Modern Learning Is Tech-Driven and Peer-to-Peer

Timely access to relevant information is key to sales success. But locating that information when it’s needed most is often difficult (if not impossible), so reps wind up improvising in front of prospects.

Many organizations spend large sums (to no avail) on national sales meetings and other training events to prevent this very situation from happening. Even worse, in sales reps’ personal lives, they enjoy instant access to a virtual universe of content.

Forget the name of that actor from Game of Thrones? Google it.

Need to assemble a complicated item or fix a leaky faucet before company shows up for the weekend? YouTube it.

Thanks to mobile, video and peer networking technologies, anyone with a PC, laptop or mobile device gets immediate access to millions of peer-to-peer and SME (Subject Matter Expert) video demonstrations and commentary, to guide them through whatever task or roadblock they encounter.

One-Room Schoolhouse Sales Training Doesn’t Rock

Modeling people’s engagement patterns with consumer technology is at the heart of modern learning – this paradigm shift sweeping the corporate world. Why is everyone suddenly in a hurry to deliver more relevant, continuous learning to professionals out in the field where they live? Because modern learning technology made it possible for the first time.

For a variety of reasons, however, many companies remain stuck in the “one-room schoolhouse era” of sales training. They stage costly events powered by old technology featuring live speakers, slides and three-ring binders stuffed with printouts. Much of the great information they’re putting out there will either fail to change behavior (if it even gets absorbed) or simply be forgotten by employees within a few weeks.

96 percent of sales reps in a recent survey felt that sales training at their organizations needed improvement. In addition, 65 percent of sales reps said that learning directly from their peers – e.g., discussing sales techniques and strategies, watching peers demonstrate, etc. – was more valuable than their company’s formal training.

Use Mobile Video to Leverage Organizational Knowledge

Training salespeople with live presentations and three ring binders in an era when most people access information with mobile devices is an anachronism.  It’s inefficient and doesn’t make it easy enough for people to learn.

But, like any important innovation, modern learning doesn’t do away with the past: it builds on it. Organizations can’t — and shouldn’t — abandon live training, by any means. There’s too much value there. But get the most out of your investment. “Load” people’s brains with key examples and stories using continuous and bite-sized content leading up the event, and watch the transformation happen in the quality of the training interactions that go on.

Then make sure that some – or all – of the live session gets captured on video and quickly divided up into bite-sized chunks so reps can access it all on the fly later if they need a refresher (or if they missed one).

Or, eliminate some presentations altogether by “bumping” some speakers from a sales meeting and having them recording 15-minute videos of their presentations on their smartphone or tablet instead. The videos go out to attendees a week before the event and thanks to the analytics built into many modern learning platforms, you can confirm whether or not everyone watched the presentations in their entirety before the meeting. After the event, you can take all these videos of top sellers recounting key messages and strategies and push them out to the rest of the pack right on their mobile devices at the appropriate stage of the sales cycle with one or two touches on your smartphone.

Or just make them really discoverable so salespeople find it with one or two touches while perusing on their phone. Good modern learning solutions will even incorporate machine learning to gauge a learner’s topic mastery levels in order to serve up targeted learning content based on ongoing knowledge and skill gaps

Today, much of the content (and hard work) from sales meetings is lost or forgotten soon after the event. But modern learning saves the day. For more on how organizations use Allego to activate modern learning, read our success story How Tableau to Improve Sales Training ROI.