It’s almost hard to believe how far we’ve come since we first introduced Mindtickle to the world. Almost. Early on, we saw a gap between what sales and revenue leaders should be doing to make their teams more effective and what was actually happening in the real world. This gap continues to grow given the changing business landscape fueled by digital transformation and buyer centricity. But now, it is crystal clear that sales readiness is the single most critical lever revenue leaders have to consistently meet or exceed their goals. We’re thrilled to continue our partnership with Softbank to fund our vision for sales readiness and bring a platform to market that helps these leaders modernize the revenue organizations and help their sellers be ready.
The rise of sales readiness
With a dynamic business landscape filled with new products, competitors, and disruptions — as well as savvier, more well-informed buyers — businesses have invested trillions in digital transformation projects to modernize their business infrastructure with AI, machine learning, and customer experience technologies. However, as technology has raced forward, 21st-century workers have fallen behind, compromising their ability to add value to their businesses, including how they interact with prospects and customers, causing them to lose out on revenue opportunities.
This problem is particularly acute in sales, where the Pareto Principle — the notion that approximately 20% of sellers generate 80% of the revenue — is no longer holding. Ramp times are increasing, seller tenure is decreasing, and we’re seeing drops in seller performance. Against this backdrop, businesses can’t afford to rely on a small subset of sellers being the “heroes” for their revenue leaders. Rather, these leaders must look for ways to systematically enable and ready their sellers to be in a continuous state of excellence.
The perfect storm described here has created an appetite among organizations around the world to look for a viable solution for employee and sales readiness. Dozens of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies and hundreds of the world’s most recognized and fastest-growing companies use Mindtickle’s complete sales readiness platform to help their revenue leaders (CROs, CSOs, and front-line managers) define excellence, build knowledge, align content, analyze performance and optimize behavior. Delivered in a single solution, it provides a more comprehensive approach to readiness so sellers can maximize customer interactions to ensure better business outcomes.
Mindtickle has documented a number of business transformations among its many customers. Splunk, for example, created a dynamic, companywide culture of coaching using Mindtickle as the foundation for “Splunk Coach.” Ultimately, Splunk was able to gain greater insight into skills gaps, realize improvements in sales productivity, and improve its new-hire training process with Mindtickle. MongoDB realized significant gains as well, including a 45% reduction in ramp time for new hires, a $200k increase in average productivity of fully ramped reps, and double the number of new reps hitting quota.
Investing in the future
Given all this, as well as the accelerated pace at which business moves, Mindtickle is at the intersection of these trends poised to bring significant and measurable value to companies around the world. And investors like SoftBank are all in. After investing $100 million in Mindtickle just nine months ago, SoftBank quickly saw Mindtickle’s value, appeal across industries and geographies, and the market opportunity, and doubled down on us for another $100 million in our latest round.
With this latest round, Mindtickle continues to be laser-focused on innovating and expanding toward our mission to create sales readiness as the instrumental new category of tech to solve the readiness crisis. In addition, we’re making Mindtickle more accessible to businesses around the world in every market, helping them to future-proof their organizations so they can be successful in the face of these dynamic and ever-changing environments.
With that, I congratulate everyone at Mindtickle — and those who have journeyed with us at one point or another — who’ve worked tirelessly to support our vision and our customers. And monumental thanks to our customers and investors who believed in us and our mission. The road to SaaS unicorn can be long, with only a select few companies — with the vision, innovation, and temerity to get here. But this moment represents a pivotal point in time for Mindtickle and the sales readiness category. And I’m looking forward to entering this new phase of growth with you all.
There’s a cruel reality facing many revenue leaders today: most sellers aren’t ready to adapt to the fast-changing business environment they face daily. It’s not that they aren’t talented; it’s that traditional sales training and enablement programs are failing them.
While the statement sounds hyperbolic, plenty of research supports it. According to CSO Insights, only 27.5% of stakeholders feel that sales enablement initiatives meet or exceed their expectations, and another research report found that 90% of sales training programs fail after 120 days.
This squares with my experiences. Prior to Mindtickle, I’ve seen firsthand the challenges of enabling hundreds of sellers. The basic problem? Large scale certification and kickoff events create an initial burst of knowledge transfer and skills development, but fall off day-over-day, week-over-week, and month-over-month.
To transform revenue organizations, they must embrace sales readiness. This post will offer a definition for it, and a framework for how to make it a reality.
What is sales readiness?
At Mindtickle, we define sales readiness as:
Sales readiness is a continuous state of excellence to grow revenue by utilizing a suite of tools and processes to increase knowledge, enhance performance, and adapt to change.
How do I achieve sales readiness?
We’ve developed a Sales Readiness Framework that outlines what revenue and sales leaders must do to achieve it. Whether you have a sales readiness platform to help you do it, or you manage it with separate tools, spreadsheets and serious hacking skills, the concepts remain the same.
The Sales Readiness Framework includes five core steps:
Define excellence
Build knowledge
Align content
Analyze performance
Optimize behavior
Step 1: Define excellence
Most organizations track hard sales metrics such as quota attainment, pipeline and revenue. While you could argue hitting those goals constitutes excellence, excellence in this context is an order of magnitude more specific: what is the ideal rep profile and associated competencies? This notion of excellence needs to become more scientific than “this rep has an ‘it’ factor” and other vague business cliches that don’t create organization-wide excellence.
Every business is different, but some that have been important for Mindtickle customers include:
Competitive knowledge
Product and services mastery
Industry proficiency
Persona and buyer comprehension
Sales process discipline
Product demo proficiency (without requiring a sales engineer)
Use case development
Every organization will prioritize and weigh the importance of each competency differently. Take the time to partner with other members of sales leadership to define a readiness index based on the competencies you believe make up the ideal rep profile. It will help set a baseline for what knowledge, skills and capabilities each sales rep in your organization should possess.
