[WEBINAR] Make Blended Learning Work for Sales Training
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We expect a lot out of our sales teams. It’s crucial that they perform at optimal levels. Pipelines are directly impacted by what they do and don’t do. Ineffective and effective, sales teams impact the bottom line. So shouldn’t we nurture our sales teams as much as the leads that flood in? Absolutely. In this 30-minute webinar, Make Blended Learning Work for Sales Teams, Cammy Bean, Kineo US VP of Learning Design, and Chip Cleary, VP of Solutions & Consulting share tips and insights for designing a blended program for sales teams.
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[WEBINAR] Make Blended Learning Work for Sales Training
- 1. 1 BlendedLearningthatWorks Sales & Product Knowledge Chip Cleary & Cammy Bean #KineoInsights
- 2. 22 Chip Cleary VP of Solutions & Consulting chip.cleary@kineo.com Your hosts Cammy Bean VP of Learning Design cammy.bean@kineo.com @cammybean
- 3. 3 Introducing • Elearning • Learning Portals • Blended Programs • Consulting and Training • Marketing & Awareness
- 4. 4 Thanks for the inputs of our clients! Based on our guides Now with more “worked examples”
- 6. 66 Haven’t we been doing sales blends all along?
- 7. 7 Poll Think about your sales team today. What is your biggest challenge? *pick just one* o Information changes too quickly o Customers know more than we do o Everyone’s mobile o It’s not just our internal team we need to worry about anymore
- 8. 88 Today’s selling environment. New products. All the time. Savvy customers. Sales teams on the move. A need to serve the entire value chain.
- 9. 9 1. Get the technology mix right. Make it mobile.
- 10. 1010 TUI
- 12. 12 2. Get the content blend right. Wrap it in context.
- 13. 13 Please, not just the facts, ma’am. Knowing about a product’s features is not the same as... • Understanding key benefits • Being able to deal with customer queries • Closing a sale
- 15. 1515 Hear from your sales veterans – guerilla style.
- 16. 16 Sales + Service + Product Knowledge
- 17. 17 3. Get the audience blend right. Think beyond internal training and include your entire value chain: • Customers • Suppliers • Partners
- 18. 1818 DataFlux: sharing knowledge with customers.
- 19. 1919 Bridgestone: sharing knowledge with resellers.
- 20. 2020 Levis: sharing knowledge with franchises.
- 21. 2121 In short … Make it mobile Wrap it in context Think beyond your internal team: include customers, suppliers, partners
- 23. 2323 Chip Cleary VP of Solutions & Consulting chip.cleary@kineo.com Contact us! Cammy Bean VP of Learning Design cammy.bean@kineo.com @cammybean
- 24. 24 Subtitle WHATADVICE WOULD YOU SHARE? SHARE YOUR TIPS #KINEOINSIGHTS Get your copy of the guide: http://resources.kineo.com/blended-learning-that-works-leadership-guide-download
Editor's Notes
- [Chip] Welcome, welcome! We have a simple premise: Blended learning is going mainstream. It’s crossing the chasm from the early days with few adopters and more smoke than heat to becoming a part of the everyday ways in which organizations drive learning and performance. That‘s taken awhile and, at this knee-bend in it’s maturity curve, some organizations are deep into it and others are just getting started. Today, is our second webinar in our blended learning series. As in our first, we’ll be sharing lots of examples packed into a short 30 minutes session. As the series continues, we’ll be focusing on orientation. And finally compliance. We’ll spend 5 minutes on introductions, 15 to 20 minutes on sharing, and then leave some time for Q&A. Thanks for joining, let’s dig in.
- [Joint: Chip to intro]
- [Chip] Part of C&G Group.
- [Cammy] We’re hoping to keep the thrill of blended learning but take away a little of the danger by sharing out the best practices we’re seeing. We started that with our guides and are trying to move ahead with these webinars. This is a new format … 30 minutes … so we are going to keep it snappy. Please post your questions as we go along. Our hope is to leave time at the end to tackle them. http://www.kineo.com/us/blog/trends/city-guilds-kineo-release-new-blended-learning-that-works-guides
- {Chip] As we take this journey together today, we’ll be looking at a bunch of examples – mostly from the retail sales world. For some of us: When I think “sales”, I typically think of “complex B2B sales”. Like “How can an IBM salesperson grow a relationship and close a complex solution deal.” Where IBM can count on their guy being around and investing in a lot of training and development. A lot of what we’ll be looking at today – in terms of examples – will be focused on more transactional business-to-consumer sales. Think retail: Tires. Travel. Disk drives. Burgers. These are typically areas that have a lot of turnover in the sales force or it’s a channel sales force, that is people working as sales people in stores that sell your product. So as we consider these examples today – think about your big picture sales environment and what’s different. Then consider how you can apply this to your world.
