Sales readiness platform MindTickle secures $12.5M Series A funding from NEA and Accel Partners

MindTickle, a leading sales readiness platform, announced today that it had received a $12.5 million Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and existing investor Accel Partners. The SaaS platform aims to combine learning best practices such as micro-learning, social learning, gamification, and mobile etc., with a data-driven approach to make the sales and customer success departments more productive.

Story so far

MindTickle was started by Mohit Garg, Krishna Depura, Deepak Diwakar, and Nishant Mungali in August 2011. The company has a global sales presence with headquarters in San Francisco, Bay Area, and operations team in India and claims that their products have been deployed by 100+ companies with over 1,50,000 users. Some of their clients such as Olacabs, Nutanix, Cloudera, AppDynamics, and Qualtrics use their platform to improve the performance of their customer-facing staff.

MindTickle aims to put the power of sales readiness into the hands of the sales teams. Companies can share resources such as pitches, presentation decks, and product updates in real time. This allows companies to keep their sales representatives up to date on the latest product features, objection handling and customer success stories. MindTickle also employs social tools and gamification to tap into sales teams’ inner competitiveness and improve usage rates. They claim that these features have helped them consistently demonstrate an end-user engagement of more than 90 percent.

In addition to providing an engaging and millennial-friendly user experience, the MindTickle platform claims to offer strong management capabilities. The company’s administrative interface enables product and marketing teams to publish new updates, assessments/surveys and roleplay coaching exercises in a few minutes. For the sales leaders, the platform provides insightful reports and a dashboard that helps them identify knowledge gaps for each representative and the summary views that help track the sales readiness by region, team or user cohort.

MindTickle integrates with Salesforce.com thus eliminating the need for a separate username and password. The administrators are able to assign learning paths and slice and dice data based on the CRM profile fields. MindTickle had earlier raised angel investment from senior executives of WhatsApp and Google and were recently recognised among most promising TiE 50 tech startups in 2015.

Sector overview and future plans

Talking about the sector and why they decided to back MindTickle, Ravi Viswanathan (who will be joining the MindTickle board), General Partner, NEA added,

The marketing technology stack has been well established in the last decade, and now the sales technology stack is in the process of getting defined. While a number of players in the sales productivity space are working on driving up efficiency of sales activities, MindTickle is focussing on making sales teams more effective, helping new reps ramp faster and tenured reps stay on top of their game.

On how the enterprise sector is changing dramatically as the cloud consumption model introduces consumer grade techniques that are increasingly one-click and API-driven, Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix(a MindTickle customer) said, “Our products are changing rapidly, as we keep pace with our customers' demands and a dramatically shifting competitive landscape. Sales enablement must adapt to become high-velocity, bite sized, fun, mobile-friendly, and social. MindTickle takes an outsider’s view to learning in the enterprise. It will disrupt a large industry, if it focusses on being a system of engagement, not just a boring system of record that certifications used to be.”

MindTickle plans to use the new investment round to build upon its early successes in combining gamification, mobile delivery and data science to improve the engagement and performance of direct and channel sales teams. This includes continued development of its workflows for onboarding, coaching and ongoing enablement of customer facing teams. In conjunction, the company is scaling out its API framework that customers and partners can leverage to derive more meaningful insights across the entire sales organisation.

On their current and future plans, Krishna, who is the CEO of MindTickle, says,

Established companies with large sales teams are benefiting from the ability to keep the field teams up to date with real-time updates on mobile devices, and improving the performance of their inside sales teams through audio/video roleplay and scenario-based training on MindTickle. We have worked with several customers and analysed thousands of datasets to fine tune the sales enablement workflows that help improve sales metrics. Our next frontier is to provide dashboard and analytics that correlate learning performance with sales performance

Website: MindTickle