Step 2: Build knowledge
According to Gartner, B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month. To move beyond the once-a-year kickoff meetings when sellers sit through hours of training, best-in-class sales organizations invest in modern sales enablement that emphasizes continuous excellence. These programs include three core components:
Spaced reinforcement to create “everboarding.” So much focus in enablement is on onboarding, but what happens after? With spaced reinforcement, you can intelligently create programs that revisit key themes and topics by facilitating scenario-based questions with videos, images, and explanations. The program should automatically adapt or double-down on questions where rep proficiency looks weaker.
Micro-learning. Sellers are busy, so it’s better to let them chip away at knowledge building bit-by-bit with quick-hitting notifications and questions. While each one may not be as comprehensive as traditional training programs, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Engagement mechanics. While selling is serious business, learning the skill sets necessary to win can, and should be, fun. Time-bound quizzes, missions, achievements, leaderboards, and the elevation of top performer’s reputation is proven to drive more engagement with sales enablement.
Step 3: Align content
Alignment is the critical word here. While partners in marketing can create compelling content, today the majority of it goes unused by sellers. The reason is simple: while the intent by marketing is to help advance the buyer journey, there’s a pragmatism sellers employ with content. They will leverage it if it’ll advance a deal forward; they’ll avoid using it if it won’t.
When sellers are enabled and equipped with relevant content, it plays an undeniably important role in driving deals forward. The key is enabling sellers to be ready to use it. A great example would be when a new case study is available. It’s vital that it’s not only shared in a central location, but sellers are given quick training on what it is, who it’s relevant to, when to use it, and how other sellers have leveraged it to move deals forward.
Step 4: Analyze performance
For so long, we’ve spent significant time, money and resources on enablement programs. While they transfer important knowledge, they’re often done in more hypothetical, academic environments. The good news is that the rise of conversational intelligence abilities means we can start to see how these pieces of information actually resonate.
Sales readiness means you have visibility to analyze the messaging, themes, and topics that are carried to market in the real-world interactions between sellers and customers. It’s imperative for sales leaders to understand the habits of great sellers if they are to course-correct those reps who need more guidance. A comprehensive sales readiness strategy should include conversational intelligence capabilities that leverage AI and machine learning to provide sales leaders insight into what’s happening in the field, and tie that back to competencies that were or weren’t achieved from an enablement standpoint.
Step 5: Optimize behavior
Based on the insights you gain from analyzing field interactions and rep competencies, the final step is to follow up with effective sales coaching programs. Role-play scenarios, scorecards, and practice are important first steps at the human, manger-to-rep level. But a comprehensive sales readiness program should also leverage AI to make programmatic changes and recommendations for coaching based on critical gaps that get identified in real-world selling scenarios.
These coaching activities help sellers practice and prepare so they know how to handle complex selling situations. With these activities in place, you are essentially closing the readiness loop and ensuring feedback makes its way back to not only individual reps, but to your entire readiness program.
Why sales readiness matters
Without a structured sales readiness program in place (no matter if you’re following this one or not), the same problems will continue to persist. Sellers won’t be prepared for the moments that matter – when money is on the line. Understanding and prioritizing readiness activities helps organizations create the culture of sales excellence that is essential to driving revenue.
Today we shared the news that I joined Mindtickle as its new Chief Marketing Officer. There are several reasons why it’s an honor to join this company. First, Mindtickle has a strong culture that values its employees as its most vital asset. Second, it provides a compelling product that thousands of companies need to compete. And finally, it has an amazing marketing team that I’m excited to work with!
From an intellectual standpoint, Mindtickle’s value proposition resonated most with me because I’ve lived the challenge of helping enable and train large organizations, particularly at companies with complex and frequently evolving product portfolios. While I’ve led B2B marketing teams that take a content-heavy approach to marketing, we learned content can only carry a company so far if you don’t instill the actual knowledge necessary to carry those messages to market. As marketing and enablement teams applaud completion rates and content downloads, the hard reality is many sellers don’t translate that into revenue growth. Even on the blowout quarters where you “hit the number,” a small portion of the team closes the majority of the revenue. What’s worse, companies just accept this reality and plan around it. CFOs actually bake these low productivity rates into their math.
Then I saw the problem from the customer’s end of things. During the past couple of years, as a practitioner in consumer marketing, where I lived the grind of planning campaigns to a daily sales number, I sat through dozens of pitches for products and services. While almost every rep I interacted with could get through a pitch deck or demo, if I asked a next level down question, many either leaned on a sales engineer or said they’d get back to me. They had been taught to recite and memorize messaging, but not actually gain mastery of the topics.
Mindtickle is addressing that challenge head on, and the ways in which it can help may well extend beyond the sales function.
I truly believe the readiness gap of many 21st century workers will become a crisis across all functions and industries if we don’t address it. While AI and machine learning are being viewed as a panacea across many digital transformation projects, the reality is people still need to provide the insight and strategic approaches to carry our world forward (I mean, just look at your consulting bill on your last digital transformation project!).
I’m very excited to be joining this team as I believe it has, and will continue, to create a positive effect on the business world, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
To say that the last year has been challenging would be an understatement. Between lockdowns, remote working, and general pandemic blues, we have all faced significant difficulties. As such, prioritizing mental wellness has been vital for organizations large and small over the last year, particularly for employees on the frontlines of customer interaction. Luckily many have benefited from applying readiness strategies, wellbeing principles and relevant content to engage and support their people.
Sales teams have not been exempt from the challenges of prioritizing and maintaining their mental health and wellbeing. Current events have only exacerbated an already stressful role. A recent survey estimates that more than 40% of sales workers struggle with their mental health. That’s two out of every five members of your sales team. Additionally, a survey by PayScale ranked Sales Account Managers as the second most stressful job — a massive 73% of respondents said the job is highly stressful.
Despite this, mental health issues are often stigmatized or swept under the rug. Worryingly, 92% of people with mental health conditions think that admitting these conditions at work would damage their career.
