The Virtual Business Review as Your Strategic Cornerstone for Driving Revenue: A CRO’s Perspective

According to a recent Gartner CSO report, customer engagement remains critical in addressing both market downturns and demand rebounds. Because of this, executing a scheduled or emergency Business Review (e.g. QBR) is one of the most powerful strategic actions sales, marketing and service line leaders have to strategically re-plan, communicate and set focus on the activities that will drive revenue outcomes for their organization.

Unfortunately, there is typically a disconnect between the strategic intent and the actual execution of a QBR. Sellers oftentimes view the session as a management task, lazily filling out a template the night before their session, and disregard the content and takeaways immediately afterwards so ‘they can get on with their day job’. Presenters drone on, leaving their sales audience glossy-eyed and multitasking. And leadership oftentimes struggle to remain focused and provide consistent, detailed and actionable feedback as the parade of territory and opportunity reviews span multiple hours or days.

So, we all need to flip the script to make your next QBR as strategic as we intend, whether its delivered in-person, remote, or some combination thereof.

Here’s what sales leaders need to do now:

  • In a virtual setting, the break-out of the focus and effort should be as follows: 3/5 for pre-work, 1/5 in-session, 1/5 follow-on, and keep your in-session review to a maximum of 1 day, with 50% of that day spent on ‘state of the union’ and other important updates, and 50% of the day on upskilling and up-leveling your team.
  • Move your account and territory reviews into pre-work two weeks prior to the business review. Having your sellers record their presentations and talking points will force them to prepare and helps identify gaps in critical thinking. Mindtickle’s video role play capability provides a forum for practicing, getting automated feedback, and submitting a final presentation that hits the mark while staying on-time.
  • Plan ahead and ensure your reviewers explicitly carve out time to complete the reviews at least 1 week before the live session. This ensures ample time to provide quality reviews. Mindtickle accommodates reviews on web or mobile, making it convenient for reviewers to squeeze in the time they need to complete quality reviews. Mindtickle also allows for in-line comments with the video recording to deliver targeted feedback that emulates live-session interaction. Pre-built reviewer forms and templates also promote consistent, in-depth, and personalized feedback.
  • For the live-session QBR – implement a 3/5 presenter rule: push presenters to condense their presentations to 3 slides and a maximum of 5 minutes which forces them to tailor crisp and concise messaging specifically to the sales audience. Also ensure that each presenter outlines a maximum of 3 takeaways or action items. Use these to formulate post-presentation quiz questions to ensure these items are internalized by the sales team.

At Mindtickle, we’re keen practitioners of the concepts I’ve laid out in this blog–regular business reviews like QBRs are an anchor of our revenue planning and alignment processes. Whether you’re a front-line sales manager responsible for a small team or a seasoned CRO managing a global sea of RVPs and seasoned enterprise account executives and have wondered how you can optimize your upcoming virtual business review initiative, I hope you found the read worth your while.

The Mindtickle team has prepared a comprehensive guide to assist enablement, marketing and sales teams in executing an effective virtual business review. For more information, download our Complete Guide and watch our short video demo to learn how to run an effective virtual business review.

Building the New Millennial Financial Advisor with Sales Readiness

*Editor’s Note: In this blog post, guest author and financial Services and Go-To-Market leader, Cory Haynes (click for LinkedIn profile), shares his thoughts on building and growing a financial services team with the “IG Generation.”

Sitting at a lovely French-inspired restaurant overlooking the Napa River on an unseasonably warm day in Autumn, I spoke with a veteran financial advisor, whom I’ve known many years. I wanted to get his perspective on the Wealth Management Industry, as it has come through the 2008 global financial crisis, the onslaught of robo-advisors, and the greatest wealth transfer in history is taking place as baby boomers transfer their wealth to their children. “The average financial advisor acquired 1.3 net new households; however, our advisors acquired 5.2 net new households”, said Eric Gonzales, Senior Vice President at Merrill for over twenty years. In his time with Merrill, Eric has been quite successful managing a team of twenty advisors and his own book of business This is despite a crowded marketplace of generational wealth family offices, fiercely independent Registered Independent Advisors (RIA), cheaper and increasingly more sophisticated robo-advisors and zero-commission online brokers. Not to mention the demographic shift among his advisors to a younger generation. This shift aligns with the overall industry trend with millennials set to replace the 25% retiring by 2024, according to Cerulli Associates, a leading global research firm for financial services. The majority of advisers industry-wide at end-2017 were between 55 and 64, according to Cerulli. Only around 9% are under 35. For Eric and other leaders in the wealth management space, these statistics highlight a challenge faced by many financial institutions – it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain new talent. 

Merrill Lynch, which is among the largest US wealth managers with 17,657 financial advisers and some $2.9 trillion in client balances, is a great case study for this broader theme playing out across the wealth-management landscape.

To be successful with the next generation, the secret sauce for senior managers like Eric, is finding the right technology and incentives to recruit, train, and nurture current and new financial advisors into exceptional, client-trusted advisors. They need coaching and guidance that can evolve with them at their different career growth stages. “We want to model the behaviors of the best advisors and find the right formula so that others can replicate the behavior. We understand every advisor is different, and their clients and demographics are different but behaviors and actions can be controlled and replicated to produce consistent and positive outcomes,” said Eric.

Efforts to train and retain new advisers are hardly unique to Merrill Lynch, with rival wealth managers grappling with demographic shifts across the wealth-management space. Wells Fargo Advisors introduced their internal “Summit Program” earlier this year, which is designed to encourage retiring financial advisers to sell their books of business within the firm. High failure rates to be sure, churn is common in the classic wealth-management industry. Cerulli Associates’ research says that the industry attracted about 20,000 trainees in 2018, with a failure rate of approximately 75%. Large broker dealers can spend on average $85,000 on training and coaching, which underscores their laser focus to find the right candidate and retain them. Over five years, successful financial advisors can become extremely profitable to the firm. Merrill’s parent company, Bank of America, reported a third-quarter profit that topped Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The wealth-management arm reported record net income of $1.1 billion, a rise of 8% compared with the same time last year.

