So-called sales readiness technology provider MindTickle Inc. is running with the unicorns today after landing a $100 million Series E round of funding.

The round was led by SoftBank with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures. It follows a previous $100 million raise led by SoftBank last November, and brings the company’s total amount raised to $281 million, with a valuation of $1.2 billion.

MindTickle is on a mission to help large and small businesses improve their sales operations by training staff to be better at it. Through its platform, companies can train and upskill potentially hundreds of sales personnel. One of the key aspects of the platform is it uses role playing methods to help sales staff practice their sales pitches and gain experience on handle customer queries.

Salespeople can measure their improvement through the MindTickle platform via revenue metrics. Further, it provides feedback on the calls they have handled. Machine learning is a key ingredient too, helping to serve up personal recommendations and remediations, the company says.

MindTickle Chief Executive Krishna Depura told SiliconANGLE in an interview that sales teams need to improve because sales have suddenly become much harder. He reeled off a number of data points that underline this, saying the average ramp time of sales reps has increased from six to nine months, their average quota attainment has come down from 63% to 43%, and 75% of team members say that their existing training and knowledge programs don’t enhance performance.

“Fundamentally, there’s a crisis of readiness with most sales organizations of this day,” Depura said.

He explained this decline in sales performance was traditionally attributed to the rapidly increasing complexity and competition in the world that sellers have to navigate. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made things harder, he said.

“First, there are fewer on-site sales meetings. Second, as more selling happens remotely and organizations try to simplify their processes, it’s leading to a transformation of inside and field sales organizations,” Depura said. “Altogether, these trends have laid bare the deficiencies in traditional sales enablement programs that exist at most companies today.”

Mindtickle’s goal is to create what Depura calls “sales readiness”, which he defines as a continuous state of excellence among organizations to help them grow revenue and adapt to change. He said the mission of sales enablement programs today must be to engage with learners using a comprehensive and individualized set of strategies.

“Those companies that are still trying to tackle 21st-century readiness with 20th-century sales enablement programs are not “ready,” Depura said. “Their approach to sales readiness isn’t working because their traditional enablement programs are memorization exercises, not skill-building strategies.”

MindTickle claims a number of leading Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 firms have already seen this, with the likes of Juniper Networks Inc., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., Merck & Co., Inc. and Snowflake Inc. all mentioned as customers on its website.

MindTickle is aiming for a bigger share of what will likely be growing demand for next-generation sales enablement technologies. Sales in that niche are set to grow to $4.23 billion by 2027, while the conversation intelligence market is forecast to hit $13 billion by 2025, the company said.

Looking ahead, Depura said the company will invest in its research and development efforts, focused on leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data intelligence to unlock greater value for customers. “We are seeing massive demand for our technology from across sectors and geographies, so we plan to invest in ramping up our go-to market capabilities to be able to address this increased demand,” he said.

Image: MindTickle