These statistics should be concerning for anyone involved in sales. After all, to provide an amazing customer experience, sales managers, L&D, and sales enablement leaders must first support their sales team by providing an exceptional employee experience. Don’t just take our word for it. Statistics from the Sales Health Alliance show an average of 230% return on every dollar invested in creating a mentally healthy workplace.
Basically, it is in everyone’s best interests to remove stigmas and support your sales team’s mental health. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it also leads to happier employees, more satisfied customers, and even increased ROI.
So, what does supporting your sales team’s mental health look like in practice? Follow these three techniques.
Reduce workplace stigma
The first step to supporting your sales team’s mental health is reducing workplace stigma relating to mental health. As mentioned, 92% of people with mental health conditions think that admitting these conditions at work would damage their career. What’s more, a SANE Australia survey found that almost three-quarters of respondents living with a mental illness (74%) have experienced stigma.
Mental health stigma is a barrier to open, supportive, and productive workplace dialogues. Not only are mental health stigmas harmful to employees, but they’re also just bad business. The business case for reducing mental health stigma at work includes:
Reduced turnover and costs related to recruitment and training
Attracting top talent that prefers a workplace that supports mental health
Reduced burnout as employees are supported to be productive at work
Corporate social responsibility by providing a workplace that supports employees
Improved performance by supporting employees to produce their best work
Strategies to reduce workplace mental health stigma include: educating employees about mental health and the associated stigmas, fostering awareness through online training, encouraging open dialogues about mental health, and asking your leaders to promote mental health awareness.
A great way to do this would be to encourage sales managers to use a sales readiness platform to communicate (with feedback flowing both ways), coach, and offer direct support to their reps, especially during today’s all-remote environment. For example, Mindtickle can be used by sales managers to keep in touch with their reps on a regular cadence to check in on them as well as to coach reps on ways to minimize stress and offer tips on working smarter, not harder, to beat quotas more efficiently.
Provide social support
All too often, mental health issues are isolating. People regularly feel like they have to suffer in silence. In times like these, a strong and robust social support network is essential.
A social support network is a group of people you can turn to for support in times of need — particularly if you are experiencing mental health issues. Your support network may include family, friends, colleagues, or even online communities.
Building your social support network is as simple as identifying the people in your life with whom you feel comfortable sharing important thoughts and feelings.
According to Very Well, some of the key benefits of social support are increased motivation, healthier choices, and reduced stress. They add, “psychologists and other mental health professionals often talk about the importance of having a strong social support network. Research has also demonstrated the link between social relationships and many different aspects of health and wellness.”
For many people, workplace teams can feel like a second family. As such, workplace social support is critical to supporting your sales team’s mental health.
Emotional support, which means “expressions of empathy, love, trust, and caring.”
Instrumental support, which means offering “tangible aid and service.”
Informational support, which means offering “advice, suggestions, and information.”
Appraisal support, which means “providing information that is useful for self-evaluation.“
To best support your sales team’s mental health, keep these four types of social support in mind.
Promote mental health self-care strategies
Finally, encouraging teams to develop mental health self-care plans is an excellent strategy for supporting your sales team’s mental health. In simple terms, a mental health self-care plan is a list of activities or techniques that you can turn to when things feel overwhelming. A mental health self-care plan can include general self-care, self-care at work, interpersonal self-care, and psychological self-care.
General self-care strategies might include getting enough sleep and exercise and following a healthy and nourishing diet. In an office context, self-care might mean regularly checking in with your supervisor to reduce stress when your workload feels overwhelming, setting strict work-life boundaries, or taking regular self-care breaks throughout the day.
Finally, psychological self-care strategies can include making time for hobbies, reframing negative thoughts, mindfulness meditation, and yoga.
Tackling mental health can be a daunting task. Luckily, Go1 makes it easier, especially when its content can be used on Mindtickle, where it can be part of the ongoing readiness and enablement experience for every valued team member, helping to mitigate stress and address mental health issues head-on. With a range of mental health courses from world-class training providers, Go1 can help support your sales team’s mental health, reduce stigmas, and start open, productive conversations.
Want to learn more about how you can leverage Go1 content on the Mindtickle platform? Request a demo here.
The largest software review platform, G2, recently announced the 2021 winners of its annual Best Software Awards. And, I’m humbled to announce that Mindtickle has ranked at the top of five software lists including #1 for Enterprise Software Products for the second year in a row!
Our intentional focus on the success of our customers drives everything we do and stand for. So this validation is incredibly meaningful for us. In that spirit, we send a big thank you to the hundreds of Mindtickle customers who provided reviews on the G2 platform. As we collectively target returns to strong growth in 2021, we’re proud to partner with you in this effort — ensure customer-facing teams have the right capabilities and behaviors needed to drive revenue growth
Mindtickle was prominently featured as:
#1 of the Top 50 Products for Enterprise for the second year in a row! This is a huge testament to our dedication to the success of our customers. This is a coveted spot that was granted to Tableau in 2019 which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020 for $15.7B!
We’re so grateful for this latest recognition, and to be the leader in four categories of Sales Acceleration software according to G2. In the latest Winter 2021 G2 reports, we are the highest-rated overall solution and enterprise solution for Sales Enablement software, Sales Training and Onboarding software, and Sales Performance Management software. And we’re also the highest rated enterprise Sales Coaching software solution!
In addition to our customers, a special round of applause must go to the Mindtickle teams who support our efforts to be the best in the industry. From the Product team for building and maintaining enterprise-grade software and service, to Customer-facing teams across Success and Enablement, Support, Services, Sales and Marketing, all of whom embody the Mindtickle principle of delighting our customers at every stage of their journey!
Onwards and upwards in 2021!
Ready to see what Mindtickle can do for revenue productivity at your org?
