Chapter I: Why training your sales forces should be a priority
We are evolving in a digital context where consumers have access, in a few seconds, to a multitude of offers concerning the same product or the same service. Their behaviors and expectations are constantly becoming more complex. The evolution of these practices has given rise to new requirements among consumers, in search of performance and attractiveness.
In search of transparency, ethics and sustainability, 60% of them research product quality, 41% focus on customer service and 31% favor customer reviews (consumer study 2022, Salsify). The role of your sales forces is therefore essential, both to guarantee a good brand image in the eyes of customers and to remain competitive.
Consequence? The market is bigger and more competitive than ever.
Consumers, over-solicited through various communication channels, expect to have a unique, flexible and personalized experience.
To meet these new expectations, your sales forces must therefore be able to remain operational in the field, by adapting to new sales techniques and new consumer expectations. For that, many companies have invested in the training of their sales teams.
For 70% of companies, the health crisis was a trigger or accelerator for digital training projects and digital projects in general (2021 digitalization of training survey). Only 6% of organizations believe that Covid-19 has had no impact on the digitalization of training.
According to the same survey, 56% of organizations are now completely convinced of the benefits of digital training. However, the remaining 44% of companies are not opposed to the digitalization of training. According to 19% of them, blended learning, or blended learning, corresponds to the most efficient modality.
Training sales forces has become essential to guarantee company performance, optimize it and stay in the race.
Chapter II: The harmful consequences of a lack of training for sales forces
The role of your sales forces is to develop your turnover as well as the profitability of the company. The lack of training for your salespeople can have serious consequences such as a loss of turnover. Indeed, if salespeople do not have the necessary resources, they cannot properly meet consumer expectations. They are therefore likely to reduce their orders or simply to go elsewhere.
In addition, your sales forces are the ambassadors of your brand image. These employees are the company's first point of contact in the field. If they are not trained in market news, your products or new sales techniques, they will not be able to satisfy customers. The risk of this lack of expertise can have an impact on your employer brand. Indeed, on social networks, or sites such as Glassdoor, consumers do not hesitate to leave reviews if they are not satisfied. In a context of talent shortage, a bad reputation will prevent the organization from attracting new customers.
In addition, consumers are more likely to consume if they trust the brand. Indeed, 44% of them say that between two identical products, they are ready to choose the most expensive product if it belongs to a brand they trust (Salsify 2022 study).
The brand image, competitiveness and attractiveness of the company can therefore be affected by the lack of training of your sales forces.
Finally, untrained sales forces may become demotivated by not seeing progress in their results or prospects for development. The pleasure of doing a good job, successes and recognition are motivational factors. By stagnating, or even regressing, your sales forces may lose all motivation and disengage. The loss of motivation can cause an increase in the rate of absenteeism, delays, sick leave, and turnover. Note that in the retail sector, the average turnover rate is around 50% in France (INSEE study). It is 15% on average, all sectors combined.
Working with a demotivated employee can generate frustration or even conflicts within teams, impacting quality of life at work.
However, fulfilment at work is not negligible. It improves business profitability and productivity. Indeed, according to a study (MIT and Harvard), happy employees are half as sick, 31% more productive and 55% more creative. The loss of motivation therefore has a negative impact on the performance of talent, that of the company, as well as that of the teams.
Chapter III: Why do sales forces need to be trained?
The salesperson, on the front line in the field, is the main intermediary between the public and the company. A true ambassador of the brand image in the eyes of customers, he guarantees the reputation of the company as well as its performance.
Consumers, on the other hand, are solicited throughout the day via various channels. Their expectations have evolved at the same time as their consumption practices and they are increasingly demanding.
In fact, commercial techniques and strategies are constantly evolving to meet consumer expectations. Training your sales forces allows them to update their knowledge and skills in order to remain competitive in an ultra-competitive market. They must now be in a position to offer them a unique, flexible and personalized experience. The training of your sales forces is therefore the solution to keep your teams efficient and competitive.
Investing in the training of your sales forces is beneficial in the eyes of customers and guarantees their satisfaction. The impact is considerable on both your results and your brand image, whether in the eyes of consumers or candidates.
Finally, when training is recurrent, it becomes intuitive and improves learners' memory skills. It allows them to develop their skills and therefore their employability. Satisfaction contributes to making your sales forces more fulfilled and committed to their daily professional life! At the same time, the competitiveness of the company is increasing.
So training your sales forces makes it possible to attract new consumers, to engage your talents and to maintain the performance of your company while remaining competitive ! So How to successfully train sales forces in the field ?
Chapter IV: So, what training solution for your sales forces?
