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How does Data Drive Content Adoption and Learner Engagement?

Malini Sakhrani on June 29, 2017

Did you know that

up to 80%

of all content produced for sales teams is never used? By leveraging microlearning and knowledge retention techniques in your sales enablement programs you can drive content adoption and learner engagement and ensure your investment is not wasted.

What is microlearning?

Microlearning, or bite-sized learning, is where information is broken down into smaller chunks so that it’s easier for sales reps to consume and retain. The bite-sized content is also perfect for just-in-time training, which means it’s more likely to be consumed.

A programme of content, or

a “micro-curriculum,” can be drip-fed over days, weeks and months. Leveraging quizzes and knowledge checks, with techniques like repeated retrieval and spaced repetition, sales reps can retain more information long-term.

Who benefits from microlearning today and how?

Millennial salespeople make up a significant portion of the current sales population today. B

2025 it’s estimated that millennials will account for 75%

of the global population. That’s why it’s important to address the preferences of the millennial workforce when implementing sales enablement initiatives, and millennials have a preference for brief, bite-sized content.

But it’s not just millennial salespeople that benefit from microlearning. All sales reps can benefit from microlearning, particularly with busy schedules and distributed locations. But just because information is bite-sized doesn’t necessarily mean it’s engaging. You still need to ensure the content is engaging.

How do you develop engaging content?

There are two common challenges to overcome when creating engaging content:

How long should the content be?

This depends on several factors including:

The demographics of your audience (like age and education level)
The subject matter (is it about new product features, process changes or specific skill development)
How important the content being shared is (is it ‘good-to-know’ or a business imperative)
How frequently the content is updated (is this static or evergreen content, or dynamic information like competitive insights)
How frequently will learners be exposed to this information (is it once-off baseline or onboarding knowledge, or part of ongoing training)

How can you drive learner engagement?

While many consider this question after sales training is completed, this question really should be addressed as the program is being designed. This will ensure the design can incorporate any features that will drive engagement, like knowledge checks.

How does Mindtickle solve these challenges?

Mindtickle is a sales readiness platform that helps high-growth customers like AppDynamics, Nutanix, MuleSoft and Cloudera solve these issues. Our experience gives us access to data (1)

from of over 200,000 sales representatives that span a broad range of demographic parameters – including age, education level, industry and type of sales team set-up (inside, field, BDRs etc.).

To find answers to these questions we conducted a deep-dive analysis to identify trends and best practices for content adoption across industries.

As a part of this analysis, we looked at several factors including the length and type of the content, time spent reading content, and whether the content included assessments. We also conducted additional analysis to find points of relevant correlation and to identify actionable results.

Now, let’s look at our findings for each of the challenges.

Challenge 1: How long should the content be?

Across all industries, salespeople are more likely to complete a module if the document is less than 5 pages long, but this drops drastically when the document contains 15 or more pages.

But the size of the document isn’t the only factor, it’s also important to consider how much information is on each page and how it’s presented. To ensure the information is easier to read:

Use bullet points where possible to reduce text
Summarize content in graphics where possible
Use a complementary palette of colours that’s easy to read
Don’t use images just to add aesthetic value
Limit yourself to one concept per page

Of course, it is sometimes necessary to have longer documents due to the complexity and nature of the content or to achieve the desired learning outcome, but the document can still be made easier to read with these suggestions.

Challenge 2: How can you drive learner engagement?

The concept of ‘Test to Teach’ has been

well-accepted as a preferred alternative

to traditional testing in the context of school education. The same principles apply to adult learners.

In her article

‘

Facilitating Adult Learning: How to teach so people learn

’

, Dr Lela Vandenberg talks about ‘Application and Action’ as an important principle when designing a program for adult learning. She says, “adult learners are busy, practical, and learn by doing. They learn best when:

There is an immediate application for the learning
They participate actively in the learning process
They can practice new skills or test new knowledge before leaving a learning session.”

Our data on sales reps confirm this. We found that sales reps spend more time on modules that included a quiz than those that didn’t. In fact, the presence of a short quiz improves engagement by 34% on average.

Though the overall findings are consistent across industries, the impact on each industry is different.

Including a quiz in the sales training module increased the time spent on a course considerably, particularly in the Pharma, BFS, E-commerce and Electronics industries.

Whether or not you should include intermittent quiz or knowledge checks will depend on the objectives of your sales enablement initiatives. And in case you were wondering, there is a difference between a quiz and a knowledge check. According to

The Training Doctor

A quiz is used to test a learner’s ability to apply content. Their responses are scored based on predefined parameters, with results often recorded and compared to their peers.
A knowledge check is used to review the content a learner has received to ensure learning took place. Learners are usually able to review the content until they feel confident enough to apply this knowledge.

