If you work in a regulated industry, you’re all too familiar with the challenges of keeping your sales team both up to date and in compliance.

Compliance training may be one of the least sexy parts of your job—and the most important. Making sure sellers and other client-facing teams understand the correct messaging and actions helps prevent future issues and avoidable violations.

Investing in compliance training can save you time, money, and reputation. In the complex and rapidly changing regulatory landscape of today, corporate compliance enables your organization to operate safely and efficiently.

But how can you make a mandatory training both engaging and effective, especially during a global pandemic that has reduced travel and restricted in-person training?

Compliance Training When You Can’t Meet In-Person

Whether you need to certify your sales force on a new indication for a pharmaceutical product, or ensure compliance with SEC regulations, training today is more complicated when your reps are scattered across the country. Before the pandemic, flying everyone to headquarters for a relatively short meeting would be a waste of both time and resources. Now, it’s virtually impossible.

In the past, many companies would simply resort to using video conference software to hold a live training. But this method is cumbersome and doesn’t produce an audit trail, which is critical for regulated industries.

Today, organizations are re-thinking the certification process and evaluating alternatives that will enable them to certify reps in an effective and compliant way—without requiring travel. Read on to learn new tactics you can implement to certify sellers without travel, boost engagement, and deliver successful compliance training.

A Four-Step Strategy to Certify Reps

Step 1: Broadcast

The first step to delivering effective training is hosting a televised meeting for everyone who needs certification—your sales team or the entire organization. Gather a handful of sales trainers and subject matter experts at your company’s headquarters and broadcast a presentation of the new content. This allows the rest of the sales team to watch from their homes or local offices.

Step 2: Practice

The second step is to ensure that sellers have mastered the messaging, product launch information, or other new material. Create an assignment for each rep and allow some time (up to a week after the meeting) to practice. Then, reps can record their delivery and share the practice videos with their managers. Managers can review and provide feedback. Reps can learn from this feedback, refine their delivery, and record a final video.

Step 3: Certify

Next, managers can review each seller’s compliance video and either certify or give them a failing grade, sending them back to Step Two with additional feedback for practice.

Step 4: Share

To leverage your investment in this training, each manager can select the best video and share it with the rest of the team. At organizations with multiple sales teams, the sales director can then review the top videos and pick one as the ultimate example.

Leverage the Power of Video Practice

This four-step plan relies on the use of both live and recorded video. One of the biggest benefits of recorded video is that it encourages your people to practice. When sales reps are asked to record their practice sessions, they rehearse their presentations an average of ten times before submitting them for review. This cements new knowledge and allows reps to improve through iteration. Video practice also provides insights and reveals flaws that might otherwise go unnoticed during a purely “mental” rehearsal or a live role-playing session.

“When you have a platform like Allego, you get the benefit of having someone review the reps’ performance and give them feedback, and reps also get the benefit of doing it in the privacy of their own homes. And that seems to make people a lot happier,” said Chris Gish, vice president of sales at a global pharmaceutical company. “That’s why video sales practice is one of the best ways to improve. It’s a great way to self-correct.”

In addition to the discipline provided by video rehearsal, video also gives reps easy access to peer-to-peer learning content. When reps share great examples of best practices, objection handling, and customer win (and loss) stories with their peers, it gives them field-tested intel and spurs them to practice more.

Involve Compliance Up Front

Before implementing this four-step approach, don’t assume that your compliance team is on board. Savvy sales enablement managers involve compliance at every stage, explaining the benefits of certification via video.

“We involved compliance from the start, and this process really grew their confidence because there were a couple of cases where somebody on a video said something that was non-compliant,” said Gish. When the compliance team noticed a problem, “I would talk to the rep’s manager, the manager would give the rep some coaching, and we would document that coaching.”

Companies using video to train and reinforce learning have another advantage. This approach produces evidence that the company takes compliance seriously and follows a process to correct and prevent problems. Video becomes documentation that the company is doing the right thing.

Boost Confidence and Competence

Organizations that certify their sellers using these tactics find that the process moves much more quickly than their previous in-person approach. Sellers and other client-facing teams are certified and in the field in a much shorter time frame. Plus, because sellers practice and refine their delivery so thoroughly, they’re more confident and competent to make the most of every interaction with prospects.

Don’t let travel restrictions and time zone issues put a halt to critical training. Take advantage of today’s new tactics to certify sellers without travel, boost engagement, and keep your company in compliance.

Learn More

To learn how to run an outstanding virtual meeting, download your copy of Re-Thinking the National Sales Meeting: How to Run a Virtual Sales Kickoff During a Pandemic today.