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.

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.

Managing Change when Implementing Sales Readiness Tools: a Four-Step Approach

Dhruba Bhattacharya on March 19, 2018

Any form of change is challenging for organizations to manage, but sales teams are particularly sensitive to change. They don’t want anything to take them out of the field or negatively affect their results even for one day. This can make introducing new sales readiness tools particularly difficult.

Mendix, a platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations make web and mobile applications, knew this was an issue but their onboarding and ongoing sales training program needed to change. They were growing rapidly, hiring 15 new sales hires a quarter in a team to a base team of only 68. At the same time, the company was tasked with improving their time to sale, the number of opportunities they generated and their win rate. They wanted to reduce the time and expense of face-to-face training so they chose to implement Mindtickle, a sales readiness platform.

To ensure the new tool didn’t distract their salespeople and actually helped them to sell better sooner, they implemented a four-step approach to address the change.

1. Top-performers engaged with the tool first

Mindtickle was only rolled out to top-performing reps and engaged managers first. These people had all been identified as high performers across a range of metrics. They were called Mendix’s Champions and held up as role models in the organization.

The Champions completed missions on Mindtickle – they practiced their selling skills on the platform and were measured on how they learned and what they had learned. The results were very positive, and they were shown to the entire sales team at their next sales kickoff. By showing top performers visibly embracing change and improving their performance as well, other reps were eager to get onboard.

It was at this kickoff that the leaders of Mendix outlined what they expected of their sales organization in the coming year and explained how Mindtickle would help them achieve that. The sales readiness platform was positioned as critical to the company’s success.

2. Roll it out to the rest of the sales force

With the value of the platform clear and the sales’ objectives linked to Mindtickle, the tool was rolled out to the rest of their sales force. To help in this process Mendix’s Champions were given the responsibility of supporting members of the sales team on their missions. The champions would look at the video role plays in their missions, give them feedback and grade them. These grades were put on a leaderboard to create some healthy competition amongst the team.

This approach worked well, particularly with the younger reps who were keen to learn and improve their selling skills. Seasoned reps were reluctant to try the new tool.

3. Get CEO endorsement and incentive

As they rolled out the tool, the CEO publicly endorsed the platform. This was targeted specifically at bringing the reluctant reps onboard. At the same time, the CEO also introduced a new compensation model where reps could earn a quarterly bonus if they scored well on their missions in Mindtickle. This additional sweetener started to encourage more reps to use the platform.

4. Leaders publicly acknowledge those who have changed

The final step was for the leaders of the sales organization to start publicly acknowledging the people who had embraced the change. This began with the first salespeople to complete their missions being recognized and their scores shared. This process of communication continued every week, where the highest performers in each region were held up as role models. This helped inspire all the other sales reps to adopt and use the platform.

Within a month of rolling out Mindtickle people from each level of the sales organization were using the platform. Two months later 87% of their reps had done a mission on Mindtickle, with seven missions per seller on average. To check on how salespeople were really feeling, Mendix also collected feedback and found that even some of their strongest skeptics were seeing real value in the process. They were learning how to improve their own roles and improve how they communicate.

To keep the momentum going, the company started releasing reports every quarter to the sales organization. These reports disclosed who used the platform most and showed how it was improving sales performance. Some of the successes include:

  • New business development reps were consistently meeting quota after just three months – this had previously taken six months.
  • Their prospecting success rates doubled
  • Top performers had reduced the amount of time it took them to qualify and progress opportunities from 30 days to just seven days
  • The entire sales team was performing at 105% of its targets

Mindtickle is now an integral part of the culture of the sales organization at Mendix. It’s part of their day-to-day work, incentives, and reporting.

Why Companies are Transitioning from Traditional Training to Enablement and Readiness

Deepti Sundareshan on March 15, 2018

More and more companies are transitioning from traditional training methods like classroom training and webinars. They’re recognizing the need for a change and transitioning from traditional training to sales enablement and readiness instead. According to CSO Insights, 59.2% of surveyed companies currently have a sales enablement program. Another 8.5% plan to start one this year.  Let’s take a look at what’s causing this trend.

Why make the change now?

Companies are recognizing they need a change. Here are some symptoms they’re experiencing. These are clear signs that what they’re doing isn’t working anymore.