Most aspiring money managers end up failing early on as the pressure to take on new clients and generate sales burns out newcomers. A pattern among newbie advisers that’s unfolding in Bank of America’s wealth-management unit shows how traditional wealth managers are adapting to that reality. Financial-advisers-in-training at Merrill Lynch who exit its trainee program are now often transitioning to other roles within the firm instead of leaving altogether. This keeps the talent in the firm, but doesn’t erase the deficit of financial advisors.

Managers are clamoring for tools to enable them to coach and guide at scale. They want to employ repeatable and measurable methodology to help financial advisors on prospecting, lead generation, and closing deals. As Eric stated, “A successful financial advisor trainee lifts all boats, the customer is happy, the brand becomes stronger, the firm becomes more profitable, and I have yet another success story to share with new recruits.”  

 As a former financial advisor, I have found that enterprise platforms like Mindtickle can bridge the financial advisor skill gaps in knowledge, compliance and field execution to drive more sales at higher margins. Mindtickle’s Readiness platform enables sellers to develop their capabilities through virtual practice and coaching, empowering them to:

  • Speak with more authority to prospects by building credibility
  • Better handle common situations with video role-plays and simulated customer scenarios
  • Receive effective and continuous 1:1 coaching 

Mindtickle leverages AI and Machine learning to personalize the training and coaching for the financial advisors through a patented data-driven Readiness platform. Nothing can be improved unless it is measured. Out-of-the-box reports can drive enablement with data to:

  • Understand the status of existing enablement programs
  • Easily report on effectiveness to management teams
  • Drive internal compliance

Eric and other wealth managers are grappling with the outsized margin pressures and the seismic demographic shifts in their business. So the demand  for more technology is only increasing. Mobile-first tools that learn and evolve to train and retain might very well help stave off the fully automated solutions and the changing preferences of customers and incoming financial advisors alike.  Leveraging mobile-based training and learning platforms of the future might even empower new financial advisors to simply pull out their phones to do augmented reality prospecting with geo-targeting and simulated financial planning with virtual clients. It’s this type of innovation that will attract and retain Gen Y & Z advisors, but more importantly, it will help them service their clients better as true fiduciaries – doing what’s in the best interest of the client, which is what the business is all about…serving the client.

As the sunlight dances on the river and the din of the restaurant patrons increases, fittingly Eric’s grin widens. He can see a bright future ahead as he embraces this new frontier in technology, which will no doubt give him an edge in recruiting and retention. His KPIs to reduce turnover by 25% and reduce training expenses by 20% will take at least a quarter to realize. In the interim, he can envision his practice exponentially growing — outpacing his industry peers –while maintaining the highest fiduciary standards and trust with his clients. “It’s nice to be on the positive side of the wealth management industry trends and statistics,” smiled Eric.

[Podcast] Transforming Sales Enablement for Ongoing Sales Readiness with Joe Booth from SecureAuth

As the Senior Director of Sales Enablement and Competitive Intelligence at SecureAuth, Joe Booth is responsible for putting the systems and processes in place to ensure reps are effective in the field. Mindtickle was one of the key tools for helping reps find accurate, up to date information that was consistent across the channels and the sales reps were able to find quickly and easily when they needed it.

“Not only are we able to keep content in Mindtickle and keep that very up to date, but we’re also put together training on how to use that content and also training on sales process and onboarding and a lot of the other things that you would expect from a system like Mindtickle to be able to do. But I would say that Mindtickle being able to integrate with our content management system as well as integrating into our CRM has been a huge, huge gain in productivity and efficiency for our sales reps across the organization,” explains Joe.

Joe continues on to discuss how SecureAuth’s enablement program includes sales certifications for passing different kinds of Missions, Mindtickle’s virtual role-play capability, to develop and practice skills such as elevator pitches, demo presentations, or writing prospect-facing emails. For example, “SecureAuth’s Account Executives complete a video role-play with a screen-share scenario presenting their pitch deck. The Sales Engineers practice a screen recording of a demo.” As continuing enablement, Joe is developing various quizzes associated with these different scenarios as well as coaching programs to engage SecureAuth’s leadership in their enablement programs.

In this 30 minute podcast, Joe explains how SecureAuth:

  • Established best practices and periodically ensures reps are on-message
  • Reduced admin overhead and accelerated the onboarding experience with Mindtickle and Salesforce user-sync
  • Ensured consistent adoption of enablement programs through steady stream of communication
  • Plans for the future of partner enablement and onboarding

The Best Sales Training Ideas: Techniques to Ensure Success

We’ve entered a new era of sales training. For many decades, long presentations in classroom environments were the only form of career learning available. But today, sales reps expect more creative and comprehensive career development tools, and customers expect salespeople to be valuable industry experts.

As technology evolves, attention spans decrease and customer knowledge skyrockets. Sales instruction must now include new methodologies that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. Today’s training is fueled by sales enablement technologies, and it’s bolstered by innovative coaching methods.

What is Sales Training?

Sales training is the ongoing process of teaching sales teams how to create profitable, deal-closing interactions with buyers. This may include in-person learning, e-learning, micro-learning, gamification, or other training techniques to help salespeople improve.

Sales training is designed to help sales reps close more deals, of course. But it’s also about teaching reps to build long-term relationships with buyers and guide them to buying decisions that best benefit their organizations as well.

