How Mindtickle Builds a Sales Coaching Culture

Alex Salop on October 21, 2022

Every company has aspirations for a sales coaching culture, where frontline managers have the time, tools, and expertise to meet the individualized needs of every revenue producer, and align instruction with company-wide goals. In practice, however, until now I’ve never worked at a company where this vision was more than a pipe dream. At most companies, reality gets in the way: managers are too busy to coach, there are no tools to support the effort, and tactical, deal-focused needs trump everything else.

Mindtickle Guide to Sales Coaching Download

But a key part of Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Platform is the ability to deliver an effective, institutionalized approach to coaching that focuses on the competencies proven to win deals. Our Readiness team has been the beneficiary of this functionality and I thought I’d share how we use coaching internally to spark some consideration about how it would look in your organization.

First steps to building a coaching culture

I took over the team in early 2022, and one of my first aha moments was the realization that our sales onboarding focus needed to be reconsidered. We brought on a ton of new salespeople in the previous few months, but once our teams were mostly in seat and fully onboarded, I understood the need to better support them in the field. I think this is a pretty common refrain for sales enablement organizations right now: an increased focus on improving the productivity of existing teams vs. making new hires.

My second aha was coming to grips with the idea that measuring the skills of our sellers once they’re in the field was no longer easily possible when they weren’t constantly being trained, We had certain tools — role-play exercises, spaced reinforcement programs, etc. — and they were good at showing what reps knew, but that didn’t really help quantify what they did.

That’s when my team started focusing on providing support for coaching by our frontline managers. We’ve defined the competencies that make salespeople successful, and through insights from Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence solution, we can see how salespeople transfer knowledge to behaviors in the field. So we had lots of data to help with the coaching process, but we also needed to deliver a consistent, organization-wide, coaching approach.

Using Mindtickle to reinforce a sales coaching culture

That’s where Mindtickle — the platform, not the company — comes in. With Mindtickle, we can empower all of our frontline managers to provide individualized coaching for each rep, all aligned to ideal rep profiles (IRPs) we had previously defined. The coaching forms we provide managers are built to help them track the competencies that are exhibited by our most successful reps. Managers can use these forms as the foundation of bespoke coaching sessions with each seller, with three key outcomes:

  • Managers and the Readiness team can track each seller’s progress against each of the competencies we track
  • Based on this feedback, they can focus on coaching to the skill gaps needing the most attention, while de-emphasizing the areas where sellers demonstrate proficiency
  • These coaching evaluations go directly into the Mindtickle Readiness Index, which measures competency attainment vs. business performance — so we can always see how key skills are matching up against metrics like quota attainment, time to first deal, pipeline creation, deal acceleration, and more.

The key thing about coaching, though, is that there’s still a time component. Managers always (understandably) have to focus on deals, particularly as we approach fiscal milestones.   But because coaching is so closely integrated into the Mindtickle platform, managers can more easily incorporate coaching into their day-to-day jobs. For example, every conversation recorded by Call AI, Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence solution, provides access to a variety of competency-focused coaching forms that managers can use to note their observations, grade sellers against a rubric of key competencies, and even recommend content for remediation. Frontline managers can also keep coaching forms open while they’re in sessions with reps, recording their impressions, insights, and feedback as part of an existing process.

As well, sellers can easily see how they’re doing and where they need to improve. Coaching rooms, also part of the Mindtickle platform, help our reps check to see how they’ve been doing over time: where they’re making progress, and what needs improvement. So instead of all of this information having to be kept in frontline managers’ heads, it’s easily available.

For me, one of the greatest aspects of the Mindtickle platform is its ability to transform from a powerful onboarding solution into a comprehensive way to track and improve existing seller performance. That’s only possible because we can empower our managers to coach and then track the impact of their efforts against the metrics that count: revenue generation. quota attainment, time to first deal, pipeline creation, deal acceleration, and other relevant criteria.

Ready to see how Mindtickle can help you build and amplify a sales coaching culture? Set up time for a Mindtickle demo today.

Why Conversation Intelligence Is a Game-Changer for My Team

Alex Salop on September 7, 2022

While sales enablement is a critical function, it sometimes feels like a half-complete mission.

We spend countless hours creating programs and content to prepare sellers for success, but when they’re in the field, we have little knowledge of whether our efforts actually move the needle.

It’s also a bit unsatisfying for CROs, and for the same reason. Most sales leaders know they should enable sellers, but they often don’t really know if it works or not (adoption is not a surrogate for success). Even worse, enablement priorities are often informed by anecdotal evidence rather than clear-cut examples of success or failure.

That’s where conversation intelligence comes in.

What is conversation intelligence?

If you’re not familiar, conversation intelligence tools transcribe conversations that occur over the phone, Zoom, WebEx, Teams, etc., and then provide insights about those conversations using artificial intelligence. This technology has taken off in recent years, particularly around deal coaching, because reps and managers can identify at-risk deals more easily and then take steps to increase close probabilities.

The reason why I’m bullish on conversation intelligence for my team is less about deals and more about skills. It’s great to remediate a deal, but what if you could fix the competencies that put the deal at risk to begin with? That’s exactly what Mindtickle’s offering, Call AI, empowers both frontline managers and my team to do: focus on the deal and the skills that make sellers successful.