- [Chip] The old world order: Week of sales training Dump elearning modules out after 6 months. Put out some job aids and tools on your tablets. Voila! You have a blend. “It’s always been a blended curriculum.” But these are just separate ingredients, not well blended together. We need to think more holistically about the blend and find ways to make sure the resources and tools we’re giving them blend into their actual ways of working and support their performance when they need it the most. We need to take people on more of a journey and find ways to create mature blends. A blend isn’t just “face to face classroom training plus some elearning tacked on.” A mature blend may include classroom, webinars, mobile tools, games to reinforce skills being learned, self-paced elearning modules, forums and other social elements, user generated content and more.
- [Cammy to summarize. Sabrina to run poll] Let’s get a sense for where the group is starting from today. Think about your sales training initiatives. Which description would be the best for most of your programs? “If you had to pick one box.”
- [Cammy] Savvy Customers. Everyone’s got the Google these days and customers come in to buying situations knowing a lot about the products. So how can you make sure your sales team has that extra something? How can you make sure they’re smarter than Google? Sales teams are on the go. This part of selling has never changed. You’ve got a mobile workforce, now armed with mobile tools and multiple devices. How do you meet their needs wherever they may be? New week, new product. Whether you’re selling mobile phones in a big box store or sandwiches in a fast food restaurant, chances are you’re rolling out new products all the time. And that’s a lot for your sales team to keep up with. Your entire value chain. Do you have franchise stores? Suppliers and partners? How do you ensure they’re as up to speed as your internal team? And what about your customers? Customers want product training, too. So we’re going to take a tour now of three key things we think we should be adding to the sales mix in order to get the blend right.
- [Cammy] When we’re talking about blends, we know we’ve got a lot of ingredients out there. We’re talking about blending things together, mixing up the right “learning cocktails” with the freshest and best ingredients. And to stretch a metaphor here a bit, it’s not just the ingredients that go into the drink that matter – but the container that you drink it from, right? If you’re sitting on the beach, you might want a coozie around your can of beer; driving to work a travel mug, etc. We know that sales teams aren’t stationary. They’re on the go – onsite visiting clients, on the retail floor serving customers. When your sales training blend include online access to resources, materials, and eLearning, we need to make sure it’s accessible no matter where they are. Multi-device learning is where it’s at. Of course, we do need to be mindful about WHAT we put onto mobile devices. Don’t make the mistake of just throwing big courses that really don’t fit the experience on a mobile device. But that’s a conversation for another day – although an important one that we know a lot of organizations continue to struggle with.
- [Cammy] Imagine you’re a travel agent. I have a friend who is one – she’s selling from her car, in the back of boy scout meetings, my kitchen table while the kids have a play date. She’s completely mobile and needs quick access to tools and information to share with her customers. She needs to have the info down in her head and be able to easily access it for quick refresher. Think searchable. This example was built using Adapt, an open source responsive elearning framework. The learning site feels like more of a browsable website – packed with tools and information to help maximize a sales person knowledge, putting information at their fingertips no matter the device. This is not to say that *everything* you put together for a blend must be mobile, but it’s important to consider – as part of your sales training journey – what elements to make mobile. Access and run demo: https://clients.kineo.com/tui/mod/scorm/player.php?a=164&scoid=490
- [Cammy] This client needs to train sales people in big box stores in product features, handling objectives, and differentiating their products from the competition. Sales people on the move in a retail environment – moving from the back room to the store floor, taking breaks and wanting quick refreshers, perhaps even needing to access information with a customer. Mobile was a must. They created a mobile friendly LMS built on Totara, with elearning modules created in Adapt. Demo: WD Responsive Product Knoweldge modules built in Adapt: https://clients.kineo.com/westerndigital/course/view.php?id=5
- [Chip] OK – this one’s for all you bacon lovers out there. (And apparently, one of us was hungry when we put together this deck!) It’s essential for sales teams --- and pretty much for anyone, so this tip really applies to the whole spectrum of eLearning content – to wrap the content in context. Those ingredients – what you’re putting into the blend itself - - that’s all about the content. We’re aiming for the freshest and best ingredients we can find. And we know that we want to change behaviors and improve performance. Some of our best tools for doing that are to wrap content – sales process, product knowledge – with context by using stories. Stories and scenarios and realistic challenges make the content memorable, relevant, and meaningful. They ensure better transfer back to the job because we see the process in action – stories are like dress rehearsals for our brains. Let’s look next at a few different ways you can wrap your content with context, starting with a game based approach.