If there is one thing we at Mindtickle have learned in our ceaseless pursuit to create a world-class Sales Readiness platform, it is the value of a strong partner ecosystem. Broadly speaking, partners enrich our market-leading offering, complementing the robust Mindtickle platform with the extra muscle needed to drive revenue growth faster and foster a culture of sales readiness for our customers. Some partnerships add to this by making it possible for Mindtickle to offer an even greater go-to-market value. Performance Solutions International (PSI), SalesSparx, and Menemsha Group are three such partners.
The vertical play with SalesSparx
Having a vertical go-to-market strategy has become increasingly important for companies today. While many technology products and solutions have historically been sold horizontally — across many industries — having a vertical-specific go-to-market strategy allows companies to capitalize on growth potential in particular markets. With this in mind, companies are looking for ways to make meaningful connections with their vertical customers that will yield more closed deals, faster.
SalesSparx enriches Mindtickle’s data-driven learning, training, and coaching capabilities with industry-specific playbooks, processes, and training needed to arm sellers in the B2B healthcare vertical — a huge market with equally huge revenue potential. The sales methodologies, strategies, and processes are created with the healthcare industry’s nuances in mind.
Alliances matter in staffing and recruiting
Similarly, Menemsha Group’s deep industry expertise complements the Mindtickle Sales Readiness platform — but for sales teams in the staffing and recruiting industry. A long-term Mindtickle partner, Menemsha provides the specific skills, knowledge, and messaging that staffing and recruitment sales teams need to move opportunities down the funnel. When Menemsha Group’s industry-focused solution is paired with Mindtickle’s platform for onboarding, skills development, training, coaching, and ongoing readiness, it results in more focused and relevant seller-to-customer interactions and a powerful way for customers to go to market
Cross-industry training content to uplevel sales conversations
Another way to build readiness in vertical-specific sales capability is by arming sellers with industry-specific knowledge and helping them demonstrate an empathetic understanding of their customers’ challenges. That’s where Performance Solutions International (PSI) comes in. PSI is a leader in industry-focused talent development and performance support that enables sales to understand their clients and prospects so they can better identify new opportunities and position solutions strategically. PSI further enriches the Mindtickle platform with industry language, market dynamics, regulatory requirements, common buyers, and supply-chain information. Together, Mindtickle and PSI clients can measurably achieve their sales readiness goals selling to businesses in financial services, health care, life sciences, insurance, manufacturing, technology, media, telecommunications, and more.
When Mindtickle’s data-driven learning, training, and coaching capabilities are paired with industry-specific content and expertise from PSI and SalesSparx, companies have an unrivaled solution to efficiently tackle the challenges inherent in selling into healthcare.
As today’s companies continue to make their vertical go-to-market strategies a priority, their sales team’s industry fluency, readiness to engage with buyers, and expertise become increasingly important factors in closing a deal. Thanks to its partnerships with companies like PSI, SalesSparx, and Menemsha Group, Mindtickle provides the firepower needed to help tip the scales in its customers’ favor, continuously improving sellers’ skill sets and knowledge, and ultimately driving better business outcomes.
It’s now a given that more sales meetings will be virtual for the foreseeable future. But keeping people engaged and focused while virtual is a challenge. Too many people turn off their camera and multitask. While people may commit to attending a meeting but they don’t necessarily attend with purpose or feel energized when attending.
There’s an opportunity for salespeople to flip this around. Most people take their foot off the pedal once a meeting is scheduled. But there are things that you and your sales team can do between getting a meeting scheduled and making sure the time your buyers invest with you is engaging and useful.
Whether it’s a meet and greet, a kickoff meeting, a critical sales pitch, or a discovery call, you need to define the parameters that make a successful meeting and help your salespeople skill up in their teaching skills. What’s surprising is how seldom sales teams define meeting facilitation as a critical sales skill to be taught, reinforced or observed in salespeople. There is a need for a systematic process to upskill your people on those critical behaviors that make for a successful virtual sales meeting. They should be part of your onboarding experience and your coaching cadence.
You can’t ever over-prepare people on how to put the ACTIVE in interactive presentations. You have to help them build their mindset and skillset so they have hardened muscles in terms of the core selling skills and habits that apply to greater influence in a virtual world. One that doesn’t require technology, but enables all to benefit from it.
The perfect sales meeting
There are four factors that define a successful sales meeting:
Being on time, prepared, and ready with an “ENGAGEing” presentation
The next meeting is scheduled
Checklist of outcomes reviewed
All standing items are resolved
Without all of these in place, you will probably not get a next meeting.
We are increasingly in a complex buying and selling cycle. Today’s buyer is not a single entity, it’s actually many people working with the buyer – procurement, finance, the user, process owners. Similarly for the seller, the sales experience has gone well beyond simply the account executive.
At the meeting, every member of your sales team has to be on message. They need to know exactly what their role is in the meeting, what specific skill sets they’re going to need and what content they need to bring to the table. This all needs to be completely aligned. Aligning all of your sales team, not just your account executives, is crucial because you need to help them understand their audience and empower them with the right content with the right skills to conduct a successful virtual sales meeting.
Engaging virtual participants
Too often, salespeople can sound robotic as they focus on pitching rather than engaging their buyers. You need to make sure you understand the persona of your buyer and tailor your content, pitch, pre-work and facilitation to engage and add value in the time you have with them.
To engage them, design your meetings so people feel like they are the center. This means you also need to know your technology so it’s seamless for you. You can then really focus on the people and deliver in a way that brings out the brilliance of your product, service, and how you are solving the buyer’s unique challenges.
When designing your sales meeting, you can engage buyers by thinking about it differently. You’re not running a sales meeting, you’re training your customers. This means your salespeople aren’t selling, they’re teaching. This is a big differentiator. If you have a 20-minute sales call, your mission should be to teach your buyers everything you can.
A seller may spend most of their time thinking about what they want to share and very little thinking about how to share it in a way that resonates. You need to flip that equation and spend most of your energy designing your virtual meetings so that the buyer is fired up. You want your buyer to spend 30% of their time learning the content and 70% practicing.