How do sales teams use conversation intelligence?

Because of Call AI’s skill focus, it’s unique in the conversation intelligence space. Our frontline managers use Call AI to look into deal conversations to identify at-risk opportunities, but we can also look at Call AI-specific functionality like call scores and key moments to see how reps are performing against critical competencies like qualification, pitches, demos, and so on.

With Call AI, I can look at our sellers whose call scores are below the mark and quickly find out where they’re missing.

  • Are they hitting on key themes?
  • Are they talking too much, or too little?
  • Is their pitch focused on key challenges or is it missing the mark?

This (and more) real-world evidence, served up with key insights to help me or frontline managers optimize our time, makes it possible to see not just the impact of our enablement efforts, but also take steps to close skill gaps.

For example, Call AI’s integration with Mindtickle’s coaching functionality enables us to build custom coaching templates that managers can use to evaluate seller performance, and then either provide specific skills-focused coaching or recommend individualized content or programs to remediate skill gaps. That’s a game-changer for us.

How does conversation intelligence help measure the impact of sales enablement?

Another game-changing aspect of Call AI is that we can now infuse our enablement programs with examples of what good looks like. There is nothing more powerful than a snippet from a real-world conversation to demonstrate the impact of a well-executed sales interaction. Call recordings are a key way to make our content more interesting and provide greater impact to our sellers.

Instead of hoping our enablement efforts pay off, Call AI enables us to see the impact of our efforts on real-world conversations, recommend bespoke remediation, and make program changes based on demonstrated needs. When markets evolve, the competitive landscape changes, our go-to-market strategy is updated, etc., we can see how those changes play out in the field and update our enablement priorities to stay current.  And showing the impact of our effort on real-world conversations goes a long way toward helping my CRO see the value that we bring to the organization.

How the Mindtickle Sales Readiness Team Makes Sure Reps Perform in the Classroom and in the Field

Alex Salop on August 18, 2022

If your reps pass a quiz or even a certification, are they fully enabled? While it might be a tongue-in-cheek question, the reality is that most enablement organizations can only measure adoption and test scores to predict field performance.

But knowledge does not necessarily translate into behavior.

I know what a good golf swing looks like, yet I still struggle to lower my golf score. Just like my golf game, many reps “know” what good selling looks like, but that doesn’t mean they’re applying that knowledge in the field when it counts.

For enablement to be proven effective, there has to be a way to ensure sellers don’t just internalize what they learn but also demonstrate it in their buyer interactions. And for the sales readiness team here at Mindtickle, a key way to accomplish that goal is to collaborate with our frontline managers to check, score, and remediate skills in the field.

Mindtickle IRP generator

How to translate sales training knowledge into real-world selling

One of the reasons why we call Mindtickle a sales readiness platform (and why I’m the VP of Readiness and not sales enablement) is that we feel that making reps successful doesn’t stop when they pass an assessment or get certified.  Our team works hand-in-hand with our frontline sales leaders to ensure what sellers learn translates into real-world performance, and we use Mindtickle’s Readiness Index to score individualized seller behaviors against an ideal rep profile, or IRP. Here’s how we do it:

  • All new sellers go through an onboarding process that incorporates on-demand and live instruction, along with quizzes and assessments to confirm knowledge. Unfortunately, this is where enablement stops for some companies, but we take our process several steps further.
  • After that, they’re assigned role-play exercises in which they have to demonstrate the skills necessary to do their jobs effectively in the field. An AI-powered evaluation process enables sellers to practice pitches, presentation skills, objection-handling, and more before submitting them for grading by approved evaluators. At this point, we feel confident sellers have demonstrated both the knowledge and skills to be out in the field selling. But if we stopped here, we still wouldn’t know if reps are practicing the right behaviors in their day-to-day jobs.

How the Mindtickle sales readiness team engages frontline managers

This is where that frontline manager collaboration becomes especially important. One reason why sales enablers are left in the dark about sales behaviors is that there’s no way to check them. Fortunately, the Mindtickle platform gives our team two important tools to continue tracking sales behaviors long after sellers complete their training:

  • The first is Call AI, Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence solution that lets us listen in on real-world conversations between sellers and buyers. Both frontline managers and the readiness team can review calls quickly using features in Call AI such as call scores, key moments, talk and listen time, questions asked, and more. We share call snippets with each other, provide comments and suggestions, and create libraries of good (or bad) examples to share with other teams. By working together, we identify opportunities for remediation and act on them.

screenshot of Mindtickle Call AI

  • Second, we provide frontline managers with coaching forms that are integrated with Call AI or available for ad hoc use. These forms align with the key competencies we track as part of our Readiness Index. Each seller has a score that comprises applicable learning modules and coaching forms. Scores reflect how that person performs against the IRP, and can also be correlated against key metrics in the CRM like quota attainment, time to productivity, and more. Using coaching forms is really valuable to our company in two ways:
    • First, managers can perform evaluations against recorded conversations or live interactions using a coaching form that focuses on key competencies, so there’s an institutionalized process that gives our managers guidance on the key areas to evaluate.
    • Second, they can provide remediation either on a one-to-one basis or through recommended content that is curated for each of the more important competencies.

