Sales and launch training to the Pod Generation

Note to management: Your sales and product launch training model is broken. Delivered to the fanfare of polished PowerPoints, soothing monotone of the training staff, and sterile canned speeches by product managers, the launch training is dreaded by sales reps and deemed inefficient by their managers. The situation is so bad that many sales managers are refusing to take their sales people off the street to do training. They are rejecting a launch training model that is both teacher-centric instead of learner-centric and product-centric instead of customer-centric.

The only thing duller than watching the endless parade of PowerPoint slides in a classroom is to watch them on your own laptop. Most Web-based training has merely automated a failed legacy model of learning instead of fixing it, putting people to sleep at their cubicles instead of in the class room. This is a problem for all training, but is exacerbated with the sales force, a breed notorious for its short attention span and pragmatic approach to learning. Anything they can't put to immediate use to help solve customer problems and reach their quotas will be lost on them. Sales people are not going to translate the morass of product information they receive into customer conversation. Instead, they need their training delivered the same way 22 million owners of MP3 players get music delivered: just-in-time and just-in-place.

Traditional launch training is not only ineffective, it's misguided in its focus on products instead of customers. By focusing on features, functions and benefits of individual products, this model treats sales reps as talking brochures. As result, reps spend client meetings spouting product specs instead of asking probing questions about the customer's needs. The average sales reps in one industry, pharma, provides eight product features before mentioning any benefits to the client or asking what the client is looking for. The failure of training organizations to do their job is forcing sales managers to spend time giving reps remedial sales training, taking them away from their strategic work of managing markets and cultivating relationships with the highest value customers.

It doesn't have to be this way. Sales and launch training can deliver tremendous bang for the buck if it's more engaging, more fun, more interactive and more like the computer games, blogs and Podcasts that people of the Pod generation are interacting with on their spare time. Evidence suggests that adults learn more in courses that incorporate such gaming elements as competitive scoring, increasingly difficult player level, and role playing.

A customer and learner centric approach to a launch strategy starts by identifying the performance expectations of each step in the sales cycle. Next step is to develop opportunities for sales people to practice customer conversations at each step. Working in front of the computer, reps can watch video sequences of the customers played by professional actors, ask them questions about their needs, preferences and concerns, and watch video sequences of their responses. Using such online "sales simulations," sales reps get to practice asking the key qualifying questions to diagnose customer problems, prescribing a complete solution to meet these, responding to the most common customer concerns, and making condensed "elevator pitches" of their value proposition.

These same sales simulation-based approaches can be used to recruit and select successful sales reps. It's no longer just Donald Trump who has the opportunity to put his apprentices through real-life scenarios and observe how well they perform. Simulations like the Gronstedt Group developed Car Sales Simulator® simulates this kind of on-the-job experiences for purpose of evaluation, assessment, testing, screening and recruitment.

While simulations are formidable sand boxes for practicing new skills, blogs are emerging as powerful tools to facilitate real-time conversations in far-flung field organizations. Blogs can be used during the product development process to post ideas and solicit feedback and during the launch to reinforce key messages in a format that is as conversational as sales conversations themselves. IBM has about 3,100 internal blogs, protected by a firewall from the outside world, where employees discuss a range of issues. Sales leaders can use internal blogs to comment on recent wins and losses and provide regular motivation. Blogs can also be external to keep in touch with the global client base along with the sales force. That's the purpose behind a blog by IBM's top executive in charge of Lotus Notes sales, Ed Brill. His blog, cleverly named edbrill.com, reports from his meetings with clients, sales teams and user groups around the world and includes pictures from his trips and the occasional rant about every-day topics like the quality of his morning newspaper. IBM customers and sales reps around the world post comments on his musings, creating a global community in real time. Brill argues that such blogs, both internal- and external-facing, are becoming part of the corporate memory, a knowledge management system to capture and retrieve sales experience.

The online logs are increasingly complemented with "podcasted" radio programs. IBM has been podcasting weekly radio shows straight to the iPods of its employees since January. Capital One recently handed out 3,000 iPods to its employees and distributes MP3 audio files on everything from training classes in diversity to the company's quarterly earnings call. Our client experiences has proven that fast-paced, entertaining, radio-style format of a podcast can hold sales people's attention as they drive to client meetings or clean the house.

We're at a unique juncture in history where we can separate expertise from the expert and target sales people when they need it where they need it, in context and on demand. The stakes and rewards are tremendous for any company that wants to reclaim control over how their field organization interacts with customers.