Building out a sales training program is one thing, but measuring its success is a whole different beast. You know it’s not enough to stand up a sales training technology solution without also building out the key predictors of sales performance you need to track. We took a look at how different organizations are measuring success and broke them down into five buckets. Here they are:
Sales onboarding + ramp time
Sales everboarding (continuous training)
Practice + role-plays
Sales coaching
Call analysis
What are selling skills and why are they important?
Selling skills are the competencies your team must have, maintain, and build over time. Not all sellers join your organization with the same set of skills — and that’s OK. As a sales leader, it’s your job to identify the skills that define success at your organization and then ensure your entire team has them. Once they’re defined and codified, your teams will be more productive, individual performance will improve, and ultimately, revenue targets will be hit consistently.
Check out this graphic below that outlines the five buckets of sales training and gives you specific metrics to track in order to truly understand and accurately measure seller performance. Want the full guide? Download the Definitive Guide to Measuring Sales Readiness.
This post was originally published in July 2021 and was updated in January 2023.
Not all sales training works. In fact, research by Gartner found that sales reps only remember 13% of the information a month after their sales training.
Motivation plays a big role in sales reps’ willingness to engage with sales learning. By adding ways to engage sellers with sales training, you increase sales quota attainment and the ROI of your sales training.
Here are six ways you can change your sales training to motivate your sales team.
Avoid reteaching sales reps skills they already possess. Instead, improve career skills with personalized sales training and development.
There is nothing more boring than going over material you already know — it’s repetitive, it’s discouraging, and, ultimately, it’s not rewarding. That’s why personalization is key to fostering motivation — it’s both relevant and rewarding.
Personalized sales training puts a focus on strengthening weaknesses and filling in any knowledge gaps that are relevant to each sales rep. For example, if a particular sales rep is great at deal strategy but needs improvement on closing sales, tailor a plan to work on customer conversations to see the quickest results.
And it’s important for personalized training to come hand in hand with a personal development plan for sellers to see what steps are required for success.
To begin a personalized plan, first, define what success looks like. In other words, what skills and knowledge do each seller need to reach their sales goals? What behavior and sales approaches do sellers need to learn to close more deals?
Once those elements are defined, you can create a sales readiness index and an ideal rep profile (IRP). This helps build an end goal and vision for sales reps to work toward.
With a defined sales readiness score and a personalized development plan, sellers can take ownership of each milestone and understand what steps will need to be undertaken in order to match your IRP.
Make sales training relatable and interactive
To motivate your sales team to learn, your training needs to be relatable and relevant to your sales reps’ everyday tasks and interactions.
Use real-life scenarios and role-plays for your sales reps to get a glimpse of what actions and sales practices they need before the real action begins. Interactive sales training demands focus, which improves engagement and attentiveness to the task at hand.
Use role-plays to put into practice the skills reps have learned in a safe environment. This encourages sellers to continue their sales practice, as it prevents them from feeling demotivated or nervous in real scenarios and coaches them on how to navigate tricky situations.
Managers can also use role-plays to see their sales team in action. Then, depending on each rep’s performance, they can provide additional resources for improvement. In turn, the relevant feedback and interaction serve as motivation, being a key for improvement and signaling that managers care about the seller’s success in their role.
Support your sales reps with achievable development paths
Sales coaches often think having a 1:1 with their sales reps means their team will automatically feel supported. While that’s a good start, more is required for sellers to feel motivated and encouraged in their growth.
To begin development plans, meet with your sales reps individually to understand their personal goals. It’s much easier to build motivation when both parties are aligned in the direction of development. Once the goals have been defined, use skills tests to assess where your sales rep currently stands. Then, you’re able to track progress using benchmarks to celebrate milestones and address any pitfalls.
As a manager, it’s your responsibility to show sales reps the relationship between skill development and quota attainment. Ultimately, you want your sales reps to quickly see how new skills personally impact their sales efforts and be drawn to continually improve their success.
Nurture an environment where feedback is welcomed. Your sales reps are in a unique position to tell you exactly what sales training resources are helpful in their role. Their insights may benefit the company’s sales training quality and relevance. Not only is this information helpful, but it’s also motivating, as sellers see their thoughts on improvement are acknowledged and are making changes.
Encourage failure and practice
In training, don’t be afraid to let your sales team fail, fail again, and then learn from those experiences. Practice exercises motivate sales reps to learn from their mistakes in a safe environment.
Be clear with sales reps that tests and assessments are encouraged to understand what will help them progress in their career and are not an assessment of their ability to do their job. The difference is important because sales reps need to be allowed to acknowledge their own weaknesses and build paths for improvement.
Sales reps will find the impetus to continue working on skills that have been improved upon — particularly if they track them in their personal development plan and see how much they have progressed.
To motivate your team through failure, remember to build a sales training initiative that is inspirational with past success stories. And encourage sales reps to rely o share tips and tricks. When reps lean on one another, it removes the risk of sellers feeling isolated and builds resilience and determination to reach personal goals.
Build team identity and support
When sellers feel like they are part of a team and supported by a coached manager, the overall team’s performance can be boosted by as much as 31%. When sellers feel part of a team, they push through tasks and feel a responsibility to work together.
In an environment where team members are able to support, and encourage one another, the sense of community and aligned objectives motivates each sales rep to accomplish their sales training for the better of the team.
This helps build team identity. This is important, as research shows that employees who identify as part of a team have higher productivity rates than those who don’t (50% vs. 36%).
Team members can play toward the same goal but also stimulate one another through friendly competition that pushes each seller to outperform colleagues. In sales training, use leaderboards to nurture this.
