PreSales Academy Sees 84% Increase in Student Enrollment Using Mindtickle for Sales Training

Overview

The PreSales Collective is an organization that focuses on two core areas: building a community for people within presales, such as sales engineering or solutions consulting, and providing training for career changers to get into presales or sales engineering roles through its PreSales Academy.

The PreSales Academy helps career changers by providing a training program that equips them with the knowledge and resources needed to own their job search. As part of this training, PreSales Academy also provides detailed one-on-one coaching from Career Advisors, who are experienced sales engineers who volunteer their time to coach and mentor students.

Growing demand met with bottlenecks

PreSales Academy was growing, and so was their demand. More career changers were submitting applications to the academy leading PreSales to start re-evaluating their current processes for the academy program. Previously, the majority of the academy was virtual training sessions that were scheduled at certain dates and times and all students would attend. This posed a bottleneck not only for the students, who have varying schedules and career changes, but also for the trainers and volunteer coaches, who all had to commit time.

In addition, PreSales Academy started to notice inconsistency among coaches and how they provided feedback. Coaches would share one large document of feedback with over 10 parameters, becoming overwhelming for students to understand.

PreSales started researching platforms to support its goals of providing personalized training at scale, realistic mock interviews, and streamlined coaching. It was clear after the evaluation period that a traditional Learning Management System (LMS) would not suffice for PreSales Academy’s needs.

Mindtickle was selected for its focus on revenue generating roles, like sales engineers, with added features such as virtual role-plays and coaching that could not be supported with a traditional LMS.

Supporting hypergrowth during a pandemic

While many organizations were scaling down their workforces due to COVID-19, ChowNow experienced growth during national lockdowns, especially within its sales team. To support the influx of inbound leads, the company was hiring new reps and trying to get them up and running as quickly as possible.

As restaurants began opening again, the competitive landscape had also expanded exponentially. The pressure to differentiate ChowNow when working with potential restaurant partners was greater than ever — so honing a rep’s consultative skill set needed to start on day one with the company. “These restaurant owners have put their blood, sweat, and tears into keeping their business afloat,” Cole said. “Reps have to go into a conversation as a consultative sales approach, but also convey empathy for what these people are going through.”

This challenge, coupled with the obstacle of selling remotely, meant Cole needed a way to get new reps inspired, up to speed, and connected to their teams ASAP.

A new approach for the Academy

Mattie Stremic joined presales as the Head of the Academy after being an academy student, volunteer, and community member herself.

“My experience as an end-user was this is a really easy platform to use. I liked that I could upload videos and get feedback right away from my role-plays” says Stremic.

Mattie was the primary Mindtickle administrator until she brought on Winny Delcin, PSA’s Training Program Manager. She was able to help transform the academy so it could enroll more students and provide a flexible learning path while still delivering the highest quality of training.

Now, PreSales is broken up into three stages:

Stage 1

This stage is self-paced where students ramp up and absorb all basic training on becoming a sales engineer. This entire phase used to be driven by training sessions at certain times, but now, with Mindtickle, is delivered all virtually so that students can learn at times that are most convenient for them. As learners complete their training, the system recommends additional content and training based on their performance so that they can reinforce knowledge gaps and further hone their new skills. PreSales uses Mindtickle to deliver a resource library to students so they can browse all content available to them and self-serve their learning needs.

Stage 2

This stage is proctored by training experts but provides a hands-on workshop experience so students can start to apply all of the learning they completed in phase one. These workshops help students practice and get ready to land their dream jobs. This is done with realistic mock demos and targeted coaching from experts.

Stremic and the team use Mindtickle’s virtual role-plays to give students a series of interview scenarios and record their submissions as if they were in the room. Mindtickle’s AI-powered scoring gives the students initial feedback to perfect their pitch. Then, presales experts use Mindtickle’s coaching forms to give both quantitative and qualitative feedback, streamlining the coaching responses. Mattie monitors the roleplay and coaching scores with Mindtickle’s comprehensive dashboards and reports to evaluate the progress of students as they progress through each phase.

Stage 3

Once students have passed phase two with a minimum 80% score across their coaching forms and role-plays, they advance to final stage, which focuses on preparing students for the job search (interviews, networking, negotiating, etc). Stage 3 begins with a final mock interview using role-plays and then students start focusing on building their portfolio and updating their LinkedIn profiles.

The Impact

Mindtickle has enabled PreSales Academy to scale its training program, increasing its student enrollment by 84% in two years.

When comparing students’ first Demo role-play scores to their last, PreSales has seen an average of 22% increase in scores due to the targeted training and learning. Stremic refers to her partnership with the Mindtickle team as “Incredibly supportive, collaborative, and helpful. The Mindtickle team ensures we are utilizing the platform to its fullest potential and often go out of their way to ensure we have what we need to support our students.”

In addition to the growth in business, PreSales Academy has seen an average of 95% in student satisfaction and five-star reviews from graduates across relevant review sites (CourseReport & CareerKarma) from students who complete the program. As end users, students have positively reacted to utilizing Mindtickle. One student said in a review, “Mindtickle was streamlined and definitely easy to understand and utilize.“

PreSales Academy graduates who land roles also increase their salary by an average of $80,000. The median salary for graduates exceeds $118,000, and includes individuals from all different professional backgrounds (education, sales, real estate, etc.). With the growth and demand PreSales has experienced, the team is now able to plan to scale their organization even more. As PSA continues to scale and refine the program with online training, role-plays, and coaching through the Mindtickle platform.