry leaders demonstrates the important role that Mindtickle’s sales readiness platform has on companies with international footprints.

In addition to these annual awards, G2 released its Winter 2022 rankings. We were named leaders in the following:

• Sales Enablement: We continue to empower our customers to build best-in-class enablement programs, individualized at scale, that leaders can map to business outcomes.
• Sales Coaching: Mindtickle helps organizations institutionalize a coaching culture by empowering frontline managers to deliver individualized sales coaching that focuses on the skills it takes to close business.

• Sales Training and Onboarding: Customers rely on us to improve time to productivity with sales onboarding programs focused on each seller’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Conversation Intelligence: Mindtickle’s integrated conversation intelligence approach enables frontline managers to identify and remediate skill gaps that stop sellers from closing more business.

The annual and quarterly rankings from G2 serve as a reminder of what we’re doing well, why our customers love using our product, and where we need to focus. Stay tuned for a product announcement in the next month, as well as a State of the Union report on sales readiness.

If you’re ready to see what our G2 reviews are talking about, let’s set up a demo.

Your sales reps have a different mix of skills and experience. So how do you know if every seller is ready to face your prospects during sales calls? You could take an educated guess based on the seller’s past experience and previous performance, or you could know for sure by providing your reps with a sales readiness checklist.

A sales readiness checklist helps you and your reps understand whether they have all the information, skills, and competencies they need to have conversations with potential customers. Use it to assess whether your reps are ready or need a little more training, coaching, or practice. Share this 10-step checklist with your reps, or send it to your sales managers to use in their 1:1 meetings with each rep.

1. I understand how customers use our product.

Your sales reps need to be an expert on your product, so they can talk with prospects about it authoritatively. To become an expert, your team needs to understand how your product works, how customers use it, and its main benefits.

All your reps should have training sessions with your product team as part of their sales onboarding. They should also have regular refresher sessions to remind them how best to use the product and to help them understand and explain new features and product updates.

2. I understand our entire sales process, including handing over conversations to other team members.

Unless your sales team is small, your reps likely won’t handle the entire sales process, from outreach to close. But they should know the process end-to-end and when (and how) to hand over conversations to account executives. This will help the sales process run smoothly and give prospects a positive, professional impression.

To help your sales reps understand the sales process:

1. Give them a copy of your company’s sales process document in their onboarding pack.
2. Review the document regularly (once or twice a year) and update it if any parts of the process have changed.
3. Work with your sales managers to understand which parts of the process reps find confusing and add clarifying information to the document.

3. I understand the outcomes our buyers look to achieve with our product.

Your reps need to understand the outcomes your prospects are looking to achieve with your product, so they can explain how your product meets customer needs.

When agents are on customer calls, they should ask questions to understand what outcomes the customer is looking for. This sets their relationship up for success because it leads to an understanding of what the customer needs to achieve with your product. Once they close the deal and the customer starts using your product, your customer success team can track progress towards that goal during customer onboarding and check-in conversations.

4. I can confidently handle common objections from prospects.

Objection handling is a vital skill for all sales reps. Customers may hesitate over your pricing, features, or whether your product is best for their specific use case. If your reps can’t address, handle, and overcome objections from prospects, they’ll struggle to close deals — even with the best products in the world.

Encourage your sales leaders to run training sessions on objection handling with their reps and listen back to their call recordings as a group. This exercise will help your reps learn how others on their team tackle common objections and help them understand what does (and doesn’t) resonate with prospects.

5. I have access to content that can help nurture prospects through different stages of the funnel.

Sales enablement content can accelerate time-to-close for your deals. It also provides decision-makers with helpful social proof that can reassure them during the buying process.

Ensure all your reps have access to your company’s sales enablement content. Set up a centralized content library in your sales content management solution and make sure reps don’t need to request access to each file. Encourage your sales managers to regularly ask their team about case studies, slide decks, and other resources they may need, so they can work with marketing to create content that will have the biggest impact.

6. I know how to use different pieces of content in my interactions with prospects.

Content only helps move deals forward if your reps know which pieces best suit different sales scenarios. They need to understand how to use different content at each stage of the buyer journey to educate and nurture your prospects.

Mindtickle’s Asset Hub provides a central home for sales content and delivers contextualized training to help reps discover new content and learn how to use it in their sales conversations. You can also share updates when you add new sales enablement content. These updates can include tips for your reps on how and when to use the content in the sales process.