Although the terms are sometimes used synonymously, sales training is not the same as “sales enablement” or “sales coaching.”

Sales enablement is a wide umbrella. While it includes training, it also involves tools, content, processes, and other resources that enable sales reps to be at their best.

Sales coaching is a crucial reinforcer of training. It’s the continuous, one-on-one guidance given to salespeople to fill each individual rep’s specific knowledge gaps.

The Best Sales Training Techniques

There’s no single training plan that works for every sales organization, and it’s beneficial to use a mix of different methods to keep things interesting. There are, however, several training techniques that, when implemented correctly, boost the performance of sales teams. Here are key sales training techniques to consider:

E-learning

Technology and flexible work arrangements continue to change how and where work is performed.

Over 40% of U.S. employees worked remotely for at least part of the time in 2017, up from only 23% in 2003.

and salespeople are no exception. Even when employees are in the office, sales teams are often dispersed throughout different cities, states, and even countries to serve different markets.

Traditional, in-person training is challenging to coordinate, expensive to execute, and requires taking the sales staff away from valuable customer-facing activities for hours or days at a time.

E-learning can take different forms, such as instructor-led classes vs. massive open online courses (MOOCs). These are most commonly used to teach several new concepts in a short span of time, such as during sales rep onboarding or training on a new system.

E-learning eliminates many of the pitfalls of traditional sales training by providing:

  • Anywhere/anytime access: By offering training courses online via the cloud, sales reps can access training materials wherever and whenever is convenient for them. The best e-learning technology also enables learners to take courses from any device, whether desktops, laptops, tablets or phones.
  • Increased sales-rep productivity: The downtime required to travel to a conference center and sit through training would be better served on the front lines with buyers. Because e-learning enables salespeople to take courses whenever their schedules permit, they gain more time to focus on customer relationship building and revenue-generating activities.
  • Cost reductions: Although e-learning requires up-front investment, it ultimately leads to steep cost reductions. Virtual learning reduces the costs of travel, training centers, physical learning materials (like training guides), and the expenses associated with bringing in dedicated trainers.
  • Many engaging formats: E-learning can be as creative and engaging as you want it to be. And in our era of shrinking attention spans, engagement is important. The best e-learning training offers a mix of presentation formats that boost engagement. Examples include video, interactive infographics, whiteboard-style free animations, kinetic text, and challenging-yet-fun assessments to test the learner’s knowledge.
  • Attractive perks for top talent: Companies with the most convenient and robust learning opportunities can win top talent better than competitors. Sales training offers career and skill development—something that millennials want and expect from their employers. A sales organization that offers 24/7 access to industry-leading training materials can highlight their commitment to ongoing improvement in the recruiting process.

Micro-learning

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Micro-learning is the practice of offering bite-sized, always-accessible, individualized training content to employees. This practice uses small learning opportunities to reinforce key concepts and drive employee development.

Micro-learning is often focused on one topic or problem, and it is easily searchable so employees can find information on the right topic at the right time. Micro-learning may incorporate a range of content types, including quizzes, videos, games, simulations, audio clips, and more.

Micro-learning taps into a key principle of how humans learn: the more we repeat and use information, the more ingrained it becomes in long-term memory. Research also shows that information is retained more effectively when it is spread over a longer period of time, compared to when the information is presented all at once.

Not only does micro-learning aid in the learning process, but it also saves precious time and helps the learner absorb information in a way that’s fun and engaging.

Here are some important benefits of micro-learning:

  • Retain more training information: Conventional e-learning typically covers numerous training objectives in one lengthy course. This can create “information overload,” causing reps to struggle to retain a wide range of concepts. Micro-learning flips this tactic on its head by presenting the learner with short-and-sweet training modules.
  • Fit into busy reps’ schedules: Each training module is quick, fun, and engaging. It focuses on one learning objective, with one vital concept to remember, and then ends. The learner can then either take another training module or go about their day with that one newly-learned concept in mind.
  • Identify knowledge gaps and track progress: Advanced micro-learning platforms provide the ability for sales leaders to identify reps’ knowledge gaps, assign training to fill that gap, and track the reps’ progress in that area.
  • Customize and personalize training programs: With larger sales teams, there are numerous knowledge gaps to fill. Traditionally, the way to deal with knowledge gaps was to present dozens (or even hundreds) of reps with one lengthy training session in an attempt to cover every possible need. With micro-learning, sales coaches can assign the exact modules needed to fill every rep’s knowledge gaps. This approach boosts efficiency, saves time for the entire sales team, and gives reps a more customized approach to development.
  • Provide information that is relevant here and now: Sales training should be refreshed frequently to accommodate the latest product knowledge, buyer insights, and industry trends. Traditional classroom materials or even e-learning can take months to update. Micro-learning modules, on the other hand, can be updated within hours to ensure reps are getting the most relevant information.
  • Improve training completion rates: The longer and more challenging the training, the less likely your reps are to complete the entire program. With shorter, more approachable training that is easy to fit in with day-to-day activities, reps are more likely to start and complete their training modules.
  • Gain a competitive advantage: Companies can gain and cement their competitive advantage by using micro-learning techniques. Dynamic learning opportunities like micro-learning improve the onboarding process, increase productivity, help attract and retain top talent, and require less time to find and update than traditional training materials. All of these benefits together help you build a competitive advantage and deliver more value to customers.

Gamification

Gamification provides something that was once unheard of: training programs that are fun. Training that’s enjoyable and engaging helps the learner retain more of the material for longer periods of time.

When training and assessments are enjoyable, reps are motivated to complete modules even when they’re not assigned to them. This provides for more training opportunities and more reinforcement of key concepts covered in e-learning, micro-learning, or other training formats. When salespeople are motivated to complete more training, the result is a more highly skilled sales team that is prepared to drive revenue growth.

