Sales Training Effectiveness

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>> Hi my name is Garrett Schwartner assumed spelling with Selling Power TV. Today we'll talk about Sales Training Effectiveness and we have here Massood Zarrabian, he's the CEO of OutStart. Welcome Massood.

>> Massood Zarrabian: Thank you Garrett. Thank you very much.

>> Garrett: What is the secret to having an organization where sales training is far more effective than what we have done the last decade?

>> Massood: Well I think what they have done the last decade in sales training has been continuation of the physical world. In the physical world all our sales training requires people interfaces and meetings, classrooms, and when you do that in a virtual world, it is ineffective. Especially those sessions are created around a time where you have an event; not necessarily the time that a sales person is selling what they need to sell, so we go through training, people leave, six months later they run into an opportunity where they're trying to sell the product that was rolled out six months ago and they don't remember anything. In the old, old days we used to do this with documents. Then we came up with the idea of CDs and so we started shipping people CDs; and then became the idea of portals and put those documents in portals. But if you look at it, documents never were used, the CDs were never used and the portals are cumbersome because at the end of it is documentation centric and today's world is information centric and people need major information when they need it.

>> Garrett: So how do you change to paradigm and how do you deliver sales training when sales people really need it most?

>> Massood: We think in our approach to it is a platform approach. A software approach with advanced technologies to create collaboration across the peers, collaboration between peers and experts; and a great collaboration between account executives and everybody in the company if necessary to organically capture all the information you need on an ongoing basis and make it available and findable by sales people whenever they need it. And that needs to be done in conjunction with the tools they already use independent of the tool is it automation tool, or is it e-mail or is it instant messaging or is it Word or PowerPoint or Excel? So it has to be something that has integrated all the tools they use to make it convenient and natural for them to have a use.

>> Garrett: Let's assume I'm a sales manager and January 1 we need to roll out a new product and we need to have 200 sales people up to speed and knowledgeable and maybe a couple hundred channel partners. How do I use OutStart?

>> Massood: So the tradition modally is you create an event, you get a lot of presentation done, you bring a whole bunch of people to an auditorium, you roll people through one by one presenting that--and if you'll notice at all times in back of the room a lot of people are talking to each other. Most probably people have been around for a while and have already decided this is useless in the first place anyways. They leave and if you look at the studies, the studies suggest that if that information is not used within the first ten days, 90% of it would be forgotten ten days later. And we all know when you do a product roll out the information is not going to be used in the first ten days. It will take time to go and get there.

>> Garrett: So what's different with Out Start?

>> Massood: So the modally proposed is that information can be developed and deployed for self-service training before the meeting. In fact if you want to you can add assessments to it so you can actually find out if people learned it. Now the beauty in having done that, that information will be available forever. So not only can we use later, it can also be used by new sales people joining the company at a later time. You blend that with environments in which sales people can interact with experts or create communities of interest. And then capture all those interactions, categorize them and store them and make them available again for their future use.

>> Garrett: So you're saying you still have the meeting, but have the content delivered in advance of the meeting; so people can see it in advance then discuss it when they're there, and then review it after they're gone.

>> Massood: Review it after and even after they leave, if they have questions or issues they still use the system. So even that can be done in a virtual world and effectively, organically capturing all the knowledge of your sales people, your sales manager, your CEO, your marketing, everybody in the company. And that knowledge can be used by many, many people over a long, long period of time.

>> Garrett: We're going to continue our conversation with Massood tomorrow where we take into one very important subject which is knowledge share; how to share knowledge across the organization.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====