Jul 17, 2020
In the midst of a socioeconomic crisis brought about by COVID-19, organizations are racing to resiliency by embracing telework and remote communications and collaboration approaches as they prepare for a new paradigm, in which all their employees will be remote some of the time, and many will be remote all of the time. Sales leaders especially — charged with shaping the team that brings in revenue for an organization — must make sure their tactics and strategies for training are as effective virtually as they were in the office. To this end, sales leaders are driving initiatives that digitally onboard, train, develop skills, and coach their team members to adopt the digital skills required to make today’s remote customer engagement effective .
As Mindtickle’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Gopkiran Rao pointed out in a recent podcast with Sandler Training’s CEO and President Dave Mattson, “This is either a challenge or opportunity for every company out there” (especially when both the buyer and the seller are remote). Of course, while the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of desklessness, the reality is that the global workforce has been moving toward predominantly remote work for a while now.
The podcast discussion began with an overview of the pandemic’s role in reframing our idea of the workplace, but surfaced a number of critical market drivers and conditions as to why equipping field teams for the digital field has been such a challenge for companies in the pandemic environment.
Often with many stakeholders across sales operations, sales training, corporate learning, marketing and frontline sales management focusing on different aspects of seller engagement and productivity, there is breakdown in communication. Understanding this disconnect and determining where an organization falls short in developing a common language to uplevel sales skill can be challenging, and requires stakeholders to think more deeply about their current sales readiness programs, especially in the context of working remotely. Gop and Dave pointed out that now especially, the questions to ask include:
- Do you have remote selling proficiency and how do you measure and reinforce it?
- Do you have the ability to engage and educate your sellers in the flow of work, which is increasingly intermingled with the flow of life?
- Do you have the ability to drive spaced reinforcements of key content and skill critical to engaging remote buyers?
- Do you have the ability to do virtual ride-alongs, or shadowing and quickly address gaps in digital-first selling skill?
The partnership began earlier this year and was almost immediately recognized by leading analyst firm, Forrester Research. In the Forrester Wave™: Sales Training And Services, Q1 2020 by Mary Shea she pointed out that “Sandler Training leans into a self-service, always-on model… In partnership with Mindtickle, the provider embeds its training content into the sales readiness vendor’s tool.” Mary explained that “Sandler Training has made a strategic decision to reduce dependencies on ILT and diversify its training delivery methods. Within the past decade, the provider has pivoted to include learning management systems and online content offerings within a self-service model that leverages top-tier technologies and encourages users to access training content directly from its platform.”
And when the Mindtickle-Sandler partnership was formally announced in June, it couldn’t have come at a better time. The Sandler-Mindtickle partnership is important to addressing common pain points of organizations, because it is a focused effort to align many stakeholders responsible for parts of sales learning, management and coaching and execution. In the podcast, Gop and Dave agreed that the partnership enables a common language, set of processes, skills and knowledge that drive the business outcomes that customers are looking for. In today’s climate, in which organizations’ employees are not only working from home, but are also required to stay effective and engaged with both their teams and their remote customers. It’s more important than ever to be aligned on a repeatable methodology, professional learning, manager observation and intervention, and seller execution. By virtue of Mindtickle’s data-driven virtual training and coaching sales readiness platform and Sandler’s best-in-class sales training, organizations have a standard playbook of best practices, content training, coaching, visibility and expertise that is accessible anytime and anywhere.
Dave said that having this common language and being aligned on methodology is important because it “raises your game so much faster, which is good for the organization, good for the individual and good for the client. It’s a winning combination.”
Only technology (Mindtickle) combined with methodology (Sandler) can make possible affirmative answers to these questions.
In a deskless world, it’s more important than ever for sales teams to be enabled and ready to improve their success rates wherever they are. Together, Mindtickle and Sandler are the “what” and the “how” combined in one partnership to address this need: instilling a transformational virtual sales training and coaching culture of applied knowledge, skills development and behavior change in a joint solution.
Catch Gop and Dave’s entire conversation in a 30-minute podcast. Click here to take a listen.