In summary, optimize the engagement and adoption of your sales enablement initiatives by:

Leveraging microlearning – keep content short and to the point, between one to five minutes
Keeping content brief – below 15 pages but preferably less than five pages if possible
Making it easier to read – use bullet points, short sentences and graphics
Using quizzes and knowledge checks

While this analysis provides insights into how content can be made more engaging, it is always important to consider your own specific circumstances. Conducting a similar analysis with your own data will highlight any unique factors that may improve engagement and content adoption amongst your own sales reps.

By leveraging powerful data analytics you can empower your managers to make informed decisions and design more effective sales enablement initiatives. Data analytics will also help you prepare your sales reps for more effective customer conversations and equip them to become true champions for your organization.

Footnotes:

Data Source: Usage Data of 200k+ Sales Reps on Mindtickle from January – April 2017.

Transforming from Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0 and Beyond

Shankar Ganapathy on June 29, 2017

Sales managers are critical to the success of their sales reps. While sales managers are charged with ensuring reps meet their numbers, how they meet their numbers is not as simple as it once was. In the past, focusing in on pipeline and activities was the hallmark of a good sales manager, but the way customers purchase and reps sell has changed, and the role of sales managers has evolved as well.

A highly successful sales manager now invests significant time in coaching their reps to improve their knowledge and skills, drive excellence in execution, and of course keep them on track. Yet businesses often under-invest in their sales managers. Harvard Business Review reported that only 12% of organizations currently invest sufficiently in the development of their frontline sales managers.

Sales managers have a difficult job and yet we often leave them to figure out things on their own.

While the

70/20/10 learning model

says that the majority of learning does happen on-the-job, for managers to develop they still need to receive their 10% of formal learning and 20% through coaching or mentoring. This model just doesn’t work anymore. If we leave our sales managers to work out what they’re doing on their own it may take them years to get it right. Can your sales reps wait that long?

In this day and age that’s simply not good enough. The role of sales is rapidly evolving and we expect much more of our sales reps, so it naturally follows that their leaders also need to evolve.

As we move into the era of Sales 3.0, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help our sales reps adapt to the changing world order. This search should start with taking a good look at the sales managers to make sure they have the skills and tools they need to lead their reps through this change. The time has come for organizations to retire Sales Manager 1.0 and Sales Manager 2.0, and set about enabling Sales Manager 3.0.

Sales Manager 2.0 is no longer compatible with Sales 3.0

Sales Manager 1.0: The expert administrator

Manages sales and administrative tasks
Dealing with complaints or individual issues with sales reps
Executives performance management
Gives feedback on individual issues
Responds to queries by sales leaders

Sales Manager 2.0: The activity generator

Undertakes the same activities as Sales Manager 1.0
plus
Leverages email automation tools to improve productivity
Relies on scaling customer communications to broaden the reach
Focuses on a high turnover with power dialers and other productivity tools

Sales Manager 3.0: The strategist and mentor

Manages sales reps
Ensures execution of account and territory strategies
Helping sales reps create business
Developing and executing customer-management strategies
Coaches and mentors reps using a structured approach to improve performance and behaviors
Supports executives to make strategic decisions about a sales organization
Forecasting
Funnel management

So how do you get your Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0

The key is to plan your approach and enable your sales managers to perform at their best. Here are four steps to transform your sales managers.

1. Define their role

Sales management is rarely a one-size-fits-all role. In most organizations there are several sales management roles; for example inside sales managers, field sales managers, territory managers. Each of these roles has different responsibilities and requires different skills.

Before you can determine what your sales managers need to be enabled on, their role needs to be clearly defined. In this step, outline the parameters of each role and what they are expected to achieve. This sets the basis for the next step.

2. Determine the skills required for each role

Once the role of each sales manager in your organization is defined you can then determine what skills are required to perform the roles effectively. As part of this process, it’s essential to consider the behaviors and activities that your managers need to demonstrate to be successful in their role. Questions you can ask include:

Do they know how to focus on their team over their individual performance? Many sales managers are promoted from the field where they were judged on their own performance. Making the mental shift to focusing on the performance of the collective can be challenging for some.
Do they know how the business of sales runs? Forecasting, reporting, sales methodologies, and processes; these are all skills that are fundamental to leading a successful sales team.
Do they know how to create an effective sales strategy? Stepping back and mapping out the big picture is essential to Sales Manager 3.0. This requires being able to identify skill gaps and understanding how these can be plugged and their reps’ skills developed over time.
How much experience have they had leading people? A core skill for any sales manager is leading people. This covers more than just hiring and monitoring their quotas. Leading a sales team involves identifying and developing skills as well as coaching and mentoring.
Do they know what to coach on and how to do it? Coaching is much more than just giving feedback to reps about how they performed in a meeting. It covers all aspects of selling from lead identification to how they close the deal.
Do they know how to mentor individuals? Mentoring is different from coaching. It’s about guiding and providing advice to help reps develop their own skills. This is a skill that can be difficult for anyone to learn, yet it’s crucial to the success of Sales Manager 3.0.
Do they know what success looks like? Meeting quota is no longer the only indicator of a sales reps’ success. It’s important that sales managers not only understand what success looks like for their reps but also what it means in terms of their own role, so they can then build their own skill gaps if necessary.

