Johnson & Johnson Vision Turns Directed-Learning Into Learner-Driven Using Allego

Situation: Time to Move to Modern Learning

Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision had just reorganized and needed to roll out enablement training to its sales force. But these efforts were hampered by a traditional instructor-led approach and the lack of an easily accessible, centralized content repository. Reps were not able to attend sessions at their convenience, but had to cut into selling time for training.

Challenge: Outdated Training Hinders Rep Success

After joining Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision as Education Specialist, Instructional Design & Development, Training, Melinda Dean confronted challenges on multiple fronts.

“We were doing everything through instructor-led training sessions, and there was no on-demand education. There was no one place for our learners to get all the information they needed, and what we had wasn’t mobile accessible,” Dean said. “We were asking our reps to take time out of the field to sit in their office at their computer or attend a session when they would rather be out selling and working with customers.”

To make matters worse, Dean discovered that much of the sales content was not very appealing—or relevant—to most reps.

“It was very much a directed learning culture. We pushed it out, they checked the box, and they moved on. And there was no ability to share best practices,” said Dean.

After assessing these challenges, Dean decided that her primary focus would be on driving a culture shift. “We wanted to take it from directed learning to learner-driven education. We wanted the reps to crave and consume and want to learn, and to have a place where they could find on-demand content that was easy to access at the moment of need. We wanted to really change the approach to what we were doing, and … this led us to Allego,” she said.

Solution: Organize and Streamline Content with Allego

With a clear vision of what success looked like, the next step was determining where to begin when it came to building out their Allego platform. Dean transferred all the training content into Allego and quickly made the content more accessible, usable, searchable, and scalable for the entire sales organization. “We took the kitchen sink and everything and just dumped it in. But we did it in a way to make it accessible and usable by our learners and searchable,” she said.

Dean created an education catalog named Get Equipped—an on-demand version of every existing e-learning module, which was designed to help reps improve their sales results. Get Equipped is now their most popular channel on Allego, with over 7,000 views.

Rather than pushing out content to multiple different platforms, Allego became the company’s sole repository, ensuring that when reps were looking for the information they needed, they knew there was one place they could go to seek out the answers. Allego was their one-stop shop to access all of the content and training they needed, and also linked out to all of the other external education resources and tools to streamline the user experience.

“We spotlighted different courses, videos, podcasts—all kinds of content—categorized by topics, so it was easy for them to find. Now, if someone needs information about a product, and they’re not sure where to find it, they go to Get Equipped,” Dean said. “We wanted our platform to be Google for our reps. We wanted them to say, ‘I want to come here because I know I can find it,’ so that’s what we built.”

A ‘Branding Campaign’ Drives Engagement

As a former sales rep, Dean knew that simply introducing a new enablement platform would not be enough. She needed to convince the salesforce of the value that Allego could provide for each of them. “We started a branding campaign. I’m always selling, even as an educator, and I knew we had to market Allego to our users to drive engagement—to get them to understand why Allego is different, how it is going to help you, and why this was going to be good,” she said.

Dean used Allego’s analytics and dashboards to measure the outcomes of their “eyeConnect University” advertorial campaign by developing a baseline level of engagement within the platform so they could assess whether they were maintaining growth, understand if users were going into the platform to view and revisit the available content, and how they could address continuing to improve engagement levels over time.

This branding campaign paved the way for the launch of the company’s Talking TECNIS® channel, which has attracted over 2,400 views to date, becoming their third most popular channel on the Allego platform. “We have people going in there multiple times to access content. Right now we have over 2,400 views of 19 items, so it’s very curated,” Dean said.

1,300% in Post-Product Launch Sales Growth

Once Dean began driving traffic to the platform, she decided to pilot an additional use case for Allego: a new product launch. “We had different content, we had completed assignments, pre-training that was optional, and we had a certification. We also launched our first video exercise. The results were outstanding,” she said.

The new product launch was conducted across three different regions. Allego was piloted with Region 3, and Region 1 and Region 2 acted as control groups so they could assess the ROI of the platform. “When we did this product launch, Region 1 had 154% growth. It’s not bad. Our sales leadership was super happy. Region 2 had 173% growth. These two regions were not part of our pilot. They didn’t have Allego. They were doing it the old fashioned way,” Dean said.

The Allego pilot was even more of a success. Region 3 saw 8x the lift in growth compared to the other two control regions, resulting in 1,300% average growth post-product launch certification. The sellers using Allego not only completed 100% of their assigned tasks, but they also achieved 100% of their certifications with score results of 90% or higher.

“This was our pilot. The engagement was there, the process was working, and the word got out,” Dean said. “The other two regions that don’t yet have Allego are saying, ‘Why don’t we have that? We want that. What do we need to do to get it and how can we get involved in this process?’”

“We’re Doing Something Good”

Word spread quickly around the growing excitement for Allego and the future looks bright for J&J Vision. “Right now we’re in the midst of global expansion. We’ve launched in the US. We’re expanding right now into the Americas. In the first quarter of this year, we’ve added 11 AsiaPac countries and we’re launching to China and Japan next. Europe will be on by the end of the year. Word caught on that we’re doing something good,” Dean said.

The company plans to start using Allego for their onboarding and training, as well as pilot Allego Digital Sales Rooms to provide professional education to surgeons they work directly with. They also plan to continue to rely on the support from their Allego Customer Success team to optimize their content strategy and deployment to continue to grow engagement.

“We’re really excited about the platform,” Dean said. “For us, it’s all about shifting the culture from ‘We’re going to push out training’ to ‘We want our learners to just come and get that training.’ We want them to feel like Allego is a place where they can get easy, on-demand access, practice their skills in a safe environment, and shift that culture of directed learning to learner-driven education.”