Milaap Meets Mindtickle

Deepti Sundareshan on March 12, 2019

Milaap is India’s largest online crowdfunding platform. Founded in 2010 by a team of young and passionate entrepreneurs, Milaap has pioneered the vision to enable people to directly assist individuals in need.  They have changed the scenario of person to person giving in India and how Indians support a cause.

Over the past eight years, it has emerged as a preferred platform to fund medical emergencies. Online crowdfunding is now becoming accessible to more people across the country, backed by social media and the ease of digital payments. Today, Indians are effectively mobilizing support to face difficult situations through online communities across the world. This crowdfunding approach has applications in almost every domain.

While an increasing number of students are able to explore more opportunities for higher studies, people are more empowered to address local issues with help communities that connect with their cause.

“Over 80 percent of the funds raised on crowdfunding platform Milaap are for medical needs,” says co-founder and President Anoj Viswanathan.
Milaap.org has gone one step ahead and taken the ease of online fundraising a notch higher. They are moving away from conventional, mechanical forms to a more empathetic and conversational approach through chatbots. Based on intensive research, and feedback from their community of users, the platform has pioneered a way to make it easier for people to share their need with others.

With an overwhelming majority of funds raised for medical causes, the platform is now focusing on making quality healthcare affordable, and therefore accessible to more people in the country. The Milaap platform not only helps one share sensitive stories with greater comfort but also makes the process extremely easy for new users, who may be from extremely remote places. With all the required details in place, the verification process is much faster. This new feature is so unique that Milaap is in the process of applying to get a patent.

With the industry growing rapidly and the concept gaining more acceptance, the team at Milaap is striving to take crowdfunding to a broader audience. Especially, those who may be from the most remote areas of the country. This is indeed a big step into the future, where people can share their cause with the world over a simple conversation. As Anoj Viswanathan says, “Quality healthcare is becoming accessible to more people, without financial constraints.”

Milaap collaborates with hospitals and corporations and seeks to widen its network by going into smaller cities and carrying campaigns in local languages. With families being pushed into poverty because of medical expenses, the “tech-for-good” company’s initiative gives patients’ families an avenue to cope with massive medical bills.

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a global Sales Readiness platform which helps companies across industries build robust sales teams. Mindtickle’s core focus is on enabling companies to grow revenue and build brand by equipping customer-facing teams to be on message and on task.

At Mindtickle, we are always looking for ways to give back to society in various forms. We support social causes and try to help people during natural disasters and raise funds to help with relief efforts during a crisis.

“We have grown with the help and support of the Society, and every individual who is privileged and fortunate enough should help the less privileged and give back,” says Krishna Depura, Co-Founder and CEO of Mindtickle.

While some of our professionals have started their own dog shelter to rescue dogs, some reach out to orphanages and nursing homes to donate, celebrate, or spend some fun time while making artwork.

Milaap joins hands with Mindtickle

Mindtickle’s founders have always strived to support socially conscious organizations and activities. This support includes donating their technology to help organizations like Milaap train their team members to be ready to render help to those in need.

“When we heard of Milaap we thought what could be a better way to give back to the society while helping the process of connecting individuals to donors! Hence, we are helping Milaap to use our platform to train their team members and keep them posted on how they can enable individuals to avail and raise donations on the go,” said Krishna Depura.

The tool also helps train members to reach out to doctors, and with hospitals they collaborate with, to guide patients or their relatives to reach out to Milaap when in need.

Milaap runs several campaigns to help crowdsource funds for individuals and patients out of which came a campaign named “Feet on Street.” In this campaign, team members are stationed in every super specialty hospital across India to help patients know more about crowdfunding, and educate the hospitals about the help that Milaap provides.

The Mindtickle platform, in such cases, becomes a valuable tool to help them provide the right info and training material to help individuals without losing precious time.  The platform also helps them fast track the fund-raising process by training team members with regular updates and enabling people to create campaigns on the Milaap website to get timely help.

Mindtickle helps Milaap ensure the right distribution of resources required by the representatives, with up-to-date info on the go, efficient training to help the patients at the sensitive time of need and to address their issues with the right guidance.

When Launching Sales Enablement Tools, Create a Change Management Strategy

Deepti Sundareshan on May 24, 2018

We’ve talked about best practices for successful implementation, how to increase the adoption of initiatives, and how to manage change when launching sales enablement tools.

But before you begin your sales enablement implementation process, you must understand how creating a change management strategy can ensure you receive the desired outcomes.

Mindtickle Sales Enablement Benchmark Report

What is a change management strategy?

Change is necessary for companies to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. Unfortunately, people tend to resist change and wish to continue doing what they’ve been doing. Change management helps guide an organization through the transitional process as quickly and easily as possible. Change management strategy is a framework to support changes. It isn’t about the alterations themselves.

Why you need a strategy before your implementation

When preparing to change any processes in your organization it is important to create a unified strategy. Having a strategy ensures that everyone is on the same page before you start to make a change. You’ll confirm that everyone impacted by the upcoming transition understands the need for it. Plus they’ll know what to expect and will help you collect any needed input. When this all happens ahead of time, it brings people closer together and makes them feel more comfortable. This leads to increased compliance and adoption throughout the entire journey to your new desired state.