Some of the most effective gamification elements include:

  • Video-game components: Gaming is a familiar format to millennials, who make up the largest share of the U.S. workforce. The gaming format offers fun and engaging challenges to help apply and reinforce what is learned.
  • Leaderboards: Leaderboards and badges add healthy colleague-to-colleague competition to the training mix. Since their achievements can be publicized company-wide, reps receive more recognition and motivation than they did with traditional training courses.
  • Social elements: Newsfeeds and open communication between reps make the gamification experience even more rewarding. Social elements can promote new business connections and profitable interactions (like knowledge sharing and meaningful encouragement) within the sales force.
  • Gamified quizzes: Even quizzes can be fun when they’re turned into games. When reps don’t pass an assessment on the first try, they’re more willing and motivated to play the learning game again to pick up the information they might have missed.

Real-world incentives

Salespeople are goal-driven and competitive by nature. Online training programs should leverage these traits. While many reps complete e-learning courses for their own career development, the right incentives can add motivational fuel to the fire. Here are a few important guidelines:

  • Make sure the incentives are desirable: Incentives can take many forms, like spiffs awarded after meeting a challenging training goal, or gift cards or concert tickets. Anything that will motivate your reps is fair game. Don’t make the common mistake of assuming your team will be motivated by company-branded giveaway items like pens and sport bottles—your reps are more valuable than that, so it’s worth putting time and thought into your incentives.
  • Incentives need to be achievable: If the incentive requirements aren’t attainable, such as earning 100% on all training quizzes for a month, reps will be discouraged rather than motivated. The requirements should be challenging, but reps need to believe they can actually win. Consider running “nearly impossible” incentives alongside achievable ones. For example, earning 85% or higher on all training quizzes this month will earn a standard (but desirable) reward, and landing 100% on all quizzes is worth an even more valuable reward.
  • Get input from sales reps: With larger sales teams, especially when they’re remote, it might be harder to anticipate what kinds of incentives resonate well with your reps. If you’re not sure what to offer, ask reps directly. Consider emailing a questionnaire with a list of rewards to choose from, whether gift cards, a donation to their favorite charity, etc. Then, when a rep earns an incentive, you’ll know their preferences.
  • Deliver the reward immediately: With remote sales reps, make sure the reward is mailed quickly. For reps working in the office, hand-deliver it the day it’s earned, if possible. To maintain the motivation, reps should see training incentives being received as promised.

How a Sales Training Platform Can Help

There are countless approaches to establishing effective sales training and onboarding at your organization. The right training platform can help your reps achieve quotas faster and improve new reps’ time to productivity. Look for a platform that enables you to:

  • Identify your reps’ specific knowledge gaps
  • Assign your reps the right learning paths based on their roles
  • Track onboarding progress with milestones and certifications
  • Provide training modules that incorporate gamification elements

Mindtickle is a trusted sales training platform that enables sales teams worldwide to become more competitive and profitable. Schedule a demo to see how Mindtickle can help you establish and refine your sales training program.

Spaced Reinforcements: Helping Sales Readiness and Enablement Win the Battle Against the Forgetting Curve

Mindtickle Spaced Reinforcements Blog

All too often we “commit” something to memory, only to completely forget that information or a portion of it hours later. We sometimes jokingly blame it on getting older, but these growing knowledge gaps surprisingly have less to do with our age and more to do with the way our brains actually work. There is, in fact, a term for it: the “Forgetting Curve.”

Coined in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, the Forgetting Curve is a mathematical formula depicting the rate at which humans forget information if there’s no attempt to retain it. The formula shows that humans forget approximately 50% of new information within an hour; that number increases to 70% in 24 hours and 90% after 30 days.

Sales and other customer-facing representatives are likely familiar with the phenomenon. As a sales rep, information about products, services, and even industry trends boost credibility and adds value in the eyes of the customer or prospect. This in combination with the skills and behaviors to effectively convey that knowledge elevates the rep to “consultative professional” and can greatly influence customer experience, customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand value. But with the Forgetting Curve working against them, customer-facing reps have a more difficult time retaining information to be seen as a credible authority and attaining that “consultative professional” status. Even more recent research like the 2006 report Spacing Learning Events Over Time: What the Research Says by Will Thalheimer indicates that “spacing is particularly beneficial if long-term retention is the goal.” Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements has emerged as a critical capability to overcome this dilemma.

Spaced Reinforcements is the industry’s only intelligent and adaptive tool that leverages microlearning coupled with spaced repetition, retrieval practice, coaching, and personalization as well as gamification and smart notifications to promote knowledge retention. Leveraging these mechanisms that are automatically delivered at intelligently spaced intervals, Spaced Reinforcements helps reps stay productive and builds their proficiency levels so that they can retain more information and speak with more confidence, credibility, and authority to prospects and customers. More importantly, sales leaders gain insights into the improvement of the sellers across their competencies.

Through Mindtickle’s intelligent and adaptive engine, personalized questions and scenarios are presented based on how individuals respond to the reinforcement process.  For example, if a rep has demonstrated proficiency in a specific area, that area will not repeat as frequently given the individual’s mastery.  Conversely, a rep who requires improvement in an area will see increased frequency in related questions and scenarios.

Mindtickle also makes Sales Enablement and Readiness programs more engaging and fun by awarding points for correct answers and attempts. Representatives earn badges for completed levels within established time periods. At the same time, business leaders gain actionable insights into their team’s proficiency and capabilities so they can identify areas that need more help and can be remediated with training, coaching or other skill-building. And, Spaced Reinforcements can be implemented as part of a Sales Readiness strategy to help sales reps learn complex concepts and stay up to date on ongoing regulatory compliance issues that their financial services and healthcare customers and prospects care most about.