3. Identify where the skill gaps are

Once you know what skills your sales managers require to perform their jobs effectively you can then overlay their existing skills to help you identify areas where they require improvement or development.

A useful tool to help identify areas where your sales managers may require development is by looking at your

efficiency and sales effectiveness indicators

. These metrics focus in on the areas that are important to sales managers when looking at the progress of their reps. So it makes sense that they need to be able to drive the behaviors and capabilities that will drive these indicators in the right direction.

For example, if your reps are struggling in their elevator pitches then they need support from their managers to improve. This requires managers to coach them on improving their messaging and pitch skills. So it follows that your managers may require some help bringing their coaching skills in these areas up to the mark.

4. Leverage technology to enable your sales managers

Just like your sales stack helps your reps perform at their best, your sales managers need a technology stack of their own. This goes beyond your CRM and really hones in on helping them perform each of the elements of their role better. Their stack can borrow from the existing sales stack and also leverage tools from other parts of the organization. The sales managers stack may include:

Hiring: To improve their hiring process consider tools that help test candidates for sales aptitude and competency.
Coaching: Sales readiness platforms can help optimize coaching by establishing a formal framework that helps managers identify skill gaps and then focus on remediation by developing reps’ skills. This should incorporate a range of coaching activities including role plays, so managers can focus in on specific skills.
Messaging: Video and audio tools can often be found in sales readiness platforms. These can help reps practice their messaging and get feedback, not only from their managers but also from other subject matter experts, on how they articulate their value proposition in different situations.
Forecasting: Tools like your CRM can help your managers accurately forecast sales results, so they can identify issues early and act quickly when necessary.
Managing: This can include the basics of management, like how to motivate their team or conduct performance reviews. If your sales managers have never led a team before then the basics are essential to learning.

These tools will help you enable your sales managers, but the key focus shouldn’t be on helping take your sales managers to the next level. After all, they play an integral role in the overall sales success of your business. But it’s important to remember that enablement isn’t a set and forget exercise. Once you’ve built Sales Manager 3.0 it will almost certainly be time to start working on the next model.

What Separates your Top 1% of Sales Reps from your Bottom 5%?

Shankar Ganapathy on June 29, 2017

Imagine if only one in every hundred Big Mac’s had that special sauce that gives the burger its deliciously sweet and savory flavors. You’d probably be less likely to buy one, opting for another option. It’s the fact that every single burger, everywhere in the world, has the same secret sauce that drives sales of Big Macs from New York to New Caledonia.

Now imagine if all your “C” Players, wherever they’re located, had the same secret sauce that keeps your A Players would closing deals? It would instantly transform them from sub-standard performers into predictable selling machines. The key is identifying what ingredients separate your top 1% of sales reps from the bottom 5%.

So how do we break down the secret sauce?

We know that that being a good sales rep is about being outcome driven. It’s about closing more deals, bigger deals, better deals.

But being a great salesperson involves more than just closing deals. The ability to close a deal actually starts a few steps back in the process. So if you really want to know what makes a good salesperson, have a look at what your best reps know and do to actually get their deals over the line.

It’s this knowledge and execution that drives closing rates. And this comes from their selling skills and how they execute the sales process. Essentially, the secret sauce is made up of competencies that your A Players use to deliver revenue. If you can replicate in the rest of your reps then you’ll be able to bridge the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 5%?

Five competencies make all the difference

Research

by The Objective Management Group looked into the competency disparities between salespeople. They identified five competencies that account for over a third of the biggest disparities between the top 1% and the bottom 5% of reps.

These are all skills that can be identified, solved for and managed through coaching and development initiatives. By actively addressing them, the majority of businesses can improve the capabilities and revenue generation opportunities of their entire sales organization.

What makes your “A” Players tick?

While it’s helpful to understand what competencies drive most businesses, what will really provide the biggest bang for the buck in your business is identifying the specific competencies that are making a difference to your reps.

To do this you will first need to identify which competencies make your A Players tick. These are the skills that come together to create the secret sauce that sells your product. Isolating these competencies gives you the recipe that will improve how all of your reps sell.

This could include a range of different competencies, for example, some hold themselves more accountable to their quota; they see it as their responsibility. Others take a systematic approach to the sales process, while others have bought into the company’s message and leadership – they’re inspired to perform.