7. I can confidently run product demos.

Prospects won’t buy something they’ve never seen. So it’s important to provide clear, coherent product demos that show off your product’s best features and functionality.

For confident product demos, practice makes perfect. Virtual role-plays help reps practice product demos away from the high-pressure sales environment, and are fantastic coaching opportunities for sales managers. Reps should also get refresher training from the product team if there are some features they’re less confident with. Additionally, make sure you arrange hands-on training for reps when new product features are released, so they can properly demo them to your prospects.

8. I record calls with prospects to share with my manager.

Recording their sales calls allows reps to listen back and review them with their manager and other reps on their team. Call recordings will help sales managers see their reps’ skills in action and accurately assess sales readiness levels.

There are lots of sales tools you can use to record calls. Mindtickle’s Call AI lets you record and analyze reps’ calls as well as other sales interactions across different channels and deal stages. Sales leaders can then analyze the calls and conversations to work out where their reps excel and focus their training to ensure reps stay sales-ready.

9. I meet regularly with my manager to discuss my strengths and areas for improvement.

Sales managers can help your reps understand which areas they need to focus on improving to boost their overall sales readiness. They will know how reps measure up compared to others on the team and identify people who excel in key areas who can support reps who might be struggling.

Make sure your sales leaders have regular 1:1 meetings with all their reps. Often, these can slip in busy times (especially in the run-up to the end of the quarter or end of the month when everyone’s trying to hit their targets). But meeting regularly will make it easier for your team to improve over time. If your organization has implemented a Sales Readiness Index, your managers can use it to assess and measure their reps’ skills in different areas and identify areas to work on.

10. I take part in training regularly to keep my skills sharp.

Your reps had lots of training during onboarding, but how much of that do they still remember? Provide continuous training and sales coaching throughout the year to help reps keep their skills sharp. Practical training and learning from other team members who might excel in different areas can help your reps improve. and allow them to.

The Sales Readiness Index will help your managers create personalized training programs for their sales reps by showing strengths and weaknesses across their team. They should tailor training opportunities based on reps’ skill sets and provide their team with opportunities to learn new proficiencies and sharpen existing ones. Effective training exercises include practice calls, role-play scenarios, and sharing and analyzing call recordings in group discussions.

Use this checklist to make sure all your reps are sales ready

Many sales organizations have a couple of top performers with the rest of the reps struggling to hit quota. But the strongest teams ensure all their reps are sales ready and focus on turning everyone into a top performer.

The checklist above will help teams focus on improving their shared performance rather than championing individual top performers. Use this checklist together with our Sales Readiness Index and ideal rep profile, two tools Mindtickle uses to help companies scale sales excellence across their entire teams. They help you define excellence for your sales team and then build processes and training opportunities to coach and develop key competencies, setting all your reps up for success.

As a sales leader, it should be no surprise to hear that preparing your team to win starts with building knowledge through continuous training and reinforcement. Developing seller knowledge starts with onboarding, but it’s most effective when continually reinforced throughout a seller’s tenure with your company.

We recently teamed up with Heinz Marketing to create The New Sales Enablement Standard: How Today’s Sales Leaders Grow Revenue With a Sales Readiness Approach. In it, we look at how sales leaders can empower their teams to achieve revenue goals through customized readiness programs. Let’s dig in!

1. Many sales leaders used to expect 20% of their sales force to generate 80% of their revenue.

Gone are the days of sales leaders relying on a few top sellers to do the heavy lifting for the rest of their teams. In a typical organization, that means four out of five sellers wouldn’t be used to their full potential — causing a serious negative impact on the bottom line.

By creating customized sales training plans, sales managers can unlock the true power of their full team. To do this, it’s important for managers to quantify every possible aspect of seller performance including things like sales performance based on business goals, completion of training modules, and the number of new skills obtained.

When coaching and monitoring these specific key performance metrics in each seller, teams are able to customize their tactics to each individual seller to help them reach their goals.

2. Of teams who hit 100% of their sales goals, 32% have a dedicated sales enablement program.

The reality is that only 14.7% of sales teams hit their sales goals. That isn’t a particularly high amount when you consider the investments that most organizations put into sales headcount. But when you look at the teams that are crushing their targets, there’s something many of them have in common: a dedicated sales enablement program.

Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have managed the sales enablement strategy entirely on their own. But a modern selling environment calls for the involvement of more teams in order to build a stronger program and ultimately a stronger team. The top three functions involved in sales enablement programs are sales/revenue operations, sales leadership, and marketing.

3. 78.6% of companies that have an effective training program meet 100% of their selling quota.

When an organization takes the time to invest in a sales training program, everybody wins. With nearly 80% of companies that have an effective training program in place meeting their quota, the results speak for themselves.

The key is to take training beyond onboarding and on-the-job coaching and start regularly training employees on a more consistent basis, placing an emphasis on knowledge retention rather than just delivering information.

4. Only 37% of companies extend their onboarding programs beyond the first month.

While we’re all familiar with onboarding and how important it is to a seller’s success, very few organizations foster a learning environment for reps outside of that first 30-day window. The major problem with this is that it’s proven that companies who invest in ongoing training win more deals.

In the results of a recent survey, of the respondents who hit 75% or of their quota, 90% participate in sales training on a monthly basis. Promoting continuous learning is essential to equipping sellers with the skills and knowledge they need to achieve their revenue goals.

5. After just six days, people forget 75% of the information they learn in training.

Reinforcing knowledge is just as important as the imparting of knowledge itself. We often speak about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, which is a formula that states that humans forget approximately 50% of new information within an hour, forget 70% in 24 hours, and 90% after 30 days.

This is where spaced reinforcements come into play. By creating microlearning modules coupled with spaced repetition, retrieval practice, coaching, and personalization for each rep, sales managers can more effectively promote knowledge retention within their teams.

6. 8 out of 10 teams who have effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of sales quotas.

It’s no secret that better coaching practices equate to more wins for your team. In fact, adopting a consistent coaching culture is vital to your team’s success. When done right, it can provide insight and opportunity to improve on every buyer interaction (like where something went wrong, how to uncover bottlenecks, and how to pivot for future success).

Performance-related conversations can be difficult to have, especially if a rep isn’t doing well. But when we rely on data to guide these conversations, they not only become easier to have, but are also more valuable for the rep on the receiving end of the feedback.

7. 57% of respondents who have effective practice opportunities see sellers achieving 75% and greater of their sales goals.

Sales practice opportunities can include everything from microlearning, to role-play, to quizzes, to certifications, and beyond. The important thing is that sellers are given ample resources to flex their knowledge and build on their existing skills to grow in their roles.

Of the respondents to our recent survey who hit 100% seller quota attainment, 57% rely heavily on coaching to build knowledge within their teams. This shows that with every bit of coaching a seller receives, their ability to move deals forward and close deals in real-world conversations dramatically increases.

A worthy investment for sales leaders

Sales coaching is definitely an investment, but when you look at the data, it’s not something sales leaders can afford to ignore. It’s clear that taking the time to build out training programs that go beyond a seller’s first 30 or 90 days on the job drive tangible results, and are well worth the efforts when it comes to achieving revenue goals.

At the end of the day, we all want our teams to be successful and reach quota every quarter. But in order to hit those goals on a team level, we have to take a step back and start nurturing sellers’ abilities on an individual level too. After all, the greatest successes all start with one small change. Let a stellar training program be yours!

Imagine all the time we spend in sales and marketing developing ideal customer profiles, or as the acronym goes, ICPs.

Sales leaders spend a lot of time and effort to:

1. Ensure the leadership team agrees upon and documents the ICP
2. Train everyone in the sales organization on sales motions aligned to the ICP
3. Collaborate with marketing and product teams to deliver content and offerings aligned to ICP needs

However, as we all know well, every sales deal has two sides – the customer and the seller.

While you may have targeted the right ICP-fit prospects, your success as a sales organization still rests greatly on the skills of your own sales rep.

So, how much time do sales leaders spend thinking about and strategizing about the ideal rep profile – or as we call it, the IRP?

Very little.

Some sales leaders like Mark Roberge, the ex-CRO at Hubspot, evangelize the concept of ideal hiring profiles. But does good sales performance begin and end at hiring the right people?

The truth is that it’s a long journey that might begin with hiring for the right fit, but along the way includes things like onboarding, ongoing training, practice, reinforcement, continuous coaching, account planning, and so much more.