When people log into a sales presentation they want it to be all about them. That requires some very powerful shifts. You want to let people talk and open up to you. This flips the design of a typical sales meeting where the presenters usually do all the talking and the buyers are processing.
You want your buyers to have a high level of involvement. To engage them and prevent them from multitasking you need interactivity every two to three minutes. This can be listening to other voices, talking themself or doing fun stuff.
There are lots of ways that you can do this virtually, and I’ll explain some of these in more detail below.
To help you achieve this, I’ve identified six steps to holding an engaging virtual sales meeting.
1. Energize participants
Really engaging participants starts by energizing people. Data tells us the average human attention span is 20 minutes, but for online video interactions it’s about 60 seconds. We’re competing for attention span from buyers trying to get work done on a 10 by 12 inch screen.
The faster you energize people when they log in, the faster they’re involved. Ask them a tough or interesting question and get them to type their answers in the chat box. You want them to realize that it’s important that they show up to this meeting, they can’t just sit back passively. A hint, don’t start with a super tricky question. Perhaps start with a simple question, like where they’re dialling in from and then move to more complex questions.
You can also energize people ahead of the meeting. Send out a book, article video or even an online survey, and ask them to take a look at it if they have a few minutes before the meeting. This activates the reticular activating system in their brain so they come in already energized and excited to learn.
2. Navigate content
Before you share the information that you want to share, you need to be crystal clear about what your objectives are. What do you want your buyers to do differently as a result of the time with you?
If you know where you want them to get to, then you can work out how you’re going to get them there. When you’re face to face, it’s pretty clear because you can see people nodding, but virtually you have to put in interactivity along the way. You can do this by asking them questions or putting them in a breakout room with a buddy and ask them a powerful question that you need to know so you can position your solution. You could also get them to experience what you’re selling and then go back and deconstruct it.
When you’re presenting, you want to use multiple modalities so you can connect with multiple senses. Every time you shift the modality or the sense, you’re activating a different part of the brain which captures and keeps attention as well as helps people retain what you are sharing.
3. Generate meaning
Generating meaning is about letting your buyers know what’s in it for them. If you just keep sharing more and more information, their brain tries to work out what’s important to remember and what has no relevance to them. By generating meaning you stop people from checking out, reengage them in why it is valuable to pay attention and it allows you to move to the next step.
You can do this by overtly asking your buyer questions. What does a tool like this mean for you? What does it cost you not to have this tool? What are you currently doing?
Buyers can put their answers in the chat and you could then call them out by their name and ask them to tell you more. This not only generates meaning but it also helps you make a connection with the buyer. For other people on the call, it also engages them. They’re hearing different voices and they realize they may be called on to speak soon.
You can also use breakout rooms as another way to build interaction. Ask them to tell each other their stories.
What I’ve noticed in a lot of sales calls is that salespeople often tell buyers why their tool is important. When you ask the buyer to tell you what’s important, it flips it around and their answer allows you to fine-tune your sales approach.
4. Apply to the real world
When you generate meaning you can see how your buyer will apply what you’ve taught them, or your solution, in the real world. Help your buyer practice what they’ve learnt immediately by popping them in a breakout room immediately.
You can also structure your questions so they see the need for what you’re selling without realizing it. This is tricky but you can do it.
For example, I’m working with a group that teaches people how to use cameras and systems in the operating room. They ask a range of questions to help the buyers understand how they would apply their solution in the real world. Does your patient need a stent? Do they need open heart surgery? What if you saw this with the camera, what would that mean?
These questions position their product. They can then let the buyer practice with their product so they can see how it would apply to them in the real world. Anything you can do to have them demonstrate that they learned something from you in your sales presentation, and can apply it in the real world will help you.
Other things you could try include giving your buyers a mini case study and letting them go into a breakout room to figure it out. The more they apply the information you’ve taught them with you, the better the questions they’re going to ask and the more you can refine how you’re going to train them next time. Your buyers will also feel more excited and engaged with the learning experience they’ve had.
5. Gauge and celebrate
The next step is to gauge what your buyers have learned and celebrate it with them. You could do this by having a little Jeopardy game or quiz where they test their new knowledge. This gives them a chance to feel empowered that they’ve learned and sets both them and you up for success. People love to feel like they’ve achieved and it will let them log off on a high.
You can also use this approach in your own internal meetings. Ask your top-performing peers to show others what they’re doing to get those sales. All of a sudden you have a much more engaging team meeting because one of your superstars is presenting their success drivers.
6. Extend learning to action
Giving a buyer the gift of extending learning to action keeps you top of mind. This involves following up after the meeting. In this age, where everybody is multitasking, follow-up is one of the most critical things you can do to keep the learning alive and keep the focus.
That follow-up should happen the next day. It can be as simple as sending an article, book or job aid to the buyer. There are a range of things you can do to keep your organization top of mind with buyers from holding regular learning sessions to sharing success stories to email campaigns.
At the end of the day, these principles really come into play best when people have been taught, they’ve prepared and they’ve been assessed. Enable your salespeople with best practices like agenda templates, pre-meeting reminders, polls and surveys so they can go into their meetings prepared. Also give them the opportunity to drive self-confidence by developing their skills, whether it’s by role play, model pitches or accessing great examples of openings and closings.
You can also crowdsource social learning. This involves enabling your managers and top performing peers to mentor as part of your ever boarding experience – that starts with onboarding and upskilling over the journey. You can also leverage tools like artificial intelligence and embed that into your sales coaching cadence at scale to help your managers become more effective because they no longer have the luxury of shadowing or doing ride-alongs.
When building sales skills, practice really does help people make progress because we never get it right the first time. It’s not what you do once, it’s what you do better the next time. This applies to teaching in sales presentations. Teaching, in any forum, is the art and science of bringing out the brilliance that drives transformations. These tips will help you achieve brilliance in your sales presentations.