In short, Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements fosters a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing that reduces the knowledge decay depicted by the Forgetting Curve. As a result, reps bring greater value, share more meaningful insights, and address business challenges for their customers and prospects — all leading to more closed deals, revenue, better customer experiences, and greater brand value.

So, the next time you forget to remember something, remember to give yourself a break. Blame it on the Forgetting Curve. Then look into Mindtickle’s Spaced Reinforcements.

For more information, visit the Spaced Reinforcements Solutions Page.

Driving Sales Productivity: Aragon Research Draws the Lines Between Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness and LMS

If there is one thing technology vendors have really nailed, that is content marketing. With each new white paper and e-book, the digital noise aimed at buyers expands. This has been no different with sales enablement and readiness. Vendors and consultants have fallen over themselves to assure prospective buyers that they have worked out defining and differentiating sales enablement, training, sales coaching, sales effectiveness, engagement, readiness and so on. What has been missing is the authoritative voice of an analyst that marries deep practitioner experience with an in-depth understanding of the technology landscape.

The recent Tech Spectrum for Sales Coaching and Learning Report by Aragon Research is a timely and insightful snapshot of the sales training and coaching imperative as well as the technology solutions landscape. It is timely because of a renewed effort by learning platforms to co-opt sales readiness as a learning initiative and insightful because it provides a valuable framework to separate point solution pretenders from proven platforms purpose-built for sales readiness.

While this report certainly validates Mindtickle’s singular focus on tying the success of our platform to measurable capability (what reps say and do), more importantly, Aragon Research’s report lays out the interplay between sales enablement, corporate learning, and sales readiness. And at the same time, it also highlights mission-critical priorities for coaching and applied learning in the flow of work.

Mindtickle is pleased to sponsor access to the report for anyone that doesn’t have access to Aragon’s library and I invite a dialog with fellow practitioners on what I thought were three key areas the report did a particularly good job of drawing out:

  • A rubric for evaluating enterprise-readiness offerings that are winning the battle for enterprise
  • A persuasive argument for why and how sales teams should break away from corporate learning standards
  • Sales capability indexing for real-time measurement and monitoring of revenue potential.

Defining the hallmarks of a good solution provider in the modern space

Aragon Research establishes specific evaluation criteria around company leadership, including proven customer experience, company viability, product vision, and delivery, and committed R&D as a percentage of headcount and spend. Simultaneously, it assesses the product offering itself, covering pricing and packaging completeness, performance, and awareness.
In reading through the report I was struck by the subtext of this section because it underscores observations of the companies that succeed on Mindtickle.

Before determining what an ideal solution might look like, these companies carefully profile their sales teams. For example, we are increasingly seeing the need to balance seller profiles demanding on the go readiness approaches. These sellers are:

  • Increasingly desk-less and remote
  • Focused on learning in the context and in the flow of work
  • Wanting to consume bite-sized information in context, in digital formats

Aragon notes that by extension, a successful platform must not only find new ways to engage sellers in the blocking and tackling of core content learning, but also step away from simply sequencing training, coaching and skill development in proprietary formats. To extend that thought, on personalization and adaptive engagement must become a core requirement. Thirdly, a modern approach must leverage different modalities, methods, and techniques: features like video-challenges, peer-coaching, repetition-based learning, microcontent, community competitions, and others. All of these build engagement, but also lead to a comprehensive, single data model.

How to break away from corporate learning and corporate content management

To maximize their quota attainment, companies should evaluate the potential of their people as customer-facing advocates first, employees second, and as individuals third.

Aragon Research has done the market a very important service by creating a clear separation between corporate or enterprise learning, which has its place particularly for compliance, technical learning and training, and sales learning. The latter of which needs to be acknowledged separately.

With the profile of the modern salesperson in mind, the report showcases why companies need a just-in-time approach. This is a new modality to engage and ready sales giving them the information they need before they realize they need it, as opposed to teaching it to them just in case.

Aragon Research examines why corporate learning and content management are not taking the application of capability in a specified business context, which is what’s really needed to address the problem of sales teams wanting to be better. In their report, they call out critical examples of these business scenarios such as sales onboarding, ongoing sales learning, sales skills development, and sales coaching.

There are specific business scenarios that play out within the lifecycle of the salesperson, and in each of these critical moments, sales needs to know how to tailor their approach toward specific situations. From the time they walk in the door as a new salesperson, to the acquisition of the basic set of skills and knowledge they need to engage the market, to then delivering in the field – salespeople need to be coached in the context of their specific role, business objectives, and everyday job.

As sales teams grow and develop, their learning should grow and develop alongside them.

Identifying capability as a real-time revenue measurement

Finally, the Aragon report sheds light on how identifying capability can be a real-time measure of the revenue power and health of a business.

The real-time aspects of sales productivity extend beyond the real-time experience of the end participant, the salesperson. They also extend to the manager – as well as the executives who are working from HQ. They all need to understand how the sales are performing in real time and how to make micro and macro adjustments when and as necessary.

From a manager’s perspective, they need to know how to get real-time insights into what the salesperson has learned, what customer-facing skills are being invested in and developed, and what how is this being applied in the real world. To get these insights, they might do ride alongs, for example,  so they have real world visibility. And they would be able to evaluate, reinforce, intervene, and remediate. Leveraging things like machine learning to assess and improve phone calls the rep is having with smart recommendations or prescriptive insights can help facilitate the coaching process and outcomes.

Having real-time insights – even if they’re evaluated on a staggered basis – into how the salesperson is responding to these inputs physically and virtually, is incredibly empowering for any team. This sets the stage for incorporating those insights into their engagement with the customer in context, and in time.

