50 Fastest Growing Companies of the Year 2020

Enhance the capability of your customer-facing reps with MindTickle’s differentiated Sales Readiness approach

The Silicon Review

Sales readiness is a systematic approach to ensuring that customer-facing reps have the knowledge and skills necessary for impactful and relevant engagement throughout a customers’ buying journey. An effective sales readiness program seamlessly orchestrates learning, skill development, coaching, and assessment and certification. And this starts from onboarding through to ongoing readiness, all in the flow of work. When reps develop and refine capabilities required to successfully engage prospects and grow customers, they can build brand value and drive revenue aligned with a customer-first experience.

In today’s uncertain environment, it’s now more important than ever before for organizations to effectively – and appropriately – engage customers and prospects in conversations, not in sales cycles. With customers and customer-facing teams alike in lockdown, engaging with business acumen and agility and having meaningful interactions within digital environments at a distance have become paramount. But most organizations already lack a systematic, repeatable, and measurable way to prepare, assess, and reinforce customer-facing employees for digital dialogue. They don’t have a framework in place to automate and proactively measure their customer-engagement knowledge and soft skills — a system that surfaces the right set of quantifiable behaviors and capability data points. This is where a Sales Readiness platform, like MindTickle, enters to help automate this last mile of the front office. MindTickle was created to help revenue leaders build the capabilities and create the behaviors that accelerate growth, reduce risk, and deliver measurable business outcomes. This includes delivering practical training and learning content utilizing micro-learning and simulations, spaced reinforcement of key digital selling concepts, machine-reviewed role-plays based on model pitches, and AI-assisted coaching to maximize live, virtual, meetings and presentations. With $81 Million raised since its 2011 founding, an expanding list of remarkable customers, including 4 of the largest 15 health and life sciences companies and 3 of the largest 15 global technology companies, MindTickle is the industry’s fastest-growing industry provider of Sale Readiness solutions.

Founding story

MindTickle’s founding story is quite unique. In 2011 in Pune India, as a side project, co-founders Krishna Depura, Deepak Diwakar, Nishant Mungali and Mohit Garg developed an online/offline treasure hunt game to help encourage employee engagement in their organization. The engaging and gamified solution featured a unique, personalized approach to helping people gain knowledge and build job-specific skills while rewarding successful and demonstrable comprehension and demonstration. Soon after, the “game” was applied to engage sales teams by “tickling” their minds to help them become peak performers, while also providing useful data and coaching insights to managers and enablement administrators. Today, the MindTickle platform enables the best-in-class sales performance of some of the most world’s recognizable companies. Krishna Depura sets MindTickle’s strategic company vision as its co-founder and CEO. One of his greatest joys is seeing successful MindTickle customers thrive and advocate for the importance of sales readiness. Prior to co-founding MindTickle, he led product management at PubMatic, a leading sell-side platform at the forefront of programmatic innovation. Earlier in his career, he worked with various leading companies and startups, including Microsoft, Tejas Networks, and Infinera.

A highly accomplished user experience leader with nearly fifteen years of expertise in UI and UX design, as co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Nishant Mungali is responsible for driving the company’s new product vision, strategy and roadmap. Nishant is also extremely passionate about usability and makes it a priority to provide the highest quality user experience possible to MindTickle customers. Prior to co-founding MindTickle, he led UX design at PubMatic, delivering superior revenue outcomes to publishers, agencies, and advertisers. Nishant spent the early years of his career as an interaction designer at D.E. Shaw & Co, a global investment and technology development firm.

Setting the technological direction for the business and ensuring its services are secure and reliable, as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Deepak Diwakar is responsible for technology and operations at. He also oversees operations and works with the global team to achieve MindTickle’s business goals. Prior MindTickle, Deepak spent the early years of his career as a software engineer at PubMatic.

Sales Readiness Platform

MindTickle is the leading Sales Readiness platform for the customer-centric enterprise. Its comprehensive, data-driven software solution for sales readiness and enablement, fuels the revenue growth and brand value for dozens of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, and hundreds of the world’s most recognized companies across technology, life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and service sectors. With purpose-built applications, proven methodologies, and best practices designed to drive effective sales onboarding and ongoing readiness, MindTickle enables company leaders and sellers to continually assess, diagnose and develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to engage customers and drive growth effectively.

Unlike other vendors in the space, the MindTickle approach is rather different, focusing on continuous skills and capabilities development based on each individual’s strengths and areas that need improvement. According to CEO Krishna Depura, “Historically, people have been talking about ‘learning and training,’ whereas what we’re talking about is ‘readiness.’ Organizations need readiness because, until now, the entire market was always a ‘seller’s economy,’ and the last 10 or 20 years, it has become a buyer’s economy. Everything has changed…. We chose ‘readiness’ to represent the situation when ‘your people are ready for the moment of truth.’ And that moment of truth is handling that interaction with the customer. Our entire business or value proposition is ensuring your people are able to go and communicate with customers with 100% confidence and alignment with organizational objectives.”

Challenges addressed and new updates

Over the last six months, MindTickle has made significant enhancements to its “Missions” virtual role-play features to help customers develop their sales and other customer-facing teams’ skills. Missions allow sellers to practice voice-over-slideshow, video role-plays, email and task evaluation, and voice-over-screen share (product demo/walkthrough, etc.) in one unified platform. Now, enablement admins can develop sales simulations that target all forms of customer interactions. Guided creation workflows with intelligent default values ensure key settings are never missed or improperly configured. Admins can also drive accountability by creating visibility around managers/reviewers who take the extra effort to provide the most constructive feedback and who is their most proactive and diligent managers. Completion and score reports can be shared across the management chain, where each manager’s data is automatically scoped by the platform to show their direct reports.

The experience of Missions is optimized with AI assistance to ensure reviewers can provide quick, consistent, and high-quality feedback. Reviewers are shown how the submission performs on length, speech pace, and use of filler words. They’re demonstrated inline guidance on rating parameter meaning and the difference between each value of the rating scale as they examine evaluation criteria. They also receive the machine analysis of the submission around the keywords that were notable. With text transcripts, they can quickly browse the Mission so they can focus on the parts of the Mission, where the machine shows weak coverage of the keywords. For sellers, AI-enabled instant response provides input on the use of filler words, length, and talking pace. This allows sellers to practice and ‘re-attempt’ before submitting for review, leading to higher long-term proficiency. Sellers are able to see the remediation assigned by the reviewer tailored to the evaluation criteria that need improvements.

MindTickle also introduced a unique adaptive learning solution Spaced Reinforcement. Through this capability, enablement leaders can create a systematic learning path for the learners to reinforce knowledge at specific intervals to ensure that the knowledge is retained by providing scenario-based questions that are adaptively assigned to learners by the system in accordance with their individual learning strengths and weaknesses over a period of time designed to maximize long term understanding and retention.

Make a collective difference by facing the disruptions ahead in your digital transformation journey because with several best practices in line; you can gain a competitive advantage. An organization must not rush into the digital-first approach; instead, it must first understand why it is important. For MindTickle, the remote and digital-first approach was the new normal even before the global lockdown. The goal is to become more agile and be able to adapt to the new and unanticipated.