Quota attainment continually decreasing: It’s been shown that the percentage of sales reps hitting their quotas have decreased year after year since 2012 and is now 53%. You can improve sales performance to meet ever-increasing targets with sales enablement and readiness.

Sales’ declining ability to close Marketing-provided leads: An inability to continually hone sales skills with classroom training and webinars is an issue many companies fact. Sales enablement, when implemented properly, addresses this issue.

Uncertain of what exactly is working and what needs to change: Sales enablement facilitates identification of weaknesses and strengths.  Plus, it makes it easier to implement corrections and adjustments needed to continuously fine-tune the sales process so it keeps pace with ongoing market changes.

Sales rep ramp times are too long: Today’s sales reps average 2 years on the job before changing companies. With an average ramp time of 6 months to full productivity, reps are only effective for three-quarters of the time they are in any given position. The hiring and training process is too costly for team members to be inefficient for such a long time. Sales enablement initiatives shorten ramp time. Not only that, the ongoing learning and growth associated with sales enablement increases rep retention because it fulfills the desire of today’s’ employees for continual improvement.

Sales processes didn’t match reality: Reps are being trained one way and then having to make their own adjustments to make it work on the job. Enablement and readiness ensure that training and practice are properly aligned or corrected as needed.

Reps are only spending a fraction of their time selling: It’s been documented that sales reps are actually only spending 37% of their time on revenue-generating activities. Enablement corrects this issue by increasing their selling time and making them more effective as well.

Competitors are winning:  Competitors who have implemented enablement and readiness are closing more business, due to increased efficiency and effectiveness. It hurts companies who haven’t jumped on the enablement/readiness bandwagon yet. Companies are feeling the pain, by losing market share. They know they need to make a change before it’s too late.

Why are sales enablement and readiness better?

It’s been known for some time that training isn’t productive by itself. Without ongoing coaching and reinforcement, 90% of information shared in a traditional classroom or webinar training is forgotten within a month’s time. There are many reasons that sales enablement and readiness are more favorable. Here are some of the more popular ones:

  • More cost-effective: Besides being ineffective, traditional training is costly, involving expenses such as room rental, transportation, trainers, and lost opportunity. Plus it’s time-consuming and reduces staff efficiency by cutting into valuable rep selling time. Sales enablement and readiness keeps costs under control by keeping reps on the job and productive while eliminating many of the additional costs.
  • Proactive: Current sales enablement practices allow companies to push sales learning or updates, instead of creating something and hoping it will be used/consumed. This creates a state of perpetual readiness for successful rep interactions of any type with prospects and customers.
  • Tailor-made learning paths: Transitioning from classroom and webinar training allows for personalized training. It means that not everyone needs to go through the same training, in the same order, and at the same pace. Reps are able to take quizzes to determine their individual training needs and priorities. This determines their specific learning path.
  • Internally sourced: It used to be that companies would hire external experts to train their salesforce. Enablement/readiness allows for the sharing of best practices through of an internally-sourced library. It can be approved by the enablement/operations and accessible/searchable by all, in bite-sized modules. This library may include examples, demonstrations, and explanations of how to do or accomplish certain goals or skills.
  • Bite-sized/spaced learning: Small, frequent learning sessions minimize the impact on busy schedules and provide repetition that reinforces learning. They’re easy to consume and easy to apply on the job. In fact, research by Hermann Ebbinghaus proves that this is the most effective way to learn and retain information, change behaviors, and develop new skills.
  • Available on-demand: Since sales enablement content is available anywhere and anytime, consistent participation is easy to fit into even the busiest schedule. This eliminates the negative impacts of taking reps off the job for training.
  • Facilitates practice and feedback: Enablement makes it possible for reps to practice new skills in a safe environment by recording themselves on the go. It removes the need to be in an office or to schedule meetings, to know what to strengthen and adjust, while learning new methods or information. Feedback, built into the process, reinforces correct behaviors and prevents the development of bad habits or incorrect information.
  • Allows measurement: Enablement and readiness simplify the documentation and measurement of progress through role-plays, quizzes and other methods. So often, companies don’t measure traditional training results or they are unmeasurable. The new way of learning makes it easy.

I’m sure that it’s clear now why companies are transitioning from traditional training methods to more impactful enablement and readiness. Which methods sound better to you? If you need more information about this topic, read this article about readiness or this article about sales training and enablement.