And all of these performance improvement initiatives cannot operate without a sales performance benchmark.

Sales leadership teams need to define, document, and track gaps against ideal rep profiles or IRPs.

What is an ideal rep profile?

IRP is the science behind measuring and improving sales performance.

Today Mindtickle announced the launch of its new sales performance measurement product, Readiness Index.

Readiness Index helps sales leaders record their IRP competencies and skills. As an example, you could set up your IRP as a combination of competencies like:

Along with each competency, you can also add in the weight each of them has on the overall Readiness Index score for a rep or a team.

My IRP is set. What’s next?

Based on the IRP, enablement and frontline managers create custom programs and coaching plans to address every rep’s skill gaps.

Now readiness initiatives like training by the enablement team and coaching by frontline managers address the needs of the individual, above and beyond addressing only the needs of the team and the organization.

On the other hand, sales leaders can start tracking how teams and reps are performing based on their readiness score in Mindtickle.

Now sales leaders know how each team, region, and rep (or any cohort) is performing.

They know which team or rep needs help with which competency.

Can we connect readiness with revenue?

Readiness levels can now also be measured against business metrics from the Salesforce CRM.

Think quota attainment, pipeline building, competitive win rates, meetings booked (for XDRs), churn, or customer NPS (for CSMs). All of these metrics can be used to understand the impact of all your readiness activities.

Now you can focus your readiness efforts in a more targeted manner starting with the quadrant that needs improvement in both readiness and quota attainment.

Take Susan for example:

We now know she needs help with customer personas, deep discovery, and value articulation.

Steps sales leadership can take with Mindtickle to help improve Susan’s performance:

1. Listen to her discovery calls in Call AI conversation intelligence and give her prescriptive feedback on questions to ask, talk time to reduce in discovery conversations
2. Guide her on better value articulation by sending her a reinforcement course, as well as doing an AI-guided virtual role-play
3. Ensure she can use Asset Hub to easily find all persona-related content, training, highly rated roleplays submitted by top reps

Readiness Index creates more peak performers on your team by delivering bespoke education, content, and coaching based on every rep’s individual needs. Learn more about ideal rep profiles and the Readiness Index by getting a personalized demo today.

“Sales is both an art and a science.”

“It’s more about the attitude.”

“We need more reps with the ‘it’ factor.”

We’ve heard it all.

Sales rep performance is a complex challenge we’ve tried to address through traditional training and enablement programs, and for many, it’s not working the way we hoped. A study by CSO Insights suggests only 27.5% of stakeholders feel sales enablement initiatives meet or exceed their expectations.

So, is it true that sales readiness is a dream state, a mission impossible? Or can revenue organizations actually improve performance through readiness? How can sales leaders create an all-star team of quota-crushers instead of relying on a handful to carry revenue targets?

Sales leaders can master the science of sales performance by creating, tracking, and optimizing readiness with Mindtickle.

I’m proud to say that with the Fall 2021 product announcement, Mindtickle built the sales readiness platform that revenue teams need to create a state of continuous excellence.

The key highlights in the announcement include:

1. Defining your ideal rep profile and correlating skills and behaviors with sales success in our new product, Readiness Index
2. Equipping your sales teams more effectively with an integrated content experience for just-in-time learning and customer engagement in our new product, Asset Hub
3. And a few more capabilities:
   • Create programs aligned to critical competencies and based on enablement best practices using Program Templates
   • Improve remote or hybrid team engagement in training sessions or kickoffs with gamification using Live and Team Challenges
   • Act on readiness insights and gaps with role-based dashboards that give full visibility into team and rep performance

Readiness Index

What’s your ideal rep profile (IRP)?

Every deal has a customer and a rep. In sales, we devote a lot of effort to defining the ideal customer profile or ICP. But what about our own reps?

True readiness begins when sales teams know not only their ICPs but also their IRPs — ideal rep profile. Mark Roberge at HubSpot introduced the concept of ideal hiring profiles. But sales performance isn’t a challenge that can be addressed by simply hiring reps based on a profile. Your reps always need to:

1. Possess the skills
2. Display the behaviors that help win deals
3. Repeat winning behaviors consistently

Now, for the first time in any sales technology, the leadership team – CRO/CSO, heads of enablement, ops, and regions – can come together and encode their ideal characteristics in Mindtickle’s Readiness Index.

