Stop the Sales Insanity:

How 5 Stages can Transform your Sales Force

In this webinar, Sales Enablement & Training expert Mike Kunkle will address a number of common sales challenges faced by companies across industries, including:

1. How to decrease new hire ramp-up
2. How to significantly improve sales force productivity
3. How to consistently increase quota attainment
4. How to increase pipeline size and boost pipeline velocity

Mike will do so by outlining the common traps that mid-to-large companies fall into and how they can break free with a straightforward 5-Stage Sales Learning System. The webinar will also address how mentoring, coaching, AI and machine learning are playing increasing roles in helping the most successful sales organizations meet their revenue goals.

This webinar will be hosted by SalesU, the sales productivity suite recently launched by EdCast, whose knowledge management solutions are now being used by 50+ companies, including GE, HPE, Dell EMC, Salesforce, Shire and Accenture.

Don’t miss the opportunity to interact with a sales enablement leader who is helping companies increase their sales productivity. Click the button below to register for this no-cost event:

Bio:

Mike Kunkle is a respected sales transformation strategist & sales training / sales enablement expert.

He has spent 22 years as a corporate leader or consultant, helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class learning strategies and his proven-effective sales transformation methodologies. Today, Mike is leading Transforming Sales Results, LLC, consulting, writing, speaking, leading webinars, designing sales learning systems, and guiding clients through all aspects of their sales transformation.

The Democratization of Knowledge and Learning

Join us June 20 at 11a PT / 2p ET for an exceptional webinar discussing how to create a high performance organization and how the Democratization of Knowledge will redefine how we share information in the workplace.

Charles Jennings, the Co-founder of the 70:20:10 Institute and a visionary in the corporate learning space, will join Karl Mehta, the Founder & CEO of EdCast, Founder of Code for India, and noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to provide incredibly valuable insights regarding the future of corporate learning, which will include these key topical points:

• “What got us here won’t get us there” research by the Corporate Executive Board
• The world of information abundance challenging existing learning practices
• The 5 characteristics displayed by high performers
• How to unlock internal knowledge
• The benefits of the Democratization of Expertise

Don’t miss the opportunity to interact with two leaders in today’s knowledge and learning revolution. Click the button below to register for this no-cost event:

Bio:

Charles Jennings is a leading thinker and practitioner the field of building high performance strategies and solutions. He has been working with the 70:20:10 model for more than 15 years and is known worldwide for his work in this area. Charles’ background includes roles as Chief Learning Officer for Reuters and Thomson Reuters, as an academic and business school professor, and as a member of advisory boards and steering groups for international learning, performance and business bodies around the world.

He is Co-founder of the 70:20:10 Institute and co-owner of Duntroon Consultants Ltd

 Karl Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, author, investor, engineer and civil servant with over 20 years of experience. He is currently Founder & CEO of EdCast , the revolutionary, AI-powered Knowledge Cloud solution driving high-performance teams in organizations of all sizes.

Previously, he was the Founder & CEO of PlaySpan Inc., acquired by Visa Inc. (NYSE:V). Karl also served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, selected by the Obama Administration for its inaugural 2012-13 term. He was recently appointed by Governor Brown to the Workforce Investment Board of the State of California.

Karl is founder of several nonprofits including Code For India (http://CodeforINDIA.org) and Grassroots Innovation (http://grassrootsinnovation.org). He is author of “Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid” (http://www.openfininc.org).

Why Your Sales Ramping is Way Too Slow — and How to Accelerate It

Join us on May 18 at 11a PT /2p ET (CLOSED – View Recording) for a unique sales enablement-focused Webinar featuring author Amy Slater, Founder and CEO of Amy Slater Consulting and former Vice President, Enterprise Corporate Sales for Salesforce.com. The Webinar will also include Protik Mukhopadhyay, Principal Partner at Standav, a leading Systems Integrator that delivers business and technology solutions focused on CRM, Quote-to-Cash and Sales Enablement. And the Webinar will be moderated by Philip Levinson, a Business Insider contributor and Vice President of Product Marketing at EdCast, which just launched SalesU, a sales ramping software suite.

We will discuss the typical traps that sales organizations fall into that lead to slower-than-expected ramping of their sales efforts. These challenges include:

1. Initial and ongoing training of sales team members
2. Asynchronous sales education processes
3. Rapidly-changing market and product environments
4. Diffuse and varying sales efforts involving communications, presenting and demonstrating on behalf of the company

We will also review tools and methods that companies are using to overcome these challenges along with specific, real-world examples.

Sales enablement is a key priority for us, and you may have seen our press release about the launch of EdCast’s SalesU yesterday.

