Creating a learning environment that drives better sales and customer success outcomes – Interview with Pat Lynch of MindTickle

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Today’s interview is with Pat Lynch, VP of Enablement Excellence and Innovation at MindTickle, one of the industry’s most comprehensive readiness and learning solutions for closing the knowledge and skill gaps found in customer-facing teams. Pat joins me today to talk about learning versus training, the frustrations of Chief Learning Officers, what’s missing from the modern corporate learning environment, what is needed to get the most out of the Millennial and Gen-Z workforce and what MindTickle are doing about it.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Applying design thinking to culture change and employee experience – Interview with Karen Jaw-Madson – and is number 275 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my interview with Pat:

  • Learning is a key input in making any organization competitive.
  • Most businesses are training their people but are not helping them learn.
  • Moreover, traditional training or corporate learning activities are not engaging the new and younger generations (Millenials and Gen-Z).
  • In fact, they often reduce the learners learning capability.
  • Many Chief Learning Officers know this and are becoming increasingly frustrated by this situation.
  • Pat believes there is a change coming. One that will be driven by Millenials and how they want to learn ……in real time, in bite sized chunks, harnessing data, analytics, and technology and being mobile first.
  • Learning is at the heart of what it is to be a more agile and adaptable business.
  • Training or learning in corporations was often seen as a compliance or checkbox exercise.
  • That changes when you start to think about what outcomes you want.
  • Then, the challenge becomes…how do you design a learning environment and learning materials to promote those outcomes.
  • MindTickle believes that fun is essential to that process and that is why gamification is a central part to their proposition.
  • Gamification is a learning modality.
  • Whilst MindTickle has been positioned as a sales enablement tool, it’s applications range across sales teams, customer success and customer service teams.
  • It particularly enables alignment between sales and customer success teams.
  • MindTickle’s model harnesses data and analytics so that can deploy a push and pull method of learning.
  • Their research is showing that oftentimes learning is taking place on the way to work, on the way from work, at night and on weekends.
  • Quote from a previous interview with Deloitte: “processes and organizational systems need to be aligned to the desired culture and should be set up to reinforce and sustain the desired culture”.
  • One of MindTickle’s clients is one of the largest beer manufacturers in the world and they are leveraging the MindTickle approach to help them change their culture.
  • Pat’s advice to companies thinking about building a rich learning environment in their organisation is to write up a questionnaire (or get your frontline customer success people to help) with 10 simple questions, say, that is aimed at finding out what is important to your people.
  • Ask questions like:
    • What would you do if you were in my shoes?
    • What would you do if you could wave a magic wand and budget wasn’t an issue?
    • How would you solve the problems that you face internally or that customers face?
  • Did you know that the word education comes from the Latin word: educare, which means ’to bring the light out from within’.
  • Check out MindTickle and what it could do for your organisation.
  • Also, check out the Sales Enablement Society’s Annual Conference taking place in Denver between September 16th and September 19th.

About Pat

Pat LynchPatrick Lynch is the VP of enablement excellence and innovation at MindTickle. In his role, Pat is responsible for advocating the importance of and best practices for the growing field of sales enablement. Prior to MindTickle, Pat served in a variety of sales and leadership roles, including director and chief customer officer at analyst firm CSO Insights and managing partner at Salesbridge, a sales enablement consulting firm. He is also credited as a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, Denver chapter, which is dedicated to elevating the role of sales enablement worldwide through engagement, communication, research, and development.

Check out MindTickle and the Sales Enablement Society’s Annual Conference taking place in Denver between September 16th and September 19th. Do say Hi to MindTickle and Pat on Twitter @mindtickle and @pcjlynch and while you are at it connect with Pat on LinkedIn here.

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Thanks to Pixabay for the image.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Adrian Swinscoe
Adrian Swinscoe brings over 25 years experience to focusing on helping companies large and small develop and implement customer focused, sustainable growth strategies.

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