Concluding thoughts

In my years of experience in enterprise software, I’ve come to see technology as a journey – not an end in itself. Strategic initiatives like sales readiness cannot be delivered by technology or applications alone. It’s a large-scale, long-term effort both for those actively participating in the space and for those trying to define it.

What reports like the Aragon Research Tech Spectrum help us do is put out a pulse check and a call to arms. While it was gratifying for Mindtickle to be called out as a leader based on our strengths in product, customer focus, and enterprise acquisition, it also calls out all us in the space are here because we perform a mission-critical service to the industry – empowering sellers and buyers to connect on value.

Click Here to Download Your Complimentary Copy of the Research

Mindtickle Partners with Healthcare Sales Performance for Sales Readiness in the Life Sciences Industries

Partners to showcase solution for Sales Readiness at 12th Annual Medical Device & Diagnostic Sales Training and Development event.

SAN FRANCISCO — February 26th, 2019—Mindtickle, the leader in Sales Readiness technology, today announced a partnership with Healthcare Sales Performance (HSP) to help medical device, diagnostic and life science companies increase gross sales, improve team productivity and reduce onboarding and training costs. Through developing, training, coaching and measuring selling behaviors, the partnership enables more efficient and effective sales coaching, boosts new hire productivity and enhances product launches, events and training programs resulting in field effectiveness for life sciences companies.

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Mindtickle. As the healthcare market shifts, it puts pressure on sales organizations to adapt in order to be competitive,” Matt Switzer, co-founder and sales consultant at Healthcare Sales Performance. “That’s why we are so excited to be able to deliver a combination of healthcare-specific methodology, coaching effectiveness and performance analytics to our Life Sciences customers. Our customers will be able to impact sales results with relatively minimal resources and amazing speed of execution.”

The healthcare buying process has changed dramatically and manufacturers can no longer rely on sales relationships to navigate the healthcare buying process, as decisions are less clinical and more economical in nature. BioPharma and Medical Technology manufacturers and distributors must connect sales competencies, knowledge, messaging and skill, and align that with hospital structure, buying process, to reach healthcare customers. The partnership of HSP and Mindtickle offers an industry-specific commercial readiness solution for knowledge transfer, front-line manager coaching and reinforcement that allows reps to be competitive in the markets and close more sales

“There’s a perfect storm of market forces ranging from the increasing power of IDN and group-based purchasing to reliance on clinical evidence impacting the buying the hospital process. Reps must be continuously readied with online learning and coaching to have value-driven conversations tied to patient outcomes. This requires a modern approach blending technology and experiences to guide life sciences companies on the right mix of skills and behaviors to make salespeople successful,” said Gopkiran Rao, senior vice president of strategy and go to market at Mindtickle. “With HSP and Mindtickle, life sciences companies can measurably drive the knowledge, capabilities, and engagement required to drive better outcomes.”

Mindtickle is pleased to be a Gold Sponsor of the 12th Annual Medical Device & Diagnostic Sales Training and Development event, February 26-27 at the Sheraton Charlotte in North Carolina. Tom Griffin, Sr. Director, Commercial Strategy Execution at Endologix will be joined by Pam Switzer from HSP for a discussion on Wednesday the 27th entitled Blended Learning Best Practices That Boost Knowledge Retention. In this session, attendees will learn from Endologix about their journey in transforming key commercial readiness and related sales training initiatives across sales onboarding, product launches, field updates and how they put their sales training strategy on a modern footing. The presentation will showcase the programs, methodologies, and a new partnership that combines healthcare sales methodology with sales enablement and readiness technology.

For more information about the partnership and joint solution, you can learn more here.

About Healthcare Sales Performance

Healthcare Sales Performance (HSP), Inc. is a research, training and sales performance company committed to the advancement of healthcare through supporting the introduction of innovation to the marketplace. For over 25 years, HSP has consulted with the generators of healthcare innovation and healthcare providers to improve collaboration, adoption of change and outcomes for vendors, health systems and patients.

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle provides a comprehensive, data-driven solution for sales readiness and enablement that fuels revenue growth and brand affinity. Its purpose-built applications, proven methodologies, and best practices are designed to drive effective sales onboarding and ongoing readiness. With Mindtickle, company leaders and sellers can continually assess, diagnose and develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to effectively engage customers and drive growth. Companies across a wide range of industries use Mindtickle’s innovative capabilities for on-demand, online training, bite-sized mobile updates, gamification-based learning, coaching and role-play to ensure world-class sales performance. Mindtickle is a global, privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Visit them at www.Mindtickle.com.

Media Contact:
Public Relations at Mindtickle
[email protected]

Should Virtual Classrooms Replace In-Person Events to Keep Valuable Reps in the Field?

With demand on the rise for measurable sales skills training that keeps reps in the field, companies are turning to virtual classroom experiences as a replacement for in-person events. But should they be? Or do the same flaws of the traditional classroom-only approach get exacerbated in a virtual classroom environment?

The issue? Changes in the modern seller profile are creating challenges as teams move towards being desk-less, digital, and distant.

When thinking about virtual selling, how often do you take time to consider the ways in which your team might be struggling with job-specific training? Truth be told, this is something many companies are starting to realize – and address.

According to research from CVI4 out of 5 salespeople aren’t getting the skills training they need – and while some attribute this to budget limitations, the majority blame time-out-of-field constraints. It also makes sense that oftentimes, managers end up choosing training that isn’t very flexible or individually-specialized. So, how are companies thinking of tackling this?

Virtual training gives your team different kinds of opportunities – ones that with their flexibility and timeliness, can actually increase productivity in the long-run. Take custom scheduling for example: when training activities fit into your sales teams routines without disrupting their flow, learning can actually become much more continuous.