To watch the recording of this webinar, click the button below:

Leading the Sales Productivity Revolution with SalesU.io

Why is EdCast launching a sales ramping platform today?

One of the most precious assets a company possesses is its salespeople’s time. Analyze your salespeople’s workday. If they are not spending at least 70% of their time interacting with prospects, then there is a significant probability that your organization will under-perform on its revenue forecast. As we know, your sales team drives the new revenue that helps pays the bills and company payroll. I often say to my company’s employees and companies I meet, “Imagine how all those innovative growth plans and wonderful employee perks will fare if revenue targets are not achieved.”

Since EdCast was founded, we have believed that  the learning curve is the earning curve. Some of the smartest thought leaders in learning, including Bersin by Deloitte’s Josh Bersin and Accenture’s Chief Learning & Talent Officer Rahul Varma have been quite articulate in explaining this learning equals performance/earning equation in depth at our Future Learning 2020 Summit last year.  

Over the past three years, we have been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented CLOs and Learning & Development (L&D) leaders as we rolled out and implemented our Knowledge Cloud platform at visionary and fast-growing companies. We have worked with various job families, roles, functions and departments with the quest to empower them with better performance via continuous learning. In this quest, we have discovered that although the correlation between learning and earning applies to all functions and to an organization as a whole, there is one function that stands out with the most urgent needs and largest push for mission-critical ROI: the sales team.

Needless to say, making salespeople highly productive is mission critical. Failure to do this can and will lead to catastrophe, regardless of the size of a company and the moat it has in the marketplace.

With this in mind, we have been inspired to solve this hard and important problem of making sales teams productive and making this “learning equals earning” equation work better. We think of the sales team ramping problem across three dimensions, and we are thrilled to make them the three core pillars of our new SalesU.io platform:

1.     Contextual insights that reduce unproductive time by 30%: Sales teams are drowning in content but starving for precise knowledge and insights that can help them specifically close a deal faster. There is a deluge of collateral, playbooks and content both on the web and inside internal repositories, but why have salespeople waste time searching unproductively or using ineffective and outdated content? Based on our three years of work in perfecting our Knowledge Discovery Engine, we are excited about making content discoverable and pushed based on the context with each opportunity that a salesperson is chasing — and surfacing it right inside the CRM (Salesforce.com in our first release) with daily recent and curated insights.Sales teams can discover content they need much faster. In our experience, this capability helps cut down at least 30% of salespeople’s time and makes each interaction with prospects more meaningful, accelerating the sales cycle as a result.

2.     Great coaches can make the difference between success and failure: Last year, I took my family to the Himalayas and Nepal to learn what it takes to summit the gorgeous Mount Everest. I learned that no books or reading was comparable in preparing us compared to getting actual real-time insights from a Sherpa. This is not a surprise because we know that behind every winning team, there is a great coach. We know successful leaders have great mentors. Marc Benioff, a great visionary and  compassionate leader in the tech-industry, discussed at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013 how he would look up to Steve Jobs as his mentor and would go to him for advice.  In designing the EdCast Knowledge Cloud, one of the first features we had created was SME (Subject Matter Expert)-based learning. With SalesU.io we have built a mobile-first experience for salespeople to perfect their pitch through feedback from coaches and mentors. We are also leveraging some cool machine intelligence technology to act as coaches and provide feedback. We think great performers in sales are not born with all the  talent they need to succeed; we believe they work hard and are well-coached
   

3.     Becoming a Ninja in Sales Tools:  We see salespeople struggle using at least several tools they are required to use at their company, including highly customized CRMs, Quote-to-Cash tools, etc. Just finding information from the tools and reports is becoming increasingly hard to do as these tools gets customized and configured. Last month, we had launched GuideMe.io as an in-app interactive guidance to train any person on any software or online solution in minutes. Every time a configuration changes, it is easy for administrators to create a walkthrough (guided tour) about it in few minutes, and save the frustration and unproductive time of salespeople. GuideMe.io is part of the SalesU package to provide on-demand and real-time in-app training to ramp new and existing sales teams faster.

Although we spent a huge amount of time with the best talent in Silicon Valley building this solution for sales teams, we have a beginner’s mindset, and we look forward to learning from sales leaders and sales enablement experts and their feedback, so we can iterate rapidly. With the launch of SalesU.io today , our goal is to both enhance and accelerate improvements in  productivity that will have meaningful impacts on companies’ profits. Please test SalesU today — and let us know your thoughts at km@edcast.com

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) get a lot of attention when it comes to pure entertainment — but this reflects just a fraction of the power of AR/VR video. According to Karl Mehta, CEO of video education platform EdCast, more useful applications for enterprise and consumer markets alike are truly revolutionizing the AR/VR video space.

