Fidelity Launches Metrics-Driven Sales Training Powered by Allego

Situation: Enabling a Global Sales Force

Not so long ago, sales training and enablement at Boston-based Fidelity Investments was about shepherding a group of reps into a room to watch presentations from a small team of trainers. Afterward, learning managers like Rebecca Martin, Vice President, Sales/RM Learning and Engagement, often had to rely on intuition and “gut instincts” to determine the return on investment (ROI) from a particular program.

For a company that has a large selection of products and services and a diverse set of customers, it needed a more concrete method. Fidelity provides investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage, and many other financial products. And its customers, located around the world, include individual investors, businesses that manage their employees’ benefits, and advisors who use Fidelity’s products to invest their client’s money.

Challenge: Putting Numbers to the Training

Since Fidelity’s early days, its number of sales associates has nearly tripled (while the number of trainers has not), and decisions are now data-driven. Best guesses have been replaced by hard numbers and training ROI figures.

“We have to think differently about how we’re engaging our folks and measuring results,” said Martin. “When it comes to training, we have to show numbers. We have to show movement. We have to show adoption. We have to show the return on investment with those tools, and translate that to a return on learning (ROL). Can we attribute sales to a training class that we ran? We have to show metrics.”

Specifically, Martin and her team have to demonstrate that their processes are efficient and consistently drive measurable results against the company’s objectives. To ensure learning programs and processes are aligned with these objectives, Martin’s team focuses on four critical areas: (1) awareness, (2) knowledge (and knowledge retention), (3) skills application, and (4) behavior change.

“The good news,” said Martin, “is Allego helps us out in all four key areas.”

Solution: More Efficient and Effective Onboarding

While Fidelity used Allego to revamp both new-hire onboarding and coaching for seasoned reps, the greatest impact has been its ability to improve learning efficiency and effectiveness, and provide data-driven ROL, in the onboarding program.

To start, the enablement team enlisted Allego to lighten the workload of its “small, but mighty team,” implementing mobile, video-based asynchronous learning where possible (instead of time-consuming live presentations); Q&A sessions; and skills exercises. Unlike many enablement organizations, which have multiple locations to store sales collateral, videos, activities, and other content, Fidelity’s team used Allego to consolidate all of its training, coaching, and enablement content into a single, easily accessible location.

Allego also provides Fidelity’s sales reps and managers with “a very easy way to communicate and share real-time feedback,” says Kaitlyn Schoenewolff, Director, Learning RM, Investment Sales. “For example, as part of our new-hire training, we have each rep record themselves leaving a sample voicemail to one of our clients. ‘What would you say in this voicemail to capture their attention? How would you spark that curiosity with an advisor?’ We’ll have them record a video, and I can then provide real-time feedback in a comment within the video. I can provide comments throughout, and also score them based on the measurements we choose.”

Using Allego, Fidelity’s enablement team can:

• Provide the sales team with greater transparency in the form of learning and engagement data, which allows trainers to determine what’s working, and what’s not, and then revise and enhance the program.
• Offer reps a simple and more engaging way to learn and test new skills and  knowledge.
• Scale to add new types of learners quickly. The team can roll out successful initiatives across all training programs throughout the year, and make tweaks along the way to enhance them even further.

“From a reinforcement standpoint, I know exactly where I need to spend time honing certain skill sets. This is a level of insight that I didn’t have before Allego,” Martin said.

Recently, Allego helped facilitate the development and embedding of discrete learning programs within the larger onboarding program.

“Allego allowed us to take a subset of courses, assignments, quizzes, etc., and package them into different learning programs,” Schoenewolff said. “We have about 18 within the program for new-hire training. And we can assign specific days and times that they get released. It’s an automated way for courses or activities or videos to get released to the new hires on a specified days and times throughout their training. It goes right into their tasks within Allego, and the reps know how much time they have to complete each activity.”

Results: Sales Training Makes an Impact

Since the launch of the new onboarding program, Fidelity’s learning team has added more than 14 hours of videos, assignments, and activities to Allego as part of the overall training.

“This freed up 20 hours of the team’s time—20 hours when I would otherwise have been standing in front of the new hires … transferring that knowledge,” said Schoenewolff. “Allego also allowed us to add an additional seven hours of application. That’s 12 additional activities that we were able to put in by building this learning program into our new-hire training.”

Also, after every new-hire training, the reps must complete an assessment that goes over every topic they learned during their new-hire training. Since Fidelity launched the training program, the average lowest score that reps received on the assessment increased by a little over 10 points. And the number of attempts needed to pass the assessment dropped from an average of two to one. In other words, every associate passed on the first try.

“It was a great way to measure ‘Is this working? Is this successful? Are they grasping the content?’ The data showed exactly what that learning program was able to do,” Schoenewolff said.

Schoenewolff’s team has received an overwhelming number of positive responses from the reps about Allego and the impact the platform has had on new-hire training. One rep wrote, for example, that “the Allego videos were a great tool for the program. It allowed me time to pause, take notes, and come to the live sessions with questions.”

“That’s exactly what we were hoping to hear,” said Schoenewolff. “If you’re hearing from me live, it’s much harder for you to say, ‘Hey, can you hold on? Can you repeat that?’ With the videos, they’re able to learn at their own pace and on their own time. They’re able to go back if they didn’t grasp anything, pause, take some notes, write questions down. And when we come back to our live sessions, it’s more impactful because we can answer those questions and have a deep-dive conversation.”