LMS
Les LMS, Learning Management System, are training platforms for distributing educational content or tests.
Accessibility and simplicity
An LMS facilitates the management of training content for your sales forces, within a single platform. On an LMS, your sales forces find all the information related to the launch of a new product, a new service, new standards or strategies. This key information is updated directly on the platform. At their fingertips, they are accessible to all users and adapted according to their profiles. In this way, they can continue to be operational remotely. This content can be updated regularly by the company itself, according to its own news.
Collect and centralize your sales force data
An LMS allows, within a single platform, to centralize and collect the data of your sales forces: completion rate, number of learners, connection time... Depending on the completion rate, feedback and the number of connections, you can for example analyze and then improve the level of commitment of sales forces in their training. Finally, the data allows the company to measure the progress of salespeople by analyzing the test results available on the platform.
LCMS
Les LCMS, Learning Content Management System, combine the functionalities of LMS and CMS (Content Management System).
Facilitate content creation
Indeed, in addition to making it possible to manage educational content, LCMS also offer the possibility of creating them. Thus, depending on the company's news or updates on its products, you can easily modify and create new content for sales forces.
However, they do not allow this content to be broadcast. LCMS are intended for instructional designers more than salespeople.
LXP
Offer tailor-made courses to your sales forces
Les LXP, Learning Experience Platform, allow salespeople to access content personalized to their profiles and behavioral preferences, thanks to algorithms as well as technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence). Indeed, the career prospects of salespeople, their skills or their needs are taken into account. Tailor-made courses are therefore developed according to the profiles of your sales forces.
Mobile learning
Flexibility
The Mobile learning is fully anchored in the daily life of sales forces. Active and in the field, they can train on the medium of their choice thanks to mobile learning (tablet, computer, smartphone). Your sales forces can choose when and where they want to train from. Whether salespeople are in the field, on the go or in the office: they can continue to develop their skills and stay up to date on the company's offers!
Becoming an actor in your training path
Mobile learning offers flexibility to salespeople that allows them to become actors in their training courses. They access content when they want to and when they feel it's the right time for them. Thus, they are empowered and become actors in their training courses.
Microlearning
Learn, even in the field
Microlearning is linked to mobile learning. It allows sales forces to be able to train, even in the field! Indeed, the short (between 30 seconds and 5 minutes) and interactive formats of the capsules fit perfectly into their schedules. Thus, in a few minutes a day, sales forces can train on specific issues that interest them. Whether before an appointment, or in the field, they can access the content they need in a few clicks.
Promote memorization
Microlearning is based on the learning model 70/20/10. It therefore allows a better anchoring of knowledge. The diversified formats offered to salespeople (videos, gamification, etc.) develop memory anchoring. In addition, salespeople put their knowledge directly into practice in the field, which contributes to effective memorization. These formats also avoid the cognitive overload of your sales forces, having to integrate a lot of information concerning the company's commercial offer.
Gamification
La Gamification integrate the fun elements of the game into training in order to increase the commercial performance of your team.
Motivate sales forces
Being very much in demand in the field, training must attract and maintain the attention of salespeople. Gamification makes it possible to motivate your sales forces and offer them a dynamic training course (quiz, battle...). The rewards they can acquire stimulate them and motivate them to start doing the activities again, to get a better score. Gamification therefore makes it possible to make their career pleasant and to motivate them to train.
Disseminating corporate culture
Gamifying the training course also allows your sales forces to naturally immerse themselves in the company's culture and its values. Indeed, gamification makes it possible to recreate the corporate universe by placing the salesperson in a context specific to a product.
By playing for a few minutes a day, they naturally discover and become familiar with corporate culture. The objective? Becoming brand image ambassadors to the public.
Track the progress of your sales forces
Gamification makes it possible to monitor the progress of your sales forces, thanks to point systems, levels to unlock or even goals to be achieved. So you can measure their progress and observe their evolution.
Chapter V: The limits of these solutions
LMS
According to a study by Brandon Hall Group, 42% of businesses with an LMS are actively looking to replace it. Here are the top reasons.
Limited flexibility
Very widespread in the world of learning, their use is often limited to the management, collection and distribution of content. The learning experience is very linear, Top Down. Most LMSs therefore do not offer enough flexibility to sales forces. They need to be able to train directly in the field, or while traveling, via their smartphones or tablets in just a few minutes.
The lack of collaboration and social interactions
Moreover, many LMSs do not sufficiently integrate the social and collaborative dimension into the training courses. However, without a human and interactive aspect, it will be difficult to motivate and keep your sales forces engaged in front of their screens. It is therefore essential to federate them by creating a real Learning community improving their user experience.