A team environment can also keep sales reps feeling welcomed and encouraged when they experience a hard learning curve, as members can offer support and share resources and training feedback. This helps build a level of participation and incentive to continually learn and improve together as a team.
Use gamification to drive intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Learning is more fun with games (adding gamified elements to training boosts motivation to 83%) and information is retained better. Use this to your advantage when preparing sales training.
You can introduce gamification with leaderboards and scoreboards that measure the skill levels and sales readiness rankings of sales reps against one another. This encourages sales reps to either stay on top or reach the top.
As well, you should reward the training effort and motivation of high-ranking sales reps. Each time a new level is achieved, it’s good practice to appreciate and validate the efforts of the sellers.
Lastly, when rewarding sales reps’ participation and involvement with sales training, your acknowledgment and compliments need to be specific and timely for them to resonate correctly. For example, if a sales rep completes a sales training on email strategy, send them a message the same day congratulating them on their new email strategy skill.
Acknowledgment and rewarding sellers’ efforts incentivizes them to receive ongoing appraisal in their next sales course training.
Motivated training makes your sales team unstoppable
Motivated sales reps have the drive and curiosity to adapt new sales insights and content into their sales approach. They become hungry to learn and continue to practice their new skills in real scenarios, which drives increased win rates.
The combination of engaging sales training and a motivated sales team leads to:
Increase in profit: Engaged and motivated employees achieve a 23% increase in business profit. This is because when your sales training is motivating, your team will be driven to grow their skills. This drive leads to an increase in course completions, which leads to sellers being a step closer to a complete sales readiness score and matching the behaviors of the IRP.
Adaptability to market changes: Sales reps typically only spend around 17% of their time in sales training. But sales training doesn’t have to stop the moment a rep completes their first course. Use sales training as ongoing development to rethink market approaches and fine-tune skills.
Improve sales KPIs: Sales training prepares the reps to use the best practices and approaches to reach and convert potential customers. When reps are motivated to continually use training to optimize their sales approach, they are more likely to hit their quarterly KPIs and objectives.
Now you’ve got a motivated sales team; what’s next?
Although learning and completing a sales training course is a good start, it’s just the first step. The real action happens when those learned skills are put into practice with real-life scenarios.
Keeping track of improvement and insights can be tricky. That’s why it’s helpful to use a sales enablement platform to keep training, content, data, and resources all in one place.
With sales enablement platforms, data taken from real conversations, content management, deal negotiations, and seller approaches tracks the performance of your sales reps. This allows the correct training course to be recommended and tracked by management.
By having all the sales data at hand, you can quickly pinpoint what skills need to be expanded upon for each repy. Not only that, but sales enablement platforms complement management’s ability to track sales reps’ development and performance and give insights when intervention or feedback is needed.
Learn how Mindtickle can motivate your sales team with training tools that set your sales team up for success. Here’s where to set up time for a Mindtickle demo.
You’ve gotten through another days- or weeks-long sales onboarding program with your new sales hires. It feels like it went well, but how can you really know whether it had an impact? Do you know the sales onboarding metrics that will show the impact of the program?
Onboarding is important for introducing new hires to your company and familiarizing them with their roles, teams, daily tasks, tools used, and more. But as happens to even the most experienced sellers, learning so much information in a matter of days is overwhelming — and some information is bound to get lost.
Research shows that over 84% of salespeople forget what they learned in sales onboarding within the first three months.
To really ensure reps are ramped up, ready for the field, and performing at a high level, you’ve got to supplement onboarding with continuous learning and support. These onboarding success metrics help you gauge your team’s performance and provide a more straightforward path on how you can guide them to improve throughout their tenure.
Top sales onboarding metrics
Knowledge retention
Sales reps must retain important information about your company and products in order to properly engage buyers. You can measure retention by providing quizzes and certifications. The best way to help sellers stay up-to-date is with learning reinforcement through virtual micro-learning, videos, recorded role-plays, and simulated sales scenarios. Once you understand where each individual rep stacks up, you can provide personalized learning paths that address any gaps.
Ramp-up time
Also known as time to productivity, ramp-up time refers to the length of time from a new hire’s first day to the day they reach full productivity. This “full productivity” means the rep is embedded in the company culture, can effectively communicate product value, and optimizes use of your tech stack. A shorter average ramp-up time indicates that onboarding has been successful in building skills, knowledge, and behaviors.
Technology adoption
Part of sales onboarding metrics is SaaS onboarding metrics. Sellers use a laundry list of tools to perform their daily responsibilities, so adoption is key in helping them succeed. Make sure your onboarding program includes a thorough review of SaaS applications. If new hires are slow to adopt them, they are either not confident in how to use it (meaning you’ve got some work to do with onboarding) or don’t find it useful for their job (meaning it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack).
Employee satisfaction
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is ensuring your new hires feel supported and empowered from their onboarding program. People aren’t shy to leave a job if they don’t feel like they’re set up for success from day one. In fact, employees who had a negative new hire onboarding experience are twice as likely to leave a job than those who had a positive experience. Save money and hold on to your salespeople by offering a post-onboarding survey, and make changes based on their feedback.
Time to refresh your onboarding program? Here’s a sales onboarding checklist to help you get started on creating a measurable, effective, scalable program.
Here at Mindtickle, we talk a lot about the importance of continuous learning. Training isn’t “one and done.” Instead, sales reps need continuous learning opportunities (what we call everboarding) to ensure they always have the latest and greatest skills and knowledge necessary for success.
But the truth is, continuous learning is essential for revenue professionals of all levels – from the sales rep to the Chief Revenue Officer. Attending sales enablement and sales readiness events is a great way to keep a pulse on industry trends and best practices, make connections, and get ideas and inspiration for refining your sales readiness program.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the best upcoming sales enablement and sales readiness events to attend either virtually or in-person. While each event has something unique to offer, all are sure to offer insights that can help you ensure your sales readiness program is running on all cylinders.