By performing in-field coaching, enablement becomes a continuous process that helps our sellers be more productive as soon as possible rather than waiting for lagging indicators like quota performance to trigger remediation after the horse has left the barn. And our efforts as a readiness team can be gauged against real-world outcomes rather than nebulous measurements like adoption levels or test scores.

I like the Mindtickle approach to readiness in many ways, but perhaps the most important is that our partnership with the frontline managers makes it possible to have a meaningful impact on sales performance. Although I spent many years as a B2B sales professional, the fact is that sellers are much more likely to follow the guidance of their managers than some readiness guy who claims to know what makes them successful. I’m not spiteful about that because I’d feel exactly the same way. So our approach gives us the best of both worlds: enablement that’s aligned with business goals, and a partnership with our frontline managers that fosters an institutionalized coaching culture.

Why I’m the VP of Sales Readiness and Not Sales Enablement

Alex Salop on July 7, 2022

A quick search on LinkedIn will return a lot of VP of sales enablement roles, but not so many equivalent roles for sales readiness. It’s not surprising; sales enablement is a more venerable concept, and it’s been widely adopted in the market. Sales readiness, on the other hand, is gathering steam because sales organizations increasingly need to justify their sales enablement expenditure by understanding its impact on their business. Tightening budgets require sales leaders to gauge the impact of enablement, but most enablement organizations are unable to provide the level of detail to leadership. For Mindtickle, these realities are at the core of our company vision and it’s why I was named the VP of Sales Readiness earlier this year.

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In this post I’ll talk about the Kirkpatrick model, using results to measure success, and building an ideal rep profile. Over the next few months, I’ll share more about how Mindtickle approaches readiness within our own organization, and offer tips that may affect the way you think about implementing and measuring the impact of your own readiness programs.

What is the Kirkpatrick model?

Those familiar with the Kirkpatrick model know that reaction (how enablement participants feel about training) is a common surrogate for success.  In this case enablement leaders gauge effectiveness based on participation and feedback rather than impact. Reaction is a common approach because enablers have typically had neither the charter nor the tools to develop a defensible ROI.

Kirkpatrick recognizes that while reaction provides some feedback about the value of enablement efforts, the ultimate goal is to measure the results of your efforts against targeted outcomes.

Here’s the full Kirkpatrick hierarchy:

  1. Reaction – Is training favorable, engaging, and relevant?
  2. Learning – Did participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment needed to succeed?
  3. Behavior – Is learning applied on the job?
  4. Results – Did your efforts result in targeted outcomes?

Measure impact by focusing on results

It sounds like a cliche, but I’ve been a results-focused professional for some time, so the Kirkpatrick levels make a lot of sense to me. For the last 15 years, I’ve worked for companies seeking to improve results through improved sales training, practice, and execution. During that time, I’ve found that most companies struggle to get beyond anecdotal evidence of the impact of their efforts on the business. . As a result, anecdote-driven programs can lead enablement teams down unintended paths with the potential for significant opportunity costs.

That’s why my team focuses on results to measure success—which takes me back to my preference of readiness over sales enablement. Readiness requires you to demonstrate measurable impacts on the business, while traditional sales enablement approaches are often less ambitious.

First things first as VP of sales readiness: building an ideal rep profile

As a readiness team, we do traditional sales enablement, which is critical but only a part of our charter. Our programs start with role-based competency models that are aligned to revenue (we call these ideal rep profiles, or IRPs). We base each IRP on CRM data, so there’s a clear correlation between skills and outcomes. From there, we are responsible for the following:

  • Delivering sales enablement to buyer-facing teams, including role-play practice and spaced reinforcements to ensure that reps retain the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the field
  • Providing contextual, ad hoc content for use in on-the-job training and buyer interactions
  • Monitoring conversations between our sellers and buyers, using conversation intelligence software, to track the use of learned skills in real-world situations
  • Providing feedback and coaching guidelines for frontline managers to remediate skill gaps with bespoke coaching–and automatically assigning training remediation
  • Measuring and scoring all of the individualized knowledge, skills, and behaviors we track against Salesforce performance data using Mindtickle’s Readiness Index
  • Analyzing the correlations between top performers and their Readiness Index scores to ensure that we have our competency model right–and then making adjustments to either the competencies or their weighting over time as things inevitably change (Our company’s GTM, the competitive landscape, changes to the economy, etc.)

Building from the IRP with each of these steps gives my team an important role in improving employee productivity, informing hiring decisions, and more. Looking at our role from the perspective of the Kirkpatrick model, this approach enables us to hit on all cylinders:

  • Measuring reaction through engagement and completion
  • Delivering and testing learning through sales enablement, assessments, role-plays, and reinforcement exercises
  • Ensuring proper behavior using conversation intelligence to tell us how well reps do against the competencies that count–and then coaching to address skill gaps
  • And measuring results by correlating competency attainment against the same metrics that are used to determine sales success

I must admit that we have the advantage of using our own platform to achieve these goals, but that’s another reason why I took this job: I know that we have the tools to make us successful!

If you’d like to find out more, please don’t hesitate to reach me at [email protected] and take the first steps toward building your ideal rep profile here.