Creating your strategy

Preparing a strategy is about gathering information that allows you to make educated decisions when you create your actual implementation plans. Your strategy helps ensure changes are consistent and successfully applied to your entire organization. It’s about being aware of key factors ahead of your actual planning and implementation. There are three main steps to creating your change management strategy. They include:

  1.    Situational awareness
  2.    Supporting team structure
  3.    Change management strategy analysis

Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.

Situational awareness

This step involves gaining a better understanding of the actual change, who will be affected, and how your organization may have previously worked through similar changes, if applicable. Specifically, you need to look at change characteristics, organizational attributes, and groups that will be involved.
Change characteristics

  • Gain an understanding of the change that you’ll be introducing. Answer the following questions to uncover the characteristics of your planned change: What is involved in the change? How many people will it affect? Who will be impacted? Will they all be affected in the same way or differently? What is being changed – processes, systems, job roles, etc? Over what period of time will the change occur?
  • Organizational attributes: This is about understanding the history and culture of your organization as a means to better understand the people and groups being impacted. Remember that various groups will be affected in different ways. Considerations here include: How do employees and managers perceive the need for this change?  Has your organization ever managed similar changes? If so, how was it done? Does the organization have a shared vision of the final outcome? How much change is already taking place prior to the upcoming implementation?
  • Groups that will be involved: This final step in situational awareness entails developing a picture of who will be most involved in the change and how they will be impacted. You want an understanding of how different groups will be affected in their own unique way. This will enable specific and customized plans to accommodate each group during the actual change management process.

Supporting team structure

It’s important to identify a team and sponsor to support your change management strategy. Without this, it will be quite difficult to implement your plans when the time comes. Let’s take a look at both of these.

  • Team structure: The change management team structure establishes who will be managing the change. It explains how the project team and the change management team will work together. It also specifies the team members and their responsibilities.
  • Sponsor coalition: The sponsor coalition specifies which sales executives, operations, managers, and top performers should be onboard and actively involved in driving the change. It also designates the primary sponsor who authorizes and champions the specific change. The sponsor must be actively and openly engaged throughout the change project. All members of this coalition are responsible for building support and communicating with their particular audience within your organization concerning the change.

Change management strategy analysis

To ensure your change management strategy is effective, it’s important to consider what could cause your implementation to fail. Doing so allows you to proactively determine how to address these stumbling blocks so they don’t cause any delays in reaching your desired outcomes. Below are the three steps you need to take in this part of strategy creation.

  • Project risk assessment: The more dramatic and extensive the change, the higher the risk. You also have a greater chance of difficulties if your organization tends to have a history of resisting change. As you develop your strategy, the change management team should document all potential risk factors.
  • Anticipated resistance: Think carefully about where you might anticipate push-back on the upcoming change. Are there particular divisions, groups, positions, or individuals that are most likely to resist the new implementation? Making note of these can prevent them, or help prepare you to address them when they arise.
  • Developing special tactics: Once you’ve identified your potential risks and resistances, you should determine how you will deal with each when and if they arise. Have these strategies prepared to facilitate smoother progress throughout your implementation? Of course, it is impossible to anticipate every issue in advance, so you’ll want to revisit this step periodically during your launch process.

After you create your strategy you’ll be ready to devise your change management plans. Be sure to stay focused on the information you uncovered while developing your strategy. It will greatly impact the success of your implementation. Without taking the time to create your change management strategy, you risk disorganization, a lack of compliance, or incomplete change. This will only lead to greatly reduced results. Now it’s time for you to create a change management strategy to prepare for your upcoming sales readiness implementation to ensure the best possible outcomes.

Gaining a Competitive Sales Advantage with Virtual Micro-Learning

Deepti Sundareshan on May 16, 2018

In today’s ever-changing marketplace, it’s becoming more and more difficult to get an edge over competitors. Developing a strong value proposition is one way to clearly explain to prospects why they should buy your solution over others. In fact, a great value proposition could be the difference between losing a sale or closing it. According to HubSpot, only 69% of B2B firms have established value propositions, yet 54 percent of companies do nothing to optimize theirs. A strong value proposition alone is not enough to get ahead of your business rivals. It takes a well-prepared salesforce who can effectively leverage your value proposition to make the difference. The best way to prepare them to do so is with the ongoing, bite-sized training that’s accessible from anywhere. Here, we’ll show you how you’ll gain a competitive sales advantage with virtual micro-learning.

Attract and retain good talent

According to research by Gallup,

59% of millennials say opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important to them when

applying for a job

. In comparison, 44% of Gen Xers and 41% of baby boomers say the same about these types of opportunities. Plus, the Harvard Business Review found that dissatisfaction with development efforts such as training and coaching cause many to leave their job for another with better development opportunities.

