Choosing the right training platform for your sales team seems like a straight-forward process. The solution with the largest catalog of training programs will be the most effective, right? Not necessarily.
Determining whether off-the-shelf instruction is even appropriate for your team is just one of several important issues to explore before making a decision. For example, what about the vendor: Do they actually have instructional experience? Are they well-regarded in the industry? Do they have the financial stability and deep bench to support you after you make your initial investment?
To help with your decision, here are the Top 10 Questions you should ask before selecting a sales training platform.
1. Are you looking at the right system?
It is likely that your training platform is not the only solution in your training arsenal. Many businesses have an HR controlled learning management system (LMS), content database as well as other existing systems. These are perfectly suited for presenting and tracking compliance-related content. However, an LMS-type platform is not the most appropriate solution for training geographically dispersed sales teams or customers who are outside your organization. So look for a system that is designed for instructing, not for managing instruction. There is a big difference between the two.
Also, be sure that training can keep pace with the momentum of your market. For example, being able to train in a mobile environment is essential so that your sales team can stay on-the-go. In addition, the platform should be able to provide metrics to show whether training is actually improving sales performance.
2. Does the platform support social learning?
Social learning is extremely valuable in reinforcing training and creating an environment of continuous and on-demand learning. It’s particularly attractive to professionals who have previously learned this way. To take advantage of its benefits, a training platform should support functions such as blogs, journals, wikis, messaging and collaborative tools in order to facilitate users’ engaging with colleagues, mentors, subject matter experts and extended communities of practice.
3. Does the vendor understand training methodology and have a track record to support the solution’s effectiveness?
Many training solution vendors are either start-up companies or subsidiaries of conglomerates that have entered the training niche through corporate acquisition. Be sure that the solution goes deeper than simply providing a “flashy presentation.” It should be built on a foundation of proven pedagogical methods that support learner engagement, content retention and facilitates content development and course creation. Find out how many learners the platform currently supports and if client companies can point to a positive impact on sales as a result of using the platform.
4. How financially stable is the vendor?
Ask about a vendor’s financial status, including profitability. What is their annual growth rate? How much do they invest annually in R&D? These are details that indicate not only how stable the company is, but how committed it is to innovation and improving the learning experience. Plus, a vendor whose financial situation is not solid is at greater risk of not being able to support its solution.
5. What kind of training is best suited to the sale of your product or service?
If you need instruction on sales methods, generic, off-the-shelf content may be perfectly suited to your sales team. But if you need sales training that specifically addresses your product or service, the platform needs to make it easy to develop customized training. Subject matter experts should be able to link to web resources, drop in existing PowerPoint decks, and accommodate multimedia content with minimal specialized training. The platform should also be SCORM-compliant to make content development as user-friendly as possible.
6. How easy is the solution to use?
No matter how sound the training itself might be, a system is worthless if the sales team gets too confused or frustrated to use it. Be sure it presents an intuitive, easy-to-navigate interface. For example, a minimal number of keystrokes should be required to sign on and progress through training. In short, the technology should never get in the way of training.
7. How stable is the vendor’s technology?
This question is particularly important if you are looking into a cloud-based (or SaaS—Software as a Service) platform. Reliability and up-time will be key factors in determining whether training is accessible when it’s needed. Ask about the company’s infrastructure, security, data center capabilities and find out if they can guarantee an acceptable service level agreement (SLA). An SLA of 99.9% uptime is not an unreasonable expectation.
8. Are your vendor’s data centers SAS-70 Level II certified?
It is vitally important to safeguard proprietary data about your product, services and staff. Find out if vendors you are considering offer adequate network, application and hardware security along with data encryption and multiple-level backup. Ask if they are SAS-70 Level II certified or expect to receive such certification. If you are planning on integrating with any other software, you should determine if the training platform has passed a security review by the developers/providers of the other solutions.
9. How responsive is the support team?
Find out how dedicated your vendor is to customer support. Is there a users’ group for getting advice and providing input for future improvements and upgrades? How large is the support team? How frequently do technical issues arise and, on average, how long does it take to resolve them? Ideally, the vendor will provide you with 24x7 phone support and a 99.9% up-time guarantee.
10. Are you a salesforce.com-centric organization?
Look for a solution that offers interaction between learning and CRM functions and training that has a meaningful impact on day-to-day sales functions. Without it, there is a disconnect between what your staff learns and the practical application of new skills to the sales cycle and customer relationship.
These 10 questions are just the beginning. You know your product, services and staff better than anyone else.