The shift from office to work from home has made sales enablement even more essential. As we prepare for 2021 and beyond, the promise of learning from our mistakes and the ability to pivot is critical. Companies around the world are changing at a rapid pace unlike anything we’ve experienced before. As companies re-evaluate and re-prioritize, they need to ask critical questions about how to succeed. What kind of mindset is needed to thrive today? How is this mindset and plan for development built? How are we helping our team with coaching, competencies and experiences that are most valuable for the future of sales? The how and why of enablement must adapt accordingly in order to thrive in today’s remote/hybrid-remote environment. Passionate enablement professionals must shift and ensure a deep belief in the power of customer-driven innovation. While the world may prefer to return to pre-COVID experiences, the reality is: only those that are resilient will quickly incorporate the wins and benefits of virtual sales and enablement and will expand the scope into a new future.
Shift gears for higher win rates: build an engaging enablement experience
In 2020, remote video was effective, as people were working hard to keep their jobs. In 2021, video training alone will be less effective and take longer to get teams aligned on goals and to be able to effectively shift. There is an abundance of data and information at people’s fingertips. 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone. Couple this with the fact that technology is advancing quickly. The rapid development and adoption of breakthrough technologies are changing how we interact with each other. In 2020, content was king but not any longer. Content provides background and a frame of reference. Now it is “what is the right solution to support the customer and is it the right solution?” Innovative companies are moving from having thousands of assets and high consumption of resources, to designing experiences unique and personalized to give teams the practice, confidence, competence, and resources needed to help clients.
Improve time to productivity: continuous onboarding and reinforcement
How do you provide a frictionless experience for new team members remotely? Engaging and interactive technologies help teams learn and develop skills in a simulated environment, thereby increasing engagement, productivity, and retention. Strong virtual onboarding, reinforcement, and ongoing training programs help fuel enterprise growth in an intentional and responsible way while enabling teams to do more with their current resources. Peer-to-peer collaboration will help teams become problem-centric, not program centric. As enterprises limit available financial resources, tech that helps sales teams become more nimble, more efficient, and successful will continue to deliver value that extends far beyond this pandemic.
Growth mindset: leveling up sales skills
High-growth companies require today’s teams to have a mindset geared toward continuous innovation, constant re-invention, and continual improvement. Enablement teams are in a key position to help their company succeed throughout this fundamental shift. Virtual practice empowers people to learn the skills needed to execute. Teams gain experience to broaden their perspective and their belief in what is possible. This provides the foundation for today’s workforce to be successful. During monumental shifts, reputations are either won or lost. Who on your team is positioned to succeed in times of adversity? How are you helping them execute virtually? The speed of change, the challenge of change management, and speed of content and experience creation are critical to keeping pace with the speed at which a business must move.
Leadership: where deals are either won or lost
This changing world requires a fundamental shift from managing to coaching. Leaders need to be less focused on the rear-view mirror or taking over a deal, to be more of a guide who provides suggestions. Companies, like Chamberlain, Schlumberger and Farmers, who have made this shift find it accelerates revenue. Leaders and coaches drastically impact performance in a positive way. The beauty of coaching excellence is that it is never about you. It is about discovering the individual strengths of the person you are coaching. It is about using that experience to turn those strengths into a solution that provides real value to clients. A coaching culture is required to develop rock stars and innovators in the next year. Leading-edge companies gain insights into the coaching capabilities of their leaders. They are then able to use these insights to level up their leaders and align these capabilities to accelerate a positive cultural change within their organization.
Sales productivity, capability and results: where opportunities are either won or lost
Readiness only gets you so far. Your most successful reps are driven by emotion. How do you challenge your team or plan to do so in 2021? How are you evaluating productivity and capability so you can bridge skill gaps? Everyone learns differently, so how are you handling continual training virtually and differently? Revenue leaders must see stronger correlations between programs and outcomes, and quantifiable insights. Furthermore, it is critical to have the right mix of up-front, just-in-time, coaching, reinforcement. This effectively delivers the largest return on investment when the company scales and expands these behaviors across the sales organization. As business leaders aggressively look for strategies to increase output while keeping costs in check, having the right mix positively impacts performance.
In 2021, teams need the right foundation, info, tools, and confidence to be at their best. The goal is for enablement to provide the formula for the best customer outcomes. Doing so provides the roadmap to drive the choices, systems, and behaviors that drive effective selling. It also will enable your teams to sell more, better, faster, and easier in order to ensure company and customer success.
Sales leaders at most high-growth companies are constantly training and upskilling their teams to be more effective in the field and/or hiring new talent and ramping up them faster so they can start selling and closing deals as soon as possible. Sales Leaders can drive better effectiveness in sales and achieve their team quotas faster by leveraging readiness data to assess the readiness of their reps and then working to drive the right knowledge, skills, and behaviors. In fact, Gartner studies show that coaching effectiveness leads to a 19% improvement in sales performance. Informed by its comprehensive data-driven readiness platform and years of experience in helping to build world-class readiness and enablement programs across multiple industries and Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies, Mindtickle has recently developed more effective and impactful sales manager analytics and reporting to help Sales and Enablement leaders drive sales efficiency.
Gain a greater level of visibility and insights into your team’s readiness
Sales managers as well as sales leaders play a critical role to get teams ready and ramped up to sell. Greater visibility into their sales team readiness has allowed the sales leadership at one of Mindtickle’s enterprise customers to reduce rep ramp-up time by half, from 12 months to 6 months. Leadership buy-in and visibility into the progress and impact of readiness initiatives through their team’s reports were critical to their success. Mindtickle enabled leaders to share their strategic guidance for enablement programs and for Sales managers to show continuous, incremental improvement in their reps’ readiness performance. Sales managers were more able to quickly identify and remediate readiness gaps among their Sales reps to ensure they’re onboarding & ramping up faster. A faster ramp timer means they can start working on and closing deals faster to bring in revenue sooner and more efficiently.