Mindtickle Named to the Top 100 of 5 of G2’s Best Software Lists: Continues as a Leader in Sales Readiness Solutions

Alex Salop on February 10, 2022

It’s that time of year when G2 releases its annual Best Software Products lists.

You may have gone to the G2 website in the past to see customer ratings and reviews for tools you considered adding to your tech stack. If so, you probably know that millions of customers across industries and geographies visit G2.com to rate and review thousands of software applications. In sales tech alone, there are hundreds of solutions for sales ops, sales enablement, sales automation, skills development, prospecting, social selling, and more — so the competition for G2 recognition is fierce.

Even so, our customers feel so strongly about the impact Mindtickle has had on their business that they have helped us reach the top of five key lists this year. In fact, we were in the top 15 in four of them, the top five in three of them, and in the top 100 in another:

  • Best Software Products (#11)
  • Enterprise Products (#2)
  • Highest Satisfaction Products (#4)
  • Sales Products (#5)
  • Global Sellers (#66)

Here’s why we’re so honored to be included in each category:

  • Best Software Products: In this category, leaders don’t just provide a great solution, they create fantastic customer experiences for their users. This position reflects our commitment to working with our customers to build innovative sales readiness solutions that drive meaningful change within their organizations. We’re committed to leading this category not just this year, but for many years to come.
  • Enterprise Products: This recognition demonstrates that our customers have used Mindtickle to make sales readiness a mission-critical within their organizations — and a key component of their software portfolios.
  • Highest Satisfaction Products: This is all about the number and quality of user reviews. It’s an important reassurance (and reminder) that delighting our users will continue to be a key focus of our work.
  • Sales Products: We’re really proud to be the highest-ranked sales enablement solution in this category. With the array of tools sellers use every day, we appreciate the fact that our users recognize the impact of our solution on their businesses.
  • Global Sellers: Microsoft, HubSpot, and Zoom have previously topped this list. Inclusion alongside these industry leaders demonstrates the important role that Mindtickle’s sales readiness platform has on companies with international footprints.

In addition to these annual awards, G2 released its Winter 2022 rankings. We were named leaders in the following:

  • Sales Enablement: We continue to empower our customers to build best-in-class enablement programs, individualized at scale, that leaders can map to business outcomes.
  • Sales Coaching: Mindtickle helps organizations institutionalize a coaching culture by empowering frontline managers to deliver individualized sales coaching that focuses on the skills it takes to close business.
  • Sales Training and Onboarding: Customers rely on us to improve time to productivity with sales onboarding programs focused on each seller’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Conversation Intelligence: Mindtickle’s integrated conversation intelligence approach enables frontline managers to identify and remediate skill gaps that stop sellers from closing more business.

The annual and quarterly rankings from G2 serve as a reminder of what we’re doing well, why our customers love using our product, and where we need to focus. Stay tuned for a product announcement in the next month, as well as a State of the Union report on sales readiness.

If you’re ready to see what our G2 reviews are talking about, let’s set up a demo.

Sales Readiness vs. Sales Enablement: Successful Sales Teams Need Both

Alex Salop on February 3, 2022

Some companies talk about sales readiness and sales enablement interchangeably. Others pit them against each other, as though they’re two opposing disciplines. But it’s not sales readiness versus sales enablement, because sales enablement is part of sales readiness.

Sales enablement helps your sellers prepare for their interactions with prospects, which is an essential part of developing a successful, sales-ready team. Sales enablement is one element of your overall sales readiness framework. You need the whole framework — including data driven sales enablement— to improve your sales reps’ performance and create a culture of excellence within the team.

Sales readiness is the measure of a successful sales team

Sales readiness is a process of continuous improvement for sales teams. It ensures sellers have all the information and tools they need, plus the essential sales skills and behaviors to go into any sales conversation with any customer, fully prepared. It empowers managers to monitor and measure their team’s performance and put into place remedial training, coaching, and education to help sellers improve based on their demonstrated areas of weakness.

At Mindtickle, we describe sales readiness as a continuous state of excellence that enables sales teams to grow revenue by using a suite of tools and processes to increase knowledge, enhance performance, and adapt to change.

We’ve developed a sales readiness framework to help sales and revenue leaders understand whether their sellers have the skills, competencies, and knowledge necessary to hit quota and close deals successfully.

Mindtickle sales readiness framework

The sales readiness framework covers five steps to help sales leaders measure their sellers’ ongoing performance and sales readiness:

  1. Define excellence. Sales leaders identify the key knowledge, skills, and behaviors reps need to succeed in your organization. They document these skills in an ideal rep profile to set the baseline against which reps’ knowledge and capabilities are measured.
  2. Build knowledge. Sales leaders provide their reps with the information, tools, and resources that let them learn about the product and industry, plus essential selling skills and behaviors.
  3. Align content. Sellers are equipped with just-in-time access to content that prepares them for every selling situation. Marketing and sales teams align to ensure content helps sellers move deals forward, and reps know how the content helps them optimize every selling situation..
  4. Analyze performance. Sales managers review sellers’ real-life sales interactions to spot skills gaps and opportunities for improvement. They can analyze their team’s use of key messaging and themes and assess essential selling skills like objection handling and product demos.
  5. Optimize behavior. Sales managers provide personalized, tailored coaching for each rep based on revealed skill gaps. Individualized coaching helps sales reps develop the skills and behaviors that align with your ideal rep profile to help teams win deals.