Once you’ve honed in on the behaviors that really drive sales performance you can then look at how your A Players leverage these skills to achieve. How do they negotiate difficult pricing conversations with conversations? How do they incorporate the company’s messaging into their elevator pitch? How do they manage themselves and their quota so they can track how they’re performing and make adjustments when necessary?

By defining how A Players behave and operate, you will then be well-positioned to impart this knowledge to your other reps. This can be done in a variety of ways; from success stories to structured coaching.

As the knowledge is imparted and reinforced to your reps, it needs to become an integral part of your ongoing learning and coaching initiatives. That’s because it’s the secret sauce of how your business sells. It’s how you meet and smash your revenue targets.

Over time, your recipe will improve and evolve, and your initiatives to impart this knowledge will also evolve. In this day and age, there’s nothing stays the same for long. But as things change you’ll be starting from a very different base, one where the gap between your top 1% and the bottom 5% is much smaller. By narrowing this gap you’ll have a stronger more agile sales team and more predictable revenue. So no matter what your industry or competitors throw your way, you’ll be better equipped to manage the ups and downs.

How do you know if your business is sales ready?

Shankar Ganapathy on June 16, 2017

You need a license before you can drive a car. Your SAT scores open the door to grad school. Applying the same lens to sales teams, how do you know if your sales team are ready to have customer conversations?

If you don’t know whether your reps are sales ready, you’re really just hoping they know what to say and how to address your customer’s pain points.

While your business might be winning deals today, a more agile and sales ready competitor could leapfrog you and adversely affect your quarter in an instant. There are so many things that could and do affect your deals, but sales readiness is one of the few that is within your control.

Sales readiness ensures that your reps aren’t losing deals because they simply do not possess the required knowledge or skills, or they aren’t receiving the right coaching. These are all things that you may not know about if you aren’t measuring the sales readiness of your reps.

So how do you know if your business is sales ready?

Your company strategy filters down to tactics and go-to-market strategy

Business strategy doesn’t operate in isolation. For a business to be successful it’s sales and go-to-market strategy has to be continuously aligned with the changing strategy. Businesses that achieve this are able to align their sales organization with their strategy seamlessly. Consider these questions:

How confident are you that a random sample of 20 of your sales reps can articulate your top three value propositions consistently?
Are your other customer facing teams, from technology support to Customer Success, using the same messaging and philosophy when communicating with customers? How do you track whether they’re on message?
How often do your sales reps lose a deal because they weren’t aware that a particular product feature existed?

Sales enablement is a priority

While some businesses have jumped onto the sales enablement bandwagon with vigor and understand its importance others are still a bit sceptical. Then there are those who set up a sales enablement team because everyone else around them is, not because they see the value in the role.

Only businesses who prioritize sales enablement at all levels of the organization will succeed. However, if you’re not sure whether your entire business is along for the ride consider this:

Do you have a formal sales enablement function and prioritized sales enablement initiatives?
Is your C-Suite aligned with the sales enablement priorities? Are they investing sufficient time to ensure that your sales team accepts your sales enablement initiatives?
Are you able to demonstrate the ROI of sales enablement initiatives to the C-Suite and your sales team?
How much collaboration is there between sales enablement and other areas of your organization (such as Marketing, Sales Operations, Product and the C-Suite)?
Does your sales team have access to sales enablement tools that they use regularly? Can you measure how effective these tools are and how engaged your reps are with them?

Your new hires are ramping up quickly

If you don’t start them on the right foot your reps are less likely to succeed. MongoDB has experienced sales success because they set up a robust onboarding program – this has translated into $200k more revenue per rep in their first year and a reduction in new hire ramp up time from 11 to 5 months. Some questions to answer about your organization include:

Are your new hires ramping up at a consistent rate or are there large variations in time to productivity?
How do you know whether your new hires understand the knowledge they’ve been trained on?
How often do you check back to see if they’ve retained this knowledge?
Do you have a process in place for reps to demonstrate that they know how to apply their knowledge in customer conversations?

Your sales team is meeting quota

According to SiriusDecisions only 27% of sales reps meet or exceed their quota. If the majority of your team are meeting quota then hold onto them because they’re clearly ready for any situation that’s put before them. However, if many of your reps are struggling to meet their targets then it might be time to consider the following:

Do you have a strong pipeline of opportunities in place? How can this be bolstered?
How closely are you tracking the performance of individual team members against forecast? Do you know if your reps are delivering the right value proposition to your prospects?
Is there consistency in your deal size, or is this haphazard? Are some reps more consistent than others?
How do your win rates stack up against your competitors? Are there any specific competitors that present a greater challenge for your reps? Why?

