Market Perspectives

The annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase the professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. This prestigious award recognizes leaders and pioneers who have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Bill Mills at Thomson Reuters using Mindtickle its prestigious 2021 Digital Leadership Award in Office of Sales. This award recognizes the individual, organization and technology that best exemplifies leadership in the application or technologies that support the sales organization. All award finalists in Office of Sales were considered for this prestigious award.

The continuous pressure on sales to outperform cannot be addressed successfully without strategic investments into the people and processes that drive sales forward. What’s required are effective methods to manage sales performance, ranging from coaching and compensation management to the optimization of quotas and pipelines. In today’s competitive environment, attempting to execute salesforce automation using spreadsheets and email rather than dedicated, purpose-built applications are a doomed undertaking. The path to maximization of your organization’s revenue potential starts with a close evaluation of dedicated applications that help with continuous improvement in areas like product information management, planning and analytics, direct digital commerce, recurring revenue, indirect selling and the use of channel data.

Ventana Research selected Thomson Reuters for the 14th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Office of Sales for its ability to provide the enablement and engagement for interacting effectively with buyers and customers.

Thomson Reuters sought a sales enablement technology platform that would deliver impactful learning content while also engaging both sellers and their managers with an easy-to-use, seamless UX. In addition, the company wanted to be able to measure and track seller performance and behaviors over time to identify where skills and knowledge gaps exist and remediate as needed. In doing so, Thomson Reuters would create and maintain consistently high levels of competency across sales teams and ensure greater productivity, efficiency and win rates. The platform would also have to meet the company’s need to go 100% virtual, including transitioning to virtual instructor-led training (VILT) and virtual sales and leadership conferences with up to 4,000 attendees. In order to achieve its goals, Thomson Reuters understood that it must evolve from its standard learning management system to a sales readiness platform that provided interactive and engaging learning modules — specifically, a data-driven, digital platform with personalized sales enablement training, practice and reinforcement based on individualized strengths and weaknesses.

Thomson Reuters knows that the faster its sellers learn about its new products, the better able they are to sell them, the higher the win rates and the greater the chance the company meets its revenue goals. With Mindtickle, Thomson Reuters has been able to engage sellers to get up to speed quickly, creating efficiencies and gains in revenue, while reducing operations overhead. In addition, because Mindtickle is integrated with the rest of the system, users enjoy a more streamlined experience. Mindtickle’s AI and automation eliminate complexities so sellers and their managers spend less time and effort casting about in different systems to find what they need and more time focusing on what really matters. For example, seller instructions are embedded in Mindtickle, as are manager reviews. Less complexity means more follow through.

Mindtickle has raised the bar in sales enablement, as Thomson Reuters can directly link it to its bottom line. With this platform, Thomson Reuters has been able to increase its speed to market and scope of impact, while monitoring its learner behaviors via Mindtickle’s off-the-shelf dashboards. It’s a higher level of insight and impact that Thomson Reuters couldn’t have achieved as easily before Mindtickle. It has met aggressive, COVID-driven timelines to implement the new platform, and develop and deliver prework content, followed by a virtual conference all hosted on Mindtickle. Content completion and learner engagement was high, so the conference was considered a success. Thomson Reuters improved its support of operations reporting requirements with Mindtickle. The company is now able to measure this through the speed and credibility of user records in the system due to Mindtickle’s Workday integration.

Thomson Reuters is committed to digitally transforming its operations to keep pace with the ever-changing world around it. As a digital platform, Mindtickle is a key part of advancing the company’s digital strategy, helping Thomson Reuters meet its OKRs. For Thomson Reuters, speed-to-market is critical and only growing in importance in its competitive industry. Mindtickle’s automation, efficiencies and user engagement improve the responsiveness of the company’s development efforts.

Office of Sales applications and technology is a software category in need of innovation and optimization. Mindtickle addresses the challenges that sales organizations face to shorten the time to be ready for effective interactions. Organizations with sales teams will appreciate its focus on the efficient interactions that are ready to engage effectively.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how Office of Sales can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Mindtickle can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Bill Mills at Thomson Reuters, for your leadership.

Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on sales to help you build core competencies that will increase your organization’s potential for revenue. To attain excellence in sales, it is critical to evaluate investments based on their potential to augment rather than detract from sales processes and to deliver excellence in sales. Change is required to maintain sales competitiveness and to enable business resilience and organizational readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.