Global Asset Management Firm Empowers Team with Video Sales Training

Remote sales training can be like threading an obstacle course. There are the hurdles of time zones, Zoom fatigue, and sales rep engagement. But one of the biggest challenges is how to create, manage, and distribute training content efficiently. This is where video sales training can make all the difference.

I observed this remote training struggle at many firms, even before the pandemic, and it was the case at a premier global asset management firm. For some time, the firm’s director of sales training and VP of internal sales had been seeking creative ways to distribute timely information and provide virtual training for the asset management company’s distributed sales force.

Their aha! moment came from a sign. “I got a promotional email that featured a video thumbnail of a woman holding up a sign that said, ‘Hi.’ I was intrigued, so I opened the email and watched the video. That email really got our attention, and we began thinking of ways we could use video internally,” the VP said.

Encountering the Pitfalls of a ‘Do It Yourself’ Approach

With the help of the marketing department, the two experimented with a “home grown” system that would enable sales reps to record product presentations and submit them to product management for coaching via email.

“We asked all the sales directors to record a product presentation or product pitch on their phone,” said the director, “and then put it on our shared drive or email the recording to me for training.

“Unfortunately, it was a complete disaster from a technology perspective—it just didn’t work.” In some cases, video files were too large for basic email; in other cases, the sales directors’ computers froze up.

Discovering the Solution: Allego

The director and VP decided to evaluate learning and enablement platforms to make the process more user-friendly and efficient. After months of planning and testing, the firm launched the Allego platform at a national sales meeting in December 2018.

“When we officially launched on the big stage, people were clapping because the videos were so compelling and relatable.”

The Allego video sales training became an instant hit with the audience. “Both of us were over the moon because of the reaction from the audience,” said the director. “When we officially launched on the big stage, people were clapping because the videos were so compelling and relatable. The two of us thought, ‘Wow, this is actually happening. This is awesome. This is affirmation.’”

Empowering the Sales Team with High-Impact Video

Since the launch, the director and VP have been continually impressed with the immediacy and power of Allego videos as a communications and sales training tool.

“As a salesperson going into a product pitch meeting with a client, you once had to memorize a bunch of talking points and try to keep them straight,” said the VP. “Today, instead of reading a bunch of literature, you can pull up a video of one of our top salespeople talking about how he pitches ETFs (Exchanged Traded Funds), and watch that in about five minutes.

“Then, you can take a couple of bullet points from the video you just watched, and convey that to an advisor client. That is so much more impactful than anything you could come up with on your own. If I can do that, I’m a much more powerful salesperson. I’m going to be using the best ideas that people are sharing throughout the organization,” said the VP.

Raising the Visibility of Training

Thanks to Allego, the director and VP find themselves “getting golden opportunities to meet with various teams and individuals at all levels of the company” to record employees’ thoughts after face-to-face trainings or to capture important news, updates and product messaging changes from key leaders and subject matter experts.

“Allego has given our training approaches a lot of visibility internally, which has been beneficial from a career growth perspective as well,” said the director. They’ve also launched a number of video contests to increase employee engagement with Allego.

Improving Communication and Product Rollout

Word of Allego’s ease of use and impact spread quickly through the team. Despite the social distancing requirements and remote work arrangements caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Allego has helped to strengthen the relationships between members of different departments, between sales reps, and between reps and their clients.

Now the firm’s portfolio managers have the ability to get information out in a way that’s quick, easy and so seamless for them that it’s made collaboration much stronger. These subject matter experts are normally very difficult to get time with because of how in-demand they are internally.

“A portfolio manager wanted to announce a change on one of our largest products. Previously, not many people in the firm had heard him speak or were familiar with his philosophy,” said the VP. “But one day he came by our desks and said he’d like to get a video out to the sales team. We met in the office and recorded a five-minute video. Ten minutes later, it was in the salespeople’s hands, and they were all hearing from him directly.

“For sales reps, being able to hear this product change straight from his mouth … to have that change and be able to communicate it to clients so quickly was super, super powerful.”

Driving Sales and Proving ROI

Although there was plenty of anecdotal evidence to indicate that Allego was helping to improve sales and client relationships, the VP and director wanted empirical proof. They enlisted the company’s business intelligence unit to get answers to three key questions:

• Do Allego “heavy users” have better sales than “light users?”
• Does the firm see higher ETF sales/interactions when sales teams watch ETF-related sales training videos?
• Do sales teams run more Portfolio Strategy (PS) reports for clients when they watch PS videos?

The answer to all three questions was yes. Business intelligence confirmed that Allego was having a significant bottom-line impact. The report found a statistically significant correlation between Allego usage and inflows—the highest producing sales teams are also heavy users of Allego videos. This has led to more purchases, more net flows, and more interactions.

“ETF video view count is highly correlated with ETF purchase and net inflows. In other words, the more sales teams watch ETF-related videos, the better they sell.”

“Allego is a great tool to quickly learn the most recent product updates and the heavy users are benefiting from the tool,” says the report.

Business intelligence also discovered that “the ETF video view count is highly correlated with ETF purchase and net inflows.” In other words, the more sales teams watch ETF-related videos, the higher their confidence in the messaging and the better they sell. The report also concluded that the more sales teams watch Portfolio Strategy-related videos, the more PS reports are run, which statistically leads to more revenue.

“We were very happy and excited by these results,” said the director. “The report lends credibility to everything we’ve been trying to do and articulate. We believe in Allego, but it was nice to have some proof.”

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