Once the IRP is set in Mindtickle, enablement programs and sales content can be aligned to deliver the knowledge and skills required to create more ideal closers. This is made even easier with our new Program Templates, which make it simpler and faster to get your courses off the ground.

Then, as reps learn, reinforce, and practice key skills in Mindtickle’s enablement programs, their readiness scores start reflecting their proficiencies and gaps in the Readiness Index visualizations.

Now, enablement teams and frontline managers can tailor their programs and coaching to help bridge gaps for each individual rep.

Asset Hub

Do your reps have access to just-in-time sales content?

When most sales teams think of sales content, they think mostly of marketing collateral. But is that all that makes reps successful? What about training content, internal talk tracks, battlecards, role-play videos, and recorded snippets from actual customer conversations?

Many kinds of content drive rep success in the field. Mindtickle’s integrated content experience in Asset Hub ensures your reps can access, learn, and share the content that’s aligned with your readiness approach and proven to help win deals.

With the right content at their fingertips, reps can:

• Prepare for calls by listening to real-world, winning conversations
• Get the latest updates from SMEs in easy-to-consume microlearning
• Respond to objections quickly and confidently
• Practice pitches using AI-powered recommendations
• Share marketing-approved assets that win, contextualized for key selling situations

Additional sales readiness product capabilities released

Role-based dashboards for sales leaders and enablement

At any time, you have parallel programs as well 1-on-1 or team-level coaching activities underway. Mindtickle Insights bring you role-based reporting and analytics for sales leaders (CROs/CSOs), enablement, frontline managers, and ops.

They cover the entire gamut of data analytics – from adoption and engagement to learning scores, conversation intelligence, and revenue outcomes. And if editing your dashboards with the widget style isn’t enough, then you can also build your own reports and dashboards from scratch.

Live and Team Challenges to gamify sales enablement and training

With Live Challenges, enablement teams and trainers can strategically intersperse interactive contests throughout live training sessions to boost attention and improve recall. Teams get a series of multiple-choice questions where scores are based on how quickly you respond. After each question, the leaderboard is flashed. It’s a great learning experience that promotes friendly competition and fun.

Hybrid sales teams can now use Team Challenges to drive more rep engagement. The product design is our homage to the arcade games of the 1980s. Team Challenges encourage teamwork, camaraderie, and retention during sales meetings and kickoffs as it involves significant teamwork, communication, and knowledge to win the game.

Templates to launch programs in days not weeks

Quickly launch new programs using Mindtickle’s templates based on industry best practices.

Use templates for onboarding, product/service knowledge, and sales methodology implementations to start delivering value quickly. These templates significantly cut down the time needed to launch a new program – the average time taken in the beta process was nine days. The Mindtickle Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) team will continue to build out the repository of templates till we eventually have an entire marketplace where enablement professionals and training organizations can offer their own templates.

And that’s a wrap!

That’s all we have in store for Fall and Winter 2021. But I can tell you that the product and engineering teams (400 strong now!) are already working toward an amazing roadmap for 2022. We’re working closely with customers and industry practitioners to get feedback.

We want to hear from you! Reach out to [email protected] to let us know your thoughts on this release and ideas for future ones. Maybe you will see them in our Spring 2022 announcement.

There are two sides to every sale. Each side must meet certain criteria if a deal is to move forward.

On one side is the buyer. Of course, not all accounts are of equal value to your organization. And with limited hours in the day, sales reps must focus their time and energy on those that are most likely to convert. As such, most sales organizations have developed an ideal customer profile (ICP), which is a model of the key qualities that make an account a great fit for your company’s products or services. These qualities can include annual revenue, employee range, industry, customer base, organizational maturity, and geography, among a myriad of others. Sales and marketing then qualify accounts based on how they measure up to this ICP.

On the other side is the seller. There’s no doubt there are certain skills and behaviors common to all successful sellers. However, few organizations take the time to define their ideal rep profile (IRP).

What is an ideal rep profile – and why is it imperative to improving your organization’s sales readiness strategy? Read on to find out.

What is an ideal rep profile?

In a perfect world, all of the reps on your team would be top performers. But that’s not reality. Instead, most sales teams are composed of reps with a wide range of experience, strengths, and weaknesses.

So, what makes top performers stand out among the rest? Usually, there are a number of common competencies and selling skills top performers have. Those skills are correlated with success in the field.

