When you’ve only got a handful of sales reps it’s easy to work out who should attend the trade shows. But what happens when you’ve got dozens, hundreds or even thousands of reps?
Many companies are now taking a more scientific approach to preparing reps to work by identifying which reps are most prepared to attend a specific event. Plus, sales leaders can take it a further step to certify reps they’ll have confidence that reps will always be taking their A game to the key events. By the way, i
t’s possible to achieve this in less than ten minutes per sales rep. By r
ecording a short video to capture their level of readiness you can ascertain if they’re ready. Here are some questions to ask during the video recording:
Why are you best suited to attend this trade show?
What kind of prospects are you targeting at the event?
What will be your elevator pitch to them?
What are your goals for the trade show?
The reps can record their responses and elevator pitches on their mobile device or desktop computer. These can then be approved and certified by subject matter experts and the top certified reps selected to attend the trade show. The good news is the process is straightforward and simple enough that you can use it every time you’re investing in a trade show, so you’ll always have only your best reps in attendance.
According to research, 91% of Millennials expect to stay in their current job for three years or less, with 45% of companies reporting higher turnover rates among this group vs. other generations. They have no problem leaving a job for one that will be more accommodating to their millennial characteristics such as personal values and ambitions, holding these at a premium over career advancement in their current company. While Millennials are ambitious to move up in their careers, loyalty to the organization is not a particularly strong value.
If this is setting off your alarms, you are not the only one. Many hiring managers are concerned with the rapid job turnover of Millennials. You already know the impact of losing an employee after a short time after having invested in their learning and development.
It is critical to understand Millennial characteristics and how to keep them engaged at work.
Irrespective of the long-term aims and ambitions of an individual company, the ability to attract and retain millennial talent will be a vital step to achieving it.
– PwC’s 14th Annual Global CEO Survey
Here are 10 key personality traits human resources managers and learning and development professionals should understand when cultivating today’s Millennials to be tomorrow’s business leaders.
1. Millennial characteristics: motivated by meaning
What else do they want for career happiness? Millennials are constantly on the lookout for a job that provides more “meaning”. What does “meaning” mean, exactly? Through interviews, Fast Company uncovered that meaningful work allows you to:
Share your gifts
Make an impact in the lives of others
Live your desired quality of life.
Getting these three components to align is the goal, but it’s certainly not easy. Millennials derive a sense of meaning from helping others, with 84% agreeing with the statement, “Knowing I am helping to make a positive difference in the world is more important to me than professional recognition.”
Finding meaning in their work isn’t just a “wouldn’t it be nice” factor – it’s fundamental. 77% of Millennials stated that their ability to excel in their job is contingent upon deriving meaning from their work. Unfortunately, less than half report feeling that they actually get this sense of “meaning”. Clearly, the structures currently in place by most organizations to motivate Millennials simply aren’t cutting it.
According to the 2013 Millennial Impact Research Report, organizations will know their message is resonating when Millennials are compelled to share their content. It’s an instant feedback loop that tells organizations what this audience finds interesting and worth disseminating. Sharing, in fact, is a form of indirect advocacy, in that it furthers education about the cause and draws other people to the issue.
2. Millennials challenge hierarchical structures
Millennials aren’t afraid to share their opinions and ideas, nor challenge those of their superiors. This comes not from a disdain for authority, but from the notion that the best possible outcome for the company will come from listening to everybody’s point of view.
They prefer a cross-functional way of working that transcends the constraints of rank, genuinely believing this is better for the business than blindly following orders passed down from the top of the totem pole.
3. Millennials want a relationship with their boss
Millennials want a manager that they can regard as a mentor, even a friend. They want to feel comfortable asking for feedback and advice and establishing a rapport of frequent communication. They work best in companies where they feel they have a “work family”, with co-workers and superiors looking out for them as individuals, not just trying to retain them as a “resource”.
4. Millennials are tech savvy, to say the least
Millennials breathe technology – though that may be an understatement… 53% of millennials said they rather get rid of their sense of smell than their digital devices. These “digital natives” grew up playing educational games in middle school and expressing themselves on social media in high school. In the work setting, Millennials don’t just approve of using social media, they insist on it, with 56% saying they would not accept jobs from companies that ban social media. They disagree with the notion that social media is a productivity-suck, having a keen understanding of the many ways that it can support a company’s business goals. Millennials have a firm grasp on how to use these tools to do things like build relationships, crowdsource solutions and research information on demand.
5. Millennials are open to change
Millennials don’t agree with doing something a certain way just because that’s how it’s always been done. They recognize that the business and technology landscape is constantly changing and that our ways of working should change with them. This gives them the reputation of sticking their nose up at the status quo, but with how quickly things are changing – is this really a bad thing?
