For successful companies, sales training is not a “once in a year” affair. They recognize that learning needs to happen every day. The market evolves. Competitors launch new products. The customer change preferences in a matter of weeks. Products change. New personnel take over. The companies think: Can we have the extended field team skilling up every week? Can we have them go through a short burst (8 minute) training module every week - covering a product or a service or a critical skill? Our experience proves that it is possible - under the right conditions. Teams that have adopted to continuous learning have noticed 17% incremental premium mix and 7% incremental sales over teams that have not adopted the program*.

1. Bsharp delivers over 60K minutes of learning every month. Here are some of our best practices.
www.bsharpcorp.com
Continuous Learning = Oxygen
7 steps to implement a continuous learning program
for your sales personnel.

2. Continuous Learning = Oxygen
Continuous Learning = Oxygen
For successful companies, sales training is not a “once in a year” affair. They
recognize that learning needs to happen every day.
The market evolves. Competitors launch new products. The customer
change preferences in a matter of weeks. Products change. New personnel
take over.
The companies think: Can we have the extended field team skilling up
every week? Can we have them go through a short burst (8 minute) training
module every week - covering a product or a service or a critical skill?
Our experience proves that it is possible - under the right conditions.
Teams that have adopted to continuous learning have noticed 17%
incremental premium mix and 7% incremental sales over teams that
have not adopted the program*.
* Impact testing done by Bsharp for one of Bsharp’s customer implementations.
Done over 2 quarters with 200+ sales personnel.

3. Bsharp provides a continuous learning paradigm to companies across a
spectrum of industries – PC, High-Tech, Tech Accessories, Smartphones,
Healthcare, Cosmetics, Medical Instrumentation and Publishing.
The steps:
• The Goaly Grail
• The Boss Promise
• Holding the Threads
• Learning @ the arm’s reach of desire
• Think Communication: 2X it
• Certify, Gamify, Reward
• Measure, Modify, Measure, Modify
Have a plan to navigate the entire process - this is critical to execute
and sustain a continuous mobile learning program.
7 Steps to Continuous Learning

4. Continuous Learning = Oxygen
1. The Goaly Grail
There will be many stakeholders – but your success in the project will
be dependent on defining a few, clear, measurable goals.
Defining the goals of the program and the metrics is often tricky. You need to
include parameters like:
• Direct, Short Term Metrics.
• No of people in the project, compliance rate.
• An increase in assessment scores.
• In-Direct Medium Term Metrics.
• An increase in sales and premium mix (measured through control group
experiments.
• User feedback customer feedback.

5. Getting the management to commit their time and energy towards the launch,
execution, monitoring of this project is key for the success.
2. The Boss Promise
Without the head of the business rallying behind this, the troops will get a
mixed message. That buy-in process will mean that you will have to work
through the hierarchy and factor in their feedback.
How do you save valuable time during the buy-in process? By making a solid,
easy to envision proposal.

6. Include things like:
• The branding of the program
• An example of the training content (latest premium product, may be)
• The IT security perspective
• A demo of the app in the target device (working with your content)
• A great financial plan (low upfront costs + pay as you go based on users)
You should also get a Quarterly Business Review with all stake holders for
continuous support.
Careful planning of demo frameworks and financial models will help you
in your journey. Data security is of primary consideration and you need
to have a clearly laid out process.

7. An execution plan of this nature will open up several streams of activities. You
will have to cover:
• Content planning
• Database updates
• Content creation for the ‘burst’ trainings
• Communication
• Certification, Rewards, Recognition
• Reporting and Management presentations
• Impact Measurement
3. Holding the threads: Execution
In this scenario, you can see yourselves quickly getting into a world of
coordination, meetings, approvals, presentations, reviews… Stop.
A clear execution calendar with buy-ins from the stake holders got
right in the beginning of the program is key to a flawless week on week
execution.

8. Learning is multi-pronged. The team needs to have the opportunity to learn
through:
• Reviewing product details and assets: Just going through product
videos and documents will provide the distributed sales team a great
way to understand the proposition. The system needs to make the prod-
uct assets available systematically on the mobile device.
• See the product experts in action: Who best can talk about the product
than the product manager. Can the product manager’s message about
the product be available for the sales personnel in the field – real time?
Can the CEO send out the launch presentation to all the field personnel
to consume on their phone?
4. Learning @ arm’s reach of desire

9. The platform will have to allow for such “collateral learning”. Bsharp’s Broad-
cast feature helps corporate office personnel to share critical documents
with the distributed field sales team.
• Formal courses and certficiation: The team needs to be able to take
a formal course through the phone. Training, at the arm’s reach of desire.
The ideal features to be thought about are:
o How do you produce a training light enough to be consumed on the
phone + a mobile broad band connection?
o If the idea is to push one training a week, how do we build the
capability to produce that amount of content?
Check out on the platform capabilities. The platform will have to allow
a range of learning mechanisms - from formal courses to informal
learning methods. In emerging markets, the platform will have to host
the content offline - to enable a smooth learning experience in slower
speed connections.

