Episode summary

ChowNow was looking to elevate and grow its sales training program using Mindtickle. Cole Lindbergh, Sales Enablement Manager, Revenue Operations at ChowNow, talks about his experience with Mindtickle. While they were already using Mindtickle’s revenue productivity platform for its sales training, they’re now starting to use the Readiness Index to build an overall curriculum that goes beyond asking sellers to watch videos and take a quiz. They’re also using Mindtickle to get more insights into what makes sellers successful by building out ideal rep profiles (IRPs), which helps them identify the winning behaviors of top reps and gaps in sellers who might be struggling.

Cole talks through how he’s used learnings from the IRP and Readiness Index to inform his sales training strategy and how he’s tying sales training programs to revenue impact at ChowNow. Specifically, he outlines how they’ve been able to shrink onboarding time by two business days and get reps to their first deal faster using Mindtickle.

Key highlights

• Using Mindtickle as its LMS but looking to expand its sales training curriculum beyond quizzing and videos
• Looking at the Readiness Index and ideal rep profiles to understand what makes sellers tick and what separates high performers from the rest
• Working with managers on sales coaching opportunities
• Focusing on showing how sales training has an impact on business growth
• Shrunk onboarding time from 8 days to six

Video transcription

Right now we’re using Mindtickle a lot of different ways. We’re leveraging in a lot of different ways. We’re obviously using it as our Learning Management System. We are doing training through it, we are doing assessments through it. We use missions, which is a lot of fun. But we’re looking to kind of grow on that too.

We’ve just started going down the Readiness Index path. We’re looking at coaching sessions, we’re looking at Quests, we’re looking at all these different things to try and really make our training more than just, “Hey, I’m gonna sit down, watch a video, and take a quiz.”

The whole idea here is, is that we want to try to build an overall curriculum. And when you build an overall curriculum, that doesn’t just mean you watch your video and take a quiz, right? You want to have feedback, you want to see how you’re performing, it’s others, you want to learn how I can do better.

I’m excited about the things that Mindtickle is doing because it’s ultimately going to set us up to be able to have so much more insight into really what makes our sellers tick, what makes them great sellers, or how can they improve. For me, how can I make my training better, right? 

Sales enablement plays a huge role in that a lot of our training is built around trying to emulate those that are top performers. Looking at ideal rep profiles, looking at the type of things that. How can I replicate what a rep is doing very well, and bring it over to someone else?

And having an ideal rep profile, like, “Hey, this is the person that’s excelling. They’re taking the trainings, they’re doing great, and coaching sessions, they’re hitting their day, their deals, that’s awesome.” Looking at the ideal rep profile, now I can start to identify, you know, hey, this person is doing really well on these types of trainings. This person is not, is there a correlation there.

If I can go to a sales manager and say, “Hey, your rep is exceeding in all these different areas, and this rep is not, what can we do to change that? If we’re able to focus on those little things? Can we make it better? Can we get them up to quota? Can we get them to close more deals?”

I’m a true believer in explaining the positives. Let’s look at the positives and see if they’re doing well. But then let’s work on those negatives and try to bring them up to speed to create a more well-rounded rep, in the long run, things because well-rounded rep, or sales or money. That’s it’s, it’s the never-ending sight.

Now we’re looking at more of these competencies. Ideas like these KPIs around training and these KPIs around competency and Readiness Index, I’m hoping are going to be that thing that ultimately brings that to us. I mean, we’re all trying to drive revenue, like we’re all trying to drive more sales.

At the end of the day, if I can show some level of how our training is affecting the overall growth of the company, and driving more sales, that ultimately is going to put me in a better position. There is this idea of if I can clone the great rap. And that’s like winning, and I can replicate that across others. That’s going to drive more sales.

By doing a formalized onboarding, we were able to increase the time that a rep got to their first deal significantly, you know, normally it was like, 6-8 weeks, somewhere in that range. And we were able to get to 3-4 weeks. And that’s including training time. That’s strictly just because we were setting the reps up for success from the get-go.

There is an entire world of additional learnings and additional resources that are available to you to continue to grow upon that. So we’ve actually kind of shrunk some of our onboarding time, in some instances, just because of simple fact. We have the ability now to like, refer you back to a specific training or for you. We’re doing an eight-day onboarding. And now we’re down to eight business days and now we’re down to six. So we cut two days. It’s an extra two days, not only on the field, but like extra two days to meet more people.