6. Millennials are task (not time) oriented
69% of Millennials say they believe office attendance on a regular basis is unnecessary and 89% prefer to choose when and where they work rather than being placed in a 9-5 position. This is because they measure productivity by work completed, not by time spent in the office. They see no point in tracking an employee’s “facetime”, finding more importance in the actual value that he or she delivers to the organization. They are comfortable telecommuting and don’t mind working late nights and weekends, while recognizing the importance of taking personal time to recharge, for themselves and for their work. The ability to be flexible with when and where they do their work allows them to make more room for family and personal pursuits, aspects which they hold in high regard. For this reason, 45% of Millennials will choose a workplace with more flexibility over one with higher pay
7. Millennials have a hunger for learning
Just because Millennials are out of college, doesn’t mean they want to be done with learning. In fact, a strong millennial characteristic is that they are eager to continue expanding their skill sets and amassing knowledge, and holding intellectual stimulation as a top factor in workplace motivation.
Beyond understanding how to perform a task – Millennials want to know why. 95% said that they are motivated to work harder when they understand the importance of a particular task within the context of the company’s big-picture goals.
Also, social media is a key channel for learning and information transfer. According to the 2013 Millennial Impact Research Report, Millennials who want constant updates on an organization no longer rely on or return to websites to receive that information. Instead, they use websites first to learn about the organization, and then to connect with its social networks to stay updated. The smoother and more integrated the online experience, the better.
8. Millennials crave constant feedback
80% of Millennials said they want to receive regular feedback from their managers. They don’t want to have to wait for their mid-year review, preferring to receive bite-size feedback more often. They want to have clarity on how they’re doing day-by-day, seeing performance management as an ongoing journey, vs. a one-off event.
9. Millennials want recognition
Millennials also expect recognition for their hard work and accomplishments, with 89% saying a reward should be given for a job well done. This isn’t because this generation is needy and self-centered, rather – it’s because they crave indications that their superiors approve of their work. Unlike previous generations, they’re not holding off for the promotions and raises promised down the road – they want to know if they’re being successful today.
10. Millennials (don’t just) want to have fun!
Arguably, everyone wants to have fun – but Millennials want and even expect it in the workplace. With their less formal, task-oriented approach to work – they want to be able to have light moments in the workplace. This shouldn’t be confused with laziness or lack of professionalism – indeed, Millennials find business value in bonding with teammates and taking a break for creative inspiration. Not surprisingly, 90% of Millennials want their workplace to be social and fun, and 88% say that a positive company culture is essential to their dream job.
Next steps for learning and development professionals
Provide mentoring and coaching. Millennials respond well to mentoring from more experienced employees. They would like to see their manager as a coach who supports them in their professional development – just keep in mind that they generally prefer to learn by the application than by being told what to do.
Set clear targets and offer regular and structured feedback. Millennials welcome and expect detailed regular feedback. 51% of those questioned said feedback should be given very frequently or continually on the job and only 1% said feedback was not important to them. That’s huge!
Cultivate an environment of continuous learning. Millennials expect ongoing learning as they enter the workplace and spend a high proportion of their time absorbing new information. 35% said they were attracted to employers who offer excellent training and development programs for this reason and saw it as the top benefit they wanted from an employer.
Invest in learning technology. Millennials respond well to a range of digital learning styles and delivery methods, which might include online learning modules, webinars or interactive game-play. They are innately collaborative and accustomed to learning in teams and by doing.
Offer training in workplace behavior and culture. Human resources leaders have found that millennials often require training in fundamental workplace behavior and culture. Because they are accustomed to instant responses when they chat with friends via text, they may not realize that older workers do not always treat messages with the same urgency.
By understanding the millennial generation characteristics outlined above, companies can address the professional values that make this demographic so different from past generations.
On-the-job training and continuous professional development is a critical aspect of any sales development rep’s role within an organization. Ongoing training provides many benefits, including updated best practices and strategy, improved messaging, new prospecting methods, and ensured adoption of the latest tools and technologies to assist in the sales process.
Regardless of how savvy your sales development reps appear on the job, even your sales vets can benefit from revisiting skill training and building on their foundation of learning and understanding. We asked our own internal team of sales development reps at QuotaFactory where they felt they could benefit from additional training and found there were 5 key areas for sales development managers to focus their ongoing training efforts on:
1. The role of role play
It is natural for SDRs to experience call reluctance, especially when every phone call can be slightly different than the last. The sales development rep that frequently projects anxiety over picking up the phone and tends to rely heavily on email needs a confidence boost and perhaps, more phone training.
