Episode summary

At Data Axle, sales enablement is a crucial focus. However, the team needed a modern solution to deliver onboarding and ongoing training. Sal Pecoraro, SVP, of Client Technology Solutions at Data Axle, outlines how the Data Axle team uses Mindtickle’s complete Revenue Productivity Platform to ensure its sellers are ramped up quickly and always ready to close any deal.

Pecoraro uses Mindtickle to develop the company’s Ideal Rep Profile (IRP), the core set of skills and competencies a rep needs to win. In particular, he talks about how much the team relies on Mindtickle’s Call AI to understand better what’s happening in the field and coach sellers toward better outcomes. In this video, Pecoraro talks about how Data Axle and Mindtickle work to build a sales enablement approach that’s built on data.

Key highlights of Data Axle and Mindtickle partnership

• The combination of training and using Call AI is powerful: Getting value from listening to calls and getting visibility into keywords, filler words, important terms, and phrases. Helping managers understand what’s happening on calls and where to coach reps.
• Sellers can focus better during calls: Call AI transcribes calls and identifies sentiment so sellers don’t have to. During calls, they can be more present and can go back afterward into recordings to focus on each part of the sales process. At the same time, other teams have visibility into what’s happening on calls.
• Call scoring floats good and bad calls to the top of the queue: Because Data Axle gets knows which calls went well and which didn’t, they’re able to work with sellers to course correct where necessary.
• Defining competencies has been key: The Data Axle team looks at performance on quizzes and certifications and how those same sellers perform in the field. They’re using those insights to drive decision-making about training programs.
• They’ve seen double-digit improvements: Their onboarding time has shrunk by 30-35% and now that they’re measuring sales readiness, they are confident 80% of their sellers are prepared to sell.

Video transcription

We have our sales executives and our BDR team are both leveraging this system, we found that the combination of the training that we were able to do with it, as well as the call AI, to get some metrics on performance has been really very helpful.

They’re getting some great value out of looking at the statistics like understanding what calls are happening based on keywords, getting some industry standard information back things like speech patterns and filler words, things like keywords that we’ve tagged for important terms and phrases that we’ve been looking for.

And it’s really helping the managers get in there and understand what’s happening to cause and which reps to help and focus on previously, there had to be a lot of translation, people were not really paying attention to the call, they were focused on taking furious notes, they were trying to translate the sentiment of the call. And now they can actually capture the information, focus on the call, have the transcript to go back, and even have the voice conversation, which is searchable.

It helps them go back and focus on the important parts of the sales process and also lets the other teams get the information that they need as well call scoring is great because it floats those good calls and bad calls to the top of the queue. So we’ve got the metrics in place now.

When we see that calls are scored low, we’re able to jump and look at those calls and understand what’s happening. And then, you know, apply the effective measures to correct those on future calls.

We feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of defining the competencies we want our reps to demonstrate. Now we’re in the process of gathering the metrics. I’m excited to know we’ll be able to determine if people have a good understanding of things and perform well on tests, and may not perform well in the real world ongoing in their actual sales performance.

So I think the future is to have a tool like this that can both manage your training, but also call analyze what’s actually happening in real sales, real-world sales calls. It’s something that we’re really becoming dependent on. So it’s a tool that we like we’re adopting more and more.

Me personally, I can’t live without it. It’s something that’s a go-to tool to understand what’s happening and to affect the outcomes. From initially the onboarding process, we’ve seen our onboarding times shrink maybe 30-35% faster onboarding,

Just from having a structured methodology, we find that our training sessions are less haphazard. Adoption is a big KPI. Sales readiness percentage-wise, I think we’re probably in the high 80% right now with sales we feel are qualified.

I give the Mindtickle team five stars. It’s been a fantastic experience.

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Want to learn more about the Data Axle story and how they’re simplifying sales enablement and gaining actionable insights with Mindtickle? Download the full Data Axle case study here.