Sales rep engagement increases when micro-learning is used instead of other training methods because it’s in a format that’s easily incorporated into their routine while meeting their desire to learn. It also increases job satisfaction, since the sales staff feels more prepared and enjoys their work more. Plus, micro-learning is fun!

Faster onboarding

Effective salespeople are masters of a complex skill set. It takes technical expertise and fine-tuned people skills to translate product specs into persuasive value. Micro-learning

shortens ramp time. This means less time to full productivity and more reps selling at their full potential at all times. This reduces the financial drain on the organization and creates a stronger selling team compared to those of competitors.

Always up-to-date

In today’s marketplace, there’s always something new to learn and changes to know. They include updates relating to product, marketplace, prospect challenges, industry information, competitors, and the best sales techniques. With micro-learning, your reps are continually learning and always up to date on the latest need-to-know information.

It helps them easily

keep their knowledge and skills fresh. Consistently improving through reinforcement with practice and application, they’re always ready for any prospect or scenario.

The right information at the right time

Since virtual micro-learning is available from anywhere on any device, sales reps can review the information they need, when they need it. For example, they can refresh on value propositions for specific prospects just prior to presenting to or meeting with, them. This easy-to-access information makes it possible for reps to respond promptly to prospect and customer questions too, resulting in increased sales and customer satisfaction.

This content, consumed at the moment the rep most needs it, is reinforced with an immediate application that results in greater retention. The individualized learning experience that micro-learning provides keeps reps interested and wanting to learn more to fill their individual learning gaps.

Increased productivity

Unlike other learning methods,

micro-learning doesn’t interrupt your reps’ daily work, it fits right in. They remain on-the-job instead of sitting in a training room where they aren’t productive. Also, your team members learn faster and retain more with micro-learning, so they’re better prepared to close more business in less time.

Agile

Matching the pace of today’s business, virtual micro-learning is agiler than other forms of training and communication. Due to their brevity, micro-learning courses can be produced quickly and updated on the go. Plus, notifications about changes to your company, competition, product, and more are easily created and distributed with just a few clicks.

This allows your organization to adapt to change quickly and easily in the marketplace.

As you can see, micro-learning enables your sales force to be better prepared to meet with various prospects, differentiate your solution, and win more deals. With the top talent that’s always up-to-date and continually improving, you’ll already have an edge over your rivals. The resulting productivity combined with your ability to rapidly change with the marketplace, your industry opponents will be no match. It’s time for you to give this method of learning a try and experience the competitive sales advantage with virtual micro-learning in your company.

Why a Sales Onboarding Program Design for Sales Engineers is Important

Deepti Sundareshan on May 14, 2018

Strategic sales onboarding, regardless of team size or role, should be a non-negotiable priority for any company.

Research by the Aberdeen Group backs this up: a recent study found that when onboarded effectively, 71% of employees exceeded expectations, versus a reported 8% by companies without an onboarding strategy. And while it’s a given that every team member needs to learn the same foundations about the company and its culture, different roles require specialized learning.

What’s a sales onboarding program just for sales engineers?

Due to the particular focus on cross-disciplinary skills, the specialized role of the technical sales engineer is a perfect example of the impact effective onboarding can have. Sales engineers bridge the gap between the sales reps and the product: since sales engineers bring deep technical knowledge to the sales process, they need in-depth immersion and training on the product.

This means that basic product training or an overview of APIs, integrations, and use cases are not enough: sales engineers need to know and understand their product like the back of their hands. However, some capabilities that sales engineers need are similar to sales reps: they need to understand their customers and all the ways the product helps them relieve business pain points.

So, what should a sales engineers onboarding include?

Sales engineers need to understand the intricacies of how your product works and be able to apply specific use cases and solutions. They then must be able to explain these to a customer in a way that actually sells your product. To help them become proficient in each of these as quickly as possible, your onboarding should include:

  • Time with your product – The role of sales engineers is to know your product inside out. And, they don’t just need to know the features, they must understand how people use the product and be able to demonstrate it. They need to be able to test and put into practice what they’ve learned.
  • Detail on your product roadmap – Sales engineers need to understand what the product roadmap looks and how it affects your industry and competitive positioning. This will help them tailor discussions and solutions for customers. During the onboarding process, ask engineering and product development to get involved so they can give your engineers a holistic view of how the product works today and the future product roadmap.
  • Certify they can demo – The first time a customer meets an engineer will often be at the product demo. Before the demo, engineers need to understand the customer, their pain points, and needs so they can tailor the demo accordingly. Getting the demo right can make or break the deal. As part of their onboarding let sales engineers see other use cases (recorded or live) and get them to practice different scenarios. They should also be certified in how to complete a tailored demo before meeting a customer. This process ideally will include receiving plenty of feedback from both their peers and managers so they can keep improving and refine their technique.
  • Practice objection handling – Considered an expert, technical sales engineers often face the most challenging objections. They not only need to know what to say but also how to say it in a way that keeps the sale in play. This is a learned skill as it can be easy to get caught up in technical details that the customer doesn’t necessarily need to know. Using role plays and scenario-based training, technical sales engineers can make sure they have mastered handling objections.
  • Understanding competitor products – To explain to a customer why your product is superior to a competitor’s your sales engineers need to understand exactly what your competitor’s products do and don’t do; not just listed features. Depending on how complex your product is, your sales engineer’s onboarding should include a detailed explanation of your key product differentiators as compared to your competitors. For more complex products, give them access to your competitor’s products and let them spend some time seeing how they work.
  • Customer-based Solutions – To give customers real solutions to their problems, engineers need to understand your product in the context of how it works in a business environment. By spending time with your customer success team they can see these use cases in action and perhaps also gather feedback from customers so that they can learn what works and what doesn’t.
  • Relationship building with sales reps – Sales engineers need to build relationships with sales reps so that they bring them into their deals and promote overall sales effectiveness. It’s important to help sales engineers build these relationships and you get the ball rolling by onboarding them together where their coursework overlaps. Enabling engineers to shadow sales onboarding and vice versa, sharing technical sales engineer onboarding with the reps – including the checkpoints and certifications they must complete – will help build their relationships.