Solution: Improvising on a phone call is a skill that will come with time and practice. The best solution is to use role play. SDRs should role play with their manager as well as their peers. Assign each participant a different “persona” to challenge the SDR to adapt to new calling scenarios so they become more comfortable with the process.
Tip: Mindtickle has a role-play feature in which you can create real-life scenarios for your SDRs to train and also allows you to give them specific constructive feedback.
2. Keep employee morale up
Using the phone to prospect inevitably means dealing with a variety of personalities on a daily basis. Therefore, SDRs must hone their ability to control their emotional response in any given situation. Every day, SDRs must control their aggravation with rude or condescending prospects and must be able to rise above negativity to remain positive for the next dial and conversation. Mastering positivity goes hand in hand with learning how to manage patience when it comes to reaching the metrics required of every SDR. It can be tough to maintain enthusiasm when effort doesn’t match results.
Solution: As a sales development manager, you must be the outlet for your SDRs. Maintain a healthy relationship with them and let them know your door is always open. Talking through negative conversations can be just as beneficial as learning from the good ones. Also, it’s important that your SDRs take small incremental breaks from the phone whether it be to take a lap around the office, play a game of ping pong, or walk outside for a breather. This helps retain their patience and resets their positivity for future calls.
3. Skills that can be mastered off the phone
SDRs have a lot less live conversations than they do dials on their report. This means that there is added pressure to make every live conversation count. Pressure equals nerves.
Solution: Practice and rework messaging strategies. Review objection handling, one-sentence “what we do” statements and key questions to ask to uncover pain points and maintain conversations. Continue with this practice until the rep’s tone of voice is even, the pace of conversation is moderate, and they can easily direct the conversation.
4. A well-documented and accessible playbook
We’ve all heard the statistic; salespeople spend way too much time on administrative tasks. Maintaining an effective and efficient daily schedule while also keeping track of accounts, call plans, and data can be overwhelming without a clearly defined process in place.
Solution: Daily structure is something your SDRs will need constant help with. Create and provide easy access to a sales playbook to define best practices. Try to automate and streamline this process for your entire team and keep all of the materials in a local place like within the Mindtickle platform.
5.Keep reminders handy
Handling an objection plus the added complication of nerves can result in some pretty quick talking. SDRs must master the skill of controlling the speed of their speech, no matter how badly the prospect on the other end of the line throws them off their game.
Solution: This is an important skill that can be acquired over time. Try posting a sticky note with the reminder to “SPEAK SLOWLY” on the SDRs computer screen. One-way call recording is also an effective training method, some reps may be surprised as to what they hear. The first step to fixing a problem is understanding and acknowledging the issue.
For growing companies that have pursued a targeted or global channel strategy, there comes a point in time when they have to look at how to align their internal sales enablement and their channel partner enablement strategies. Speaking to many customers who are facing this challenge, there’s no silver bullet that magically brings the two together, and surprisingly some didn’t actually think it was necessary to align the two closely at all.
After all the two functions are run as separate initiatives. Separate teams, separate accountabilities and their own unique problems. However, as we work closely with many sales enablement and partner enablement teams, I’ve found that there are some good opportunities for businesses to leverage synergies between the two departments.
Overlapping perspectives
As both sales and channel partner teams are trying to get sales reps ready to sell, there are natural areas where their needs overlap. But the level of control and relationship between an internal sales team and a channel partner team are markedly different. Channel partner reps’ motivations for selling your product differ and their go-to-market models are certainly not the same. This means the approach to enablement also needs to differ.
But there are similarities in terms of the type of customer conversations each needs to have in order to sell your product, and of course, they need to understand what they’re selling. These similarities make onboarding a good place to start looking for opportunities for synergies between your two enablement programs.
Leverage similarities in onboarding programs
By leveraging existing onboarding programs created for your internal sales teams many of our customers have been able to exploit the similarities across the two channels; saving time and significant cost in the process. The key is knowing how to differentiate between the programs so that they are suitable for their audience.
For example, a recommended framework for channel partner onboarding could follow the same base plan. While your internal sales reps have a
30, 60 and 90-day plan
, you could structure it as a tiered program for your channel partner reps. Not all your channel partners want to go through a full-blown onboarding program, and that’s why you have tiered program. A premium partner would go through all three tiers. Each rep could graduate to a new level of responsibility after completing each certification (or tier).
Just like your internal onboarding program is aligned in your CRM, you could use your partner relationship management platform (PRM) to structure your tiers.
While the first two points address the issue of time and cost, the third one highlights a particular difference between internal sales onboarding and channel partner onboarding. While you measure engagement metrics for internal sales reps, they may not apply to your channel partner reps. After all, their motivations to learn and sell your product may be entirely different and influencing them largely out of your control.
