Five for 5: Five Tips to Virtualize a 5-Day Sales Certification Bootcamp

Whether you’re a sales enablement leader responsible for sales certification or an L&D practitioner ensuring your customer-facing teams are trained, you’re likely strategizing on how to engage and coach your remote teams. Typically, you’d develop a bootcamp for in-depth training or sales onboarding, but these aren’t normal times. Your challenge is creating a virtual equivalent to the traditional 5-day sales certification in-person bootcamp slated for the end of the quarter. How do you take a “tried and true” certification program, that your organization has delivered in person for years, and successfully transition to a fully virtual offering? First, take a deep breath… Here are 5 critical tips for effectively transitioning a certification enablement bootcamp to online delivery.

Don’t Try to Recreate the In-Person Experience
This may seem like a no brainer, but when a certification program is an established institution at an organization, it may be hard to conceptualize anything else. Start by taking a close look at your agenda and decide what can be adapted or even cut out altogether. Activities like, introductions, company overviews, and trainer backgrounds could be provided ahead of time or cut completely.

Consider a Blended Approach
Use a blended framework that includes pre-work, self-paced content, virtual roleplay (e.g. Mindtickle Missions) and webinars to create an engaging learning experience. Assign pre-work and reading before the training begins. Asking sales leadership to record a video that demonstrates a best-in-class pitch or demo is a great way to keep learners engaged. (Pro tip: Be sure to keep it short and simple) Create self-paced voice over slideshows and pre-recorded videos to teach information and show what great looks like. Save the webinar (in person time) for discussions and Q&A. Consider requiring participants to complete pre-work in order to participate in the program. This will increase engagement and motivate learners to come prepared.

Focus on Skills
Re-evaluate your objectives and focus on the specific skills needed for certification. You will probably need to adjust the agenda and even the content in order to stay skills centered. Remember, while it may be important to know the five product lines at your company, focus only on the ones they are currently studying. Provide opportunities to apply their skills using virtual roleplay activities that include constructive feedback from managers or trainers. Consider using scenario based questions to reinforce skills and knowledge, then complement that with incentives to drive engagement. For example, Mindtickle leverages gamification and allows team members to earn badges as they go.

Communicate Early and Often
Write communications with a “what’s in it for me” mindset and set/send expectations well ahead of time. Be sure to clearly state due dates, timelines, technical requirements, and pre-work. Don’t forget to communicate with managers and leadership as well. They should be aware of the changes to the program and any new expectations so they can answer or direct questions. Additionally, if managers will participate in roleplay activities, it’s important they are enabled on the tools used and provided guidance on the activity parameters. Follow up with at least one additional communication prior to the first day of the training.

Review and Refine
As you move the certification program from in-person to virtual, it’s critical that you evaluate participant feedback, engagement, and performance during and after the program. Use polls or surveys after each section to gauge learner experience. Use the data to look for trends or gaps that need to be addressed. Be prepared to make changes on the fly. Creating a scalable program can be challenging but have a big impact on outcomes.

Using these strategies as well as a robust Sales Readiness platform, such as Mindtickle, you can confidently deploy your virtual certification program. To learn more about Mindtickle’s enablement platform request a demo here. Or if you’re already a customer and have any questions, please reach out to your Mindtickle Customer Success representative.

For more information, please see our page about how Mindtickle supports virtual and online sales events.

Sales Replanning without Anxiety: An Enablement Leader’s Practical Perspective on Executing an Effective Virtual Business Review

Business reviews are especially critical at the moment in aligning sales and management teams to adjusted targets, current quarter forecasts as well as a unified and standardized message. With no options to meet face-to-face, it is imperative that your virtual replanning and review strategy be one that is inclusive and prescriptive, including collaboration with internal departments that have a stake in ensuring messaging and sales execution is done correctly. Getting the same level of involvement and team participation from collaborators (now in different zipcodes and timezones) can be impossible if you rely on a multi-hour or multi-day live streaming session or default to passing documents back and forth over content channels. 

Luckily sales readiness technology such as Mindtickle can assist with soliciting feedback from the field team and managers, account planning and pre-meeting territory reviews. By enabling video or screen share submissions, auto- and manager-driven, 1:1 reviews, sellers benefit from  proper preparation and are impactful. Activities such as pre-work and video role play are great tools to include to increase participation, while gamification drives engagement that’s fun and effective. In my experience there are two key elements common to every successful QBR or business review I have been part of that I believe are critical in today’s environment.

Consideration #1

Business reviews should not be an anxiety-inducing exercise for sellers…far from it.  Sellers should look forward to receiving feedback from leaders and cross-departmental stakeholders to increase their skills and tactics. 

Tip:

  • Sessions need to be upbeat, positive, and encouraging for sellers, and more importantly, this keeps them engaged and involved. 
  • Sales enablement leaders should ensure that the content being presented at business reviews correlate back to competencies and skills that have been identified as key to an individual seller’s success. For sales leaders, this can help in better evaluating skills gaps and learning opportunities that either hindered or helped in driving sellers to get their prospects converted through each stage of the sales process.

Consideration #2

Business reviews shouldn’t be an overwhelming experience in the amount of information that’s presented.  Consider the requirements and venue of your remote workforce since the business review will be done via video conference.

Tip: 

  • Enablement leaders will have to reinforce a lot of the messaging, so keep it to just the essentials. If there is content that would be better delivered post business review as a follow-up, don’t include it in the core content. To encourage further engagement, include as much content from the field as possible. No one understands better what is happening in the field than the sellers so learning from each other is key to a seller’s success. 
  • Keep content as applicable as possible. Sales theories and methodologies are important to any sales strategy, but business reviews are a time to put those theories into practical application that lead to closing more business for the sellers. 

I hope you enjoyed my thoughts and that you can benefit from the strategies and tactics I mentioned above. Learn more by downloading our Complete Guide and watch our demo video for running a virtual business review that inspires your organization.