Bigtincan has announced the winners of its 2022 SHARKIE Awards, a long-running tradition instituted by Brainshark and continued by Bigtincan to honor the achievements of our united and expanded community.
The annual award program recognizes standout success stories among thousands of Bigtincan and Brainshark customers, highlighting the top-performing companies and business users across sales enablement, readiness, content, strategy, and leadership from over the past year.
The 2022 SHARKIE Awards recipients were selected from entries spanning six categories:
- Sales Enablement Program of the Year
- Sales Enablement Leader of the Year
- Sales Coaching Program of the Year
- Interactive Experience of the Year
- Presentation of the Year
- Rookie of the Year
The respective winners were recognized for program development, execution, metrics, and the applied use of sales enablement automation technologies to drive organizational growth and sustained success.
The 2022 SHARKIE Award winners, separated by category, are listed below.
Sales Enablement Program of the Year
The Sales Enablement Program of the Year honors organizations with sales enablement programs that empowered sales reps to reach new heights.
This year’s Sales Enablement Program of the Year award goes to: OwnBackup.
In early 2020, OwnBackup’s revenue enablement team implemented Brainshark (now part of the Bigtincan Learning platform) to help scale learning and development efforts. Since then, OwnBackup — and their use of the platform — has continued to steadily grow. Now, all new hires use Brainshark upon their start date for onboarding, as well as change management and introduction to new products, platforms, and ecosystems.
The Revenue Enablement team has provided new hires with a way to ramp faster and hit the ground running. OwnBackup has also entered into two new markets, and with the help of on-demand learning, reps were enabled quickly and efficiently.
Sales Enablement Leader of the Year
The Sales Enablement Leader of the Year award honors individuals who worked to advance the sales enablement profession and achieve amazing results.
This year’s Sales Enablement Leader of the Year award goes to: Lauren Garris of Gamut and Kathleen Hill of Natus.
Lauren Garris, Gamut, Manager of Sales Enablement and Effectiveness
Lauren spearheaded the launch of Gamut’s first Sales Enablement program through Bigtincan/Brainshark and the results speak for themselves. Affectionately referred to as their own “Mr. Feeny” (from the hit 1990’s show Boy Meets World), Lauren brings sensibility, expertise, real-world wisdom and factual detail to our curriculum.
She has managed their entire platform as a one-person team, combined with live and in-person trainings, and has coordinated a host of additional curricula going above and beyond Gamut’s expectations. With Lauren’s grit, together with the Bigtincan/Brainshark web-based streamlined user interface, she was able to exceed curriculum development 133% above goal, an astonishing feat in year-one of our program along with the normal successful launch aspects of a new product like branding, change management, and selling and adoption with channel partners.
Today, Gamut is seeing double-digit year-over-year revenue growth, posting their largest revenue year to date. And since this is only Lauren’s FIRST YEAR in a Sales Enablement Leadership role, they can’t wait to see what she will do next (and neither can we)!
Kathleen Hill, Natus Medical, Global Sales Training Director
As the Director of Global Sales Training, Kathleen is responsible for onboarding of all new global sales reps, managers, and directors, as well as global marketing and global clinical team members. She facilitates Brainshark (internally called The Cube) management for all Natus' global distribution partners, manages all subject matter expert content creators for The Cube, and ensures all materials are maximized using best practices for effectiveness.
In 2021-2022, Natus started to include service teams on The Cube. By doing this, they enable their tech support teams to give support to customers while shortening call times (and thereby call wait times) as they are able to send out videos of how to utilize, troubleshoot, and problem solve Natus products.
In 2021-2022, Natus Medical also added 1,633 new presentations and 894 new courses, bringing them up to a total of 9,585 courses and presentations created on The Cube (this number includes inactive and deleted courses). The Cube has 439 active users including direct global sales teams and indirect distribution partners, plus an additional 300 users after adding service teams.
The Cube just celebrated its 9th anniversary thanks to Kathleen, who has been the administrator and architect of Natus’ incredible sales enablement platform for all nine of those years.
Sales Coaching Program of the Year
The Sales Coaching Program of the Year award honors organizations that demonstrated the best use of Brainshark or Bigtincan Coaching solutions to empower their sales teams.