Teams benefit and learn on a daily basis with ongoing reinforcement videos, opportunities to review and compare with peers, and revisit key concepts on demand. Coaching becomes more comprehensive too: reviewers and managers have a renewed flexibility to review and provide more detailed feedback on assignments.

But the most impressive finding from CVI research is the fact that virtual training increases sales reps confidence twice as much as traditional classroom training. This is huge if you add to this the typical cost savings gained with virtual training sessions.

Running a successful virtual training program, however, requires a different approach. It is not enough to upload your traditional training content online and share it with everyone. The truly impactful virtual programs follow a framework consisting of:

  1. Identify knowledge and skills gaps
  2. Plan and deploy  personalized programs
  3. Enable practice and feedback
  4. Leverage guided coaching

To learn more about this framework for virtual training and the details behind what make for successful programs, watch the online recording of where Gopkiran Rao, SVP Strategy at Mindtickle, and Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Visions, explore a virtual training approach that breaks free of classroom constraints altogether.

Click here to watch now.

SalesHacker: Sales Training is Only One-Third of What You Need to Be Doing for Sales Enablement

 

In a recent article by SalesHacker, Mindtickle’s Manager of Enablement, Ashley Philipps, discusses what sales training and sales enablement have in common – and how successful sales enablement can get you ahead of the game.

The key takeaway? While sales training is ideally suited for onboarding new hires and getting them up to speed, sales training alone can’t help to move the revenue dial. In the article, she writes, “At the end of the day, sales training in and of itself is only a portion of the overall solution that an organization needs to be adopting.”

Ashley outlines what sales enablement is, as well as what it isn’t, and cites some important statistics from a recent Forrester tech sales report. This discussion brings to light just what exactly you and your organization should expect from a successful sales enablement initiative.

Among the many functionalities and tools sales enablement should deliver are an overview of reps’ competencies and capabilities, as well as rigorous alignment with business goals. Some questions a successful program will help you answer:

  • What do my reps know?
  • How are they talking about the company and the offering?
  • How are they handling objections or concerns?
  • Are they capable of creating an environment conducive to selling?

After reading this article, you’ll be a step closer to equip your team with the skills, behaviors, and knowledge they need to succeed today.

To learn more about the do’s and don’ts of sales enablement, read on here!

6 Reasons Your Managers Need Sales Leadership Coaching

coaching_the_sales_coach

We know that sales coaching is an important part of sales management. It helps your reps become better salespeople overall, improves their skills, increases their engagement with your organization and, of course, improves your topline revenue. Studies have found that effective sales coaching programs can improve sales reps’ performance by up to 20%. But many managers actually don’t know how to coach well. Despite their abundance of experience as a rep, the promotion to a management role doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with specialized training.

Effective sales coaching isn’t about occasionally auditing your reps’ activities, or giving some in-person feedback every once in a while, but about building a regular cadence to provide useful, insightful and specific coaching in areas where individual reps need help. After all, coaching sales reps can be tricky for management because each individual has unique areas that they excel and others where they need extra guidance.

Here’s the thing: Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are one of the fastest growing teams inside B2B sales organizations. But when you look at some of the data about these specialized sellers you find out that over 80% of them have less than 2 years of experience and their average tenure at companies is 1.5 years, according to the Bridge Group.

This presents a few challenges for sales managers. First, very inexperienced sales hires require a lot of information about industry, processes, methodologies and overall basic sales knowledge than your tenured salesperson, and their short tenures mean you will be constantly onboarding new sales development reps which may strain your onboarding program but most importantly, you need to ensure extremely short ramp times.

To best enable the SDR team you have to think of your enablement program as more than just onboarding. Having a great sales onboarding program is great and the best way to ensure quick success for the SDR but think of it more holistically including:

  • Ongoing knowledge reinforcement
  • Experiential training and practicing
  • Coaching and career development

For example, if your rep has five areas where they need coaching, how do you know if their sales managers can address every single one? And how do you prepare your managers to find these gaps in the first place? Perhaps they’re great at pipeline management but struggle when it comes to deal coaching.

Given the breadth of the role of sales manager, it’s simply not possible for them to know how to coach sales reps on everything. But, just like their reps, they need sales leadership coaching so they can fill their own gaps.

Look in the “too hard” basket

Another issue that all sales leaders deal with at one point or another is “avoidance”. If something is difficult to do, or someone simply doesn’t know where to start, it’s much easier to put it in the “too hard” basket and forget about it until something bad happens.

Trying to coach sales reps only in adversity, like when they’ve just lost a big deal, is hard for both the manager and the rep. After all, no one wants attention just because they haven’t done their best, and coaching isn’t about yelling at someone for not performing. It’s about encouraging and developing reps to be their best.

That’s why it’s sales leadership coaching is so necessary; it’s important to ensure sales managers are coached to provide their teams with the skills and behaviors they need,  proactively rather than reactively.

So what exactly is sales leadership coaching?

Before we get into the detail of how to help your sales managers learn how to coach their reps, it’s important to differentiate between coaching, training, and managing.

  • Management is about overseeing things and making sure they stay on track.
  • Training focuses on learning new knowledge.
  • Coaching is about developing skills, improving performance and/or changing behaviors.

Sales coaching is the ongoing, one-on-one mentorship of each rep on a sales team. It is a conversation between the rep and a coach, where the rep does most of the talking while the coach listens, observes, and offers feedback.

It’s not about telling someone what to do, but about helping them look at different ways to achieve better results. When done well, sales coaching can drive sales’ productivity and effectiveness.