Leveraging onboarding course for two different sales roles

When developing your onboarding program you can create a range of courses that cover different roles, and then assign those that are relevant based on job role or even location. For example, your course on buyer personas could be assigned to both sales reps and engineers, but your product training modules for each role may be different.

The need for two sets of skills combined into one company representative, as important as a technical sales engineer, means you can leverage the sales enablement courses for:

  • General corporate onboarding – policies, culture, and organizational strategy
  • Buyer and user personas
  • Product positioning and messaging
  • Industry trends

While it may be tempting to put your engineers through the same onboarding program as your sales reps, it’s important to remember that this may impact their ability to ramp up quickly and start helping your reps sell. Investing in onboarding your sales engineers is one of the best ways to make sure your new hires – reps and engineers – achieve their quota quicker.

Reducing Overall Sales Training Costs By Using Virtual Micro-Learning

Deepti Sundareshan on May 9, 2018

Historically sales training has been event-based. The costs can really add up with this style of learning. Fortunately, with today’s sales technologies, you no longer need to invest in old-style educational methods. If your organization is like most, you’re looking for ways to contain spending. Using virtual micro-learning is a great way to do so. In fact, it’s been found to cost at least 50% less to develop than traditional training. That’s some significant savings. So, how is it possible to reduce costs with virtual micro-learning for sales?

What is virtual micro-learning?

Micro-learning involves bite-sized, mobile-friendly, highly focused, individualized training content that can be retrieved from anywhere. That’s what makes it virtual. It includes various content types such as videos, games, quizzes, audio recordings, simulations and more. Research shows that learning in short bursts over time, combined with short quizzes, results in a better long-term recall. That’s why this method of learning is more effective than traditional classroom or event-based training.

Where can you reduce costs?

There are many categories where you can reduce costs with virtual micro-learning for sales. They include:

  •         Travel
  •         Facilities and planning
  •         Materials
  •         Trainers
  •         Re-training
  •         Onboarding
  •         Productivity

Travel

Traditional classroom or event-based training often requires your sales staff to travel to a central location. Costs such as airfare or mileage plus meals and other travel-related expenses can really add up. The larger your salesforce the higher this expense. Of course, for global enterprises, travel is even more significant. When utilizing virtual micro-learning, you reduce or eliminate the need for these sales training-related travel costs.

Facilities and planning

Sales training often involves locating and renting facilities for educational events. Even single-day events, or those taught in your own facilities, typically include meals and/or snacks for all participants as well. Micro-learning is incorporated into your sales reps’ activities on an ongoing basis. Plus it’s accessible from anywhere and on any device. This means you no longer need to incur facility expenses or a planner to make the arrangements.

Materials

Sales readiness materials are all stored in the cloud. This virtual micro-learning eliminates the need to produce, transport, or ship bulky training manuals and hand-outs. You no longer need to update existing print manuals or bear the costs associated with such a time-consuming process. The content used for micro-learning are considerably shorter than traditional materials and can be created much more quickly. This reduces development costs.

Trainers

Switching to this short-format, easily accessible learning format means that you no longer need to pay a trainer to teach in live classroom-like settings. You won’t have to pay an instructor’s hourly rates. In fact, you’ll be able to use many internal SME’s, and other knowledgeable staff members, to create training materials. You can also repurpose your existing training content.

Re-training

It’s a known fact that learning is forgotten if it’s not reiterated often. Based on research by Hermann Ebbinghaus’ research, more than 40% is forgotten within just a few days. By the end of a months’ time, participants have lost 80-90% of the information taught. This creates the need to re-train on topics periodically when traditional training methods are used. Reps are taken out of the field, yet again, simply to refresh their memory of material already covered. With micro-learning, you never need to conduct retraining or refresher training sessions. Plus, information reinforcement is built into the easily accessible bite-sized training style.

Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

(as seen on flashcardlearner.com)

Onboarding

Research indicates that employee retention increases when companies keep them engaged and provide quality training. Virtual micro-learning enables excellent training that accomplishes both of these needs. This, in turn, reduces sales rep turnover, the need for new hires, and the resulting onboarding expenses. Plus, micro-learning accelerates new rep ramp rate because modules are short and easy to digest. This means that they reach full productivity faster, reducing onboarding costs, and increasing their contribution to the bottom line sooner.

Productivity

Although productivity is a soft cost, its financial impact is very real. Traditional training requires your sales force to lose valuable selling time that can never be recovered. Sales dollars are reduced during the time your sales team is at an event. It also takes your reps time to get back into their normal routine once they return from training. Micro-learning doesn’t have this negative impact on sales productivity because it easily fits into your sales reps’ daily schedule.

These savings are just one aspect of the value of using virtual micro-learning to educate your sales force. With pressure to contain costs, this is one way that you can accomplish this goal while getting an edge in the marketplace. Next time we’ll be talking about gaining a competitive advantage with virtual micro-learning. In the meanwhile, you can reduce costs with virtual micro-learning for sales so your organization can start experiencing the benefits now.

Why Its Important to Integrate Sales Engineers into Your Company’s Sales Process

Deepti Sundareshan on May 8, 2018

Sales engineers play a crucial role in the sales process for complex products. With their deep technical expertise, they bring to life the value your product adds to customers. But many sales organizations make the mistake of bringing them into the process too early or too late.

When you’re in the discovery stage, customers don’t need an engineer’s level of expertise, they just need to qualify that your product may be right for them. But if you bring them in when a customer has started to question your product features or value, it may be too late for them to change their mind.

So when should you involve a sales engineer?

Sales engineers should be brought into the sales process early enough to add value to your customer. They often do this by helping the customer understand how your product may solve their problem and address their pain points. In the early stages, sales engineers may make suggestions or give a customer new ideas for them to consider. This helps the customer understand what their own requirements are before they start to evaluate specific solutions.

By the time a customer is matching requirements to vendors, the opportunity for your sales engineer to add value has been lost. This is because customers narrow their perspective of what they need as they progress down the sales process. While sales engineers add a lot of value later in the process, they can really help seal the deal early on by helping customers define their requirements. This process can begin before a customer has even seen a demo of your product.

Sales engineers process

How do you integrate sales engineers into the sales process?

By getting a sales engineer involved in the pitch stage, they can start to understand your customer’s unique needs, what they need and your sales strategy. If they are only brought in at the demo stage, they will be essentially walking into a customer meeting blind – without any context to what has happened before. This is less than optimal for both the sales engineer and your customer.

As sales engineers are involved in many crucial parts of the sales process, from pitch right through to RFP, it’s important to integrate them into the sales process so they, and your reps, always have the information they need. There are four ways to integrate your sales engineers into the process.

1. Tell reps when to get them involved

Your sales process should help your reps understand when they should get a sales engineer involved and how they should be involved. The right moment will depend on your product and how complex it is.

If you’re not sure when or how to get a sales engineer involved, take a look at past success stories that have involved sales engineers. Where and how did they add the most value? This will help you identify where to incorporate engineers into your process.

Once you’ve identified the right time, make sure your sales reps and engineers are trained on this. They should understand why they’re getting a sales engineer involved, the role they play in the sales process and what they can expect. This will give both sales reps and engineers clarity on their roles.

2. Incorporate their tools

Sales engineers use a range of tools to help them work effectively and efficiently. These may include worksheets and selling aids, for example. These tools should not be kept and maintained outside the sales process, but rather integrated into it. This means they should be included in workflows, available centrally so that they’re easily accessible and incorporated into the standard process.

3. Put them in the system

An important part of integrating your sales engineers into the entire sales process is through systems. Your CRM is the heart of your sales stack, so the role of the sales engineer should be incorporated into its workflows. Adding all of their tasks and tools into your CRM workflow will ensure that they know where each customer is in the sales process and are ready to go when your reps need them.

Sales engineers should also use the same enablement or sales readiness software as your reps. This will make sure there are no gaps in their capabilities or the information that both engineers and reps receive. By using the same sales readiness software they can receive the same learning modules, the same quick updates on competitors and product features and the internal communications. This ensures that everyone is on the same page.

4. Connect them to the conversation

There are often many people involved in the sales process and social or collaboration tools are a great way to keep everyone on the same page. Sales engineers should be included in those conversations so they have all the information they need to help your reps close the deal. This is crucial, especially considering that sales engineers often bring in expertise from other parts of the organization. They work closely with the product to understand features and customer success for use cases. By bringing them into collaborative discussions, they can not only add value to the sales strategy but also stay on top of it.

By integrating your sales engineers into your sales process, you can ensure your engineers have all the information they need and are ready whenever your reps need them. This will give each opportunity the best chance of success.

A Sr. Sales Enablement Leader at MuleSoft Explains Effective Best Practices [A Podcast]

Deepti Sundareshan on May 3, 2018

As

Senior Manager of Sales Enablement, Ali Jones is responsible for MuleSoft’s early stage opportunity strategy and executive briefing program. Her experience brings together Ali’s experience in direct selling and consulting.

