Client Challenge
Buyers have raised the bar for the experience they expect, and sellers need to catch up. When budgets are tight, deals heavily scrutinized, and objections real, sellers must get the sales experience right, to buyer’s satisfaction, or deals won’t happen. This is the need that Integrate recognized.
Solution
Integrate started its transformation effort on the right foot — investing time and critical thinking to build a development roadmap. It had three parts:
1. Objectives (clarity and vision on what to accomplish)
2. Methodology (a proven go-to-market and people development approach)
3. Toolset (the right tools for each required step)
The company then began executing the roadmap, integrating its objectives, methodology, and toolset.
Step 1: Build commercial messages: Integrate and Challenger worked together to redesign the company’s commercial choreography (or sales message) and build related content to support sales conversations.
Step 2: Develop fundamental skills: Integrate recognized the need to give sellers a fundamental skill set that aligned to the sales experience that most buyers look for. The company used Challenger’s set of virtual learning tools to develop these skills.
Step 3: Embed in workflow: Challenger partnered with sales enablement platform provider Showpad to provide Integrate sellers additional learning and resources. Sellers have direct access to relevant e-learning, tools, and message content in a system they use every day.
Step 4: Coach and test capability: Using Showpad Coach, Integrate developed specialized learning modules to help sellers learn and understand commercial messages and then practice delivering those messages using Showpad’s PitchIQ technology. Recorded videos of sellers presenting the commercial insight are shared with sales leaders who certify each individual’s ability to deliver the message effectively.
Step 5: Validate application: It’s one thing to certify a seller’s ability to deliver messages in a video practice environment. It’s another to observe sellers delivering the message in live customer conversations. Advances in conversation intelligence allow Integrate to confirm that sellers apply what they practice — and evaluate customers’ responses. This recorded video call data supports a continuous feedback loop between marketing and sales.
Step 6: Aggregate data and measure: Integrate can measure the full development process by hosting messages in Showpad, certifying a seller’s ability to deliver those messages using video-enabled practice tools, capturing real call application of skills using conversation intelligence, and tying it all to account records in the CRM. This allows the company to connect individual development investments (training and practice) to business outcomes and align to all four Kirkpatrick Method steps.
The Kirkpatrick Method is widely regarded as the most complete model for evaluating learning and development outcomes. First used in the 1950s and published in Don Kirkpatrick’s 1975 book, Evaluating Training Programs, this method defines four levels of learning evaluation.
Level 1, Reaction: Measures the opinion of the learning experience directly after an event or course completion, typically gathered via feedback forms. Integrate tracks the completion of Challenger training modules and completion of specialized modules around commercial insight. The company solicits feedback from participants on the quality of the learning experience.
Level 2, Learning: Measures the degree to which participants acquired the knowledge, skills, and attitudes the event or course was designed to provide. Challenger learning modules have built-in gamification and testing, which help to validate knowledge transfer. The use of a video-based practice tool (Showpad PitchIQ) provides additional data on how well sellers understand commercial messages and trained skills.
Level 3, Behavior: Measures the degree to which applied behavior changes as a result of learning and development. Both the Showpad PitchIQ tool and a conversation intelligence tool help Integrate validate sellers’ ability to present the message and apply the skills — both in a practice environment and in live sales conversations. Managers review and validate skill application.
Level 4, Results: Measures the tangible results of the development program on sales performance metrics (pipeline growth, average deal size, conversion rate, and cycle time) and the program’s return on investment. By collecting all the data from practice to application and feeding it into the CRM, Integrate can measure performance against the program’s predictive and outcome metrics.
Results:
Challenger messages provided to sellers on Integrate’s instance of Showpad Content are among the top 5% of all used content on the platform. Overall content views are up 152%. The average seller time spent on Challenger insight messages is 2X the time previously spent on content.
It’s clear that Challenger commercial insight is content that sellers want to use and find valuable. The program has put Challenger strategy right at sellers’ fingertips, giving them the resources they need to perform better and to give customers the sales experience they are looking for.
The change in message and behavior is also leading to a more powerful sales experience and to impressive performance for the business. Integrate has seen a 23% increase in the number of deals sold over 2019. A recent product launch with commercial insight messaging led to a 462% increase in deals sold with that product.
Not only is Integrate seeing greater deal volume in an environment where many companies struggle, but the company also has the proven messaging, skill, and commercial strategy needed for new products to explode in the market.
Before Challenger
- Integrate’s Demand Cloud is a scalable solution that B2B marketing organizations like Red Hat, Adobe, SFDC Akamai, Splunk, and ServiceNow rely on to unify disconnected, disparate demand gen channels, processes, data, programs, and tools.
After Challenger
- Top B2B marketing teams are taking back their time and making their paid media and events budgets go much further with improved lead-to-pipeline conversion numbers. What others must realize is this effort starts with connecting, then streamlining, then standardizing top-funnel paid media and events channels, programs, data, sources, processes, and systems. It’s a change in mindset and a commitment to transform for bigger, better results.