This framework helps sellers adapt to changing products, buyer needs, and business landscape. It also helps them develop and maintain the skills and knowledge they need to go into every customer conversation fully prepared.

How sales enablement helps reps be ready

Sales enablement is the training, reinforcement, and practice that lets sellers engage in successful interactions with prospects and customers, hit quota, and close deals. Sales enablement fits into several stages of our sales readiness framework, helping reps build the knowledge and skills they need to be ready for high-stakes sales interactions with prospects.

Sales enablement helps sellers build knowledge

Sales enablement helps reps develop their product and industry knowledge through continuous training and practice. Sellers build knowledge by completing training modules and then put that theory into practice by completing test product demos and virtual role-plays. Sales enablement also helps reps retain their knowledge through spaced reinforcement training exercises so they can recall and use their training correctly in sales interactions.

For example, in the Mindtickle platform, reps can complete AI-guided role-plays to practice pitches, product demos, objection handling, and other common selling scenarios in a virtual environment. These exercises familiarize them with your company’s core messaging and product and ensure they’re following sales behavior best practices before they get in front of their next big prospect.

Mindtickle Practice Pitch

Ensuring sellers have foundational product and industry knowledge is essential for getting reps ready for high-value calls when they’re live with potential customers. Sales enablement helps reps develop their subject matter expertise and put in enough practice and reinforcement to retain that knowledge long-term.

Sales enablement aligns content with the sales process

Sales content is a valuable tool for sales reps for ad-hoc enablement or to use when nurturing leads and prospects to help move the conversation forward. Sales enablement ensures reps know how and when to use marketing content in sales conversations. Sellers should have access to your library of sales content, so they can find and identify the best pieces for their current sales interaction.

For example, your marketing team can tag case studies about the buyer persona, vertical, or customer outcome to which it’s most relevant. Then your reps can search their content library for those key terms and easily find the case studies that best fit their current needs. And, in the same place, your enablement team can use the same tags to provide microlearning, recorded conversation snippets, competitive info, and other just-in-time training content to ensure proper preparation for every interaction.

Regardless of whether it comes from sales, marketing, or another source, just-in-time sales enablement content should live in a single, searchable location to help your reps find and use your assets. Our platform combines intuitive filters and smart search functionality to help sellers identify and surface valuable sales content quickly and efficiently.

Sales enablement helps reps and managers optimize behavior

Sales enablement creates a culture of ongoing development, training, and improvement in sales teams. It isn’t just about enabling reps to gain new knowledge and skills — sales enablement is also focused on reinforcing key skills and behaviors through training and practice.

With Mindtickle, managers facilitate training for their reps on an ongoing basis. They monitor and analyze reps’ performance by listening to call recordings, running debrief sessions after important calls, and using conversation intelligence solutions like Mindtickle’s Call AI. Analyzing their team’s real-world sales interactions enables managers to assess reps’ performance and identify gaps in skills and knowledge. Then they can share training resources and coaching exercises to help reps practice those skills that need remediation.

Mindtickle Call AI

For example, a sales manager identifies that some reps struggle to handle customer objections around their pricing plans. The manager can coach sellers directly or ask the reps to complete virtual role-plays to practice pricing conversations ahead of their next conversation with a real customer. The manager can also look at trends in reps’ scores and feedback from their role-plays to see how well each rep is progressing and retaining information from previous coaching efforts.

Stop thinking of sales readiness vs sales enablement and give your sellers all the tools they need to succeed

If you’re still thinking of sales readiness and sales enablement as two opposing approaches for your sellers, consider how they complement each other. Sales enablement is one part of a sales readiness program that ensures your reps have — and use — the knowledge and skills they need for every selling scenario.

any companies see sales enablement as separate from sales readiness, so they silo enablement training and content in learning-centric tools that are disconnected from content management or conversation intelligence software, making sales enablement a one-and-done activity rather than a continuous part of the selling process.

Mindtickle’s platform offers a suite of tools and processes to help reps increase knowledge, enhance performance, and go into every customer conversation ready to succeed. Our single platform offers:

  • Sales enablement
  • Sales content management
  • Conversation intelligence
  • Sales training and coaching

Make sales enablement a key part of your sales readiness approach. Request a demo or learn more about how sales readiness pros use Mindtickle to build effective programs for their teams.

Why You Need Content Experiences for Sales to Improve Productivity and Accelerate Deals

Alex Salop on September 15, 2021

In 1996, Bill Gates famously penned an article titled “Content is King.” Though the article is now a quarter of a century old, the sentiment has never been more true – especially for sales organizations.

There’s no doubt sales content is a key ingredient of sales readiness and selling success. And it comes in many forms. Internal content, such as product updates delivered via easy-to-consume microlearning, ensures sellers are always up-to-date, access and use accurate, consistent messaging, and are able to convey the value of their solution. On the other hand, the right marketing-approved assets enable sellers to deliver relevant content to customers throughout the selling cycle. This external content helps sellers increase engagement, set traps for the competition, and move deals through the funnel more quickly.

But getting the right content in sellers’ hands is rife with obstacles – for both sellers and administrators. If they’re going to arm salespeople with content that improves deal outcomes, organizations need to rethink what kind of content is shared, how it’s shared, and how it’s used.