1. Develop a coaching framework

The first step in helping managers learn how to become an effective sales coach is to develop a sales coaching framework. But beware, there is no one-size-fits-all solution because every business is different. To work out what your coaching framework should include why not ask your sales reps what they need. Speak to your sales managers to find out what they would find useful, and ask your executives about the overall objectives.

This information can then be used to build your aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching. This framework is tailored to your organization’s needs while ensuring you cover the necessary aspects of sales coaching including knowledge, messaging, sales skills, process, and execution rigor and discipline. While no sales coaching program will be identical, it’s critical that each ensures that managers have:

  • The knowledge required to coach in all the areas
  • The skills to actually coach
  • The tools required to build a cadence for coaching
  • The discipline to execute the coaching framework consistently

2. Put the sales coach into training

Once you’ve identified the key areas that your salespeople need coaching, you’ll need to identify whether your managers have the requisite skills. The best way to ensure managers have the knowledge and skills to coach is to provide them with formal training. There are many ways this can be done, from formal in-class training to peer to peer learning.

Football coaches have to be certified before they get to coach players. In fact, the process for certifying a football coach is thorough, with several levels, depending on the experience of the coach and the level of the players they seek to coach. It should be the same for sales coaches.

One of the most effective ways to coach is to give both the reps and their managers the same information and knowledge and make sure they are certified in key areas. This ensures they have the same baseline knowledge, and the certification ensures they have absorbed the information and are able to apply it.

For example, one of our customers, a high growth tech company was launching a new product and wanted to ensure their sales team delivered a consistent message to prospects. To enable their sales managers to coach sales reps through this they first certified them on how to sell the product themselves. This ensured that they knew exactly what the reps had to do, and when combined with their own experience and skills were prepared to coach their teams effectively.

When this approach is complemented by guidance on how to coach, it can be powerful.

Provide live examples to managers on how to have coaching conversations. Help them understand what they should be looking for and what areas to focus in on for the greatest impact. Provide them with the opportunity to role-play their coaching so they can play it back and learn from it.

3. Leverage reporting and tools

All the training and practicing in the world won’t be of any use to a sales manager if they’re going into their coaching sessions blind. That’s where good reporting on the right things is critical. When determining what they should be coaching sales reps on, most managers just look at lagging indicators like pipeline activity and what deals reps have won or lost. But this doesn’t always provide enough useful data. That’s where efficiency and capability indicators are important.

While effectiveness indicators look at the behaviors that sales reps can demonstrate to drive lagging indicators. Coaching is about behaviors, not quotas, this qualitative information needs to be available to managers so they know what to coach on.

This information can be identified by bringing together information from several places, whether it’s from a CRM, sales enablement software or competitive intel. The key is giving managers the tools that can help them identify which indicators to look at and access to get the right information.

For example, if you’re looking at what the indicators are for salespeople who win deals, your sales enablement software can provide you with information on what content your best reps are accessing before a big meeting. This may provide data about what behaviors are correlative with winning deals, and in turn what behaviors may need to change in order to improve the results of some of your reps.

With useful data-driven reports in hand, managers are able to identify what specific areas individual reps require coaching in, and start working on improving their behaviors and results.

4. Mentor the coach

With the right tools, your sales managers will be much better equipped to coach. But they will still need to learn how to use tools to achieve the best effect. One of the best ways to learn coaching is to learn from peers. Your sales reps buddy up, so why not “buddy up” your sales managers? With role models to help mentor and demonstrate good practice, managers will be able to ask questions and share their knowledge with their peers.

While mentoring and buddying is usually a one-on-one activity, you can encourage collaboration and peer-to-peer learning amongst the management team by bringing them together. Some of our customers have organized manager workshops that give sales managers the opportunity to share what works and what doesn’t in a supportive and collaborative environment.

It’s also a great idea to encourage managers to share their coaching wins with the entire sales team. This has a dual impact for allowing the sales organization to learn from what works, and also demonstrates the value of coaching to any skeptics.

5. Provide regular feedback from executives

If your organization has a sales coaching culture then your sales leadership will want to know how your sales managers are performing. Rather than observing from afar, they should be encouraged to see how managers are coaching regularly and provide their own feedback and insight to the team or when appropriate, even individuals. By getting involved they can demonstrate just how important the sales coaching program is to the success of their sales team, and in doing so, boost engagement in the process.

6. Incentivize successful coaches

Along with executive buy-in, rewards and incentives are another good way to engage sales managers. While successful sales managers are incentivized when their team meets quota, how often are good sales coaches recognized or incentivized?

Consider adding in a coaching specific incentive to your KPIs for encouragement for those who learn how to coach well. When used as part of a structured coaching program, these six steps will ensure that you give your sales managers the knowledge, skills, and discipline to coach consistently.

Concluding thoughts

Ultimately, more than helping SDRs craft an email or hone their pitch, sales enablement training for a manager can help them coach their reps based on the competency model that was developed (or recruit the managers to help craft it). Part of the problem most companies face is not giving good guidance for managers on what to coach their teams on and ensuring all managers are consistently coaching their teams on an ongoing basis. While this can be tricky to implement initially, some organizations turn to Coaching Reports in the form of an Excel file, Word document or similar which although well-intentioned end up being a burden for the managers and makes it difficult for the enablement team when it comes time to compile information and glean insights from it.

Finally, technology here can help as well. With the ability to create electronic coaching forms that follow a competency profile and different online forms for different coaching situations you can ensure managers are all following the same guidance and the data collected can be analyzed and shared back with the managers to show them how their teams are doing in their expected competencies as well as guide the managers to where more coaching is needed.

The ultimate takeaway here is that it’s extremely important to treat your sales manager training differently from all others –making sure to tailor each program to the needs of your particular reps based on their experience, tenure, and skill level will help your managers’ coaching significantly both in the short and the long run.