This year’s Sales Coaching Program of the Year award goes to: Arctic Wolf.
In the past 12 months, Arctic Wolf has hired more than 1,000 employees, many of which are members of the Sales Organization. Using Brainshark, they have developed a world-class coaching program designed around sales onboarding.
They have designed role-based programs with unique competency-based curriculums to ensure sellers have the knowledge and skills they need to quickly achieve their goals and meet (and beat) their ramp times. This includes unique learning paths for Acquisition Sales, Customer Success, Channel Sales, Sales Engineering, and the Sales Development Reps.
Leveraging Coaching Activities as capstones throughout these curricula has increased engagement between learners and their respective management and provided opportunities for coaching at critical points in the learner’s development. In fact, over the past year, Arctic Wolf has had over 200 learners complete their elevator pitch coaching activities with strong, positive scores and feedback.
Arctic Wolf has also developed custom Scorecard Layouts for each role, doing what they call progression reporting and tracking that against actual performance data within their CRM.
By combining sales onboarding with ramp performance, they adapt their content and role-based training programs to accelerate sales performance in the field.
Interactive Experience of the Year
The Interactive Experience of the Year award honors this year’s most engaging creations through Bigtincan XR or through customizations, integrations, and apps.
This year’s Interactive Experience of the Year award goes to: Collins & Associates and Optus.
Collins & Associates
Collins & Associates successfully integrated UKG Kronos HRIS with Brainshark through Bigtincan to enable sales associates throughout the organization to access necessary training for their job position, location, and other individual needs.
The integration allows for a seamless onboarding process for new associates and simple recurring training for existing associates. Bigtincan automates the training assignment and tracking processes. Associate information is synced into Brainshark multiple times per day to keep their curriculum assignments, manager, assigned territory, and more up to date.
Teams are automatically set up by the integration to connect managers with need-to-know data about progress of individuals and groups without having to sort through unrelated data. Management only needs to keep the information in the existing human resources software updated and the integration will take care of keeping the learning management system updated based on that information.
The integration eliminated the need to manually assign and track training. It also eliminated the need to input updated associate data into the LMS directly and allowed a reduction of $20,000 in savings annually for manual data entry. Reduced associate downtime and improved training access time adds another $336,000 in annual savings.
Overall, the project saves over $1.5 million dollars a year in direct and indirect costs by conveniently connecting associates to the training they need to be successful.
Optus
Optus made their live sales kick-off event more interactive and engaging than ever with the VR interactive innovation showroom, saying, "It was the highest level of engagement ever for any Optus Live event. We have not had any way of tracking engagement in the past.”
They used email and Zunos (part of Bigtincan Learning) push notifications for a countdown and shared video teasers with their team. Bigtincan gave the Optus team a chance to engage and build excitement ahead of the event by utilizing leaderboards, quizzes, competitions, interactive forms, and activities.
The feedback posted in the forum “spoke volumes about the positive new way to connect, especially given that it was the first time that we had used the tool."
The interactive VR showroom experience highlighted Optus' FutureNow Innovation Centre and 5G Innovation Hub encouraged the salesforce to realize the power of 5G and how Optus takes a customer focused, human-centered approach to sell these solutions.
Presentation of the Year
The Presentation of the Year award honors this year’s most creative presentations developed with Brainshark or Bigtincan Content Hub to power Onboarding, Continuous Training, and Communications.
This year’s Presentation of the Year award goes to: NBC10 Boston, Telemundo Boston, NBC Sports Boston & NECN, Keurig Dr. Pepper, and Labcorp.
NBC10 Boston, Telemundo Boston, NBC Sports Boston & NECN
The Boston stations of NBC and Telemundo are passionate about educating their sellers and clients about the Hispanic Market across New England.
They have multiple television stations, including Telemundo, who have been doing an incredible job reaching out to the Hispanic Audience of New England. They will continue making efforts to help the market understand the changing demographic landscape and shifts in spending power.
The NBCUniversal Boston team created and shared their award-winning presentation with over 150 clients across the country. It was so successful that other teams made use of it (including NBCUniversal New York, Chicago, Texas, Miami, Connecticut, Philly, LA, San Diego, and Mexico).