Looking to get your sales team ready to close more deals in the second half of the year? Then be sure to check out the Mindtickle Revenue Reboot.
This summer, we’re partnering up with Chili Piper, Vidyard, BoostUp, Baker Communications, and Qualified to deliver a line-up of weekly content and experiences that’ll help you reboot your revenue in the second half of the year. Sign up now to access brand new videos from experts featuring fresh sales enablement and training tips, live and in-person networking discussions, a curated summer reading list, and more.
This year’s Chief Revenue Officer Summit will gather revenue leaders from all types of companies – from the largest enterprises to promising, innovative startups. At this in-person event, attendees will have the opportunity to share stories, network, and walk away with practical ideas for driving revenue growth at their organizations.
It’s a challenging time to be a seller. These days, sales teams must work harder than ever to engage buyers and articulate value throughout the customer journey. salesDisrupted, powered by B2B DecisionLabs, is a one-day, research-focused event held in Boston, MA that promises to help sales professionals and leaders level up their leadership and selling skills. Rather than teaching theory, this conference disrupts the status quo by focusing on results.
September 20-22, 2022 | San Francisco, CA and Virtual
The largest software conference in the world is returning to downtown San Francisco this fall. This year, Salesforce will be celebrating its 20th Dreamforce with an event that promises to be bigger and better than ever. Attendees can expect 1,000+ sessions and workshops, networking opportunities, and plenty of fun. Professionals of every level are sure to walk away with inspiration and ideas for finding success and growing revenue in a digital-first world. In fact, 87% of Salesforce event attendees say they learned something that helped them accelerate business growth.
This fall, sales enablement professionals and revenue leaders from around the world will gather for this one-day, in-person event in San Francisco. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from industry leaders and network and connect with peers. There will also be opportunities to evaluate best-in-class enablement and sales readiness solutions that can take any sales readiness strategy to the next level.
After a two-year hiatus, the Sales Enablement Society’s annual, in-person conference is back. The theme of this year’s event is “Take the Leap: Connect. Innovate. Elevate.” Attendees can expect an inspiring experience featuring engaging keynotes and 40+ informative breakout sessions. There will also be opportunities to network, recharge, and have some fun, including the opening night party, happy hour, and a wellness patio.
Many revenue leaders resign themselves to the notion that 20% of sellers will continue to drive 80% of revenue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to embrace the science of sales and start creating an entire team of quota-crushing reps.
This autumn, the team at Mindtickle will be making our final stop on our Road to Readiness Roadshow. Register for this in-person event for an opportunity to connect with industry leaders and peers and walk away with best practices and strategies for creating an entire team of top performers.
This October, the Sales Enablement Summit will descend on Boston. At this one-day event, sales enablement professionals from companies of all sizes and types will gather to share experiences, challenges, and ideas. The event will cover hot button sales readiness topics including cross-functional collaboration, scaling enablement, tracking key metrics to prove value, and more.
Gain insights and network with peers – all from the comfort of home or the office. Sign up for the Sales Enablement Festival to access more than 20 hours worth of content from more than 40 sales enablement leaders from companies including Google Cloud, Getty Images, IBM, Zoom, and others.
The Sales Enablement Summit is returning to the Windy City this fall. More than 300 attendees from 75+ organizations will gather to learn, discuss challenges, and share ideas during this one-day event.
Mindtickle Fall Product Announcement Webinar
Autumn 2022 | Virtual
Mindtickle’s complete sales readiness program enables revenue leaders to create high performance teams. But creating a winning platform isn’t a one-time event. Instead, we’re always innovating to make the platform even better.
Come to our fall product announcement webinar to see what’s in store for Mindtickle customers. Stay tuned for more information and a registration link.
The Sales Innovation Expo is focused on inspiring sales professionals. This free, two-day event features sessions on everything from sales engagement and enablement to leadership and sales techniques – and everything in between. Attendees are guaranteed to leave full of ideas to apply once back in the field.
The only dedicated summit for Chief Revenue Officers is making a stop in London for the first time ever. 80+ revenue leaders from 75+ companies will gather to hear from industry leaders and share knowledge, ideas, and best practices for driving sustainable revenue growth.
Are you headed to any of these sales enablement and readiness events in 2022 and 2023? So are we! We hope to meet you there to discuss how Mindtickle can help you make sales readiness a reality.
An extrovert is “an outgoing, gregarious person who thrives in dynamic environments and seeks to maximize social engagement.” That sounds like what you’d expect a typical sales rep to be like.
But modern buyers don’t want to be “sold to” anymore. Gartner found that 33% of buyers want a “seller-free sales experience,” while LinkedIn found that 88% of consumers will only make a purchase when they see a salesperson as a “trusted advisor.” Today, buyers want to learn about your product, find solutions to their problems, and be confident that they’re making the best decision. They want to be front and center in any sales conversation, with your sales rep in a supporting role.
The days of pushy salespeople who talk non-stop and never let you get a word in edgewise are long gone. Your most extroverted sales reps may thrive at networking events and in large groups of people, but talking will only get them so far. Buyers are looking to buy from people they can trust, so sellers need to develop skills more closely associated with introverts and master the consultative approach to selling.
Active listening
Active listening involves engaging with your prospects in a meaningful way to show that you understand what they’re asking from you. It’s an essential skill for sales reps to master for building rapport and earning trust.
Stephanie McSwiney, VP of Sales at Frontify, believes that active listening is one of the most challenging sales skills to hire for. She explained, “We want sales reps who really understand the client and can match their needs with our use cases. This can be complex and requires strong active listening skills, which are very hard to find in new sales hires.”