“We have a relatively small enablement team at MuleSoft. One person is focused on sales analytics, then three enablement managers each have ownership over part of the sales process. Each of us also has ownership over specific programs and regional alignment as well. We’re generalists yet we also have the opportunity to go deep and really maximize how we engage with our customers and generate revenue,”

explains Ali.

Each function also has their own enablement team, but they each leverage the content and assets that are built by the central team. This flexible structure has enabled MuleSoft to grow and scale up very quickly.

Two crucial parts of their central enablement program are MuleSoft’s onboarding KickStart program and its certification process.

“We take our certification process very seriously,” says Ali. “Salespeople go through multiple rounds and the bar is really high. People take weeks to prepare for their certification. The nice thing is that when they come out of it we are 100% positive that they will nail it in front of a customer.”

So far, over 500 people have been through MuleSoft’s certification program, and they aspire to do so much more with it.

As Ali says, “

sales enablement is such an interesting place to be in the software world. It’s exciting and there are so many interesting things to do.”

In this 20 minute

podcast Ali explains:

  • How MuleSoft has structured its enablement team and compensation to drive sales results
  • What makes MuleSoft’s Kickstart onboarding experience so unique and impactful
  • The tools that have helped MuleSoft enable and scale its sales team
  • The advice she would give to herself if she could do it again

Building an Integrated Sales Enablement Ecosystem

Deepti Sundareshan on April 25, 2018

With today’s buyers waiting until they are 60 – 80% along their buying process, depending on which research you read, it’s becoming more and more important for these cross-functional departments to get on the same page. Without this alignment, it becomes nearly impossible for sales to function efficiently and close business as effectively as possible. That’s why building a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem is important.

A sales enablement ecosystem should ensure that salespeople have access to the right content at the right time to advance sales. Plus, it should provide technology to sales staff that will help them streamline their tasks. An ecosystem that consists of a sales enablement platform that sits between the enterprise marketing automation (MA) system and its customer relationship management (CRM) system can facilitate the collection of intelligence from both systems and everything else that happens in between. Combining the data from both systems can help provide analytics and insights to use in decision making. With such a platform, the more solutions you can be integrated, the greater the insights. This intel is valuable to all involved departments including Marketing, Sales, Sales Ops, Product Development, Customer Service, and more. And, it puts everyone on the same page for more streamlined and efficient operations.

There are many benefits to building a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem, including:

Consistent messaging
Improved communications across the entire enterprise help with consistency of branding, messaging, and updated product information. It provides sales with timely information that’s needed to craft messages for specific prospects. Without this free flow of information between departments, it’s more difficult to achieve business success.

Buyer’s journey alignment
Improved marketing and sales alignment with the buyer’s journey is a result of improved intra-department communications. Marketing needs to remain informed concerning prospect motivators and challenges. Sales reps are in the best position to acquire this information and share it with Marketing. Salespeople see the ever-evolving pain points of their leads and are able to share them. This allows Marketing to continually create content to address these as they change.

Agile strategy adjustments
This open feedback from sales reps to other departments, such as Marketing and Operations, facilitates quick changes to sales and marketing strategies.

Ability to share quickly and easily
These adjustments are then easily communicated through this shared platform in the form of updates, training, and new content. And it’s all done with the simple click of a button.

A huge competitive advantage
Due to increased efficiencies, organizations who build a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem gain a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace.

A fully enabled sales team
With all training, coaching, content, and communications funneling through one platform, your sales team is always up-to-date. They are prepared for any prospect or situation and able to create valuable solutions easily.</>

Increased sales performance and productivity
With everything available in one place, sales reps are able to find the content they need quickly, gaining increased selling time. Plus, consistent updates, training, and coaching make them more effective. These elements improve sales results as well.

Building your ecosystem

With so many benefits you’re probably wondering how to go about building a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem for your organization. Start by determining your objectives and goals. Next, select a sales enablement platform that will best meet your requirements. The selection process includes considerations such as ease of use, mobile readiness, integration options, and analytics capabilities. Be sure to consider whether the vendor will be a good partner on the long-term. Implement your selected solution. This includes defining scope, allocating resources, building a process, training, and more. You’ll find additional information about this process in this article.

A clearer structure and open communications provide for better operations. Building a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem keeps Sales, Marketing, Operations, and more on the same page. The many benefits you’ll gain include consistent messaging and improved buyer’s journey alignment. Agile strategy adjustments and sharing of information at the touch of a button allow your organization to stay ahead of other businesses in the marketplace. This gives your company an advantage over the competition. A fully enabled salesforce increases sales performance and productivity. Of course, all of this adds up to a stronger organization and better bottom line. As you can see, it’s worth the effort to start building a completely integrated sales enablement ecosystem so your organization can reap the benefits too.

How to Change from Feature-Based Selling to Value-Based Selling

Deepti Sundareshan on April 17, 2018

When making changes to your sales approach or processes, you want to be sure you achieve your desired outcomes. With a plan in place, you increase the likelihood that you will. Below are the steps you need to take to change from feature-based selling to value-based selling.