Coaching is an integral part of your organizational culture

The better your reps’ sales skills are the more sales ready they’ll be. One of the best ways to improve sales skills is through coaching. Research has shown that as little as three hours of coaching a month can increase average close rates by 70%. But if your business supports sales coaching at all levels then you already know this, if not perhaps ask yourself these questions:

How do your managers know what to coach each individual sales rep on? How are knowledge and skill gaps identified?
Is sales coaching left up to your sales managers or are subject matter experts from across the business brought in when appropriate?

Your reps are all singing from the same songbook

The larger your sales team, the more challenging it is to ensure that they’re all on message. While there was less urgency for consistent messaging in days gone by, there’s too much happening these days to wait until your annual Sales Kickoff to bring all your reps up to speed. If your reps understand your value proposition and can articulate it on-demand then you’re on track, but if you’re not sure consider these questions:

How well can your reps adapt their message to a specific context?
Do your reps know how to connect your product with their customer’s specific pain points?
How well do your reps understand your competitive advantages? Do they know how to articulate this and connect them to your customer’s pain points?

The bell curve of your A, B and C Players is flattening

Let’s admit it, in most companies only a handful of reps consistently meet quota, and it’s virtually unheard for every rep in a sales organization to make their target. Businesses that have effectively managed to bring each of their reps closer to meeting quota are those who are able to tap into what makes their A Players tick.

Focusing in on leading indicators is key to achieving this, yet most managers still focus their energy on lagging indicators like pipeline and conversion rates. But managers aren’t to blame, they require training and frameworks that help them identify what drives those leading indicators and coach their reps to achieve this. Here are some questions that you should answer if you’re not sure how your managers coach your reps:

Are you able to identify what makes your A Players tick? Do you know how to replicate their winning formula?
What is your plan to enable those B Players who are putting in the effort but still not meeting quota?
How wide are the capability gaps between your A and B Players?
How consistently do your reps articulate your value proposition and message to customers? Do you have a process in place to remediate message gaps and inconsistencies?

Your sales team know what’s going on internally and externally

New product features, competitor movements, industry changes; things are changing so quickly in the digital age. This means sales teams need to receive and absorb a lot of information quickly to be sales ready. When your team is on top of everything they’re well placed to stay one step ahead of their competition. If you’re not sure whether your reps are up-to-date, consider these things:

Do your reps often complain that they weren’t aware of a new product feature or industry change?
Do you have a process in place to coordinate and communicate product, competitive and industry updates to your sales reps?
Can you measure or identify how well your reps can apply this new knowledge? Do they understand what it means to their prospects and how to articulate that effectively?

Unicorns like AppDynamics, Cloudera, Mulesoft, Nutanix and Qualtrics rely on sales readiness to power their sales success. What are you doing to make sure your sales team is successful?

5 Steps to Evaluate a Sales Readiness Solution

Shankar Ganapathy on June 6, 2017

You know that sales enablement can help your sales reps be more effective at their role, but how do you know which sales enablement platform is best for you? There are so many to choose from and some have very different features, which can make comparing them confusing.

Generally, sales enablement platforms fall into two categories;

sales readiness and sales asset management

Sales readiness platforms help you prepare your sales reps to have meaningful conversations with their customers. Sales asset management platforms enable reps to manage their sales content. In this post, I’m going to focus in on the five steps that will help you find the right sales readiness platform for your business.

Step 1: Step back and define your objectives

While you may be eager to pick a solution and get started, it’s important to take some time to reflect on what you’re trying to achieve first. While you may feel like you’re wasting precious time, in the long run, this step will save you from making the wrong decision, and it will help you gain clarity on what your business really needs.

There isn’t a one size fits all approach to sales readiness, what your sales reps need to be sales ready may be very different from other businesses. Consider the following questions:

What stage is your business in?If you’re scaling rapidly perhaps you’re struggling to ramp up all your new hires effectively with your current onboarding program. If you’re an established business with a large sales team perhaps you find it challenging to keep all your reps on message.
How dynamic is your industry?If your competitors (and you) are releasing new product features every other week, then communicating regularly and keeping your reps on message is crucial to their readiness.
How much visibility do you have on your reps’ capabilities?If you don’t have a process in place to identify skill or capability gaps then a solution that enables you to assess their capabilities would be helpful.
Are you developing a culture of coaching and sales effectiveness?If the majority of your reps aren’t meeting quota regularly or turning over too soon then your coaching process may need more structure to give your reps the cadence they need to close more deals. Your managers may also need more support to create a culture of coaching and feedback, enabling them to focus on broader sales effectiveness, rather than just pipeline and sales skills.
Is your business in need of a sales transformation?If you’ve recently gone through an M&A or you’ve launched a new product you may need an effective way to ensure your customer-facing team is aligned to the new messaging quickly and effectively.
Is your current system really working?Old school LMS and classroom training sessions just don’t cut it anymore. To keep your reps engaged, achieve ROI for your sales enablement efforts and keep up with your competitors, it may be time to update your system to something that addresses the sales issues you face today.