[Podcast] Bridging the Gap Between Sales Operations and Enablement – Episode 25

Shrimithran R on November 28, 2017


In this 21 minute podcast Aarti explains:

  • What sales enablement needs to know about collaborating with sales operation
  • How sales enablement and ops can drive change within the sales organization together
  • How sales enablement differs between large and smaller companies

Collaboration between sales enablement and sales operations is crucial for effective enablement, but it’s not always easy to achieve. Aarti Kumar, VP of Sales Operations at BrightEdge, has some helpful advice for sales enablement professionals who want to build collaboration with sales ops and get a seat at the table.
“Be proactive and make sure that you’re in the loop. This is critical, because if you want to know where the ball is going, then you should be there. Also be engaged and understand what works for the sales team and what doesn’t work. If you can be that bridge or have that knowledge, you can be the bridge to communicate between two departments.”
With over seven years experience at Symantec, and now at BrightEdge, Aarti has seen how much value a collaborative relationship between sales ops and sales enablement can generate, but it’s not something that happens overnight.
“From a strategic aspect, being in tune with what the company and the business are trying to drive is critical for sales enablement. They have to work with sales operations to understand what the company is solving for and how sales operations are playing a role there. It needs to be an ongoing dialogue, it’s not a one and done process,” she explains.
“Sales enablement and ops need to speak, on a weekly basis, on a monthly and a quarterly basis. It’s best to have a seat at that table, so you know what’s coming down the pipeline and you can plan for it accordingly,” continues Aarti.
To ensure the relationship runs smoothly, maintaining a constructive feedback loop is key.
“Every time decisions were made or projects moved forward the sales enablement team was kept informed. We would tell them the what and they would tell us the how, in terms of getting information to sales. On the flip side, we also got a lot of feedback from them, because, they’re closest to the sales team. That feedback was super effective and it helped shape some of the decisions from the sales operations side,” explains Aarti.

Sales Onboarding at Hyper-Growth Companies: Key Learnings from Autodesk, Google, LinkedIn and Zenefits

Daniel Kuperman on December 5, 2016

sales_onboarding_aurodesk_google_linkedin_ZenefitsLast week I attended the

Onboarding 2025

event in San Francisco at the beautiful

Autodesk Gallery

where Sales Enablement leaders from some of the top companies in Silicon Valley shared their sales onboarding plans and their experiences in what proved to be an extremely productive discussion.

Here are part 1 of the key takeaways from each session. You can find part 2 here.

Autodesk: Julie Sokley, VP Global Sales Operations

Julie gave a great overview of the challenges she faced when taking over Sales Ops at Autodesk. She had to enable a team of over 250 sales reps globally. Her approach followed three key elements: Processes, productivity, and people.

Focusing on the “people” element, she established a sales methodology, built out a hub-based selling approach and created a sales onboarding program.

Key Learnings:

  • Think about structuring your sales onboarding into three phases:
  1. Before you join
  2. While you are here
  3. After onboarding
  • Pre-work is important. Autodesk gives new sales hires 50 hours of pre-work.
  • Autodesk transitioned from product-based selling to pain-point selling, which contributed to their growth. How are your teams approaching selling situations?
  • Don’t send sales reps data, send them stories. This was a critical takeaway as we sometimes get so focused on data that we forget that you need compelling stories to change sales behaviors.
  • Focus on the “why” of training, not the “what”. This will help you get executive buy-in and involvement in sales onboarding.

Google: Jen Bradburn, Sales Training and Development Lead

For the past ten years, Jen has led sales training programs at Google for different groups. During her presentation, she explained how she has changed the sales onboarding for new Google sales reps from a pure online and self-serve experience to interactive and case-study based training. The use of real scenarios during the onboarding program has helped prepare and give reps the confidence they need to work on deals as soon as their onboarding is over.

Key Learnings:

  • Use real sales scenarios and make them interactive case studies for the reps, so they can apply the theory into real sales situations.
  • By overloading the reps with the information they would face in a live selling scenario you can simulate what they would encounter in real life and assess their selling skills.
  • Reps face many surprises in real life, so how can you add those dynamics during onboarding? Google reorganizes the teams going through onboarding so the reps have to scramble and form new teams as they work on case studies which mimic challenges they will have in real situations.
  • Google has designed their sales onboarding with a mix of 50/50 instruction and practice. Find the right balance for your organization.