To make this transition you’ll want to follow these steps:

  •         Revise your sales process
  •         Update your competency framework
  •         Identify and create the required content
  •         Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps
  •         Guide and coach your reps through personalized training
  •         Provide ongoing updates

Revise your sales process

There are several reasons to revise your sales process. They include changes to your company, team, product, customer base, customer behaviors, and decreased results from your existing process. Changing your sales methodology is often the outcome of one of these reasons. To revise your sales process consider what changes will be necessary to accommodate your value-selling approach. When, in the buyer’s journey, will your reps be initially engaging with prospects? What steps will need to take place, using a value focus, to convert the prospect to a customer? Map this out very carefully so your sales team always knows what’s next to advance through the process successfully. Once the process is implemented, be sure to use metrics and rep feedback to fine-tune and adjust it as needed.

Update your competency frameworks

Before you can make the change from feature-based to value-based selling, you need to update your sales competency frameworks. These plans provide detailed information about behaviors, skills, and knowledge requirements for each sales position. They simplify benchmarking and help you easily recognize successful training outcomes. To update your frameworks, consider what knowledge, skills, and attributes should be removed from your current ones for each sales position. Next, add any new competencies that will be required for effective value selling. Depending on your particular product or service, these will vary. In our discussion about value-selling, we included several categories of skills and knowledge your team must have for success. They include product, case studies, marketplace, industry information, and buyer personas. Compare these to your current competencies to identify the updates needed. If you’d like more information relating to sales competency frameworks, we discuss this topic in more detail in

this article

.

Identify and create the required content

Once you’ve updated your sales process and your competency frameworks, you’ll be able to identify content gaps. Develop updated content that incorporates your new messaging for both internal and external use. Be sure that you have content for every stage of the sales process, prospect industries, and each persona involved in the buying process. Content will include training materials such as buyer personas and corresponding value propositions for each product, industry, and persona. Plus sales playbooks and training materials like audio, video, and written training snippets, assessment quizzes, games, and certification exercises. Client-facing content tools might include case studies, white papers, e-books, and the like. As this content is used, don’t forget to gather feedback on it from your sales team. Track which pieces are used and which are most effective. This will simplify future content planning.

Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps

If you training your entire sales team on the same material, you risk boring more experienced reps while confusing less experienced ones. You should allow reps to fulfill their individual training requirements. To do so, you must identify each team member’s specific knowledge and skill gaps. There are several ways to do this. These include observation of demonstrated skills and behaviors, assessments through task simulations, self-assessments, quizzes, and performance data. To learn more, you can read

this article

about identifying knowledge and skill gaps.

 

Personalized training with coaching

Armed with your reps’ knowledge and skill gap information, you can start guiding and coaching your reps through the personalized training they need. Prioritize their training needs to help them get started. Utilize short bite-sized written and video training modules. At the end of each module, include short quizzes and games designed to measure their understanding while reinforcing what they’ve learned. Simulation missions allow sales reps to practice and apply what they have learned. For minimal impact on their schedules, these are completed via mobile video and coach feedback is provided. This will reinforce correct practices and prevent the development of bad practices. It’s an excellent way to incorporate another layer of coaching.

Leverage gamification

to motivate them to advance through their training. Leaderboards and rewards will activate their competitive nature too while keeping the process fun and engaging. Incorporate certifications at the end of each course to ensure that reps are properly prepared to effectively apply their newly-learned knowledge and skills.

Provide ongoing refreshers and updates

It’s been shown that training, without ongoing reinforcement, is very quickly forgotten. This is why it is important that you provide your salesforce with refreshers and updates. Refreshers can include bite-sized pieces of supplemental information relating to what they’ve already learned. Share cheat sheets, best practice examples, and reminders. Send out pop quizzes from time to time also. This will allow them to recall knowledge they’ve been taught and apply it. Coaching and simulations exercises are also excellent ways to help your team remain effective by using their skills in different scenarios so they’re always prepared. Updates should include information about new content, new success stories, changes in the marketplace, and changes internally. With these, they’ll always have the latest information at their disposal and never be caught off guard by unexpected questions from prospects pertaining to the latest changes.

Now you have a roadmap to help you change from feature-based to value-based selling. Once you’ve completed this process your team members will be prepared to provide more valuable solutions to their prospects. The end result will be consistently elevated rep performance and more closed deals. And isn’t that the goal? Now it’s time for you to get started with this process so you receive the benefits of value-based selling in your organization!

The Impact of AI on Your Sales Strategies

Deepti Sundareshan on April 17, 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. While there’s been a lot of hype about AI we’re yet to see it’s true value – but I don’t believe we’ll have to wait much longer. In fact, AI technology can be found in some sales software already.

AI has the potential to have a profound impact on your sales strategies and the sales readiness of your reps.

Forrester predicts that AI will disrupt your sales strategy this year. In fact, 84% of businesses believe AI will give them a competitive advantage and 69% believe their competitors will use it too.
Reasons-for-adopting-AI-worldwide-2017

It will make your sales organization more intelligent agile, and customer-centric. It may even change the way you sell altogether.