Formats that are unsuitable for sales forces
Macrolearning modules, generally long explanatory videos followed by multiple choice questions, are not adapted to the hectic daily life of sales forces. The LMS content format is not sufficiently interactive and fun.
LCMS
LCMS are intended for instructional designers. This explains why, like LMS, they do not make it possible to keep sales forces engaged in training.
LXP
Loss of social connection
Instead, LXPs are used in addition to LMSs. They make the training interface more fun and intuitive. However, they do not sufficiently integrate the social part of learning. This can explain the disengagement and demotivation of your sales forces in the long term.
Because to be committed, your sales forces need to feel supported and to have moments dedicated to exchanges (between peers and with the tutor).
Mobile learning
Mobile first more than responsive design
Deploying mobile learning training should not be a simple adaptation of existing e-learning content to smartphones and tablets. Indeed, to effectively train your sales forces and engage them, the mobile learning solution must be designed for accessibility on their smartphones, usable in the field or on the go.
Integration into the professional environment
The mobile application cannot stand alone. Indeed, it must also be able to transmit information to the pre-existing LMS within the company and integrate correctly into the work environment of salespeople.
Microlearning
Complexity and technicality of the content
Microlearning can be unsuitable for subjects that are too complex. Indeed, segmenting information can be difficult for your sales forces when there is a wide variety of topics and information. If your commercial offering is broad and complex, microlearning may not be suitable. This method is therefore mainly aimed at a short-term training strategy.
Optimized and attractive supports
To keep your sales forces engaged, it is essential to design adapted, fun and engaging modules. Short video formats are recommended to capture the attention of salespeople, who are often on the go or busy in the field.
Gamification
Level of difficulty
If the games are too complicated, sales forces will have no interest in participating. The activities should be short and fun enough to fit into their schedules.
On the contrary, if the games are too simple, your sales forces can quickly get bored and tired of them.
It is therefore essential to find the right balance and to address all the profiles of your sales forces.
Competitiveness
Excessive competitiveness between salespeople can damage the working environment and atmosphere. Attention must therefore be paid to the opposite effects of gamification, leading to individualism and division between team members.
In addition, excessive gamification can make you lose sight of the real challenges of training by focusing only on rewards.
In conclusion, to achieve their educational goals, sales forces must evolve in a stimulating, collaborative and flexible environment that adapts to their daily constraints. All of these solutions are complementary, but they are not sufficient in themselves.
Chapter VI: How to effectively train your sales forces with an LMS platform?
With a relevant LMS platform, you can train both your sales teams on the go, when they are in the office, but also your salespeople in the store thanks to a multimodal platform that adapts to all employee profiles, wherever they are, and no matter how much time they have.
Your teams will also be able to take advantage of the platform's many Social Learning functionalities in order to train each other by easily sharing their best practices and business actions and thus enrich your company's knowledge base...
Imagine, Romain is a salesman in your company, today, in addition to his substantive tasks such as answering emails, sending quotes etc., he is a series of two customer appointments, then he ends his day with a training session from his manager on the new product.
Like every morning, Romain arrives at the office around 9:30am, his first appointment is at 10:00am. After reading his emails, he connects to the LMS platform via your PC To review in detail the latest recently updated product training module that he must pitch to his client right after. After 6 minutes and a series of questions, he managed to 100%, he is ready for his appointment.
Once his appointment is over, he goes back to his business and leaves to join another client on his premises. He takes the subway. While on his phone, he thinks back to a question his previous client asked him about a evolution of the product and to which he had no answer. From his smartphone, he goes to the LMS platform and Ask the question directly in the “product community” in order to get an answer. La Question appears in the feed from the community and after a few minutes and several answers (including that of the CTO), he can send an email to his customer to send him the answer.
He then arrives for his second appointment, but his client is late, stuck in traffic. He therefore takes the opportunity to go back to the LMS platform via his smartphone to see if there is any news in the trading community. He notices that an employee has published a good practice in the form of a video that explains: “how to attract prospects at a trade show”, he watches it and Thanks his colleague for his advice through a comment.
He then sees in the flow of his community a message from his manager. Reminding his team of the face-to-face training at 5 pm on the very last product released. The session and the registration for it are posted as a comment to the Manager's message. Romain clicks on it and signs up for the 5 p.m. session which will take place in the main room.
His client finally arrives, he leaves for an appointment.
He then comes back to the office and takes care of answering the emails he received and sending the proposals and quotes to his clients before the training with his manager at 5 pm.