Once you have identified your key objectives, you’re ready to move onto the next stage.

Step 2: Identify your dependencies

Your sales readiness platform is probably not the only tool in your sales stack. While all these tools are designed to make life easier for your sales team, they can actually make it more challenging if they’re not integrated. After all, how many logins can you remember?

That’s why it’s a good idea to identify what tools or platforms you would like your sales readiness platform to talk to. Would reporting be easier if your sales readiness platform could report based on the categories in your CRM? Would your sales reps find it useful if your sales readiness tool could help them identify contextual content for customer conversations from your sales asset management tool?

By including this level of integration on your wishlist you can narrow down the sales readiness platforms that best suit your needs.

Step 3: Prioritize what’s important

This is where the objectives you identified in step 1 become important. They should drive the features and functionalities that you need the most from your sales readiness platform. It’s helpful to identify what your priorities are using a basic framework and then listing out the key elements that your business needs under each category. I suggest using a framework that includes knowledge enablement, skill development, scenario-based training, analytics and other features:

Knowledge Enablement:

This refers to the ability of your reps to use knowledge in the context of their sales situations.

Feature: Learning modules

You need this if you want to

- Assign modules to personalize learning tracks for different learners or groups.
- Selectively invite individuals and groups to learning modules.

Feature: Mobile app and bite-sized content files

You need this if you want to

- Share regular updates on new product features, competitive insights, success stories and marketing collateral in real time.

Feature: Assessments and Certifications

You need this if you want to

- Customize benchmarks or pass scores for goal-based assessments.
- Generate and award certificates to reps when they complete a level.

Feature: Flexible content formats

You need this if you want to

- Import content from other sources (like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slideshare or Youtube).
- Directly upload or amend content in any file format.
- Create short and long form training content.

Feature: Quick quizzes

You need this if you want to

- Measure knowledge retention with pop quizzes and reinforce key information.
- Intertwine quizzes with content for effective reinforcement.
- Conduct timed quizzes and randomize questions.

Feature: Easy content search and discovery

You need this if you want to

- Enable your reps to be able to find content easily when they need it.
- Ensure your reps can bookmark content so they can access easily.
- Enable content to be saved offline so they can find it anytime.

Feature: Gamification

You need this if you want to

- Drive adoption and ensure your sales reps actually use the platform and even enjoy using it.
- Customize rewards based on content importance.

Feature: Integration with other systems

You need this if you want to

- Integrate with your sales asset management tool so you can enable your reps to access content that is relevant to their specific situation at the time they need it most.
- Integrate with your CRM so you can leverage the segmentation and team profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.
- Integrate with HR systems so you can leverage the team and individual profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.

Skill development:

These features help your reps handle specific sales scenarios.

Feature: Structured coaching

You need this if you want to:

- Enable contextual coaching so managers can objectively observe reps while they are in their sales motion. They can then provide feedback and training and support reps when navigating complex sales scenarios in real time.
- Give your manager the ability to conduct on-the-job coaching, even when they’re in a different location to their reps. They can observe and rate how reps perform their sales activities

Scenario-based training:

These features help your reps execute your plan through coaching. This teaches them to follow the sales process and even receive specific feedback on their deals.

Feature: Video / audio role plays

You need this if you want to:

- Help your reps practice how they respond to specific and contextual sales situations.
- Ensure your reps are articulating your product value proposition consistently, know how to demo your product or can deliver a compelling elevator pitch.
- Enable managers to review video, voice over powerpoint, voiceover screen capture and audio responses in real time.
- Enable managers to review and grade email responses and offline learning.
- Customize evaluation parameters for role plays.

Feature: Automated workflows

You need this if you want to:

- Enable your sales managers, sales enablement or other team members to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on the video or audio recordings your reps submit.
- Create accountability and a cadence for coaching, so it becomes something that your managers and reps do every day.

Feature: Best practices library

You need this if you want to:

- Share best practices and success stories across your team and facilitate peer to peer learning.

Feature: Contextual remediation

You need this if you want to:

- Suggest training tracks to reps based on identified knowledge or skill gaps.
- Automate training based on gaps identified by their manager.

Analytics:

These features help you drive accountability, identify knowledge and skill gaps, and report back to sales managers and leaders.

Feature: Drill down views and reports

You need this if you want to:

- Measure and track the engagement and retention of each rep, sales team or region.
- Track cohorts (based on their onboarding batch, sales kickoff attendance etc) to see how each has performed against other cohorts.
- Export user data into Salesforce.

