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Presenting the 2017 Sharkie Award Winners!

Jun 15th, 2017

 

The winners are in for the 2017 Sharkie Awards! This annual Brainshark awards program honors the best sales enablement success stories and content across our customer base over the past year. After weeks of judging by our Brainshark experts, our winning companies and individuals were chosen based on creativity, execution, business impact and use of the Brainshark platform.

Without further ado, here are our 2017 winners!

Sales Enablement Leader of the Year

This award honors individuals who have worked to advance the sales enablement profession and achieve real business results. This year’s winners built out the sales enablement function at their companies, made incredible strides in sales readiness technology adoption, and helped put their sales force on track for greater productivity.

Christi Wall, Ping Identity: Between multiple acquisitions, product updates, and a new selling methodology, sales reps at Ping Identity had a lot to keep up with. As sales enablement manager, Christi helped spearhead the company’s sales enablement strategy, finding effective ways to keep reps informed without sacrificing selling time. She leveraged Brainshark as the main content repository for sales and to deliver creative music videos that publicized new sales training content available for reps, resulting in an 85% increase in sales content views in Brainshark.

With the help of a solid sales enablement strategy in place, the company achieved 45% year-over-year growth in 2016 and closed 7 of its 10 largest deals ever. “If the mission of sales is to make money, then the mission of sales enablement is to provide reps with the training, content and information they need to be successful in that goal,” Christi says.

Related: Ping Identity: Powering Sales Enablement with Hip-Hop

Maria White, ServiceNow: Maria led the re-engineering of sales enablement at ServiceNow, which included an increased focus on sales productivity, quota attainment and talent retention. As head of sales enablement, she also led the deployment of Brainshark in order to modernize the learning experience for reps. Ultimately, ServiceNow developed a content management strategy mapped to the customer lifecycle and the sales process, as well as a learning library for reps to get up to speed on material for various selling situations.

Sales Enablement Program of the Year

This award recognizes the companies whose sales enablement programs have empowered sales reps to reach new heights. This year our honorees have displayed leading-edge sales enablement strategies, transformative results and positive impact on rep performance.

Iron Mountain: Six years ago, sales enablement at Iron Mountain had no consistent process or alignment with other departments. “It was a blank canvas,” says VP of sales enablement Kevin Starner. Now the company has established an efficient sales enablement function, ensuring greater consistency across sales training, content and messaging. Using the Brainshark platform, the team at Iron Mountain has developed role-based onboarding, product certifications, coaching and training – all aligned with their strategic-based selling model.

Related: Iron Mountain: A Journey of Sales Enablement Discovery

Spectranetics: After acquiring new products and entering a new market, Spectranetics revamped its sales enablement strategy and deployed Brainshark to support it. The company now creates sales training content for all phases of learning for reps, and reinforces material and evaluates comprehension and mastery with the Brainshark coaching platform. Early on, the Spectranetics team rolled out 173 sales training courses, reviewed 700 coaching challenges and achieved an increase of 39% in time-to-completion of sales material. At the company’s global sales meeting, reps achieved a 95% pass rate when asked to complete an oral certification based on sales training material.

Related: Watch Spectranetics’ customer testimonial

Sales Coaching Initiative of the Year

This award recognizes those who have harnessed technology to coach their salespeople to reinforce and practice material in creative ways. This year’s honorees are pioneering the use of sales coaching technology and developing strategies that help reps work towards sales mastery.

Anaplan: Leading up to its annual sales kickoff, Anaplan created a whiteboarding exercise as pre-work for sales reps and had the leadership team review the entries and select winners. After this test run, Anaplan implemented a new sales coaching approach, including coaching challenges for sales onboarding and exercises to practice messaging for the new corporate overview deck. With the Brainshark coaching tool, reps can reinforce what they’ve learned, review videos to see what needs to be corrected and utilize a library of “best in class” examples.

GE Digital: As a relatively new division, GE Digital needed to drive a consistent and compelling message globally around digital transformation. Using Brainshark’s coaching platform, the team tested mastery of that core message across the sales organization. At this year’s sales kickoff, they launched a coaching challenge before the event and several related challenges afterwards that dove deeper into the transformation story. With this coaching strategy and Brainshark technology to support it, GE Digital now has better visibility into the skill set of sales reps and reps have a process in which to practice messaging, style and intent, and can leverage a repository of best practices and proof points.

Related: Watch GE Digital’s customer testimonial

Best Presentation

These awards honor the year’s most innovative presentations and content creation techniques with Brainshark to power sales, training, and more.

Corporate Communications – Mike Albert Fleet Solutions: Since the company underwent business changes over the last year, the team at Mike Albert created this presentation to inform employees of each department’s role in hopes of establishing a clear understanding of what the company does and a consistent overall message. View presentation

Marketing – Hub Group: This “choose your own adventure” themed presentation helps Hub Group employees understand the company and its services. The viewer can choose which areas of the company they want to learn more about, with the goal of driving better conversations during the early stages of the sales process. View presentation

Sales Training – Continuous – IGT: IGT uses this presentation to train sales reps on a new slot machine, detailing the key features, functionality and asking quiz questions at the end to test knowledge. View presentation

Sales Training – Onboarding –  Colonial Life: This presentation aims to help new sales reps become familiar with the tools and resources that will get them ramped up quickly. View presentation

Training – Goodwill Industries of Fort Worth: This division of Goodwill created this presentation to help employees learn about the culture and customer base, with the goal of promoting values, diversity and quality service. View presentation

Presentation of the Year

Gold: Goodwill Industries of Fort Worth

Silver: Mike Albert Fleet Solutions

Bronze: Hub Group

To see the full winners list, visit the Sharkie Awards page. For more information about the Sharkie Awards program, check out our press release.