Keurig Dr. Pepper
Keurig Dr. Pepper’s award-winning presentation was created to build excitement and communicate the upcoming launch of their latest brewer innovation.
The video demonstrates the unique functionalities the K-4500 brewer offers, which is unlike the rest of their brewer lineup. The video and accompanying attachments serves as a great tool for both distributors and end-users to learn more about this exciting new launch and be a part of this exciting conversation.
The K-4500 video has been the most viewed video recently and second most viewed year-to-date on their Brainshark platform. It also has served as a very beneficial tool to their internal and external sales partners to create buzz around the brewer launch. The video has been shared out many times and received tremendous feedback.
Labcorp
Labcorp started a new series this year, called "Five-Minute Focus Fix.” These are meant to be short (around five minutes), high level training on some of their focus products. The goal was to make them fun, engaging and informative. Upon completion, reps have the opportunity to take more detailed training via a Product Certification on Brainshark if they would like.
The award-winning Focus Fix training meant to educate team members about a recent rebrand was sent out to around 1,000 sales employees and “they LOVED it!” They also just generally loved the "Five-Minute Focus Fix" series because they are short and to the point.
This is some of the feedback they received:
"Love these short Brainsharks. They provide a quick refresher for you to sell testing in the field.”
"I enjoy these short & concise training sessions. Can we have more?"
"I love this platform. Engaging learning through nontypical processes keeps me interested and excited to learn new testing. Thank you for your efforts."
Rookie of the Year
The Rookie of the Year award honors a customer that started using Bigtincan technology within the past 12 months and achieved success in enablement, coaching, or content creation.
This year’s Rookie of the Year award goes to: Domo, Lion, and Clarivate.
Domo
Lion
The Lion Customer, Product & Strategy team were researching ways to use different platforms and current systems to deliver content more effectively to the sales teams. They needed to address three internal pain points:
- Finding content for our sales team to share with their customers.
- Having a consistent, automated and updated Pitch Deck to pitch for new business with customers.
- Having an automated approach to our marketing campaigns that allowed us to share the campaign details with our customers.
They were able to deliver against each of these goals using Bigtincan, saving approximately two hours per day per person.
Feedback from Lion customers on the new Content Hub included:
“It’s great to have the information that is going to be shared at our meetings with Lion ahead of time as this allows us to plan.”
“The biggest advantage is the professionalism and the ease of accessing the content.”
Lion Capability also used Bigtincan Learning Hub to deliver a formal coaching tool and dynamic learning system called “Raise the Bar.” From July 1st through October 2022, they saw 406 coaching forms completed by their sales team (152 members).
Since the launch, they have also seen an average of 102 unique content views per week
Clarivate
The Clarivate Sales Enablement team had a vision to create a single unified sales academy, digitally powered through one platform that would serve as the source of truth for all sales learning and enablement content. This strategy was to evolve from having multiple sales training systems with content that was difficult to create, maintain, and adopt and difficult to track.
They selected Brainshark to be their strategic partner and a critical component to realizing this vision so that we could enable and onboard sellers at pace and create the digital led training experience our revenue organization needs for 1,800+ users.
Brainshark allowed them to create a single sales enablement platform, together with Highspot, which they call CHASE (Clarivate Hub for Academy and Sales Enablement). Building training with Brainshark has allowed them to create more than 150 courses and curricula in just four months across multiple domains including a new sales onboarding program, product training, sales skills training, and account management training, resulting in 14,000+ course completions.
In addition to building training, Brainshark allows them to track progress quickly and accurately with flexible dashboards using the Scorecards functionality.
According to the Clarivate team, “Brainshark is part of a success story that has seen our sales enablement platform transform from an ecosystem with more than five different tools for sales enablement content and sales training courses to a single unified sales enablement platform.”
They were able to implement Brainshark, including building an initial set of four training courses, in less than two months.
Congratulations to all of our 2022 winners!
We’re so proud to be part of this community and the exceptional work they’re doing. We look forward to seeing what you come up with next year.
Interested in joining the Bigtincan community? Get in touch!