To assess your team’s active listening skills, start by reviewing call recordings to see how much time your reps talk on their calls compared with their prospects. Our State of Sales Readiness 2022 benchmark report found that customers talk for 57% of the call in top-performing reps’ discovery calls. In contrast, the average customer talk time across all the analyzed calls was just 44%.
Then look at how that talk time is divided up. Is there a healthy dialogue with customers asking lots of questions and sharing their challenges with your rep? Or is your rep talking in one solid block with minimal engagement from the prospect? Our report found that the average longest monologue by sales reps on calls (where they spoke uninterrupted) was 1 minute 37 seconds. So if your reps are talking for more than 90 seconds in a single block, they may need a reminder to give the prospect space to talk and ask questions.
Finally, you can look at whether your reps ask clarifying questions on their calls, such as, “Did I understand that correctly?” or “Have I got that right?” These questions demonstrate that a rep actively listens to their prospect and engages with what they say.
Understanding buyer needs
Understanding buyer needs is the ability to take what a prospect says and, from there, determine what they need from your product or service. This includes the challenges they’re experiencing and the problems they need to solve. It’s an essential sales skill rooted in a rep’s capacity to empathize with their prospect. If they can master this skill, they’ll be able to successfully align their product demos and discussions with what the buyer is looking for.
Freya Ward, global sales director at Headley Media, explained, “A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
“A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
For your extroverted sales reps, this may require a change in how they would naturally approach early sales calls. Train all your reps to focus on the discovery process first before they start pitching your solution.
For example, our benchmark report found that sales reps ask an average of 11 questions during the discovery process, which is a lot to fit into a 30-minute call. This shows that reps are keen to understand their buyers and are trying to dig into their challenges and motivations. For McSwiney of Frontify, understanding buyer needs is a must-have skill for her sellers. “Our AEs [account executives] really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product,” she explained. “It’s often a very educational sales process.”
Call planning is preparing for every call with prospects by researching the company and the person you’re speaking to and reviewing sales notes and CRM records from previous interactions. Reps need to appear professional and trustworthy to buyers, so they must ensure they’re ready for every sales conversation.
According to Crunchbase, top sellers spend “an average of six hours every week researching their prospects.” That’s 15% of a 40-hour workweek, which may feel like a big-time drain. However, Oracle found that 11% of prospects “ghost” sellers because the seller wasn’t properly prepared for their conversation. It’s worth investing a few hours to plan and prep for calls if the alternative is losing 11% of your prospects.
Many extroverted sales reps have learned to rely on their conversational skills and ability to think on their feet. They may feel confident they can run their calls on the fly and be hesitant to invest much time preparing for individual calls. Sales managers should help their reps understand the benefits of effective call planning and provide training materials to make it as easy as possible for your sellers.
For example, you could share pre-call checklists or run practice calls for product demos, discovery calls, or closing calls. These will allow your sellers complete role-play scenarios that match their upcoming calls, so they can prepare fully and make the best impression on their prospects.
We’ve also developed a sales readiness framework that includes five core steps to help sellers achieve a continuous state of excellence:
This framework is designed to help reps develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors they need to be fully prepared for any sales scenario. A sales readiness program ensures reps have the product and industry knowledge they need, plus access to relevant content when they need it, to provide a first-class sales experience for your prospects.
Create an ideal rep profile to document the skills your reps really need to be successful
The skills that actually help close deals and generate revenue for your organization aren’t the traditional sales skills anymore. So when you’re hiring new sales talent, don’t rely on outdated stereotypes and only hire reps who can deliver a killer sales pitch. Instead, prioritize “soft” sales skills like relationship-building and communication over more traditional skills.
Analyze the skillsets of your top-performing reps to identify the competencies that most closely correlate with sales success in your team. Then, create an ideal rep profile to document those skills. This provides an empirical way to assess new hires and identify the people who will actually help your company close more deals — rather than falling into the trap of only hiring new reps who fit the traditional stereotype of an extroverted salesperson.
This summer, Mindtickle is hitting the road for our 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow. After more than two years of virtual operations, we couldn’t be more excited to catch up with our customers face-to-face.
Each half-day session, held in cities across the US and UK, will give attendees the opportunity to connect with peers, gain insights into making sales readiness a reality, and hear what’s new at Mindtickle.
Read on to learn where the roadshow is headed, what you can expect, and why you should register today.
Coming soon to a city near you
Think you need to travel across the country to connect with peers and access actionable insights? Think again! The Mindtickle Road to Readiness Roadshow is coming to you.
We have three planned stops on our US leg of the roadshow.
The Bay Area
Tuesday, June 7
The Marker Hotel
Chicago
Wednesday, June 15
Convene Willis Tower
New York
Wednesday, June 22
Convene 75 Rock
We’re also making a stop in London in the early fall. We’re finalizing the exact data and venue and will share those details as soon as they’re available.
Who is the roadshow for?
Just about everyone on your revenue team will benefit from attending the Road to Readiness Roadshow.
Here’s what’s in it for some of your key team members.
Sales and revenue leaders: Hear from top revenue leaders about how they’re transforming their organizations, and leave with actionable insights from new research and case studies.
Sales enablement leaders: Create your own ideal rep profile and learn how to work with cross-functional stakeholders to align around transforming seller performance
Front line managers: Learn how to transform your coaching into an engine of quota attainment and seller retention, and find out how to use your tech stack to streamline your processes so you can spend more time helping on deals.
Sales and revenue ops: Unravel sales performance data from 350+ companies and learn how science is transforming how top revenue organizations approach selling.
