MindTickle helps companies reduce ramp time

Salespeople have one of the hardest jobs in the world. They deal with rejection daily. Training and coaching the team is pivotal to any entity that intends to drive sales.

“At Dabur, the sales representatives’ ability to adhere to the sales process is core to their success. We partnered with MindTickle to improve process adherence of our representatives,” says Chirag Singh, former sales capability manager at Dabur.

Pune-based sales-readiness platform MindTickle, a cloud-hosted B2B Saas product, has a solution for this. It has raised $27 million in Series-B funding in which Canaan Partners led the round.

Founded in 2012 with a vision of breaking the monotony of the traditional learning management system experience, MindTickle, also headquartered in San Francisco, was launched as a social and gamified onboarding platform that challenges the status quo and unlocks the potential of each employee. In 2014, the platform was identified as being perfect for transforming the way sales representatives are prepared.

“Since then, the entire MindTickle team has been obsessed with making sales teams successful and taking sales organisations from missed quotas to overachieving, from training to readiness. As a result, MindTickle has become a leading readiness platform and the choice of progressive companies, rapidly growing businesses and the next generation of learners,” says Krishna Depura, co-founder and CEO of MindTickle. “Sales readiness is the single most important metric that every CEO pays attention to, and the best predictor of future performance. MindTickle is the leader in this new area of applications for sales teams,” says Joydeep Bhattacharyya, partner at Canaan Partners, who has joined MindTickle’s board of directors. 

Product concept

MindTickle claims to be the most comprehensive, data-driven sales readiness platform in the market. It offers a modern, mobile and engaging experience for onboarding, micro-learning, skills development and coaching — a purpose-built platform that companies stuck with legacy tools have been waiting for.

Uniquely, MindTickle uses a data-driven approach, the sales capability index, to quantify the preparedness of representatives and tie that with actual performance.

“We believe in developing not just skills and techniques but a complete set of capabilities so everyone in your sales force has the ability to win and the potential to excel. We do this by defining the capabilities your team requires to succeed, then developing a program that scores your team, highlights gaps and delivers coaching to bring everyone up to required level,” says Depura.

Using the MindTickle platform, its customers are cutting their ramp time by 30-50 per cent and win rates are also better. MindTickle has more than 150 customers, including Symantec, Phillips, Micro Focus, DexCom, Ola, Cloudera and Nutanix.

Opportunity

MindTickle is eyeing the $8-billion sales training and coaching market as an opportunity. Currently, companies use ad hoc solutions and learning systems to prepare their sales teams. 

“We plan to tap this opportunity by investing significantly in our go-to market efforts,” adds Depura.

Road Ahead

MindTickle aims to have more 1,000 customers by 2019, up from 150 at present. The company has a presence in the US, Europe, West Asia, India and south-east Asia. The recent funding will be used by the company to develop its  product, expand customer-facing teams and invest in new technologies. 

A part of the funding will be used for global expansion.  

FACTBOX

• Founded: 2012
• Area of business: Sales readiness and sales enablement platform
• Funding: $27 million (2017), $12.5 million (2015) and $1.5million in 2012 
• Investors: Canaan Partners, NEA, Accel Partners , Qualcomm and angel investors
• Customers: 150 companies
• Target: 1,000 companies by 2019

Sales analytics and productivity

Bhushan Lawande Founder & MD, E4 Development & Coaching

Sales analytics has been spoken for a very long time in India; it enables a whole lot of data to be captured, analysed and used for specific business and customer applications. What really comes in the way of technology is the domain understanding of the user and the technologist and the ability both have to integrate the user interface. In India, adoption by field force has been a challenge while implementing the same across verticals and channel partners. It can be used for scheme communications, news letters and also SOP guidelines before users can graduate to more advanced tools. Cost is an important element, as a company adopting this would have to spend between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per user to avail of all the tools. Success would depend on whether there is a Sales HR function in the organisation or a dedicated resource to drive the same, are the content and tools available in different language and suit various industry verticals.