MindTickle Unveils New Sales Readiness Software Designed for Startups and Other Fast-Growing Companies

Mountain View, CA, October 31, 2014 --(PR.com)-- MindTickle today announced that it will expand its award-winning training software into Sales Readiness. New MindTickle for Sales allows companies to turn their existing content into real-time, easy-to-use sales training programs – from onboarding new hires to extending product training and updates to inside sales and field reps. MindTickle leverages powerful social and gamification tools, along with deep analytics for assessments, to ensure your entire sales team is prepared to sell like rainmakers.

“For any fast-growing company, the rapid pace of innovation and shortened product cycles make it challenging to implement a Sales Readiness program that can keep up with its growth,” said Krishna Depura, co-founder & CEO of MindTickle. “With new features and case studies added constantly and the team itself scaling almost daily, a static pitch deck just won’t work. We’ve created MindTickle for Sales so that you can roll out training and updates in real-time, with the power to customize info on-the-fly and track each rep’s participation and success as they go.”

MindTickle has also announced that it has secured $1.8 million in seed funding led by Accel Partners and Moneta Ventures. The company has already seen significant traction with its platform for HR training and new hire onboarding, used by large enterprise companies like eBay, SAP and Vodafone. The new MindTickle for Sales is specifically designed to meet the needs of startups and other high-growth companies.

"We see MindTickle addressing a critical need in the industry caused by shifting trends," said Dinesh Katiyar, partner at Accel Partners. "Increasingly, products are being rolled out to customers in a more continuous fashion, which makes typical bi-annual sales training camps highly ineffective. Plus, as millennials become a significant portion of the workforce, on-demand bite-sized social learning through mobile devices is becoming the norm. MindTickle has built the perfect platform for these needs."

How It Works: Why Choose MindTickle?

Historically, sales training meant outsourcing to a third party and relying on marketing or IT for support. However MindTickle believes domain experts such as product managers and sales enablement managers should be driving efforts for Sales Readiness – they know the company’s sales process, its products and competition better than anyone else. And with today’s technology, there is no reason sales teams can’t have more control and flexibility throughout the process.

MindTickle for Sales allows companies to turn any type of existing content into a real-time, easy-to-use Sales Readiness program that can be customized and accessed whenever and wherever the sales rep wants. From internal best practices, presentations, pitch coaching, product training and updates. And when a new feature is rolled out or a new success story is introduced, those resources can quickly be shared across the organization.

“Couchbase is growing fast and we are adding offices all over the world,” said Steven Mih, VP of Worldwide Sales at Couchbase. “MindTickle makes it easy to train, track and test reps’ knowledge online, which is helping us quickly scale the sales team. This is much better than webinars and wiki – and my sales reps love the gamification.”

MindTickle employs unique social tools and gamification to tap into your sales team’s inner competitiveness and dramatically improve engagement. In fact, beta customers report nearly 90 percent completion rates by sales teams.

Plus, MindTickle is tightly coupled with an analytics engine that gives you actionable insights about your team members and how ready they are to close deals. From a “Sales Readiness Index” of your company and each sales rep, to a drill-down analysis of each rep’s ability to respond to prospects and customers. Once they’re using the MindTickle platform, you not only know they completed the training; managers can take actions to ensure sales reps aren’t leaving opportunities on the table.

How It Works: Onboarding Newbie Sales Reps

It’s not uncommon to take six months for a new sales rep to get up-to-speed and productive in a selling role. Typically, that process is very fragmented. While the company might have an official new-hire training program, the training often consists of a piecemeal and broken experience. Presentations are stored on an internal server, case studies are housed somewhere on the wiki or intranet, internal team members share pitching tips over email and so on.

MindTickle for Sales enables you to accelerate the time to productivity of new sales reps, by providing a streamlined online platform and process that offers everything they need in one place, including:

· Structured learning plan – Ramp up newbie sales reps using a best practice week-on-week plan that gets them up to speed on the industry, product, sales process and competition

· Readiness score – 10+ types of assessments to measure the knowledge absorption and certify readiness of the sales reps

· Pre-join modules – Start the onboarding process in advance and have the reps primed even before they show up on day 1

· Social and gamification – Highly engaging user interface that creates opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and healthy competition among new hires

How It Works: Keep Sales Teams Selling Like Rockstars

Too often, once a sales rep is on-board for months or years, little support is offered to ensure they have all the best resources to remain productive. Most companies who invest in expensive and time-consuming online Sales Readiness programs, are left frustrated because they don’t get used by the sales reps. For those who do it the old-fashioned way, an annual, in-person training refresher not only is costly in terms of travel and logistics, but more importantly it takes key reps out of the field. It also means they aren’t getting the latest and greatest information the other 364 days of the year.

For existing sales teams, MindTickle lets you easily and cost-effectively prepare reps to close more deals all year long, with:

· Mobile updates and notifications – Keep your reps up-to-date on the latest information from the product, sales and marketing teams

· Success stories and win tips – Share the latest success stories, battle-cards and objection handling tips with the field reps; ability to search and pull relevant training content on-demand

· Ongoing re-certification – Set gamified targets for sales reps to renew their knowledge through periodic assessments and fun contests

· Integrated into existing daily workflow – Deliver sales training integrated into the Salesforce.com CRM dashboard, personalized based on the learning needs of each individual

Pricing and Availability

MindTickle for Sales is available immediately for a monthly subscription based on number of sales reps.

MindTickle will help you create a fully-functional and effective program, so that your sales team can be up and running with a customized Sales Readiness platform in a few days. More info at www.mindtickle.com/sales-readiness.

MindTickle for Sales is integrated seamlessly with Salesforce.com. Partner sales teams can have direct web-based access to MindTickle.

About MindTickle
MindTickle is a next-generation learning platform, recognized as a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in 2014 and as the “Best use of engagement techniques in Enterprise” by the Gamification Summit 2013. The SaaS platform combines learning best practices such as micro-learning, social learning, gamification, mobile, etc. with a data-driven approach to make the sales and customer service departments more productive. MindTickle has been deployed by 50+ companies like Couchbase, InMobi, Mavenlink, CTG, Vodafone, SAP and has over 70K users. MindTickle is funded by Accel partners and Moneta Ventures, with angel investment from senior execs of WhatsApp and Google. MindTickle has a global sales presence with headquarters in the Mountain View, Calif and development/operations team in India.