Jeremy Boudinet was kind enough to take some time with me and we had a great conversation about the value of Sales Training and Onboarding.
Jeremy is the Director of Marketing at Ambition. Ambition “provides the most cutting-edge sales performance management software on the market today.”
Read on for some great insights!
Jeremy’s love of sales runs in the family and he believes everything is sales and everyone is in SALES (to which I completely agree)! With sales running in the blood, it’s made Jeremy very empathetic to sales people and the sales profession. And raised the truth that ultimately a company must have a viable product for sales people to sell.
Armed with his BA in Political Science, a JD from University of Pittsburgh Law School, and his love of reading and writing, Jeremy is well positioned to be the Director of Marketing for the up and coming tech company focused on making “work suck less”. Ambition seeks to codify Training and Onboarding expectations so there are no surprises for employees!
I asked Jeremy what he meant by that and here’s some excerpts from our discussion:
DM: What are some of key insights from your customers regarding Training and Onboarding?
JB: The big thing is the love of transparency. Most people, and millennials especially, get nervous when they don’t know where they stand, don’t receive feedback, or have clearly defined expectations. The feedback we get about Ambition from our customers focuses on two key areas. 1. The Manager loves the automated and custom email alerts and reports. These allow the Manager to immediately and effectively coach without sifting through a bunch of data. 2. Codifying and visualizing daily benchmarks sets the clear expectations of the Sales Rep to ramp and where time is to be spent.
DM: How are companies tying gamification to compensation?
JB: There are roughly four levels of motivation in Ambition, all of which we’ve seen tied to monetary performance incentives. 1. You v. Your Daily Benchmarks. 2. You v. Your Past Performance 3. You v. Rest of Your Team 4. Your Team vs. Opposing Team.
In sales, rewards should be tied to both productivity and performance. And with a well-tuned process and the proper tools, creating multiple levels of competition, motivation and compensation opportunities is significantly simpler than before.
DM: Where do you see the market going?
JB: Initially, gamification was brought in-house to focus on revenue attainment. We’re seeing the market shift focus away from badges and arcade-style leaderboards towards a more sophisticated model.
The sustainable value our clients are getting comes from using Ambition to codify expectations, create a more robust CRM experience and offer personalized recognition and team competitions. (Take a look at this HBR article to dive further.) The latter part goes toward the rising tide of the collaborative, segmented inside sales model, which prizes the team-aspect of sales much more strongly than the prevailing models of years past.
The lone wolf stereotype in sales is over and gone, get on the bus! The future of sales is about a highly coordinated team attacking to achieve its goals.
DM: What makes people embrace Ambition and similar emerging technologies?
JB: The Leadership recognizes that is not a “shock the monkey” approach to motivating a sales force. Adopting gamification and technology to speed up your team is about leveraging a tried and true sales process (meaning, your organization has one already) codifying a path to success and choosing to embrace real-time data transparency.
And for your team to embrace that change, the technology has to become part of your culture. Taking a carrot-and-a-stick approach to our software is a recipe for failure. This isn’t about making a leaderboard or winning a gift card. In sales, the most important competition is always with yourself, and Ambition provides a powerful visual reminder across every member of your sales team.
With clearly defined targets, gamification and technology can be very effective at aligning your Inside Sales Strategy with your Company Strategy. We’re out to make sure that there’s no wasted potential within your organization.
You can hear more at our upcoming webinar on October 28th, 8:30am PST: Modernizing Inside Sales, Why Training and Onboarding Matter. Subscribe here.
Jeremy Boudinet is the Director of Marketing at Ambition and President of AA-ISP’s Tennessee Chapter. He devotes most of his waking life to being the “Voice of Ambition,” by publishing in-depth articles, interviews, eBooks and editorials on emerging topics in sales and performance management. You can find his content on the highly active Ambition Blog and by following @AmbitionSales on Twitter.