Customize where appropriate
A few of the customers I spoke to have found that a standardized approach to onboarding isn’t always the best way to motivate channel partner reps, but this is really dependent on the type and mix of channel partners that they had. For example, one business has a channel partner who, in their own right, has a significant presence and personality in the market. They felt that this warranted them creating an exclusive partner enablement environment for their reps. They injected it with their channel partner’s brand personality and aligned it with other training that they implemented. This, in turn, engages their channel partner reps and helped get them ramped up quickly.
Differentiation is sometimes necessary
While enablement initiatives can be leveraged for channel partners, there are certain initiatives that many felt required differentiation. One such area is when it comes to providing talking points for your channel partner reps. Particularly for your Type 1 and 2 reps, this is a key way to engage and keep them motivated to sell your product. Talking points may be in the form of success stories that give them ideas on new ways to sell your product or new product feature launches that provide an interesting value addition to your product.
For Type 3 channel partner reps it is essential to their continued success that they are enabled in the same way your internal sales reps are. Each product update or change in the competitive landscape can make the difference between closing the sale or not, so they need to be enablement needs are more involved for ongoing readiness.
Coaching is another area where enablement initiatives are more difficult to leverage for Type 1 and 2 channel partners. This is because it isn’t always practical for these channel partner reps to get to the level of detail required to invest in video certifications for example. Some either omitted this completely, while those with Type 1 channel partners who have more sophisticated tiered programs added this into their program.
Enablement must benefit the users
While it is possible to align your sales and channel partner enablement efforts, the key takeaway I had from my discussions was that it was always necessary to remember who your audience is and what they need when designing enablement initiatives. With this in mind it is possible to leverage existing material, but inevitably there will be differences that need to be accommodated. After all, your endgame is to sell more, and the better equipped your channel partner reps are to do this the higher your chance of success.
We’ve been growing our sales team rapidly to generate exponential revenue growth.
My colleague and I are responsible for Sales Enablement at Mindtickle and we’ve been charged with the challenge of onboarding of our new sales reps over the coming months. As we’re both relatively new to this role, it’s a rather daunting task.
The key items we’re focused on are
Ensuring the sales readiness of our new reps as a matter of urgency
Ensuring our onboarding and enablement programs are robust enough to facilitate ongoing growth
Developing and executing a strategy that ensures our new hires are productive at the earliest possible time… or sooner.
One of the advantages of working at Mindtickle is that we have the opportunity to learn from the best sales enablement professionals in the business, as many are our clients. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity we spoke to sales enablement pros like Cherise Chin, Tom Levey, Tracy Meersman, Pete Childers and learned how they went about designing their world-class programs.
They each had some interesting suggestions about how to put together and implement an onboarding plan, the high-level takeaways that we had were:
Each of them reinforced that their single biggestobjective was to prepare their reps for the moment of truth. In a rapidly changing environment reps can’t afford to miss an interaction or opportunity to sell. So the moment of truth can be any time they have an opportunity to accelerate their sales. What became obvious from our discussions was that the moment of truth was different depending on the team. For some, it was when an SDR made a cold call. For others, it was when their account executive uncovered a deep pain point of a customer. In other situations, could be when a solution architect presents an innovative solution for improving the business process of a prospect. Identifying when the moments of truth were for our sales team was the first step.
Once we understood our moments of truth it was necessary to solve for them. So when we spoke to our leadership team, our discussions were now elevated to a new level. Rather than talking about content and process, we were brainstorming how our onboarding program should look in order to create a culture of sales excellence. Irrespective of the outcome, we want every prospect who speaks to a Mindtickle sales rep to have an experience that leaves them thinking our reps are awesome. It’s our job to prepare them for this.
Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a need to look at onboarding from a very functional level. Our reps need to understand and appreciate the typical customer pain points, how to solve for them, our product, sales process and case studies for example. But by focusing on the bigger picture, we could approach our onboarding from a different perspective.
So with this in mind, here’s how we approached our onboarding program.
Week 1: Vision Readiness
The objective this week was to bring our new reps into our overall vision for the business and where sales fit in.
This was about addressing the Why and What of Mindtickle to our customers.
The “Why”
Why does Mindtickle exist?
Why do our customers love us?
Why do our customers face sales readiness’ challenges?
Why do our customers need our product to address these challenges?
The “What”
What problem do we solve for our customers?
What value do we add to our customers?
What specific Mindtickle features add the most value?
The first thing we did was speak to key stakeholders from within our business, such as Product, Customer Success and of course Sales and Marketing. We then allocated topics to each and asked them to create relevant sales missions on Mindtickle. For example, our CEO Krishna Depura created sales missions on our Corporate Values and Company Background. Customer Success created some product use cases and our marketing team completed the missions on buyer personas.
