CommercialTribe: Reshaping the Sales Development

Paul Ironside, CEO and Founder

After keenly observing multiple sales situations and individual sales representative’s behavior, a senior sales leader of a reputed firm discovered that 30 percent of the sales professionals in his organization were not efficient enough. The ineffectiveness of the salespeople was leading to the inability to attain monthly targets which not only incurred losses to the organization but was also making the customers unhappy. Taking a holistic view of the sales scenario, the senior sales leader inferred that to improve the effectiveness of sales operations, not only sales representatives but sales managers as well need practical sales experience. Identifying the predicaments in the sales market, the senior sales leader, Paul Ironside, went ahead to establish his own firm, CommercialTribe in 2013. Now the CEO of CommercialTribe, Paul Ironside built the company on the underpinnings of behavioral-based observational learning for improving sales cycles.

Today, CommercialTribe offers sales enablement solutions to boost the performance of sales teams of a number of clients. It provides a SaaS-based social learning platform for sales managers and sales representatives. “At first, we observe sellers in various selling scenarios, then identify sales skills gaps, and finally provide sales managers with step-by-step coaching paths,” says Ironside.

Easy, Effective, and Everywhere are the core pillars of CommercialTribe’s technology architecture

The platform allows users to record training videos as sellers practice, role-play, or make a live call, provide sales assessments, and activate sales coaching. The video role play platform articulates value by enabling sales representatives to record their own videos, self-assess, and improve their pitches. The video-based collaborative environment can significantly accelerate sales productivity, shorten sales cycles, increase both win rates and deal size, and help sales representatives to fulfill their sales target.

Easy, Effective, and Everywhere are the core pillars of CommercialTribe’s technology architecture. The platform is “easy-to-use” and facilitates salespeople and managers to understand the procedures of sales operations on their mobile devices. With its “effective” approach, the video-based platform engages sellers, improves sales target, and shortens the ramp for new hires. The recorded videos can be accessed from “everywhere” via the mobile devices such as phone or tablet.

Before establishing the company, Ironside has headed numerous successful sales operations during the 18 years he had spent at Gartner and Corporate Executive Board. His wealth of experience in the sales industry has pushed CommercialTribe forward in working with some of the world’s leading companies such as Hubspot, LinkedIn, Grainger, and ADP amongst other multinationals. With the help of its video-based practice platform, the firm has helped companies to reduce client on-boarding time and time-to-market, and improve sales manager’s coaching effectiveness.

Ironside enunciates, “Working as a senior sales leader in an organization and running a sales organization are two different jobs.” He understands the pain points of his customers and therefore, works toward developing and coaching sales professionals. His years of experience have been instrumental in taking CommercialTribe to greater heights and have helped in creating new ideas to enhance the speed and effectiveness of learning, delivery, coaching, and improving the overall productivity of the sales organizations. Currently catering to clients in 52 countries, CommercialTribe is gearing up for a global footprint with its bidirectional video-based application.