17:00 rings, he joins the room indicated on the session and entered directly from the LMS Platform application to attest to your presence. The training session on the latest product then begins, and to engage his team, the manager proposes to carry out Live training.
During this type of session, learners respond all together with several questions, they gradually see their scores increase, this creates a collective emulation within the team and motivates learners!
After 30 minutes, the presentation is over, but Romain's manager asks each person on the team to Then create a short video of them pitching the new product to see if they have retained everything correctly.
It executes, and In 5 minutes, he films his video, edits it, and publishes it in his community directly from the LMS platform. He then sees that Jade, a colleague more experienced than him, has already posted her video. He takes the opportunity to watch it.
There is no photo, Jade's pitch is better than hers, it is more fluid and complete. Romain then decided to take inspiration from it. And, as he really thought it was very good, He leaves a comment to encourage other members of his team to do the same.
Her manager approves and likes her comment. He even goes to the back office to modify the training module he created to include Jade's video so that everyone can see it.
It's 6:30pm, Romain's day is over, and without even realizing it he was able to:
- Perfectly pitch a new product to a customer
- Answering customer questions in record time
- Take advantage of the small free time of your day by training (even in the subway).
- Sharing your knowledge with your team
- Ask questions, and get answers
- Valuing the best practices of an employee
- Learn while having fun and challenging your colleagues.
Thus, with the right LMS platform, your sales forces will not only be able to have access all the time to always up-to-date and up-to-date information on the products and services they sell, but they will also be able to choose when and how they want to be trained, via short, long, digital or not formats.
In addition, they will be able to share with their communities any relevant information or best practices they have collected in order to enrich and grow their company's knowledge base.
Chapter VII: Beedeez use cases: Leroy Merlin, Promod and L'Occitane
Challenge 1: Succeed in offering training adapted to the constraints of salespeople
As explained above, sales forces do not have the same needs as other teams in a company. They are often in the field, do not always have a fixed position or spend a lot of time in appointments.
In particular, it was the case of Leroy Merlin, Before Beedeez, the brand offered a rather traditional training combining LMS and face-to-face, not very practical for salespeople. If they wanted to train, they hada single fixed station for several employees, and the courses could last several hours.
Leroy Merlin then called on Beedeez, who made it possible to offer employees a solution. accessible everywhere via smartphone for learners in the field with formats short and gamified pushed at the right time. The solution also made it possible to take advantage of The environment of Leroy Merlin stores with the possibility of offering specific and precise training in in particular scanning product bar codes.
Promod, another customer, also had the same problem. They wanted to train store sales forces to improve customer support, but with scattered populations in several stores and face-to-face training courses, it was not easy.
So they called on Beedeez for his gamified environment, its varied training methods that promote memory anchoring and especially its format ATAWADAC which provided, in addition to a web front, a application on smartphone and tablet accessible everywhere, even without a network.
Challenge 2: Offer training that is engaging and always up to date
Sales forces are the first people to be in contact with customers. They must therefore be able to best present the products and services offered by the company.
You have to be able quickly update and change content but also distribute them quickly to the right people.
For Promod What was important and what they particularly liked about Beedeez was the fact that they had an intuitive content creation platform allowing teams to easily create training capsules short, dynamic, and attractive. But also, once created, be able to modify and remodify them as many times as possible so that they are always up to date.
On the other hand, in addition to a creation platform, the L'Occitane group wanted to be able engaging employees in the formation of new products. For this, with each release of new capsules, they have set up challenges in order to create emulation and encourage learners to create and redo content. In the same idea, Battles (capsule where you can challenge another collaborator and see who will get the most points) are organized between learners from each region, with a ranking based on the best score.
The capsules are like this consulted more regularly and the products sold better. In addition, a reward system has even been set up so that learners can win cosmetic products that they test themselves and will therefore be even more likely to present.
Challenge 3: Encourage the sharing of knowledge between employees
Social Learning and knowledge sharing are the key to success for any company that wants to become a learner. In particular, it was one of the main challenges of Leroy Merlin.
This is why Beedeez co-developed, alongside Leroy Merlin, the “Video Tips” feature which allows employees to filming a business gesture or a good practice and to share it with the rest of the collaborators. The aim here is to allow all employees to share their experience and knowledge and to value their knowledge. By creating a Tip, employees then become actors in its training and participate in the decentralization of knowledge.
So, today, at Leroy Merlin, 80% of content authors are not part of the training department !
The group theOccitane called on another Social Learning feature offered by Beedeez: communities.
Different communities have been created according to the trainers. Elles In this way, each animate their community of sales consultants via targeted notifications for each group in order to be at most close to learners and build a more lasting relationship.
