E-Learning Community 2.0

Whenever you or a company launch a new product, you new to transfer the knowledge as part of product training to your clients or sales personnel.  Since your clients or sales personnel are from all over the world, you may want to get the message across to them in a clear and interactive manner.

You need to ensure that everyone gets trained in a short period of time.  Other than getting everyone to come to one place, elearning is also another great approach that can helps to reduce cost and time to market.  Besides that, with the information loaded on the site, they can continue to be used unlimited times.

With e-learning, you can do that in a virtual manner—you can run a virtual sales seminar over the Internet. You could have product experts and Senior Sales Managers lecture or conduct training on the new product features and explain how each feature affects the sales equation. You might also present some sales case studies for the new product that show how best to sell it. And you could give a short quiz at the end just to be sure that everyone understood the main points.

Webcasts are sometimes used for this type of live learning event, but 1 think it’s even more effective to use Web lectures. The difference is that a Webcast depends heavily on the video trans-mission and often focuses on the “talking head” instead of the information being transmitted. That’s good for a casual lecture, and for entertainment, but not when you really expect people to learn and remember critical facts.

Web lectures broadcast PowerPoint-type slides over the Internet with an audio voice-over. This means that each slide appears one by one on the computer screen, and you hear the lecturer talk¬ing about each slide. So you’re send¬ing the information by eye and by ear at the same time. With the Web lec¬tures, you keep the focus on the slides and not on the person talking.

Depending on the type of high-tech product you’re selling, you might be able to do a good demo of the new product features over the Web so the salespeople can see it work even if they can’t actually touch it. Don’t spend too much energy fretting over this, however, because useful product demos are very hard to pull off (even at a live event).

Put focus on the more important content of the Web lectures.
You could construct a four-part sales e-learning class like this:

Part I: Knowledge of Sales Basics
This is self-directed, on-demand training delivered via the Web, with tracking and a quiz for each course module. This is useful for information transfer, but it doesn’t do much for sales skills. And you’re going to need a skilled salesperson who knows how to do it, not just a person who is knowledgeable about sales theory.

Part 2: Sales Case Studies
An interim step for gaining sales skills is a series of collaborative sessions with other new persons at different locations all over the company. In virtual teams, and with an experienced instructor to guide them, the new sales-persons will take up sales case studies, figure out answers as a team, and present the responses online to the instructor. All of this will happen over the Internet.

Part 3: Face-to-Face Sessions
The next step is for the sales students to participate in face-to-face sessions with an instructor in order to learn the one-on-one sales techniques. (If such face-to-face sessions are impossible to organize, this can be conducted over the Internet as well, but it needs to be either one-on-one sessions or very small teams of students.)

Part 4: Ongoing Mentoring
The  final step is for an experienced salesperson to be assigned to each salesperson to act as a mentor for a couple of months. This mentoring can occur via e-mail, via instant messaging, or by phone. Instead of having the student display his new sales skills face to face, you could have the student videotape himself and send sev¬eral of those for instructor critique. With a low-cost PC camera, it might even be done over the Web.

Key to making this work is keeping the focus on the skills taught in Parts 2 and 3, instead of on the knowledge covered in Part 1. Selling is a skill, and it is not enough to “know about” sales theory and product facts. It’s one thing to know all about the physics of swinging a baseball bat, but it’s another thing altogeth¬er to hit home runs off major league pitching.