What is AI?

AI is the ability for a computer program or a machine to think and learn. AI, therefore, needs a lot of data that it can filter and process quickly. The more data you give AI the more intelligent it will become.

AI can be used in simple tasks, like playing a game of chess with you, or for more complex decisions like behind the wheel of a driverless car.

Potentially, AI can be used to do anything that a human does. It can sort through your inbox and work out what emails you should prioritize and help you research your customers. The biggest limitation on AI in the future will be what your customers are happy to accept. For example, many may not want to have a complex discussion about your product, but they may be happy to ask a chatbot some preliminary questions.

Research by Capgemini has found that AI increases sales of products and services and increases inbound customer leads.
Areas-of-AI-driven-benefit-gain-for-respondents--sales

Analyzing sales conversations

It can take hours for managers to wade through taped phone calls or listen in on live calls so they can coach their salespeople. Converastion intelligence listens to conversations, transcribing, and then analyzing them. This technology exists today and is able to pick up on key parts of the conversation like when a customer starts talking about the issues they are facing or information that competitors have given them.

This information can then be used by your sales managers to help coach their salespeople. Your sales enablement team can also use it to improve processes and best practices, like call scripts and training materials. The product and marketing teams can also use the competitor information for their market and customer insights.

This technology has the potential to develop and improve even face-to-face sales conversations in the future. Imagine if it could ‘hear’ every conversation reps have out in the field. These could all be analyzed to provide information about how to improve how each individual rep sells.

It could also be used to script phone conversations in real-time. This would give SDRs all the information they need to deal with customer questions and objections as they arise.

Optimizing lead generation

Finding the right leads for your salespeople can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Because AI can process large amounts of data quickly, and then learn from what it finds, it has the potential to revolutionize lead generation.

Rather than a person having to go through Google, social media, or other data sources, AI can review these for you. The technology can not only identify the right job titles and businesses to target, but it can also analyze the sentiment in comments made on social media or by email. This means AI can help you identify whether someone is unhappy with a competitor’s product or is in the market for a new one. When you consider that 57% of buyers are already far along their decision-making process before they meet a salesperson, the earlier you can speak to them the better your opportunity to convert them.

Some platforms already use AI to help them identify the right leads and contact them. The technology can create prospecting emails, monitor responses and improve how they react to them. It can compare lead responses to past data and even predict how each lead will respond, helping prioritize leads. This frees up the time of marketing and salespeople, qualifying prospects quicker and more cost-effectively.

Having sales conversations

While it’s unlikely that AI will replace salespeople in complex sales any time soon, they can help move sales conversations further down the process. Many businesses already use chatbots to answer simple questions for customers on their websites.

According to Forrester, these are already replacing email in customer service channels in large companies like Nike and Apple and they may influence up to 10% of purchasing decisions. The more conversations the technology has with customers, the more it will learn.

Customers are also getting used to talking to AI, with 48% of people favoring live chat compared to 54% preferring email. The gap is closing.
Live-chat-is-nearly-as-popular-as-phone-and-email

The power of AI extends far beyond the sales conversation and into the data that the technology can collect during these conversations. They can take the information that customers share, identify their sentiment and then feed that information back to your sales, enablement, product, and marketing teams. This can inform your sales training, processes, product features, and marketing strategies as well.

Automating tasks

Salespeople can spend almost a quarter of their time on administrative tasks. Managing their emails, logging their activity, and updating the CRM. This is all time that could be spent selling. It is here that AI can potentially generate the quickest wins. If it can give back selling hours to each of your salespeople’s days, that has the potential to go straight to your topline revenue.

There are many ways that AI can potentially reduce administration at the frontline. Prioritizing emails and suggesting how a salesperson should respond to them is just one. Depending on the data available to it, AI could help put together the best pricing option for a customer, conduct credit checks and automate billing. AI can even do a salesperson’s reading for them, notifying them if something has changed that means they need to call a customer. If a customer has recently acquired another business or a new VP has been appointed, it may be time for your rep to touch base again.

Forecasting

Prediction is what AI specializes in so it’s only fitting that it would be used for forecasting. By providing data about past performance it can use it to predict future performance – but AI can go further.

It can take data from a wide range of sources and pull them together to create a predictive model for future performance. Rather than just telling you if you’ll meet your quota at the end of the year, AI tells you which deals are more likely to close and when. Sales managers and reps can be far more strategic about their customer interactions.

Taking it a step further, AI could tell you which customers to upsell to and when. This can save reps a significant amount of time and energy, by focusing efforts where it’s more likely to be rewarded. The result should be an increase in win rates and productivity.

A study in MIT Sloan Management Review found that 76% of early adopters aimed for higher sales growth using AI and it’s easy to see why. AI has the potential to completely change the way reps play the game. It can give them more time to sell and improve how they sell as well.

With so many different options available to you, the biggest challenge is to work out which AI technology to implement first – perhaps there’ll be an algorithm that can even tell you that soon.

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