Co-ordinating people is no easy task, so we used the messaging functionality on Mindtickle to appoint each individual to record their pitches on the sales mission. This helped keep our project on track. And by crowdsourcing the content we were able to create about 20 sales missions in under 90 minutes. Thanks to the reminder functionality it took just a couple of days for all the videos to be created for week one of the onboarding program. In just another 30 minutes of my time, the sales missions were organized and ready for a new hire. This covered a large range of content that new hires would need to know about our business, customers, and product.
Once the new hires started to join they each were invited to complete the onboarding program. Using the Mindtickle analytics dashboard we were able to go in and see who had completed the program, how they had performed, what badges they’d earned and whether they struggled with any of the content.
Week 2: Product readiness
This week we honed in on the specific aspects of our product that work and how they are used by our customers. Following a similar process to week one, we got in touch with our Product and Customer Success teams to create sales missions covering The How.
The “How”
How does our product work?
How do sales enablement professionals use Mindtickle?
How do sales reps use Mindtickle?
How do sales managers use Mindtickle?
Within a couple of days, we had a treasure trove of content to ensure our new reps were product-ready. We anticipate iterating this process regularly as this module will continuously evolve as our Customer Success team keeps discovering new ways that our customers use Mindtickle to solve for their specific moments of truth.
Week 3: Sales Readiness
Being sales ready for our product is ensuring that our reps can handle any conversation. So it isn’t about developing a standard pitch that they use verbatim, but rather learning how to pitch for different scenarios.
The pitch
How do you make an elevator pitch?
How do you pitch for existing and new use cases?
When creating content for this week, the focus was on practice rather than listening to missions and completing quizzes. For example, for our new SDRs we created seven different scenarios for them to practice and become certified in.
At the end of the three weeks, our reps were then certified and ready to start putting what they’d learned into practice. But this didn’t mean they were onboarded yet, there’s still a way to go before they’re productive. We’ll share more detail about our onboarding plan in our next post.
We know how important it is to measure the readiness our sales reps and the impact enablement initiatives have had on their ability to perform at the moment of truth, but how does it differ when you’re managing channel partners? In my customer conversations recently I’ve been speaking to channel partner managers to find out how they ensure their partners are ready to sell and how they track their own partner enablement initiatives.
[Tweet “How do the best in the business ensure their channel partners are ready to sell?”]
When you consider partner enablement there are some important questions that need to be asked and answered. I found a very useful summary of the relevant questions here, and have replicated it below.
While there were some differences, depending on whether their business had an exclusive, targeted or global channel partner strategy, overall I identified three levels of how they measured their channel partners.
[Tweet “There are three levels to measuring the effectiveness of your channel partners”]
1. Partner onboarding completion rate
The first metric that each customer looked at closely was how many of their channel partner’s reps actually finished their onboarding program. This was considered by all to be a good indicator of engagement levels, but most looked at it in terms of the type of partners that they had.
For those channel partner reps who are at Level 3 or have even committed some reps to sell solely their product, they found that their completion rates were often higher. This is because they had the most skin in the game and a lot more to lose if they weren’t doing well. Getting their reps’ onboarding right was step one in this process. For those who didn’t have exclusive reps but had many reps who were at Level 2, they’ve shown commitment and want to move up the ladder. So if their engagement levels aren’t doing well then many found it effective to let their channel manager know so that they could try to rectify the situation. While those who had many channel partner reps who were only at Level 1, many saw any sales of their product as just opportunistic, so when they found that their reps had low engagement levels it was unlikely that this would improve.
2. Partner certification rate
Once the onboarding is completed it doesn’t necessarily mean that the reps were ready to sell. To check that they were on message and understood the sales process many also had a certification. This meant that their channel partner reps’ completed a certification program.
Completing the certification successfully gave the channel partner managers demonstrates that the channel partner reps were ready to get out there and sell. Some even used it as a tool to reward their channel partners, allocating more responsibility or marketing funds to help them sell their product. It also allowed them to identify areas where there may be knowledge gaps or where the onboarding program could be improved in the future, thereby contributing to future enablement initiatives.
3. Correlation of channel partner’s KPIs with performance
Each channel partner manager set certain KPIs for their channel partners. These were aligned to their business objectives, whether it be the level of penetration into a new market or a quota for the number of qualified leads generated.
In order to ensure these KPIs were being achieved, each customer found it helpful to measure them against their enablement initiatives.
For example, one business, that had a global channel partner strategy, would look closely at the number of certified channel partner reps in each target region or industry to determine if their overall channel partner strategy was working. If there was a low level of penetration amongst those channel partners then they would look at finding new partners in that region to expand their potential reach.