Walk away with actionable insights to drive your sales readiness program
We’re confident that Road to Readiness Roadshow attendees will leave the event feeling energized and full of insights and ideas that can be applied right away to optimize their readiness strategy.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the sessions that are in store for you.
New Industry Insights: The State of Sales Readiness
Have you ever found yourself wondering what top sales organizations are doing to ensure their reps are always ready to sell? Here’s your chance to find out.
During this panel discussion, we’ll discuss key insights from our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report. You’ll also have the opportunity to hear how brands are applying strategies to unlock better sales performance and revenue results.
Interactive Workshop: What’s Your Ideal Rep Profile?
You’ve probably already identified your ideal customer profiles (ICP). But what about the other half of the revenue equation?
During this hands-on workshop, the experts at Mindtickle will help you create an Ideal Rep Profile (IRP) for your organization. We’ll also share examples of how Mindtickle customers are using IRPs to benchmark, track progress, and map sellers’ competency improvement to sales results.
Level Up: Creating a Coaching Culture
Everyone knows sales coaching is important. And when it’s done well, it can have a big impact on sales outcomes. But oftentimes, coaching becomes just another box to check.
In this session, we’ll discuss how you can establish processes and leverage technology to make coaching more actionable, personalized, and seamlessly integrated into your full readiness approach.
Think back to the last time you started a new hobby. Maybe it was golf or swimming or basket weaving — it really doesn’t matter. Unless you’re some kind of unicorn, you probably weren’t perfect right out of the gate. Instead, you may have felt similar to a baby giraffe walking for the first time.
But with regular practice, you probably made improvements and started to feel more comfortable and confident with your new pastime.
The same can be said for sales. While training and coaching are key to getting them ready to sell, reps also need opportunities to practice what they’ve learned, risk free. That way, they can perfect their skills before going into the field — where there’s the risk of losing deals if things go south.
A lot of sales organizations incorporate some practice and role-plays into their enablement programs. But what are the best sales orgs doing differently to help ensure these practice opportunities actually help sellers get ready to close more deals?
Recently, we analyzed activity from more than one million users at 350 companies to understand what winning teams are doing differently to ensure reps are ready to sell. Based on these findings, we’ve identified the top ways you can improve the effectiveness of role-plays at your organization — and start empowering more reps to meet (or exceed) quota.
Practice and role-play exercises benefit everyone on the team
These days, when most sellers are pressed for time, are role-plays and practice exercises really worth the time and effort?
Absolutely.
In fact, when they’re done well, practice and role-plays benefit everyone on the sales team.
Benefits to sellers
Between onboarding and ongoing training, sellers get a lot of information thrown their way. But taking in this information isn’t enough. Sellers must also be able to apply it when it matters: when interacting with prospects.
Role-plays give sales reps the opportunity to practice what they’ve learned in a risk-free environment and get feedback from others. This practice boosts their skills and their confidence so they’re better prepared for any interaction that comes their way.
Benefits to sales managers
The success of a sales manager hinges on their team’s achievements so managers can’t just deliver training and coaching to reps, send them out into the field, and then hope for the best.
With practice and role-plays, managers can see their reps in action. Based on performance in role-plays, managers can then provide additional coaching and training to help reps hone their skills before money is on the line.
Benefits to sales enablement managers
According to Gartner, sellers forget almost 90% of information within 30 days of training. While practice is critical to ensuring learning sticks (and is applied in the field), sales enablement managers simply don’t have the time to facilitate real-time practice with every sales rep.
Practice and role-plays enable sellers to practice new skills on their own and receive the feedback and coaching they need to improve.
How to improve the effectiveness of practice exercises
Based on our analysis of one million Mindtickle users at over 350 companies, here are seven things you can start doing to ensure role-plays and practice opportunities adequately equip your sellers to close more deals.
1. Leverage virtual role-plays
The term “role-play” might conjure up visions of a sales rep standing in front of a group of peers at an in-person training or team meeting, delivering a practice pitch, and getting real-time feedback. But at a time when remote and hybrid work has become the norm, this is becoming less common.
Instead, the best organizations have shifted to virtual role-plays, with the help of AI-powered tools. With these, sellers have the opportunity to take multiple passes at a role-play — and they can do so on their own time. AI then analyzes the recorded role-play and delivers real-time insights and feedback to the presenter. Recordings can also be reviewed by managers and peers to provide additional feedback, which the seller can use to perfect their skills.
2. Assign role-plays on a quarterly basis, at minimum
Role-plays and practice exercises are important. But how frequently must organizations provide reps with these opportunities for practice?
We’ve found that on average, sellers submit two to three recorded role-plays per year. However, at top-performing companies, sellers do four role-plays per year. Industries including pharmaceuticals, retail, and technology are particularly heavy users of role-plays.
When it comes to role-plays, more is more. Aim to assign quarterly role-plays to ensure your sellers are always ready to close any deal.
3. Use role-plays to prepare reps for different selling situations
Many organizations use role-plays to help sellers perfect their sales presentations. But winning sales organizations leverage role-plays to help sellers master a whole host of selling scenarios.
Here are the top three use cases for which winning sales organizations leverage role-plays.
Product knowledge: Sellers must have solid product knowledge before interacting with prospects. Role-plays assess reps’ product knowledge and help managers identify and address any knowledge gaps before the rep goes into the field.
Pitch practice and marketing messaging: Reps’ messaging needs to be on point during pitches — every single time. Role-plays can help grow their confidence and ensure they’re always on message when interacting with prospects.
Voicemail practice: Most reps are no stranger to going to a prospect’s voicemail. Voicemail role-plays ensure sellers have what it takes to leave clear, concise messages that entice prospects to call back.
