Indy halves the onboarding time for new sales staff.
What is your role at Indy?
I started as a sales person at Indy. It's quite funny because before I managed the Modjo project, I started as a user and since February I joined the Sales Ops team.
The tasks of this new position are quite broad but I am mainly focused on the management and analysis of the tools. The idea is to enable sales to have the best possible workflow. My goal is to enable them to be fully focused on the business and to improve on a daily basis.
For me, it was a necessity to take a sales position before moving on to Sales Ops. Going through the sales stage allowed me to learn the processes and use the tools as a primary user.
Can you introduce me to Indy?
Indy is a software that helps companies to do their accounting. We will help them manage their accounting from A to Z. The idea is to enable everyone to do their accounting in a few hours a year. It's a world that moves a lot. Our target market is the paramedical sector, although we are now addressing all professions.
The number of staff has changed a lot since I arrived, we were barely 50. The number of employees has tripled and today there are more than 150. The sales team is made up of 24 people and we are welcoming a class of 13 people at the beginning of May. We're going to almost double the size by 2021.
We chose to recruit almost the entire new class at the beginning of the year so that the rest of the year would be dedicated to training and building the team's skills.
How have you structured your sales team?
At the level of the sales team, two managers accompany the teams and 4 coaches are responsible for training the salespeople in the field. We have also created a "sales excellence" team that will be in charge of continuous training and onboarding of new employees.
To be clear, the difference between coach and sales excellence is that the coach will remain in contact with the field because he will continue to make appointments and manage his deals.
The Sales Excellence team will dedicate all of its time to training and coaching newcomers. We set up this team because we wanted everyone to arrive at Indy with the same basics and for best practice to be shared across all teams.
A small particularity: at Indy, when you arrive on the commercial side, you must go through the SDR stage for 3 months before moving on to a business development position or a position related to the commercial side.
For the year 2021, a new organisation has been put in place within the sales team. Usually the SDRs were in a separate team from the business dev team, they took appointments which were then dispatched to the business developers.
Today, in order to create more synergy between the business developer and SDR teams, we have decided to create mixed teams with a referent coach for each.
How did you work on coaching before Modjo and why did you select our solution?
Before Modjo, we already had this practice of replaying calls except that we spent a lot of time finding the right exchanges and we didn't really know which ones to select. To explain, we had a top performer who was really above the rest and we wanted to understand where he could make the difference.
It came a little bit from there. We started to listen back to his calls and share them. The problem we had was that doing it through our phone provider was not at all simple and intuitive.
It was to address this issue that we decided to equip ourselves with a solution such as Modjo, which offers us much more than just call replay. Equipping the teams with Modjo has enabled us to facilitate replay but also to simplify communication and information sharing between salespeople, managers, coaches and sales excellence.
The tool allows us to better target the coaching we want to put in place because we can now select the calls to be listened to by subject, status deals or via a specific keyword. We are really gaining in relevance and efficiency.
How do you use Modjo in Sales Ops and Sales Excellence?
To maximise the impact of Modjo at Indy, we have set up an action plan for 2021 with Léa (Modjo's super account manager) and Margaux from the sales excellence team.
In general, this means supporting the sales staff so that they are involved in the development of the whole team. For example, they have to do 3 re-listenings per week and post 3 comments in order to discuss the "pain points" and the super positive points of the last few days.
As far as my use as a Sales Ops is concerned, on the one hand I will mainly study the analytics provided by Modjo to understand how sales people use the tool and on the other hand I will analyse the "topics" (conversation subjects automatically highlighted by the conversational intelligence in the calls) to understand which are the sales scripts that make the difference with our prospects.
Margaux, who manages the Modjo project for Sales Excellence, will mainly be listening to calls again, accompanying newcomers during onboarding, feeding the call library and coaching, via Modjo, the salespeople when they have questions or problems.
In terms of coaching, we have added a Modjo part to the one-to-one meetings. Very often, the coaches use the calls to provide best practices and help the teams to progress.
How do sales people use Modjo in the field?
As a former salesman and field user, I have a lot of insights.
The first thing, as soon as a sales person makes a good call or a good demo, he shares the call by tagging his team and his coach so that everyone can benefit from the good practices. It's the same principle when someone is having difficulties, they will ask for advice directly on the call by mentioning their coach. They will then be able to receive super-relevant advice directly linked to the call they have just made so that they can progress.
The idea is either :
- "Look I handled this deal super well by closing this deal when it wasn't hot at all, I'm sharing it with you"
- "I'm struggling with this objection, do you have any advice on how to better respond to it?"
Another important case is to be able to listen to the calls before a demo. If the prospect had given a lot of information that was not necessarily integrated into the CRM, I will be able to listen to the discovery call again to get all the information that will help me close the deal.
Sales people use Modjo mainly asynchronously. They will create discussions within the tool, in the same way as a slack feed for example, to add value to the various interactions.
Could you do without Modjo now?
Clearly, there was no going back. Modjo really helped us to understand the practices of the top performers and to duplicate them to the rest of the team.
In terms of onboarding this is also a huge advantage. Before they even pick up the phone, they already know the best sales scripts and how to respond to objections, for example.
"We've halved the onboarding time. They make their first appointments as early as the Thursday of the onboarding week vs. over a week before Modjo."
Thanks to the call library, they have the right interactions to listen to again. They can focus on the important points of the training and be operational much faster.
Even for senior salespeople it has become a must. When in doubt or having difficulty on a specific point, just go to the call library to find best practices and overcome the obstacle.
"Clearly Modjo is a must, it makes a lot of things easier and it solves a lot of problems."
Struggling salespeople have a lot of material to learn and progress very quickly.
It has also become a major tool for the recruitment team. When they run business cases, they use Modjo to listen again and structure the decision making.
The tool allows for better monitoring of recruitments, sharing of conversations and faster decision making. Now with remote recruitment, they save a lot of time with Modjo.
A fun fact to share?
When I was in sales, I sometimes had a bit of trouble getting back into the swing of things in the morning. So to motivate myself, I would take 30 minutes to listen to a few calls, either my own or those of top performers. It immediately put me back in the saddle and I could start my day with a full load! A real coaching tool!