While this may work when your organization has hundreds or even thousands of channel partners, it’s not possible to just find another partner if you have an exclusive or even targeted channel partner strategy. For those businesses, they would still correlate their KPIs with performance, but would then look at ways to improve the performance of their existing channel partners first rather than seeking out new ways. This meant that data on knowledge gaps and where engagement levels waned became more important.
Continuously improve your process
Regardless of their channel partner strategy, each customer believed that looking internally was important. Each set-aside time regularly, quarterly or bi-annually, to continuously question, analyze and improve their process.
In this process, each channel partner manager looked at a range of data points including onboarding and certification. For example, one looked at how many of their channel partner’s reps were accessing their monthly updates. Others analyzed what content was being referred to the most. This helped them identify what content was most useful so that they could improve their enablement initiatives.
Ask for what they want
Another method that some of the channel partner managers found very useful was to simply ask their partner reps. For example a couple of times a year you could survey or poll your channel partner reps to obtain feedback and encourage them to share ideas on how the process could be improved. This communication not only proved quite helpful but also increased the level of engagement of channel partner reps had with their product, as they could see they were willing to listen.
[Tweet “Measure the performance of your channel partners by aligning them with your business objectives”]
Regardless of the type of channel partner strategy, you have in place, measuring the performance of your channel partners is about aligning them with your business objectives.
Have you ever had that experience of attending an event, watching a video, reading a blog post, or listening to a TED talk that made you feel captivated and excited to share what you experienced with the world?
Not many people can define what “engaging content” really means when it comes to training. What’s more, many learning professionals are facing significant cost and time pressure to engage new hires, keep employees up to date on compliance, and provide continuing education to further develop the workforce skills. It can be a very overwhelming job, but we have to do it well!
In order to unpack how instructors can design more engaging learning experiences that make employees say “that was awesome”, we chatted with Charbel Semaan, ex-Googler and Yahoo instructional designer, and Mohit Garg, Co-Founder of Mindtickle.
Charbel, what makes content engaging for learners?
Charbel: Engaging content is something a learner would consume even if it wasn’t required. The bulk of corporate training is required content. There’s very little choice in what a learner consumes. Contrast that with social media streams or online streaming video, full of various content.
What makes you click on an article from BuzzFeed? What makes you pick an original series from Netflix or Hulu? I ask myself: What would happen if it was a requirement for me to click on someone’s post from their Twitter feed? Would I be more or less likely to engage?
The balance is between giving learners more choices in content to engage and making required content more likely to spark a desire to engage. For the former, we ought to loosen the reigns in creating rigid curriculum flows for adult learners; for the latter, we could learn much from cross-functional fields like marketing, behavior science, and gaming (e.g. headline copywriting and its relationship to course title copywriting, engaging YouTube videos that make you want to watch over and over, or addictive games like Flappy Birds or Timberman).
Mohit, same question. What makes content engaging for learners?
Mohit: Let’s draw upon differences between how consumer-centric and employee-centric learning are viewed. When you consider consumer-centric learning, for example when learning on sites like Coursera, Skillshare, and Udemy, the learner chooses to invest there because they want to invest in themselves and get smarter.
By contrast, with employee education, the focus is on “how is this person going to benefit my organization” rather than the individual learner. However, the same person who would choose to use tools like Coursera, Skillshare, and Udemy on their own time to learn does not disappear in the work environment.
You can have different personas for your learners in these different contexts but you must keep in mind that their aspirations are the same whether they are at work or learning on their own. To increase engagement, a sense of purpose should align with a person’s aspirations as an individual and as an employee. For millennials, this is even more important.
Gamification can help to create engagement and motivation as well. It provides feedback and can be used to aid in setting aspirational and motivational goals. Social aspects can be tied to the learning experience with gamification.
To increase engagement, a sense of purpose should align with a person’s aspirations as an individual and as an employee.
Charbel, why should leaders care about making training content engaging?
Charbel: If you’re a leader who has ever uttered the words, “We believe in developing our people, their talent” or “We want to provide our partners with the best resources to share/sell our product” then I would hope you show that commitment through engaging educational content.
Otherwise, what are we really telling our employees, colleagues, partners, and customers? I think we’re telling them it’s not important enough to invest in high-quality training content so what we have over here is good enough.
We can learn from cross-functional fields like marketing and bring this to employee training to optimize it. The point I’m making is it that we don’t look at examples of how other functions succeed and we “stay in a silo”.
Marketing and training go hand and hand and the line is increasingly blurred. Incorporating a strong content marketing focus helps engagement which in turn helps people do their job better. I think those lines are blurring in a good way.