10. Training
for
Healthcare
Sales
Professional
• Skills training to have impactful conversations with medical decision
makers
• Product training for new product launch and refresh
• Demonstration training: How do showcase a given product
• Induction training: How to get a new sales personnel upto to speed in
a given market
• Mandatory Training: Training with traceability to ensure that the man
datory inputs (regulatory information) are imparted to the sales
persosonnel.
• Assets Training: Companies have lot of sales assets and videos. What
is the best asset to be showcased in a given situation?
Continuous training of health care sales professionals involve the following
areas:

11. • Competitive training: How to handle competitive situations better?
• Financial training: To cover issues like Insurance, reimbursements.
• Technical selling: The challenge of selling with clinical data. The
challenge of selling based on technology to Healthcare Decision Makers.
To cover such broad set of training requirements, the companies will
organize periodic Fact to Face training programs. They are not going
to go away. The Mobile Continuous Learning initiative is aimed at
building a weekly or fortnightly cadence of learning.

12. • Create a brand name for the program – JEDI, Pro, WinQ, Advantage,
TalententLeap, Lakshya are some of the names of the programs we
currently administer for our customers. That makes it easier to recognize
• Boss connect: Stakeholders: There will be many stake holders for
making sure that the program is successful. This will include Product
Managers, Sales Managers, Regional Managers, Content owners etc.
Make sure that you are having a meeting with the Business Leader and
the stake holders to outline the expectations.
5. Think Communication: 2X It
In our experience, it takes 5 communications to convey a message to the
distributed sales personnel. More if you need to convey the message that
you “mean business”. How do we achieve this?

13. • Boss connect: Make sure that the first communication to the field team
is from the Business Leader. It could be in form of a video or an audio
clipping.
• Review process: The metrics of the initiative need to get highlighted in
the key reviews conducted by the business leaders.
• Results: The rewards and the results need to be highlighted in key
forums of the company.
• Multi-mode communication: Communicate through Email, Text Messages
Whatsapp, Con-calls etc. so that the field team gets the message.
Remember, you are trying to set up a new culture of continous learning.
Communication overload is very critical to change the culture.
Look at building standard communication templates for the various
aspects of the program. If field communication needs approval from
the branding team, get them pre- approved. These templates will help
you to execute the program faster.

14. The platform should integrate Certification and Gamification. Plan for
an offline rewards program - enabled through the platform.
6. Certify, Gamify, Reward
Certify: Make sure that the platform provides certification paths for the
users. The users, depending on their profile, should be able to download the
certificates for their trainings and proudly display them in their workspaces.
This will provide the motivation and is a means of “offline virality”.
Typically, new joinees will go through an “Induction Certification” to get to
know the basics.
Gamify: The platform should provide for points, levels and recogonition. The
users will be able to take pride on achieving the levels and pushing the
boundaries.
Rewards: Many of our customers run a rewards program for continous learn-
ing. Instead of rewarding 100% of the users on the training, the customers
typically reward the Top 15% of users in a given quarter. That will provide
better ROI for the budget invested and will motivate the users to be in the Top
15% of the user list.

15. Operational Metrics: These are the key metrics that we use to measure the
programs in the short term (Say, for a quarter):
7. Measure, Modify, Measure, Modify
Aggregate Usage #QA: Quarterly Actives
Number of users who have taken atleast 1 training
in the given quarter. Similar metric on #MA: Monthly
Actives.
Average Usage Average number of training consumed by user in
quarter (Total modules delivered / Total number of
active users)
Training Share Average Usage / Number of training published in the
quarter
Training Taken % % of allocated users who have taken a given training.
Certification % % of allocated users who have completed the given
certification.

16. These metrices will help the company drive the adoption of the overall
program. The system should help the administrator remind the
“non-compliant” users.
Bsharp’s dashboards provide you the above metrics out of the box.
Long Term Impact Metrics: This will be used to prove the incremental
sales value of the system. The Sales Head, Marketing Head and CFO will
use these metrics to determine the long-term investment plan around this
program.
Knowledge Impact The program calls for monthly assessment
of the field sales team. Increase in the
scores of the assessment give an indication
of the knowledge impact of the program.
Measure: Average assessment score trending
Sales Impact Create Focus Group and Control Group of users.
Administer program for 3 months to the Focus
group and blank it to the Control group.
Measure year on year(YOY) sales growth for Control
Group an Focus group from same set of stores. The
difference in the growth rates is a measure of the
impact of the program.
Measure: Delta of YOY growth rates between
Focus and Control Groups.
Premium Mix In the above measure of “Sales Impact” me impact
sure only impact on premium mix. This will help the
company focus on the premium, high margin
products.
Measure: Delta of YOY growth rate of Premium
Mix between Focus and Control Groups.
These measures use data outside the scope of the system to measure the
impact. A judicious selection of the markets is required for verifiable results
Your training partner should set up processes to systematically
measure the impact of the training.

17. Continuous Learning is the Oxygen that will keep the organization healthy.
The organizational goals like Sales, Premium Mix, and Market Share will
be achieved only with a completely prepared field sales team. This issue
becomes acute with increasing employee turn over.
Continuous Learning is just not a dream destination. It is an output of a
systematic process, supported by a mobile learning platform.
It is a lot of work, but Bsharp can help you in every step of the way.
Conclusion

18. Sales Person Companion Apps
Bsharp can help you implement a mobile-based sales-person continuous
learning program.
Reach out to the author at
gops@bsharp.in
Gopal Swaminathan
CEO, Bsharp Sales Enablers
Gopal brings over 20 years of sales leadership experience. He understands
the sales person and sales management challenges. He is passionate
about helping sales personnel reach their potential.
www.bsharpcorp.com
Bangalore. Boston.
www.bsharpcorp.com
Bangalore. Boston.