It’s time for sales organizations to provide integrated sales content experiences for just-in-time learning and customer engagement.

At many organizations, content chaos is the norm

Virtually every sales enabler and marketer spends a lot of time creating content to support the sales team. Different content serves different roles – and it can take many different formats. For example, “internal use only” tools such as just-in-time training and recordings of top sellers in real-world interactions help reps prepare for upcoming meetings more effectively. And customer-facing assets such as pitch decks and sell sheets can help accelerate deals.

The right content can have a significant, positive impact on a rep’s ability to close more deals. But according to SiriusDecisions, up to 70% of B2B content goes unused. And one of the chief reasons is that sellers don’t know the content exists. Or, if they do, they don’t know how or where to find it.

Because multiple stakeholders create sales content, storing and managing content gets out of control – and quickly. Keeping content in Google Drive, Dropbox, or SharePoint may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but making sure the current messaging, positioning, or competitive talking points are being accessed becomes an impossible task when your content repository wasn’t built for the task.

Even worse, there’s no organization of content along business lines. If a rep wants to see an example of pitching against a competitor, watch an SME video about the competitor, and then share some marketing assets for the same purpose, will all of that information be in the same place? Will it be up-to-date? Will there only be one copy of all of it? If your organization is like most, the answers to these questions are no, no, and no.

It’s content chaos, and sellers don’t have what they need to succeed.

Modern sellers need integrated content experiences to succeed in the field

Today’s B2B sellers have high expectations. Sellers must walk into meetings ready to deliver value, and content is a big piece of the readiness puzzle. In fact, according to the CMO Council, 87% of B2B buyers indicate content has a major or moderate impact on their purchase decisions.

Organizations must make it a priority to provide integrated content experiences that empower reps to access, learn, and share the right content at the right time. Whether it’s an internal competitive update from a subject matter expert or a marketing-approved, customer-facing brochure, content should be housed in a single, easily searchable platform. The problem is that conversation intelligence data – which can provide those real-world conversation snippets reps find so valuable – is often housed in an entirely different location than just-in-time learning content and marketing assets, making a single platform more of a fantasy than reality.

Reps need content stored in intuitive hubs that match business workflows. The subject matter in hubs may be competitors, personas, industries, sales plays, etc. But it’s hard to create these hubs when data comes from multiple locations.

Instead, you need a centralized location like Mindtickle’s Asset Hub, that pulls data from other aspects of your sales stack – enablement, conversation intelligence, etc. – and delivers it in one integrated solution. Then your content becomes more valuable, it’s used more frequently and effectively, and your reps become more consistent and productive.

Reduces time wasted on searching for content

Research suggests that reps spend less than a third of their time on revenue-generating activities. The remainder of their time is spent on myriad other activities, including paperwork, training, and servicing customers. Of course, those are all important tasks. However, a good chunk of a reps’ time is also spent doing busy work – including hunting down the right content. And if they can’t find what they need, they may take matters into their own hands and sink even more time into developing their own content from scratch. And we’ve all seen how that ends.

An integrated content experience ensures reps can always find exactly what they’re looking for, quickly. That means they can spend less time hunting for content and guessing which will help improve sales outcomes – and more time doing what they do best: selling.

Search in the Mindtickle Asset Hub

Ensures accurate, consistent messaging across the sales team

Let’s say the enablement team sends out a new sell sheet via email. But shortly after it’s been released, the content becomes outdated. Reps save the sheet and continue sharing it, even after it’s been updated, and propagate outdated information to their buyers. This scenario happens thousands of times per day, and enablement teams often feel powerless to do anything about it.

Providing reps with one-stop content access for all of their training and sharing needs ensures they have a single source of truth when it comes to content. They know they can easily find the approved version of what they need and deliver accurate, consistent messaging during sales interactions.

Better win rates

If a seller can’t find a piece of content to address a customer’s needs and objections at a specific stage of the sales cycle, it can slow down a deal.

With integrated content experiences – where content is both arranged in business-focused hubs and easily searchable – reps have access to all of the content they need in a single location. And when admin teams can easily manage content and correlate both training and marketing content to business outcomes, reps also know the content they use has been successful with top reps.

With the right content and insights into content effectiveness, reps can more effectively communicate with prospects, overcome objections, and build a strong case for their solution. They’re better equipped to close more business – faster.

End the content chaos

Sales reps need access to the right content at the right moment to move more deals forward. But a disjointed approach to content management doesn’t cut it. To turn chaos into structure, organizations need an integrated platform with three key attributes:

  • Integrated enablement, conversation intelligence, and just-in-time content to create a tight bond between training and selling
  • Centralized administration to ensure the right content is always available – and the wrong content isn’t
  • And insights into content effectiveness, helping stakeholders across the organization understand the impact of content for both training and selling

Introducing Asset Hub: The First Sales Content Manager Built for Sales

Alex Salop on September 14, 2021

As marketers, we tend to think pretty highly of our content and the role it plays in helping generate revenues, but drawing a direct line between content and results is misleading. After all, salespeople close the business, not us. The reality is that as much as 90% of our content goes unused by sales, and according to Sirius Decisions, marketing efforts are far less effective unless they’re aligned with the needs of a sales organization.