Charbel, but what should you do when you have to create engaging training content in an industry or field that most would consider to be “dry” and dare I say “boring”?
Charbel: I was talking with a LinkedIn Technologist about instructional design. She asked me what I considered “instructional sound.” I believe it’s about engagement. My measure of engagement is: would the learner engage with and consume content if they didn’t have to? It can be daunting for educators to have to answer the question: how do you make “boring content” interesting?
My advice takes a look at organizations and brands who do this well. For example, ZenDesk is a customer service tool. You may think it would be tough to make that engaging but they use humour and great branding. There is one feature where they had an old couple talking about customer service topics in a humorous way. Another strategy I’ve seen people use is to be self-deprecating. Go ahead and call out the fact that it isn’t exciting. Making the training as applied as possible also helps.
The bottom line here is to be creative and think about how to connect creative thought to the learning experience. Making an investment in this thought process is not always appealing. However, taking shortcuts is not good enough; we need a mentality shift.
Mohit, what are benefits for leaders who focus on creating more engaging training experiences?
Mohit: Learning investment to date has been driven by 2 motivating factors:
1. fear of loss. Think regulators, compliance, litigation etc…
2. promise of gain. Think more engaged and productive employees. We are all familiar with the “fear of loss” factor. I want leaders to focus on possibilities and potential of investing in the second factor, “promise of gain.”
A growing number of organizations realize the potential benefits of effective onboarding, there is increasing recognition that greater investment in onboarding can translate into a larger ROI. Engaged employees are better for ROI. They have a longer tenure, lower turnover and they get to productivity much more quickly.
From a sales training standpoint, according to an SAP study, salespeople spend 65% of their time searching for information and looking through reports to support selling. Providing the right sales tools and more engaging training allows the salesperson to spend less time researching and more time in front of customers. This is a source of creating value.
Charbel, what are some barriers that prevent learning content from being engaging?
Charbel: In terms of barriers, learning and development and human resources are almost always viewed exclusively as a cost centre. High-quality content and design of training material, courses, and skilled people to do it becomes a question of spend vs. investment.
What further complicates it is the lack of clear measurability of ROI of training content as it relates to revenue, profit, and savings. We focus too much on vanity metrics instead of metrics that have a relationship with the business itself.
Following up on that question, what are some myths about creating engaging content?
Charbel: One of the biggest myths about creating engaging learning content is that good design is meant for websites and apps. Why not training content? Another popular one is that good design is expensive – it doesn’t have to be.
Then there is “I’m not creative enough to make the training look better.” We need to keep in mind that design isn’t just about how something looks.
One of the biggest myths about creating engaging learning content is that good design is meant for websites and apps. Why not training content?
Mohit, are there other barriers or myths you’ve noticed?
Mohit: One barrier I see is learning and development not being in sync with the learner’s persona. Sometimes instructors don’t do enough research on what would be best for the learner.
Another challenge is that the production tools are not agile production tools and/or there is a long production cycle. When this happens the training content is often out of date or is not relevant anymore.
One of the myths I’ve encountered is that some trainers believe throwing in animation and audio effects will make content engaging. The other myth is that you need to have a fancy, professional production set-up for creating visuals. You can do this with your iPhone video camera!
It is more about speaking to the learner and figuring out the audience and context. There is potential in creating content on your own.
Charbel, does it cost a lot to produce engaging content?
Charbel: I think the first thing to consider is emphasizing investment, not cost. From there, it’s easier to make decisions that are based on what’s optimal. Another perspective: Spend on the expensive stuff if it’s the right tool and this can bring value (especially if someone on the team can maximize its value).
For example, don’t buy Adobe CS just so an employee can crop/resize an image in Photoshop. Plenty of free tools to do that. If your employee can make incredible graphics and engaging visuals, however, then why limit them to an inexpensive tool with limited features?
Where you spend more on value for one tool, you can always spend less and save on less important tools and resources.
Mohit, if I am pressed for time and need to scale training in a rapidly changing business environment, what are some effective ways to create a scalable and repeatable process for developing engaging learning content?
Mohit: In this type of environment, facilitating informal learning in your organization is key. This can be accomplished with a social platform and discussion boards with question and answer capability. This will alleviate the need to refresh content and you can create e-learning faster on the fly.
Also, in this type of environment, production at scale is very important. Not everything can go through learning and development. Instead, we need to create a culture where subject matter experts within the business can own content creation.
An agile learning platform can enable business line managers to create content. With complex tools, these subject matter experts will not be empowered. For example, a manager could create a course by copying a template or copying an existing course as a starting point. This is an example of how you can empower experts within your organization to help develop training content.
Charbel, any final words to add?