This company found that while launching a new product across global markets to the existing salesforce, the real-time visibility into the progress and gap insights enabled leaders to take corrective actions. The leaders worked with the management teams of the specific geographies and drove adoption and certification on product knowledge programs. Simplified and contextual real-time reporting for sales managers and leaders helped them benchmark and track their teams’ sales readiness.
By using the new Manager team reports, Enablement teams can provide their sales and other organizational leaders a greater level of visibility and insights into their teams’ readiness with just one click. These actionable reports allow leaders to identify gaps, slice and dice the data across their teams, and take corrective actions as needed to help improve team readiness. What’s more, greater functionalities in Mindtickle’s Manager Reports make tracking enablement programs easier to view, filter, customize, and confidentially share as needed across the organization.
In short, Mindtickle Manager Reports provide Managers and leaders real-time access to roll-up reports covering contextual enablement and readiness initiatives so they can benchmark progress and quickly resolve any factors affecting the readiness of sales or customer-facing teams. Use cases include:
Reducing ramp-up time: Leaders get granular visibility into the progress of their teams’ onboarding to identify and resolve roadblocks or address any lagging deficiencies and ensure reps hit quotas faster
Gaining Insights to build a profile of success for your teams: Leaders and Managers can identify behavioral as well as soft and hard skills of the best reps and replicate that ‘profile of success” accordingly across teams
Making readiness initiatives successful: Manager reports automatically align to your organizational structure or org chart to help better drive readiness and enablement with real-time visibility into initiatives aligned with company strategy
Improving the effectiveness of enablement: Get contextual insights into gaps of enablement initiatives among both teams and individuals. This will help Enablement Leaders better understand which reps perform the best and why, as well help determine why other reps are lagging to offer them customized enablement programming to improve their performance
Driving a culture of coaching and accountability: Incorporate a culture of accountability through actionable insights into enablement initiatives, while also developing a culture of coaching for Managers to hone and improve their reps soft and hard skills
Empowering enablement teams: Give enablement teams the ability to easily customize and share their enablement progress reports with stakeholders across the organization
Ensuring teams are on message: Give leaders and managers insight into whether or not teams and/or reps are successfully completing Assessments, Missions, and Coaching sessions, which helps ensure reps are on message and able to have a meaningful conversation that brings value to customers based on the challenges facing their sales/customer-facing teams and industry.
For more information, check with your CSM or contact us to schedule a demo.
There is no denying that 2020 has had an impact on the way by which sales professionals engage with their customers and prospects. The biggest shift is the obvious one – the elimination of face-to-face meetings, being replaced with remote meeting platforms. Sales professionals and buyers alike have quickly accepted and adopted this new reality. In fact, in a recent McKinsey & Company study, 80% of B2B decision makers surveyed prefer a sales model where there are more “remote human interactions” or digital self-service instead of in-person. Cited reasons are safety due to the Covid-19 pandemic, ease of scheduling, and expediting the buying experience.
The motivating news is that those same buyers believe the new sales model is just as or more effective than the face-to-face model. When it comes to the level of spend, it is not materially impacted by the buyer/selling engagement being conducted remotely. Nearly 70% of those decision makers would spend $50,000 (USD) or more in a completely self-service or remote interaction.
While there is no doubt there has been a shift, this does not mean that you can sell in the exact same manner remotely that you did in person. This fact presents a unique opportunity for sales enablement teams to highlight and further demonstrate their value and strategic importance to the customer-facing teams and organizations they support. Sales enablement can help sales teams become hyper-focused on improving their virtual engagement capabilities and exceeding modern buyer expectations overall.
There are new skills required to conduct virtual meetings to align to this buyer preference, however the core expectations modern buyers have for the sales professionals they engage with haven’t materially changed. I would argue their expectations they had prior to the pandemic are more heightened in a more virtual setting.
THE TOP BUYER EXPECTATIONS
Let’s now link the current research on “how” buyers choose to engage to “what” they expect when engaging with sales professionals. Looking at Miller Heiman Group’s (Now part of Korn Ferry) most recent Buyer Preferences Study, B2B buyers surveyed have the following four expectations for the sales professionals they engage with above all others:
Deep understanding of the decision maker’s business: Sales professionals should consistently conduct the appropriate research about their customer’s business and the individuals they engage within each customer meeting
Demonstrate excellent communication skills: The sales rep must be “crisp, compelling, and concise in every customer engagement”
Focus on the post-sale: Sales reps should consistently articulate, with all stakeholders on the buying side, what happens after the sale (i.e. sharing the vision what happens after the contract is signed, how is the solution implemented, what to expect once the customer takes delivery of solutions purchased, etc.)
Provide decision makers with insights and perspective: Sales reps are expected to educate the buyer in each engagement
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend all of my Sales Enablement colleagues (sales professionals and leaders as well) read this data-rich and eye-opening study. It will provide context to the 3 opportunities we’ll review below that we have in Sales Enablement to better support our customer-facing colleagues to exceed buyer expectations.
We could try to tackle 10 or 15 challenges and do them at a satisfactory level. Or we can be laser-focused on the critical few and execute on them exceptionally well, which in my experience typically yields better outcomes. As such, I am choosing to focus on 3 key elements that rise to the top of my organization’s priorities:
1) Onboarding: Defining what your organization considers a fully onboarded customer-facing team member to accelerate ramp appropriately
Whether your sales onboarding program is several weeks or months, no one would deny the desired outcome is to ensure your new sales reps reach revenue productivity as quickly as possible. But what does your organization consider as being a fully onboarded sales rep? This is clearly a journey and not an event and I recommend you start with the end in mind by collaborating cross-functionally and deciding on clearly defined KPIs and milestones that align to your organization’s definitions of an ideal sales rep, sales engineer, or customer success rep.
To ensure your constituents are learning and retaining knowledge over longer periods of time. I suggest a hybrid onboarding model including on-demand e-learning courses, benchmarking, assessments, video-based certifications, leader interactions, and when we can, in-person classes. Layer the continuous education to consistently reinforce what they learned previously and build incrementally.