- [Chip] Far too often, product knowledge training is just a feature dump. But we want to do more than dump features, we want to wrap those features with the context. Ultimately, that’s what’s going to close the sale, right?
- [Cammy] Here’s a game that’s all about the context. You need to know your products, you need to demonstrate good customer service skills, and you need to use the software till to conduct the transaction. You know you need to train how to run the sales process. You know everyone hates that. How can you make ‘em love it? Here’s about the most rote piece of sales process knowledge we could find anyone. Using the till for a front-line fast food sales role. We created something that actually had people coming back to do it again and again. How’d we swing that?” then “If we can do it for that task, think about how you can handle other procedural tasks. This is where you can bring gamification to your blend.” This game also wraps everything into context. You need to know the products in order to serve the customers – so an online experience like this really pulls it all together in a way that will ensure effective transfer back to the job. Demo available here: https://showcase.kineo.com/file.php/79/till_training_game/main.html
- [Cammy] This is from a few years back – sales training for people selling mobile phones – products that change more rapidly than most any industry. The team captured “secret shopper” style video of sales associates (yes, they got permission from them later to use the videos in their elearning). This was a way to capture their top sales team members in action. No matter your sales force – retail people on a store floor or a remote sales team working on their territories around the country – think about capturing their voices. A slightly different approach than the one shown here – how about guerilla style videos of sales team members ”thinking aloud’ about how they work, mistakes they’ve made, successes they’ve had. You can post these videos in elearning courses, on social network – low overhead captured on your own device and then easily posted on your Intranet. These stories go a long way to connecting your team with each other, and hearing authentic voice. This is really natural learning… From the Learning Insights Guide: These demands on product training have seen a shift away from elearning in some areas. Many are using product information on internal sites to brief staff rather than designing elearning. “The volatility of the product sets and information means that this has been moved to our Intranet.” Technology has helped significantly with product training and videos in particular. It was felt videos are quick to produce and engaging. There was more evidence of self authored, short videos by staff, which were shared and viewed by teams. Whilst production values were sometimes lower it was felt the learning was very real and authentic.
- [Cammy] That context is so important. As one sales manager that we interviewed for our insights series said about being able to combine sales skills, customer service, and product knowledge “It’s the holy grail. They have to get it right every time.” We believe that adding this context goes along way towards getting us to that holy grail. Lots of factors drive sales performance in a business. You need to develop a talented customer facing team. You need to provide up-to-date access to product knowledge and share the insights gained over many years of selling. You also need to ensure they are competent in the processes you follow to sell and win new clients and business. And they need that extra element – the attitude and behaviour that makes your customer experience better than the competition.
- [Chip] The third area that we’re going to talk about today is getting that audience blend just right. When you think about who you’re training, you may need to think beyond your internal team to include your entire value chain. We’re seeing more examples of companies creating programs to serve their customers. There’s also suppliers and partners – those out in the wild who are selling your products.
- [Cammy] This company provides technical training to its customers on their software and systems. Customers who are well trained in your product and know how to get the most value out of it become your most loyal customers and fans. This learning portal – built on Totara – provides access to courses for purchase – both online and classroom. How can you reach your customers? Are you building brand loyalty by helping your customers get the most out of your products? We’re hearing from a lot more of our LMS customers wanting integrations with Salesforce. For instance, they have workflows set up so that depending on where a customer is in its lifecycle, different training programs may be sent out to them.
- [Chip] This global tire seller has sales people who sells lots of products. Including their competitors. They wanted a learning envionrment that would work for their resellers around the world. This portal includes product knowledge elearning so agents can learn everything they need to know about Bridgestone products, and also includes resources to help.
- [Cammy] Here’s another example of a big brand educating franchise operations and resellers about their product. This is an LMS that reflects their brand in a big way. It’s marketing and training all rolled up together.
- [Chip] So just a quick review of what we’ve covered today as we think about ways to make our blends more impactful for our sales teams. OK, let’s pause there. We’d love to hear from you. What goals would you add to this list? What questions do you have for us?
- [Cammy] Time for questions … Cammy to offer up from the feed.