As the name suggests, an ideal rep profile (IRP) is a profile of a rep that’s likely to succeed at a given organization. Much like an ICP includes characteristics that make the customer “ideal,” an IRP defines the competencies and skills a rep must have to regularly close deals and meet (or even surpass) quota. For example, the best sellers use consistent messaging during role-plays – and they limit their use of filler words. Obviously, that’s just a small sampling of the skills necessary for success.

Of course, it’s possible to document your IRP in a document or spreadsheet. However, here at Mindtickle, we’ve recently released the Mindtickle Readiness Index, which allows you to record your IRP right in the Mindtickle platform so you can work toward closing knowledge gaps – and getting more reps ready to sell.

Why do you need an ideal rep profile?

Sales leaders are busy, with a to-do list a mile long. As such, you’ve got to focus on the projects and initiatives that have the highest payoff in terms of your ultimate goal: revenue growth. So, is it worth the time to create an IRP?

In a word, yes. In fact, the IRP should be the North Star for your entire sales readiness program.

Oftentimes, organizations use a spray and pray approach to sales readiness. They deliver the same generic training and coaching to all sellers – without much regard for each seller’s strengths and weaknesses. And they hope sellers will retain the information – and apply it in the field.

Creating an IRP helps ensure each seller is getting the education, content, and coaching they need to learn and are able to master the skills and competencies that are correlated with sales success. So, an IRP is the first step toward creating more peak performers and driving greater revenue growth for your organization.

How to start creating more ideal reps

Many sales organizations focus on delivering great onboarding and ongoing training programs to their go-to-market teams. And for good reason. The best sales training can improve the performance of an individual seller by 20%, on average.

Today, most sales leaders accept the 80/20 rule as inevitable and concede to the fact that the majority of revenue will always be driven by a small number of star sales reps.

These leaders continue to use a one size fits all approach to sales readiness — where all reps check off the same boxes, regardless of their skills, experience, and competencies. The result? The same handful of great reps continue to hit (or surpass) their targets – while the majority of the others don’t.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A more effective approach to readiness involves delivering content, training, and coaching based on your IRP – as well as the individual needs of your reps. With this approach, it’s very much possible to develop and prepare every seller in your organization to win.

Here’s how to start taking this approach:

Create your IRP

Creating an ideal rep profile is the first step toward a more effective readiness approach. This involves documenting the skills and competencies that are correlated with positive sales outcomes as learned from your best performers.

Each organization is different — and therefore IRPs will vary from company to company.

We’ve highlighted the competencies below that, in general, make for a great sales rep. As you build out the profile of an ideal rep at your organization, you may want to get more granular about specific knowledge areas that relate to your industry or product.

Organizations can leverage the Mindtickle Readiness Index to record their ideal rep competencies and skills right within the platform.

Measure reps’ skills against your IRP

Once you’ve established your IRP (and recorded it into the Mindtickle Readiness Index), you must understand how your reps stack up against these benchmarks. It’s essential to understand where each rep is shining – and where there are knowledge gaps standing in the way of success.

Deliver customized training and coaching 

After knowledge gaps are identified, sales enablement teams and frontline managers can create and deliver customized training and coaching that fills those gaps – and get more reps ready to sell. This will help you create more peak performers on your team by delivering education, content, and coaching based on each rep’s individual needs. This could take many forms, including in-person training, microlearning, quizzes, role-plays, and one-on-one coaching, among others.

Measure progress and optimize accordingly 

It’s key to determine whether training and coaching are moving reps closer in alignment with the IRP. To do this, sales leaders must continuously measure reps’ skill development and in-field application. One important way to determine whether reps are applying the skills they’ve learned when interacting with buyers is to leverage a conversation intelligence solution. These tools make it easy to measure performance against the skills defined in the IRP. Then, sales managers can provide individualized coaching and training to improve problem areas standing in the way of winning deals.

Drive continuous sales excellence

Buyers have high expectations. As such, organizations must ensure reps are always ready to meet (and exceed) those expectations.

Sales organizations must make sales readiness a top priority. And true readiness begins when sales teams have a firm grasp of not only their ideal customer profile but also their ideal rep profile. With the Mindtickle Readiness Index, it’s very much possible to do away with the 80/20 rule – and instead, aim to get all reps ready to sell.