Sales content management software really helps align sales and marketing, but more often than not, these products are justified by marketing based on the ability to tie content to revenue. At Mindtickle, we think sales content management should be more about sales while still providing all the good stuff for marketing.

That’s why we’re excited to announce Asset Hub from Mindtickle, the first sales content management software built for sales. Asset Hub was created from the ground up, and it’s tightly integrated into the Mindtickle Sales Readiness Platform. This last part – integration with Mindtickle – is really important, and here’s why:

We all know that salespeople spend more time selling than they do in formal training, so access to just-in-time assets is really important to help them move deals along and maintain consistent messaging. The challenge is what kind of assets they need. Sure, brochures and slides are really helpful – especially when contextualized to each selling situation, but reps also need easy-to-consume, just-in-time training as well, and more than just a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. They need to know what good looks like, be reminded about winning approaches, and be able to practice their pitches in a safe space – all just-in-time, anywhere, and anytime.

mindtickle asset hub content management

And that’s exactly what Asset Hub delivers. Because it’s part of the Mindtickle platform, Asset Hub automatically has access to all of the deep sales enablement training, practice, and reinforcement content already on the platform, as well as all of the conversation intelligence content from Call AI, Mindtickle’s integrated conversation intelligence solution.

How sales content can drive deals forward

Let’s say one of your reps is targeting a conversation with the CFO of a large tech company. She may have been trained on selling to tech or selling to CFOs, or maybe both, but maybe it’s not a persona she talks to every day or industry she normally covers. If she wants to succeed, she needs more than a few marketing assets and some documents to read. Instead of what she’d find in a typical sales content manager, Asset Hub delivers highly contextualized training to prepare her:

    • An example of a successful conversation between a top rep and a similar prospect, highlighting the winning behaviors that enabled the rep to gain interest and generate an opportunity
    • Short microlearning videos from internal SMEs about CFO personas and selling to tech companies
    • Reinforcement quizzes that jog her memory about selling to this persona and industry
    • Role-play practice exercises that enable her to practice her pitch with AI-powered feedback before she has the conversation with her buyer

Once she’s able to establish interest and create an opportunity, then she can use Asset Hub to get ready for her next meeting:

    • Share and track viewership of marketing content to increase interest across the organization
    • Watch a sales presentation from one of her teammates
    • See training from Sales Enablement or Marketing on how to use the pitch deck
    • Practice the deck with AI-generated feedback
    • Share the practice pitch with others for feedback from respected teammates

…and so on, all the way until the deal closes.

Search in the Mindtickle Asset Hub

How sales content can be a training tool

She’s connected to Asset Hub during every step of her journey, always ensuring she’s ready to give her best at every step in the process. Even better, her content usage is being tracked, so when she closes the deal, sales leadership can track her activities – the training she consumes, the tools she uses, the external-facing material she shares, etc. – to identify and promote the behaviors (not just the content) that help reps close more deals.

And that’s how Asset Hub differs from other sales content management solutions. While every vendor touts the use of their platforms for sales enablement, their focus is typically on content alone rather than the content and behaviors that win deals. Mindtickle differs because Asset Hub is part of our comprehensive sales readiness platform. Through its interaction with each of the planks of Mindtickle’s platform (listed below), Asset Hub offers far more benefits than a stand-alone sales content management platform:

  • Define excellence

Because Mindtickle enables our customers to identify the winning behaviors that make top reps successful, these skills and activities can be translated into a blueprint for creating the just-in-time microlearning, sample conversations, reinforcement activities, and other best practices that are contextualized to every selling situation in Asset Hub. And by tracking the way content is accessed and used in Asset Hub – and its correlation with business outcomes – sales organizations will be able to update and refine their definition of winning behaviors over time.

  • Build knowledge

Unlike other solutions, Asset Hub can draw from the entirety of content that has been created or curated for sales enablement purposes. Rather than having to start from scratch or create some static connection from existing content, native integration with Mindtickle increases the impact and ROI of your enablement content.

  • Align content

This is Asset Hub’s domain: aligning content from sales enablement and marketing to meet the just-in-time needs of salespeople in the field, and then feeding back the data that helps organizations define and refine the winning behaviors that close deals.

  • Analyze performance

With Mindticle’s Call AI conversation intelligence solution, sales organizations can use call scores to easily identify winning behaviors in real-world sales interactions and then correlate them to the scenarios where they can act as best practices. Contextualizing real-world examples of winning behaviors for just-in-time use in Access Hub gives salespeople a clear model for upcoming interactions and provides them valuable insights so they can make the most of every activity.

  • Optimize behavior

Mindtickle facilitates a coaching culture by identifying each rep’s strengths and weaknesses and then empowering managers to coach salespeople to better performance. With Asset Hub, reps and managers can “favorite” the content and activities that will help remediate skill gaps, helping sales teams focus on the winning behaviors that will help them achieve better results.

Ready to see what Mindtickle can do for revenue productivity at your org?

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Introducing Call AI: Mindtickle’s Conversation Intelligence Solution

Alex Salop on May 20, 2021

When salespeople swing and miss in front of buyers, it’s always a priority to save the deal. But fixing the symptoms without addressing the root cause will limit your team’s potential. Without visibility into what your salespeople do in front of buyers and a way to improve their skills, you can’t win more deals — just predict which ones you’re going to lose.