Feature: Reporting on content effectiveness

You need this if you want to:

- Identify which content has an impact on your reps’ performance and which do not.

Feature: Reporting on business impact

You need this if you want to:

- Correlate sales enablement activities with business outcomes. This will help demonstrate the impact on revenue of initiatives or improvements in capability.

Other priorities

Aside from features, there are several other questions that you may want to ask a vendor including:

What is their roadmap in terms of product enhancements and expansions?
What are the minimum software/hardware requirements to use the solution?
What are the solution’s implementation strategy and process?
How long will the implementation process take?
How much of your support is typically required during implementation?
What Is Customer Success support available after implementation?

Step 4: Evaluate platforms against your priorities

It may be tempting to just pick the first platform you demo but it may not have everything you need. It’s important to at least compare two or three sales readiness platforms so you can see just how different they are. By listing out the criteria that are your priorities, and then assessing each platform against that criteria, you can objectively identify which platform will best meet your needs.

Step 5: Get feedback or read reviews

Once you’ve identified the sales readiness platform that best meets your needs, it’s always helpful to hear from people who actually use the product. This is actually easier to do than you may realize. Websites like G2 Crowd allow users to provide unbiased reviews of software platforms they’ve used in real time. You can see how people rated different aspects of each platform and read their comments about what it’s like to use the tool.

While it may sound daunting, by taking a little extra time to evaluate and choose the right sales readiness platform you will save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Sales Knowledge Transfer: The New Enablement Framework

Daniel Kuperman on May 30, 2017

Last week, during the

SiriusDecisions Summit 2017

, analysts Peter Ostrow and Christina McKeon unveiled a new framework. This addresses the top challenges sales leaders face today:

The inability of sales reps to connect their offerings to the needs and challenges of their buyers
The inability of sales reps to differentiate their product from that of their competitors or the status quo
Their sales reps’ general knowledge gaps, such as product knowledge, understanding their customer or industry

Resolving these issues is not easy, but the new Sales Knowledge Transfer framework lays out how to approach each challenge. In particular, it focuses on ensuring the sales team can articulate value, connect with buyers, and properly use their knowledge about products, industries, and competitors during each phase of the sales cycle.

Companies that have complex solutions, operate in a competitive environment, or have an evolving product line, are especially vulnerable to these three challenges. Sales enablement leaders need to prioritize and architect how they will educate, assess, certify and keep their sales team up-to-date on a routine basis.

The five phases of knowledge transfer

SiriusDecisions outlined five phases for a successful knowledge transfer program:

Audience
Knowledge
Planning
Programs
Adoption

This is an interesting approach that helps focus your enablement efforts in a sequence that builds upon itself to deliver a comprehensive program. The first step involves creating

“Sales Personas”

. The knowledge required is then mapped to each persona before creating an enablement plan and rolling out the program. The final step requires a dashboard that enables you to track adoption and course-correct elements of the program.

Is this involved process too much?

I don’t think so.

In my experience, each of the steps outlined in the key requirements for rolling out a program that will have an impact. In particular, I like the idea of creating “sales personas.” This involves identifying the different types of sellers your organization has, how they best learn and their challenges. This is similar to creating “buyer personas” – but for an internal audience. After all, we all know that one-size-fits-all enablement programs don’t work, but we rarely take the time to truly break down our own sales teams’ needs into different documented personas. This approach will benefit not only the Sales Enablement team but also Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing as well.

Sales Training 2.0?

On the surface, this approach looks like you’re just organizing your sales training better, but there is one major point of difference. Most companies approach sales training as a one-time effort to get their sales reps up-to-speed on a certain topic. This means training is often short-lived and often done in isolation or in response to a particular event (like a new product or a change in selling methodology).

SiriusDecision’s concept of knowledge transfer takes a different approach. Rather than look at what training reps need, it considers what type of sales knowledge they require at each stage of the buying cycle and how it should match different sales events.

Taking a sales enablement perspective, the approach requires you to define all the different ‘knowledge elements’ your sales team needs and determine the best way to achieve this. In addition, it requires consideration of how to ensure the team is actually absorbing the information, certifying them so they can actually use their knowledge in specific sales scenarios, and determining how to identify what else needs to be transferred to the team.

Effectively implementing a ‘knowledge transfer’ program means taking control of what your reps need to know and rolling out a repeatable process. The process shouldn’t disrupt the team, but rather ensure they are always on top of the latest product, customer, industry, and competitive information they require to be successful.

Sales readiness and knowledge transfer

For Mindtickle customers the framework may look similar to our sales readiness approach. Being sales ready involves putting together a process to routinely update your sales team without disrupting their work. At the same time, the process should give them quick access to the knowledge they need to do their jobs effectively.