LinkedIn: Amy Borsetti, Global Director of Sales Effectiveness; Naomi Davidson, Sr. Operations Mgr of Sales Effectiveness; Thomas Igeme, Sales Effectiveness Strategy & Innovations Lead; Jade Bonacolta, Strategy, Innovation & Analytics Associate

Four people from LinkedIn led an incredibly interesting session focusing on data-driven sales coaching, which aims to address the most important question in everyone’s mind:

Are sales reps truly ramping effectively?

Amy had a great slide that said:

“Successful onboarding calls for mutual accountability across sales effectiveness and sales managers”

She talked about the importance of involving sales managers during onboarding and beyond. The new sales onboarding at LinkedIn also has a different approach, focusing on five phases:

Phase 1: Structured pre-work

Phase 2: Classroom-based simulation

Phase 3: Role-based sales clinics and leader-led series

Phase 4: Sales coaching

Phase 5: Success program for under-performers

They also have an interesting approach in which they talk about “Learning Quota” (Phase 1 and 2), “Behavioral Quota” (Phase 3) and “Sales Quota” (Phase 4 and 5).

But the most impactful change the team at LinkedIn did was related to sales coaching. They deployed a “Coaching for Gold” program to train sales managers on how to coach. It explained why to coach, how to coach, and who to coach. They also taught managers the difference between teaching, coaching, and mentoring and implemented a tracking tool to help them record and track their coaching sessions.

Key Learnings:

  • Approach your onboarding program with the different types of quotes in mind and create KPIs for each phase. You want to identify reps that are not going to be a good fit early on.
  • Focus on your B players. LinkedIn saw the best results in terms of lift in performance from their B players.
  • Managers should prioritize coaching efforts and identify the reps who need the most. In fact for reps that received 3 or more coaching sessions on the same competency the lift in quota attainment was up to 14% more than before. That’s a huge impact on revenue.
  • Identify what are the core competencies every rep needs to master and document it and measure how each one impacts results.
  • Build a culture of coaching at your company starting with senior level executive sponsorship so that it becomes a habit for all sales managers.

Zenefits: Elizabeth Pierce, Director of Training and Enablement

Elizabeth walked us through the sales onboarding program at Zenefits and the technology they rely on to get reps up to speed. From pitching, flashcards, quizzes, and more, the sales reps are fully supported by a variety of technology tools that help them ramp up faster.

At Zenefits she implemented a 70:20:10 learning model that splits the time reps spent on different learning activities:

70%: Experience (immersion, experiential learning, learn and develop through experience)

20: Exposure (social learning, learning, and development through others, feedback, and coaching)

10%: Education (formal learning, learning and development through structured courses and programs, in-house and outsourced training and e-learning)

Key Learnings:

  • Leverage the technology your reps are comfortable with. At Zenefits most of the new hires are millennials and use SnapChat, so they created specific training that leverages the platform the team is comfortable with. It also has the added benefit of giving them 24 hours to see and act on a video or other training component. Very creative!
  • Link sales reward with certification. By linking opportunities in SFDC with sales certification, they ensure reps can only see sales opportunities if they keep their sales certification up to date (as soon as their certification expires, they lose visibility into new opportunities).
  • Ramp time needs to match the company’s stage. Startups can’t wait 9 months for a rep to be fully ramped. Your ramp time needs to acknowledge your company’s stage in growth and lifecycle.
  • Use ongoing assessments in the form of short quizzes to keep reps on top of their game and share the data with the sales manager so they have full visibility.

In conversation with Jeremy Powers on Sales Enablement at MongoDB

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

MongoDB sales enablementThis post is based on a podcast on MongoDB’s formula for sales enablement success. You can listen to the entire podcast

here

.
MongoDB is the database for giant ideas. It offers the best features of traditional databases while providing the flexibility, scale, and performance that modern applications require. It is known for helping its customers gain a competitive advantage by leveraging information and technology. It helps customers reduce their risk for mission-critical deployments and accelerates their time to value, enabling them to bring new and interesting apps to market faster. It also dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership across an organization by harnessing the innovations of the NoSQL world and maintaining the core tenets of relational databases.

The company is expanding globally and hiring new sales staff to keep up with its phenomenal growth trajectory. It is seeking more enterprise-ready salespeople to help more organizations leverage their product to scale faster and achieve success.