Charbel: Look at things in a decentralized way. Don’t spend a ton of money on expensive tools. Instead look at tools that help you to achieve the end result. If you don’t need the full features Final Cut Pro, you can use iMovie. Learn how to hack and squeeze every last drop. On the flip side, don’t just get something cheap with limited features. Invest in the “right tool for the job.”
I also encourage you to use design resources as inspiration. Look up what popular people do on Dribbble, YouTube, Visual.ly, etc., to see how they design their content. What can you borrow from them? What dots can you connect between two different media to implement into your training content? This speaks to combinatorial creativity, and Maria Popova and Austin Kleon are two writers who explore the concept of borrowing and connecting dots from other people’s creativity.
Finally, set up a system for success. This will help you save time and gain efficiency. Leveraging templates and a process as much as possible for all types of content helps you nail the editing and publishing process.
For instance, check out Wistia, they use the same set up every time for more efficient video shoots. They have the same lighting and camera placement and markings on the ground. This makes it easy to go shoot in minutes. You can dedicate space to this.
Another example is Moz.com, with their Whiteboard Fridays feature. It is super simple. They use the same whiteboard set up. Also, they shoot everything in one take, this reduces post-production editing.
Thank you Charbel and Mohit for your helpful insight on making training content more engaging!
If you’re interested in achieving “that was awesome” level training experiences, we’d love to connect with you! Let us know your thoughts on how you create more engaging training in the comments.
Charbel Semaan (@charbeljs) helps people and organizations flourish through cognitive science and experience design. He’s worked with high-growth, global teams in product design, marketing, sales, customer success, and talent development at various startups, Google, Yahoo, and Stanford University. Charbel is the founder of Talent Triggers, an innovation and design consultancy.
Mohit Garg (@MohGar) is the Co-Founder of Mindtickle Interactive Media Pvt Ltd. Mr. Garg has a diverse work experience spanning across 14 years and four continents. Prior to co-founding Mindtickle, he served as a Director in PWC’s management consulting practice at New York and is a senior member of product teams. He was awarded “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Startup Leadership Program (SLP) in 2012. Mr. Garg holds an MBA degree from ISB and MSEE from Stanford University.
The first 90 days in a new role is critical, but for a sales rep, it can make or break. There’s so much information for them to learn, from the product and internal processes to customers and the competitive environment, that it’s easy for them to become overwhelmed. To keep your new hires learning, adopting and moving along the path towards their first sale it’s important to structure their first 90 days.
Sales onboarding is all about making sure your rep is sales-ready; ready to connect with your customers and start selling. To reduce their ramp-up time and increase their sales readiness, here’s our roadmap for the first 90 days.
Make sure you’ve covered everything to ramp-up your new hires and make them sales-ready with our sales training checklist.
Customer success is a term that has many different definitions, but as Venture Beat notes each organization chooses what functions it considers important enough to be included within its meaning of customer success.
Regardless of how you define the term, at the core of every customer success function is the customer. Here’s some other quotes that inspire and give me the power to delight.
Tweet This: Customer success is about more than delivering service or support.
Tweet This: Smart companies have realized that customer loyalty is the most powerful sales and marketing tool that they have.
Bill Price, Founder of Driva Solutions
Tweet This: With the shift to the SaaS model, the connection between your customer’s success and your success is much more direct and felt more quickly.
Ken Lownie, Founder of Ken Lownie Consulting Partners
Tweet This: Make sure every single employee in your company knows precisely what value your customers are seeking and how he or she can impact it.
Tom Krackeler, VP & GM Z-Insights Product Line, Zuora
Tweet This: A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.
Michael LeBoeuf, Professor Emeritus and Author
Tweet This: We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
Tweet This: Once you create a loyal customer base, it’s tough for a competitor to take that away.
Joe Mansueto, Founder and CEO at Morningstar Inc
Most of your competition spends their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn’t.
Until you know what it takes to achieve success from your customers’ perspective you will just waste valuable time doing things that will have little long-term impact.
Jason Whitehead, CEO at Tri Tuns
Tweet This: As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.
Jef Raskin, Human-Computer interface expert
Tweet This: When you improve your product so it does the customer’s job better, then you gain market share.
When you’ve only got a handful of sales reps it’s easy to work out who should attend the trade shows. But what happens when you’ve got dozens, hundreds or even thousands of reps?
For growing companies that have pursued a targeted or global channel strategy, there comes a point in time when they have to look at how to align their internal sales enablement and their channel partner enablement strategies. Speaking to many customers who are facing this challenge, there’s no silver bullet that magically brings the two together, and surprisingly some didn’t actually think it was necessary to align the two closely at all.
We’ve been growing our sales team rapidly to generate exponential revenue growth.
“What gets measured gets done.”