Telco Transformation recently sat down with Mehta for a Q&A about demand for and trends in AR/VR video. The Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Telco Transformation: Where are you seeing the greatest demand right now in terms of your customers and how they want to use more advanced video solutions like AR/VR?

Karl Mehta: The demand is really mainly in the private sector. There is consumer demand, but I think it’s still more in the early stage; consumers are [saying], “It’s nice, fancy new stuff,” but there are not that many applications that are targeted yet for consumers in a lot of this VR, AR or 3D video space. But in the enterprise space… field operations are getting revolutionized. (See AREA’s Sage Advises Augmented Reality and Defining Productive Video.)

Think of a company like a cable company, and they have 10,000 people in the field installing routers getting you Internet to your home or to your big commercial building. If you’re running that operation, how do you train those 10,000 people on a continuous basis? Because [as] a new router comes in, new complaints come in. So you could, rather than bringing people [and] flying them in to one location, you could now have a video-based app or a virtual reality-based app where right on their phone they can see what is the way to install, implement and configure a router.

You can immediately see ROI because you can see the cost savings [comparing] a traditional way of trying to learn something [versus] now using video and VR.

TT: You mentioned the difficulty in the AR/VR consumer market. Do you see a possible solution — or at least a process to finding that solution — to figure out how this is going to work for consumers and how they are going to want it, etc.?

KM: The fundamental thing that every great technology needs is a killer app. I think AR/VR still needs to find its killer app in the consumer. I mentioned the killer app in the enterprise sector is anything to do with field operations, because field operations is “people who are not in the building.” It’s not in your office. They are outside in the field. Think about oil and gas. There are people who are out on the rigs in the ocean — and how do you train them? How do you replicate situations which will be so expensive to replicate inside in an office or in a lab? So I think field operations is a killer app.

On the consumer side, gaming is where you’re seeing pretty much all the investments and funding going from the VR companies. Pretty much all VR and AR companies right now are focused on games or entertainment. There is education going on, but very little, because there isn’t enough funding available for that.

TT: Do you see a role for this advanced video definition, 3D video, AR/VR, and that sort of thing in helping along what we’re talking about?

KM: Absolutely. I think the killer app for AR/VR and 3D videos is a model in education. I mean, yes, there are other applications like health and military and all of those, but fundamentally, even within each one of those verticals, the fundamental is education. How do you train military personnel? How do you train healthcare professionals? And we’re already seeing tremendous use of virtual reality now in a lot of situations where you just cannot replicate that in a lab; you’re teaching someone chemistry and you may not have all of the equipment, but you can actually create it in virtual reality.

I just built a virtual reality app for an automobile company who trained the mechanics across all of their dealerships about how to change the brake pads [in] a new-model car. In the old format, you would have to write so many instruction manuals — and still, some mechanics would install the brake pads the wrong way. But now, you can just go into 3D virtual reality — and you know exactly where to go in and pull out which screws, and how to pull out the old brake pads, and how to put in the new one. (See How VR Helped Land Rover Raise the Roof.)

I mean, I did it in like ten minutes, and I felt like I’m a pro. I’m nowhere close to being a good automobile mechanic to do anything hands on, but that’s the power of virtual reality.

— Joe Stanganelli, Contributing Writer, Telco Transformation

Join this webinar to discuss why your learners are not engaged!

Title: Why Content Fails: Designing the Learner’s Experience

Summary: Are the engagement and satisfaction levels of your learners below expectations?

If so, then putting the learner journey where it belongs — in the center of your strategies — is likely to be the solution. In this information-rich webinar, Amar Dhaliwal, Chief Evangelist at EdCast, will lay out the challenges, opportunities, technologies and suggested tactics to building experiences that your learners will love — and will also leverage your learning investment for measurable success. Kevin Mulcahy, partner at Future Workplace, will be co-hosting the webinar and will provide valuable insights into how to get more out of your learning and development program by focusing on the learner’s experience.

Date: Apr. 19, 2017 at 10a PT / 1p ET

Limited seats available – register today

Bios:

Amar Dhaliwal, Chief Evangelist at EdCast

 He was a co-founder of the learning management pioneer THINQ and, after its acquisition by Saba in 2005, led Saba’s product, engineering, cloud, and customer operations teams. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, he was a management consultant. Amar studied at The London School of Economics.

Kevin Mulcahy, Partner at Future Workplace

Kevin J. Mulcahy is a partner with Future Workplace and along with Jeanne Meister, is the co-host of The Future Workplace Network, a membership community for HR executives. Organizations across multiple industries and geographies regularly engage him to facilitate corporate workshops on “future proofing” their business and HR strategies. Kevin coaches on leadership effectiveness at the Harvard Business School and is an adjunct faculty member at Babson College.