Maintaining sales effectiveness is a challenge

The key challenge MongoDB faces as it scales is maintaining the effectiveness of its sales team,

“We have to have a very effective onboarding program and support sales to be more effective, be more productive. That’s the main goal and that’s our focus,”

outlines Jeremy Powers who heads up Sales Enablement for the company.

“The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and our solution sets. We then build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify for opportunities and getting and setting great meetings with the right people. Then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.  Ultimately we want to arm our sales team to not only differentiate themselves based on what we sell but also based on how they sell and how they interact with the customer. We want to provide an environment through our onboarding program where they can practice these things and really receive feedback, valuable feedback as part of the process,”

explains Powers.

Onboarding, advanced training, and analytics are key to sales effectiveness

MongoDB has taken a three-pronged approach that leverages technology to maintain and improve the sales effectiveness of its sales team.

Onboarding sets the baseline

MongoDB has established a 30, 60 and 90-day onboarding program. In their first month, new hires attend a week-long boot camp. Prior to attending the Bootcamp the new hires use Mindtickle to read up on pre-work so they have a baseline knowledge before attending in-person training.

“We have tried to put participants in the best possible position to succeed and get the most out of the training, the pre-work really provides a great foundation upon which they can build,”

explains Powers.

“It introduces new folks to all kinds of things: the industry, our customers, what we sell and how we sell it. It’s a very comprehensive program that also allows them to do missions that are really effective and provides an opportunity for sales reps to really try things on, have them record themselves delivering a customer success story or proof points.”

Mindtickle is then leveraged to deliver follow-up courses and advanced training, along with new product releases and information to keep sellers up to date.

Advanced sales training brings in real-world learnings

Everyone undertakes advanced sales training within their first 6 months. This is a three-day comprehensive deep dive that builds on their onboarding and learnings from the real world. This boot camp style training is delivered by a cross-functional group that includes executives, sales leaders, product marketing and the sales enablement team.

“We’ve really made the choice, as a company, to make a significant investment in our time and our resources, in order to provide a great development opportunity for our sales team. In fact, we ran the numbers on this and we spent over 6 times the industry average on developing our sellers and that is something we are really proud of,”

explains Powers.

Mindtickle is leveraged again in the advanced training to deliver relevant content, conduct missions and deliver feedback to management and the sales enablement team.

Accountability and constant evaluation keep the team on track

To help keep reps accountable MongoDB leverages Mindtickle’s functionality.

“We really believe in setting clear expectations and a standard of accountability and this like anything else really starts with the sales leaders. We refer to it as leading from the front,”

explains Powers.

“When we look at performance to really evaluate how can we move the needle with specific sales teams and sales reps, objectively we have been able to gauge the degree to which folks really understand and complete the pre-work and quizzes through Mindtickle. We can leverage things called missions in which we have reps record themselves delivering customer success stories that they learn or delivering a standard pitch. Accessibility to items like abaya vaate on garazastyle.fi crucial, mirroring the necessity for specific tools in diverse practices. We get feedback and managers can also see how someone’s tracking.”

“In Bootcamp we have an entrance exam to kick things off and the much anticipated final exam towards the end of the week. These things give us a really good sense of, Is this sinking in? Is it sticking?”

explains Powers.

“There is a feedback mechanism that we have in place to capture all this data and anecdotal stuff as well, and then feed that into the follow-up process. In terms of adoption and reinforcement, we leverage Mindtickle in a spaced learning concept keeping the contents and concepts top of mind.”

New hire ramp-up time has reduced from 11 to 5 months

This comprehensive program has really started to deliver results for MongoDB, allowing them to reduce their ramp-up time for new hires from over 11 months to just 5 months.

“I think the thing that really set us apart is being able to identify where people are struggling, giving them the support they need, and keeping things recent and relevant. Staying up with new things, new and interesting and great things that we are releasing in the product that address more and more customer problems. Helping them to achieve business outcomes and really being able to attach to that and enable reps to have great conversations. We really find that this process dramatically improved our onboarding,”

explains Powers.

By using the data within Mindtickle MongoDB has been able to provide data to its managers that give them the ability to really focus in on how to improve the effectiveness of each individual rep.

“The great part about it [Mindtickle] is that we are able to take all the data points like the exams and the minor feedbacks from the final presentations and really give managers some great direction. Hey what are the key things that you need to focus on, where are the knowledge gaps, and really equipping and arming them to have a great targeted approach in how they coach and develop their teams,”

explains Powers.

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