Consider incorporating these role-play use cases into your enablement strategy to ensure sellers are ready to handle every situation thrown their way.
4. Incorporate written role-plays
At many organizations, role-plays and practice are focused on improving verbal selling skills. But in today’s digital-first business environment, reps also need opportunities to practice their written selling skills. After all, poor writing can be a big turnoff for buyers.
At Mindtickle, 30-40% of practice exercises are written role-plays. In fact, in 2021, we had a 2X year-over-year increase in the use of written role-plays.
Be sure to leverage written role-plays to help your sellers hone their writing skills. A great place to start is to add written role-plays for top use cases, including cold outreach emails and post–discovery call recaps.
5. Keep role-plays short and sweet
It’s tempting to cram as much as you can into a single role-play exercise. But we suggest that you resist this urge. Sellers need practice perfecting short, high-impact messages. As such, the most successful sales organizations keep role-plays short and sweet: two to four minutes is ideal.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all role-play length. Instead, you must consider key points that need to be covered and non-negotiable points versus nice-to-haves. In addition, be sure to factor in the total number of role-plays and the amount of time it’ll take reviewers to score them.
6. Allow sellers to take multiple passes at a role-play exercise
When a rep is doing a real-time, in-person role-play, they have one chance to get it right. But we’ve found that, on average, sellers complete two drafts of a virtual role play before submitting it for review.
When assigning role-plays, consider including an example of a great submission as a reference. In addition, consider leveraging AI in your role-play exercises. The best sales organizations see improved quality when they allow sellers to review AI feedback and make multiple attempts before sending in the assignment.
7. Provide focused feedback
After a role-play has been submitted, it’s imperative to provide feedback. Often, this feedback will come from the sales manager or enablement manager. Other times, it will come from peers. Still other times, a combination is used.
Our analysis found that the top common role-play improvement instructions for reps include:
Be more concise
Sound more natural
Use customer examples
What parameters should be used for role-play evaluation? If you include too many parameters, it’ll dilute the impact of the seller’s message. Instead, the best organizations focus on parameters that correspond to key seller competencies.
Finally, be sure to require all reviewers to provide written feedback, as this will provide more valuable learning to the rep.
Improve selling performance
In the world of sales, role-plays are recognized as a great training tool — for good reason. Start improving the effectiveness of your role-plays by adopting the proven best practices of the most successful organizations. Giving your sellers more meaningful opportunities to practice their skills, will grow their confidence — and get them ready for any selling situation.
Want to learn more about what winning sales organizations are doing to ensure their reps are always ready to close deals? Check out the 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report.
You can’t improve rep performance without a baseline. And all too often, even sales organizations that regularly analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t even tracking the right metrics.
Having clear goals and expectations allows you to gauge everyone’s performance and adjust your training and coaching approach as needed. Continue reading to discover the most important metrics for sales success.
Setting your sales goals
First, you must consider what your goals are — for individual reps, teams, and even leadership. Have a new product you’re trying to push? Want to reduce the average length of your sales cycle or drive better content engagement? Make sure these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) to better measure success.
It is more effective to set these goals and then work backward to establish KPIs that will progress reps toward these outcomes, rather than determining metrics prior to goal setting.
Vanity metrics
You’ve developed objectives for where you want sales reps to be — now you must set a plan to help them get there. Many sales organizations simply measure everything available even when these measurements don’t provide relevant insights.
The metrics below aren’t reliable indicators of seller success:
Conversions: The number of new leads who turn into customers
Email engagement: The number of opens, reads, and link clicks within an email
Sales activities: The number of cold calls made, number of demos performed, number of emails sent, training completion, etc.
Total appointments booked: The number of prospect meetings scheduled
Total pipeline value: The potential revenue generated if all deals in the pipeline close
What do these metrics actually tell you? Do they give you any insight to act upon?
Use these actionable metrics instead
Numbers don’t have much meaning without context. Trade vanity metrics like the ones above for indicators that directly correlate to performance and provide insights that allow for improvement.
Conversion rates put the number of conversions into context. For instance, when analyzing sales performance, seeing that 15 customers converted within a quarter doesn’t mean much when you don’t know how many leads you started with. Knowing that 50% of leads converted, on the other hand, allows you to compare against your benchmark and understand whether you need to reevaluate your approach.
Engagement rates are similar to conversion rates in that, rather than providing an arbitrary number, they demonstrate how many people opened an email or clicked a link within that email out of the total number of people who opened it. The standalone number may seem low, but the percentage allows you to take more effective action. If you have a great open rate but your clickthrough rates are low, you need to work on content and calls to action.
Average time to close indicates just that: the average length of a sales cycle across your team. This is a far greater way to gauge performance than whether reps completed training and how they scored. However, looking at these training metrics next to time to close gives insight into how your learning materials contribute to elevated (or lowered) performance.
Deal losses are not necessarily a fun metric to view but are still significant barometers of performance. By understanding why a deal was lost, where the deal was in the sales cycle when it was lost, and other details of the process, you can identify areas for improvement.
Win/loss ratio goes beyond losses to measure how many appointments are actually closing. One of your reps may be setting a high number of meetings, but if a small percentage of those close, it’s a strong signal that something in your process needs to change.
Don’t completely count out vanity metrics
All of this isn’t to say that vanity metrics aren’t important. You should continue capturing them to measure growth over time and to put other performance indicators into context. For example, by looking at which sellers are closing the most deals and identifying any trends in their activities (they make more calls, schedule more appointments, complete more training modules), you can replicate those behaviors and incorporate them into your coaching or training materials.