Mindtickle’s Call AI is the only conversation intelligence solution where you can identify and fix the real-world behaviors that stop your salespeople from closing every deal. Call AI collects and analyzes data across all aspects of readiness – all in one place, giving sales leaders the unique ability to understand readiness levels, knowledge gaps, and skill improvements for each seller.

Unlock the skills that drive successful sales interactions     

According to McKinsey research, over 85% of B2B sales interactions happen on the phone or within web conferencing platforms, making it impossible for sales managers to shadow every interaction between sellers and buyers. Without an individualized remediation plan for every salesperson, you may be able to identify and save individual sales opportunities, but you likely won’t be able to address the root cause that put deals in peril in the first place.

Call AI joins calls as a silent attendee, recording, transcribing and mining customer conversations for critical insights that drive improvements.

How it works

  • Record and identify strengths and weaknesses demonstrated by salespeople in live sales interactions with AI-based insights
  • Collaborate to share snippets with examples and feedback privately and publicly
  • Identify and share successful sales behaviors team and organization-wide
  • Integrate conversations within Salesforce opportunities, contacts, leads and accounts to evaluate the number and quality of sales conversations throughout the buying cycle
  • Understand individual and team performance and competency attainment during sales interactions
  • Correlate competencies to outcomes such as win rates, revenue achievement, project success and more

Unlike point solutions, Mindtickle enables organizations to influence selling skills before, during and after customer interactions. With actionable insights into a seller’s strengths, weaknesses and improvements, sales managers can create targeted coaching techniques to:

  • Improve the rep’s performance across every stage of the sales cycle
  • Deliver benefits and better outcomes across the entire enterprise

Call AI delivers benefits across the organization

  • Managers have significant visibility into how salespeople perform during live interactions
  • Salespeople can correct mistakes, increasing productivity and positive business outcomes
  • Deal sizes increase as salespeople can more effectively capitalize on every opportunity
  • Best practices are easy to identify, share and replicate
  • Deals are won against more poorly prepared competitors
  • Companies meet or exceed revenue targets
  • Sales churn decreases as more salespeople achieve quota
  • More salespeople make or exceed quota
  • Key business initiatives succeed because they’re informed by critical field-based evidence

Call AI quantifies individual and team competency strengths and weaknesses based on real-world interactions

With core capabilities like call recording and AI-based insights, Call AI empowers sales leaders and sellers to understand why deals are lost, what to do about it and where to find the guidance or content to help them improve.

  • Call recording: Call AI automatically captures and transcribes calls and web conferences using AI-driven analysis to deliver actionable intelligence about buyer interactions. Sales managers can relive highs and lows within every conversation through search and timeline analysis, identify the prevailing topics and themes and score calls based on best practices. Managers can then use this data to create a personalized skill development program aimed at bridging skill gaps and maximizing every salesperson’s productivity.

Call AI captures and transcribes calls and web conferences

  • Actionable insights: Call AI combines call scores with the Sales Capability Index™ to deliver a comprehensive view of individual and team readiness. Based on sellers’ strengths and weaknesses, Call AI will automatically prescribe follow-up training, coaching and practice focused on maximizing the impact of every sales interaction. Custom guidelines will be delivered to front-line managers so they can focus on both current deals and the skills that will help them improve future outcomes.

Call AI provide insights based on seller's strength & weaknesses

Deliver a comprehensive enablement program and inform future readiness initiatives based on conversation intelligence

Capabilities like readiness integration, call-sharing and collaboration, and CRM integration create a continuous cycle by incorporating training, reinforcement, and practice; revealing the impact of these efforts in real-world sales interactions and measuring their effect on business outcomes. This continuous cycle fosters a culture of professional improvement, growth and success.

  • Readiness integration: Incorporate teachable moments from live conversations into enablement programs, providing detailed evidence that demonstrates how to maximize the impact of every selling situation. Analyze sales conversations to determine the effect of programs on sales execution, helping to improve future programs based on real-world evidence.

  • Call-sharing and collaboration: Share key moments for team feedback, public consumption or as best practices to inform readiness initiatives, using timestamps and comments for detailed feedback and asynchronous, idea-sharing conversations.

Best practices to inform readiness initiatives

  • CRM integration: Automatically map interactions to CRM contacts, leads, accounts and opportunities, providing deeper insight into the buyer’s journey and correlating the impact of live interactions on revenue outcomes.

Call AI maps interactions to your CRM

“I had zero insight into why a rep couldn’t close a deal. Problem solved with Call AI. 

Rick Gouveia, CRO, Turing Video

Results: 

  • 200% increase in quota attainment year-on-year
  • 50% reduction in new rep ramp time in 2020
  • 2.5x improvement in average call scores across the team

Close the loop in your readiness program with Call AI

A successful enablement and readiness program must close the loop between coaching deals, coaching sales, and the voice of the customer. Call AI powers a continuous cycle of analysis, skill development, coaching and assessment, giving sales leaders actionable insights into why deals are won or lost and how to better prepare sellers and teams to succeed.

Click here to learn more about Call AI.

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