Sales Capability Enhancement

Advanced Instruction Design, Business Solution, Simulation & Scenarios, LMS, Custom Content Development


Business Context
Leading Consumer Brands Company is a Consumer Sales Organization that operates through geographically spread out dealer network and local sales presence. As the revenue for the company was on the rise, so was its inventory cost, which should have been reduced with better planning from the sales persons across the division. The company had invested in a new and more evolved ERP module where forecasting could be recorded.
The company conducted classroom training programs across India by very senior people at central locations to accommodate as many sales personnel as possible. Computers were also arranged to give them the walk-through of how to do planning and forecasting in the new system.

Challenge
Sessions proved to be of little success because even after running them for over a year very little impact was realized. People did not remember much of what they had learnt in these sessions to start making changes in their way of working.
There was no way to ensure that everyone understood the concepts and the workflow of the application which was critical for the success of this training.
People who got left out, there was no way to train them.
The training was already fairly complex with application workflows and along with it there were no discussion forums where people could exchange ideas or queries after the training.

Our Approach
We understood that a more robust learning experience was required as this was critical to the business success.
We understood what the company was hoping to achieve was outside the scope of what traditional training could achieve for them, given the challenge. We recommended a solution that was both scalable and provided adequate self-based practice on how to apply the newly learnt concept of planning and forecasting and how to maneuver through the new workflow in the ERP module.

Our Solution
We worked closely with the SMEs and understood the tactical change they wanted to bring to the working of their sales persons. Based on these performance objectives, we created multiple hypothetical scenarios where learners could apply the concepts in a sandbox. Working with the SMEs we preempted the kind of wrong responses learners may give, given their old style of functioning and provided clear feedback that helped them realize which step they may have miscalculated. This helped the learners identify which specific step they were doing wrong and what needed to be done instead.
After mastering the application of concepts conceptually, we created a walk-through of the application with a scenario step-by-step, and created a simulation of the application and provided hypothetical scenarios for them to input their planning figures in the right boxes. This simulated a real life usage of the application.

Impact
1. The full day training program was compressed in 1.5 hours of Digital Learning Experience.
2. The module created was scalable and repeatable which made any employee review it as many times and whenever they liked. There was no one left out.
3. A complete reporting solution was developed for them where individual division and managers could track their teams and push for completion of the module.
4. Individual task-wise score were available for the management to identify personnel who would need more attention or coaching.