To set sellers on a path to sales readiness, start by building an ideal rep profile (IRP), which sets a benchmark for these performance indicators. Learn more about what an IRP is here and get started building yours today with Mindtickle’s new IRP generator.
You’re likely familiar with the “80/20” selling philosophy, or the belief that 20% of reps make 80% of total sales for your organization. In other words, sales leaders pin their hopes on the top-performing salespeople to drive the most revenue.
This has led to these all-too-common refrains:
Sellers are born, they’re not made.
Excellence is not a skill. It’s an attitude.
Selling is an art, not a science.
But the fact that selling actually is a science.
There’s a formula for the perfect sales rep that’s a combination of knowledge, skill, and behaviors. While the formula for each organization or role is different, there’s a method for defining what makes sellers successful.
That’s why we created and today unveiled an IRP Generator, a quick, interactive, intuitive way to create and customize your ideal rep profile. You can build multiple profiles for roles like account executives and sales development representatives in minutes and share those results with your team.
What is an IRP and why do I need one?
An IRP defines and benchmarks top competencies – a combination of knowledge, skills, and behaviors – that reps must possess to be successful in the field. It is important to document and encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes.
As you make your own IRP, keep these things in mind:
Knowledge is the information and data a rep must possess
Skills help you evaluate how your rep should behave on the field
Behaviors track how a rep is actually performing on the ground
With Mindtickle’s ideal rep profile generator, you can quickly determine and weigh the importance of the necessary skills and behaviors required of your sales reps. This generator helps you figure out how your reps stack up.
How to build your IRP
The Mindtickle IRP Generator makes creating your ideal rep profile easy. Here’s how to do it:
Choose a name. Giving your rep a name helps you better visualize your IRP. You can even give your rep a fun name like Rockstar Rachel or Moneyball Mike.
Select a role. Each role does not place the same weight on skills and strengths. Depending on the role, reps have different characteristics and benchmarks that are vital for success in their particular field. Here are the ones currently included in our generator: Account Executive, Solutions Engineer, Customer Success, Sales Development Representative, and Channel Sales.
Identify goals. Depending on the role you’ve selected in step 2, we’ll serve up common goals for this role. You can select as many or few as make sense for your team. It’s important to be clear about the characteristics someone must possess to be successful in the role. This allows you to understand the competencies needed to find the right candidate and help your team become successful through training and coaching.
Customize your scorecard. We’ll serve you up a scorecard with the key knowledge, skills, and behaviors for the role and goals you identified in steps 1 and 2. You can adjust the importance of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors of your ideal rep and even remove some entirely.
Download and share. Once you download your scorecard, we’ll also serve up some action items for each of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors identified in your IRP. You can also save your profile, download or share it with your team, and create more IRPs for other roles on your team.
How to get the most of your IRP
You should encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes. With an established ideal rep profile, the 80/20 myth is busted. You can follow a “100/100” rule instead and build a sales team full of reps with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors to be successful.
Getting new hires up to speed is a major investment in both time and money for businesses. You pay their salary from day one, but it can take a long time for new sellers to hit quota and start bringing in revenue for the business. According to The Bridge Group, the average ramp-up time for sales development reps (SDRs) is 3.1 months. For account executives (AEs), it’s even longer—4.9 months.
Companies need to understand ramp-up time, what affects it, and how to calculate it to support new sales hires and help them reach full productivity sooner.
What is sales ramp-up time?
Ramp-up time is the amount of time it takes for new sales hires to reach full productivity after they join your company. It includes their onboarding period with time to complete product training, learn about your sales process, master your sales tools, and have initial coaching from managers or other colleagues.
Sales leaders need to know how long it takes to ramp up new hires, so they can create more accurate forecasts based on rep capacity. Additionally, it helps you plan your future hiring needs, so you can bring on new hires before your team is over capacity.
How to calculate ramp-up time for sales reps
Ramp-up time can be calculated in several ways. The right one for your organization depends on factors like average sales cycle length, product complexity, team size and structure, and the amount and type of training available to new hires. Here are three common ways companies calculate sales ramp-up time for new hires.
Method 1: Ramp-up time based on sales cycle length
The simplest way to calculate ramp-up time is to use the length of your sales cycle as a starting point. For example, if your average sales cycle takes three months from outreach to close, it should take a similar length of time for reps to reach full productivity. Some companies add an extra buffer—for example, if they have a short sales cycle, they might add an extra 90 days for reps to get up to speed.
This method is a great choice for fast-growing sales teams that hire in cohorts. It standardizes the ramp-up time for new hires, so it’s easy to see who’s on track and who needs some extra support to get to where they need to be. However, it’s not so good for enterprise companies with long sales cycles because they can’t afford to wait that long for reps to start bringing in new revenue. In that case, one of the methods below will be a better fit for your company.
Method 2: Ramp-up time based on experience level
Calculating ramp-up time based on a salesperson’s experience level is more complicated because it will vary for each rep. As before, you’ll use your average sales cycle length as a starting point, but depending on the experience level of your new hire, you’ll either add on or take off time.
For example, a brand-new college graduate may need a few extra weeks to complete training programs and build their knowledge from the ground up before they reach full productivity. However, if you’ve poached a top performer from one of your competitors, they’ll need less time than average because they’ll have a good level of industry and product knowledge from their past experience.
This calculation method is a good choice for teams that hire reps with very different skills and experience levels. It enables you to personalize targets, expectations, and training based on your reps’ individual needs.
Method 3: Ramp-up time based on time to reach full quota
Alternatively, you can calculate ramp-up time based on the average length of time it takes your new sales hires to reach full quota attainment. Here, the idea is to focus on sales productivity to benchmark new hire performance rather than your sales cycle. It’s a good choice if your company doesn’t have a standard sales cycle length — for example, if you sell products for different markets with very different sales processes.
