Dec 10, 2021
Salespeople aren’t constantly on the phone closing deals. Their roles require a lot of moving parts: managing pipelines, building knowledge and skills, practicing pitches and objection handling, and meeting with managers for coaching sessions. The simpler and more efficient these tasks can be, the more time reps can spend solving customer problems and generating revenue.
Jennifer O’Neill, Director of Employee and Partner Enablement at Eightfold, an AI-powered talent intelligence platform, knew there were changes that could be made within her own sales organization to make reps more productive and therefore more successful.
What was the key to improving productivity and performance? Centralization and simplification through Mindtickle, enabling Eightfold to train reps, manage sales content, and analyze conversation insights from the field. Keep reading to learn how Eightfold has achieved a streamlined experience.
How Eightfold streamlines the rep experience
#1: Consolidating tools
The number of SaaS tools a sales organization needs was amplified by the emergence of remote work. To fill in the process gaps created by remote-first workplaces, businesses have fast-tracked software deployment and digital transformation.
Eightfold is no stranger to using software for sales support. Prior to unifying its sales tech stack with Mindtickle, the leadership team used Gong for conversation intelligence and Google Drive to house and manage content. While Gong served as a catalyst for gathering voice-of-customer insights, there was no capability to connect customer conversations to content use or training performance or to predict which teams and reps were most prepared to hit their quota. The objective for moving to Call AI was to solve this gap. Using disjointed technology also meant much time and energy was wasted maneuvering from one platform to another to accomplish basic daily tasks.
While re-evaluating how to help reps be more successful, O’Neill took a step back and assessed Eightfold’s sales tech stack as a whole.
She posed the following questions to identify areas of improvement:
- What purpose does each platform serve?
- How much are sellers using each platform?
- Can we get the same functionality with fewer platforms?
- Can we retire some contracts and consolidate?
O’Neill was already implementing a new sales learning solution from Mindtickle to create customized modules and inspire a culture of coaching. “Bar none: Mindtickle is the best sales enablement platform ever,” she said.
O’Neill and her team also recently launched Mindtickle’s content management system (CMS), Asset Hub, to replace its prior solution. With the team familiar with the Mindtickle interface and user experience, Call AI product made sense as an alternative to Gong — with the added benefit of living in the same solution as these other critical sales tools.
These functionalities, plus Mindtickle’s Salesforce integration, mean reps have a centralized solution to get things done quickly and more easily.
#2: Improving access & shareability
With the new tools in place, O’Neill wanted to ensure reps can access the information they need when they need it. Whether it’s learning materials, product content to share with customers, or notes about a particular account, everything lives in a single, unified solution, saving sellers hours finding what they need.
And it’s not just about individual reps turning up what they need; it’s also about sharing materials across the team for better collaboration while creating a smoother method for distributing content to buyers and customers.
“Sharing critical account data more easily amongst the team helps you have more productive conversations with your customers,” O’Neill said.
#3: Using tools to drive results, not punish people
The aim for any solution, including conversation intelligence, should be to help employees do their jobs more effectively. O’Neill positioned Mindtickle’s Call AI as a tool to support reps before, during, and after customer meetings, promoting how it gives reps the ability to:
- Automatically transcribe calls for future reference
- Follow up on outstanding items with context
- Eliminate unnecessary meetings
- Easily share meeting details internally for those who were unable to make the call
- Get others, such as account or customer success managers, quickly up to speed when handing off a deal or account
Rather than scrawling in a notebook during calls, reps can stay focused and productive with the peace of mind that nothing will slip through the cracks.
These recordings are also available for reps to review later, to self-critique and identify areas they were successful and where they could improve.
#4: Evaluating performance for deeper insights
As with any new system introduced to the team, leadership must assess performance over time to ensure team members are using it and that it’s having a positive impact on individual and team KPIs.
O’Neill has started using the Call AI reporting feature to view coaching metrics like reps’ average number of discovery questions asked per call and the average amount of time speaking versus active listening time, amongst other data.
Using these insights and cross-referencing them with sales numbers, O’Neill and the enablement team can identify skills and behaviors they want to reinforce, create a list of best practices for customer calls, and build training around those skills and behaviors.
More opportunity ahead for Eightfold
While O’Neill and the Eightfold sales and enablement teams have seen a lot of improvement in a short amount of time since implementing Mindtickle, there is still much opportunity. Streamlining is still top of mind, as well as using the platform to inspire a culture of coaching and leveraging Mindtickle’s predictive Sales Readiness Index.
O’Neill has been satisfied with her Mindtickle experience thus far.
“I have to be conscious about what the experience is like for the end-user,” said O’Neill. “Mindtickle gets people to content and insights faster while making our reps’ lives easier.”