Your onboarding program shouldn’t become a “check-the-box” exercise of items to complete where magically you produce a fully ramped sales rep. It should be a program that is challenging, aligned to their role, engaging, true to their real world, and be consistently reinforced.
Think of your new hire ramp program in this way: No matter the duration of your formal program, it is an allotted amount of dedicated time that your new hire will never be afforded again to invest in themselves so thoroughly. To that end, it’s imperative it be a program that is measured, consistently reinforced, entrenched with adequate skills training on how to exceed buyer expectations, and aligned to your sales and organization’s strategy.
Some questions to consider with respect to your onboarding program to support exceeding buyer expectations:
How does your current onboarding program currently set your sales reps up for success to align to the buyer expectations we reviewed previously?
Does it prepare them to plan for and execute on successful customer engagements through videoconferencing such as Zoom or Teams?
Are they provided proper soft skills training to help them sharpen their communication skills to be better communicators during customer engagements?
Are your new hires taught how to conduct proper research ahead of customer meetings such as making it a common practice to read annual reports, 10-Qs, or leveraging LinkedIn to learn more about key stakeholders they might meet with? To ensure at each customer engagement your sales reps demonstrate they are well-versed in their customer’s business, industry, market, and current or future strategic imperatives.
Do they properly learn throughout your onboarding program how to properly educate and provide valuable insights at each engagement whether by video, email, or phone?
2) Effectively Developing Sales Teams by establishing a Coaching Culture
A first-line sales leader’s job is one of the most difficult in sales. The two primary objectives of a first-line leader are to help their team make their number and develop their people. Both objectives are strongly connected. What’s unfortunate is that often these leaders are underinvested in and not adequately trained on the skills to make that jump from highly successful sales rep to a people leader in the sales org.
An area of focus for sales enablement (in partnership with senior sales leadership and HR) would be to define the ideal profile for a successful first-line leader within your organization. What are the skills, competencies, level of EQ, and so on required? Secondly, once defined if your organization does not have a proper sales coaching program or framework by which to align to and upskill your first-line leaders, as an enablement team it’s never too late to build basic elements to support your first-line leaders to better execute on the two primary objectives.
For example, it could prove to be a quick win to establish a light framework and coaching model where first-line leaders can help develop their teams to improve communication skills, how to best conduct customer research and align to the other buyer expectations we discussed.
Here are some questions to consider about Coaching:
Are your first-line leaders actively and continually developing their teams? What is the established cadence in which they engage team members for coaching opportunities? Such as weekly 1×1’s, post-call de-briefings, after “ride-alongs”, and periodic opportunity reviews. Having the right cadence provides the windows of opportunity for coaching to take place.
If you feel your organization’s leader does actively coach, how do you measure and/or track coaching moments that are focused on developing sales reps to better align to your key buyers’ expectations?
How are their sales reps progressing in improving their sales skills over time?
Are all reps being developed in a consistent manner across the company aligned to your ideal buyer and their expectations?
3) Aligning Enablement Services to the Buyer’s Journey to Exceed Buyer Expectations
Lastly, we should strongly consider all the points mentioned above as well as how our holistic Enablement services we offer align to our buyer’s journey to further ensure we prepare our sales teams to exceed buyer expectations. Too often I see Enablement teams focus their services on the beginning stages of their sales process or simply offering product training, sales onboarding, competitive intelligence, or all the above. While this is foundational, we should expand upon the initial sales stages and focus our energies on aligning our services to our ideal buyer’s journey, end-to-end.
If our objectives are to exceed buyer expectations, improve the buyer experience and build ongoing trust and credibility, we should ensure that our enablement services (and our sales process to that end), is aligned to the full buyer’s journey. Keep in mind that the journey does not end when the customer signs the contract. Their journey has just begun and is filled with uncertainty if they made the correct buying decision and if outcomes they were assured will be realized.
Remember one of the top four B2B buyer expectations is to focus on the post-sale. While this is more specific to showing your buyers a vision (during the buying cycle) of what happens after a customer signs the contract such as how will your solution be implemented, you would also focus enablement services on those who engage with the customer during the life of the contract. For example, account managers, customer success managers or both if your organization has them. Supporting these teams to execute on customer centric QBRs to ensure your customers are getting past value delivered (getting the expected value for the solutions/services they purchased) or uncovering new opportunities within your install base.
Some questions to consider focused on aligning Enablement services to your ideal buyer’s journey:
Does your current sales process reinforce your organization’s ideal sales behaviors and customer-centric selling actions that align to your end-to-end buyer’s journey?
What content do you currently develop that aligns to your ideal buyer’s journey and helps those buyers gain insights and perspective? Such as what valuable content can your sales reps share with prospects or customers that helps educate them or shows your thought leadership during the entire buying cycle?
How do you leverage technology to offer your customer-facing teams the right content at the right time during your entire sales process?
What services does your enablement team offer to ensure your sales teams conduct proper and ongoing customer discovery throughout the sales pursuit?
Do you provide a level of consistency in how your sales, sales engineers, and customer success teams are trained so when they engage with customers during the buyer’s journey there is uniformity in messaging, approach, and process?
TAKING ACTION NOW
What I highlighted in this article does take a level of effort and support, not only by your enablement team but by others cross-functionally within the organization. While offering enablement services to align to buyer expectations might seem like a large undertaking, it doesn’t have to be. There are quick wins that can be achieved, and you can expedite your efforts with the appropriate sequencing of priorities for your organization and/or by engaging a technology partner to support you. As the B2B sales landscape continues to rapidly change, organizations must accelerate their efforts investing in their customer-facing teams with the objective of exceeding buyer expectations. The positive performance gains by doing so are proven in the research. The question is if your enablement services and organization are not currently aligned to exceed buyer expectations, are you ready to take the first step in that direction today?