This method helps you monitor rep progress and set targets by comparing their performance against your previous hires, using past hires as the blueprint for a successful onboarding period.
5 tips to reduce new hire ramp-up time
As we’ve seen, it can take months for your new sales hires to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to be ready for high-value sales interactions. So here are some tips for getting your sales reps ramped up quickly and enabling them to start hitting their revenue targets sooner.
1. Create and share a ramp-up plan with new hires
Put together a document that outlines your ramp-up plan for new hires. If you have a standardized process, you can use templates for this, but if you calculate ramp-up time based on experience, you’ll need to personalize this for each rep. This document should include:
Sharing a copy of this plan with your new hires will help reps check that they’re on track and meeting your expectations every step of the way. Having visibility into your expectations and the ability to monitor their progress will enable reps to take greater ownership over their ramp-up time.
2. Plan your sales onboarding
A successful ramp-up period gives reps a complete understanding of your business and how it operates and sets them up for long-term success. Sales onboarding is the initial part of a longer ramp-up period for new hires.
It’s important to ensure your onboarding program maps the skills, processes, and content that will help your reps achieve success at your company — in both the short and long term.
Make sure you’re focusing on the areas that are most important to your business, such as:
Sales onboarding should also include revenue targets and quotas — the things your reps will be measured by when they’re fully on board. Take the time to set measurable goals so that your new hires have a clear understanding of your expectations from day one. Doing so will also help provide context as your reps move through the onboarding process.
3. Provide effective sales training and coaching
When they join a company, new sales hires often go through initial training to learn about product, market, sales process, and ideal customer profile. According to Training Industry, “Highly effective sales training reduces ramp-up time by up to seven weeks.” Successful training should be tailored to the needs of each rep and include personalized coaching and plenty of resources for self-guided learning.
By adopting an on-demand learning approach, you give reps the opportunity to learn at their own pace rather than waiting around for calls to shadow or for a supervisor to walk them through a particular selling approach. Having on-demand resources available for your reps to review and use for virtual role-plays will help your sellers get up to speed faster. It will also give them more confidence in their skills as they can be honed and evaluated in a virtual environment.
Some examples of common on-demand training modules include:
Industry news and trends: Help reps start speaking your prospects’ language from the get-go by familiarizing them with how to talk about hot topics in your space and navigate industry jargon.
Objection handling: Compile the most common objections that reps at your company face and provide strategies for overcoming them.
Pitch presentations: Give your new reps the opportunity to learn and understand how you present your product to buyers.
Veteran tips: Have your most seasoned sales reps provide their top tips for excelling in the field. It’s always great to hear advice from a high-performing peer!
Sales process: Provide an overview of what the sales process at your organization looks like, including what reps are expected to do at each stage.
Competitive insights: Ensure your reps have a strong understanding of how your product offering differs from that of your competitors and what makes yours stand out.
The best part about making these specific training modules available on demand is that it doesn’t take time away from your high-performing reps who are already busy selling, and it also ensures consistency in the onboarding process.
4. Monitor and review progress
As your reps move through the onboarding process, it can be difficult to gauge their comprehension levels and how close they are to being ready to start having real sales interactions. What helps is being able to track onboarding session completion rates, as well as conducting knowledge tests along the way. This will allow you to identify knowledge gaps and give more training attention where it’s needed.
Some key areas you’ll want to test for include:
Product knowledge — especially the ability to effectively demo your product
Competitive intel
Pricing packages
Buyer personas
Post-sale services and support
Prospecting processes
How and when to qualify a lead
Vertical- or territory-specific knowledge
Ability to use your CRM
Using data is really the only concrete way to determine how prepared your reps are to sell. A Readiness Index is a great way to get a holistic view of reps’ sales readiness, factoring in coaching, knowledge, and skill. Managers should use this index — or other performance metrics — to monitor new hires’ progress and adapt their training and coaching to set them up for success.
5. Provide training beyond your onboarding program
Research by Gartner found that sellers forget “70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month.” Because of this, you need to create a culture of ongoing learning and continuous improvement to help reps develop and maintain the skills and knowledge they need to be effective when interacting with prospects.
Many companies provide their sellers with initial training during their onboarding period, but any additional training is limited to the annual sales kick-off.
But on-the-job learning shouldn’t stop with onboarding. Messaging, techniques, product offerings, and strategy are constantly evolving, so it’s integral to ensure ongoing sales readiness with continuous learning programs.
There are a number of different ways you can promote ongoing learning within your sales organization, such as:
Microlearning modules: Great for quick tips and competitive intel
Certification programs: Ideal for new product and messaging rollouts
Quizzes: Perfect for gauging knowledge retention, so sales leaders know when to coach
On-the-go learning: Provide mobile access to your training modules with an app or mobile dedicated site, so they can be accessed any time, anywhere
By taking an everboarding approach to sales training, you create a team culture of ongoing learning and allow new hires to practice their skills in a low-pressure environment. Everboarding also encourages spaced reinforcement of new topics at regular intervals to help reps retain the information they learned in their training. This will help new hires build their knowledge and skills more quickly to ramp up faster.
Support sales reps long term, not just in onboarding
Ramp-up times are a useful benchmark for monitoring the early progress of your new sales hires. But you want to set reps up for long-term success at your company — beyond their initial onboarding period. Building a culture of continuous learning, training, and practice (that extends beyond onboarding) will set your reps up for ongoing success.
If you’re ready to make the shift from onboarding to sales everboarding and extend your training and coaching beyond the ramp-up period, download our free checklist: 5 Must-Haves for Any Sales Everboarding Strategy