To address their key challenges, sales enablement leaders should take a closer look at how they are managing the sales knowledge transfer process at their company. By putting in place initiatives that better coordinate enablement efforts for their teams, they can overcome some of the issues that are currently impacting their sales performance.

Increase your Revenue per Sales Rep with Mindtickle and Seismic

Shankar Ganapathy on May 8, 2017

There are two main reasons why 63% of sales reps fail to achieve their quota according to SiriusDecisions – improper training and an inability to find and use the relevant content. This week, Mindtickle and Seismic – the leading enterprise-grade sales readiness solution and sales enablement solution respectively – have created a technology partnership that solves these issues. Together they enable enterprise sales reps to train for and execute their sales interactions more effectively than ever before.

In this day and age, buyers have changed the way they purchase and interact with salespeople, and sales organizations need to be agiler to keep up. Customers now come to the table well informed and much further down their purchasing journey, and they expect reps to be ready to respond to their questions, needs, and objections. That’s why it’s now crucial to ensure your reps are prepared, up-to-date and able to engage prospects with the most relevant and personalized content.

The sales organizations that have adapted to this new world order have achieved this by ensuring their reps and everyone in the enablement process, from content creators in marketing to sales ops and training, have access to technologies that:

Provide on-demand access to all materials necessary to increase performance:It’s no longer sufficient to just email updates or conduct training sessions a couple of times a year. Best-in-class organizations ensure their reps receive feedback on both presentation dry-runs and the content used within them. Their reps are able to tweak content on Seismic and receive coaching on their pitch on Mindtickle whenever and wherever they need.

Enable just-in-time readiness on new content:By leveraging Mindtickle’s training and video coaching capabilities, sales reps can access new content and become smarter quicker. This has the added benefit of decreasing the time spent on separate training sessions or on requesting guidance from content creators.

Give access to valuable information:Information on reps’ performance and content engagement collected in Seismic and Mindtickle is fed back to individual reps. This enables them to continuously and intelligently improve how they perform their job, focusing in on the aspects that are directly tied to closing deals more effectively.

Provide holistic sales engagement data:In this data-driven world, teams involved in the creation of sales content and training collateral require a comprehensive view of their reps’ engagement with all sales-oriented materials. Best practice sales organizations leverage this data to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of their salespeople and further inform their enablement initiatives.

Enable new content certification:It’s no longer sufficient to certify your reps once when they are onboarded and then forget about it. Reps in best-in-class sales organizations are constantly learning and improving their knowledge. Mindtickle’s certification process responds to this by applying to new collateral, including product brochures and case studies. This ensures that their reps only use the content in the field once they have demonstrated proficiency and expertise in presenting it.

By integrating Mindtickle’s training, coaching, role play and communication capabilities with Seismic’s personalized content creation and analytical capabilities, this technology partnership brings together each of these aspects. The result is a technology solution that enables best-in-class sales teams to focus on driving revenue. All teams involved in the sales enablement process, from Sales Ops to Content and Product marketing are enabled to accelerate deals, improve win rates and increase the revenue earned per sales rep.

“At Nutanix, we pride ourselves in providing sales reps with the right technologies they need to exceed quotas and drive revenue,” said Amir Chaudry, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Educational Services & Field Readiness at Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing. “The combination of Seismic and Mindtickle does just that, helping reps prepare and master messaging before meetings, and win the deal with the most relevant information and collateral during them.”

We’re excited about this partnership and believe it will add value to our customer’s businesses by helping their sales organizations to sell more effectively.

For more information on the Mindtickle-Seismic technology partnership, read the full press release here.

Coaching Millennial Salespeople

Shankar Ganapathy on April 26, 2017

Millennials are set to represent 75% of the global population by 2025. While they might be the youngest people in your business, they are by no means the most junior. Millennial managers and CEOs are now commonplace, the latter particularly in startups and technology. It’s well established that Gen X and Baby Boomer’s value career development and job satisfaction.

Similarly, millennials have distinct behaviors and work preferences, which is why they need specific training and coaching to help them perform better on the field.

To develop a coaching program that addresses the unique preferences of millennials, it’s important to understand how their behavior differs from other generations. This then impacts how to coach them, and even their propensity to be coached.

We’ve identified seven imperatives to take into account when structuring a coaching program for your millennial salespeople.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these and outline how they impact your sales coaching program.

Tie coaching to technology

By far the most distinguishing feature of millennials is the ease with which they understand and prefer to use technology. They’ll reject clunky antiquated systems in favor of convenient and intuitive technology. For millennials, being connected at all times is essential, in fact, 83% sleep with their smartphone by their bed.

While many millennials are comfortable socializing in person, they’re adept at using online mediums to enhance relationships and broaden their reach. So don’t be surprised if your millennial sales rep prefers to email customers rather than calling them.