We’re Not Launching The Coaching Cockpit After All (Here’s What We’re Doing Instead)

For months, I’ve been talking about our big upcoming launch of the Membrain Coaching Cockpit. Well, that was a mistake.

I’ve been dreaming of it for years, and we’ve been working actively on it for over a year. We planned the launch for later this year.

A few months ago, we sent a beta version out to some early adopters. Some of these are partners (sales trainers and consultants), and others are highly engaged customers.

Based on their feedback, we have decided not to launch the “Coaching Cockpit” at all. Here are the two problems our beta users told us about:

One: The Word “Cockpit”

The name “coaching cockpit” rubbed some people the wrong way. Specifically, the word “cockpit.”

Some folks found the word to be evocative in an unpleasant way. Hmmm.

Okay. Problem number one.

Two: The Word “Coaching”

The feedback here is that the word “coaching” in the name is much more limiting than the product itself. The product is so much more than just a place for a coach.

It’s a room where each individual salesperson can get everything they need to help them improve. It’s about their personal goals, their professional goals, the skillsets they need. It’s about how to assess themselves, how to track improvements over time, and how to become more self-sufficient and effective.

It’s really about building a culture of self-leadership.

In other words, our beta testers love the product, not the name.

So we renamed it.

Instead of launching a coaching cockpit this year, we’ll be launching Membrain Elevate.

Introducing: Membrain Elevate

When we envisioned Membrain Elevate (formerly the Coaching Cockpit), we knew it was bigger than just coaching. We knew it was going to be about a bigger concept, which I think of as “getting closer to the individual.” I didn’t realize that our users would demand this bigger vision right out of the gate.

So here are some of the things that individual salespeople can do with Membrain Elevate that make it more than just about coaching.

• Track their personal goals and progress toward them
• Track their professional goals and progress toward them
• Identify skill sets necessary to perform and track that progress
• Manage, view, and compare self-assessments
• Track performance over time across multiple customizable KPIs
• See how their pipeline and accounts have changed over time
• Manage their relationships with their coach and others, their coaching cadence, and their coaching goals
• Identify and track priorities for improving sales skills and abilities
• Track their time and task management

Aside from its usefulness to coaches in improving the way they coach, Membrain Elevate provides a space for the salespeople themselves to feel like they are in control of their own career and their progress in it.

Why We Called It Membrain Elevate

When we realized we’d named the product the wrong thing, we went to work immediately. Our core mission at Membrain has always been to elevate the sales profession, and in a series of branding meetings, we realized that the former “coaching cockpit” really is the culmination of that mission.

Structured coaching is about building a culture of self-leadership.

Membrain Elevate elevates everything about the way that our customers operate within the sales context. Our entire platform is about this, but now we have a way to get that elevation all the way to the individual via this new development. Ultimately, when you elevate the individual, you elevate the whole organization.

See. Coach. Grow.

While we love the name Membrain Elevate, we also understand that it’s not quite as descriptive a title as the previous name. So we’ve added a tagline: See | Coach | Grow.

What Membrain Elevate allows you to do is to see clearly everything that’s going on for each salesperson. This enables your leadership team as well as the individuals themselves to coach effectively, so that they can grow.

Membrain Elevate shows both the individual and their leaders how they’re performing, what they need to improve, what they might have missed, and what they need to do next, all in one simple framework.

Membrain Elevate Is Not a Big Brother Tool

Once we realized we had the wrong name for the product, we recognized another reason why it was the wrong name. Membrain Elevate is NOT a big brother tool, and we don’t want salespeople to perceive it that way.

The old name could have given the wrong impression by focusing on the coach rather than the individual.

Unlike traditional CRMs, Membrain is not about tracking sales activity for the sake of tracking, or just to give micro-managers something to focus on.

It’s about tracking the right things to help salespeople actually get better at what they do. For their own reasons. Because when people have their own reasons to do something, they’re motivated to do it.

Membrain Elevate doesn’t just provide accountability. It provides the ability for salespeople to define what matters to them and to track not only their progress toward company-defined goals but toward their personal goals. It also gives them the visibility to see more than just the big picture: They can see what they need to do at each step to move toward the goals they’ve set for themselves.

We believe that Membrain Elevate is the tool that the sales industry needs in order to elevate how we think about sales, how we motivate salespeople, how we end the hire-and-fire cycles, and how we create cultures of self-leadership and excellence within this profession.

We can’t wait to get it into your hands!