Hello Sir..! Good Morning…It seems like you are interested in the share market. Analysing the past few weeks, the market is not that great for immediate gain, I would say that keep your money on safe portfolios and look for long term gain. In fact, I work at a stockbroker firm and I feel that the current trend is set for long term stocks.
It was another usual day in the Cab to my office and this was a conversation between my co-passengers . He was a smart sales guy who tried his luck to get a prospect as he noticed him reading a leading business daily.
The salespersons are a bunch of most active guys in the organization who are live wires chasing and hunting down the prospects and closing the sales. While you have a good product or service, you need an equally efficient sales team to capture the market and this doesn’t come easy as an organization needs to ensure that the sales team remains competitive to tackle the various challenges thrown by the market and sales environment.
Hence, there needs no second thought or doubt to ensure that sales training is essential to make your sales force competitive
But how do you train them?
‘We call them for a classroom training, it might stretch to 2 days in a month’.
If you have a similar answer, I am sorry to say that you’re killing the sales training initiatives at your organisation.
Why so?
With your sales team spending their active working hours in the field, it is not an ideal strategy to pull them for a classroom training. A loss of an active working day for training can mean the loss of revenue to the organisation. And at the sametime, a lengthy classroom discussion can simply disengage the learners as you continues to overload them with information for hours.
With new innovations and e-learning strategies, I recommend to use mobile learning for your sales staff to train them effectively.
If you’re keen to explore the statistics, here are some important ones.
1.According to Ambient Insight research report, the revenues from m-learning will reach $14.5 billion by 2019.
2.Studies shows that employees are not at their desk 50-60% of the time.
3.The Global Mobile Workforce is Set to Increase to 1.87 Billion People in 2022,
4.According to the LinkedIn workplace report of 2018 reveals that 58% of employees prefer to learn at their own pace and 49% of the employees prefer to learn at the point of their need.
With a traditional classroom training, it looks impossible to satisfy these changing and growing requirements of the workforce.
So what are the benefits or uses of m-learning for the sales staff?
1.Anytime anywhere learning
The best benefit of using m-learning for sales team is the anytime anywhere learning. The sales team can easily access the learning content from anywhere and any device at any time. The salesperson can conveniently login from his mobile device and access the e-learning content even he is on the field, travelling etc.
2.Knowledge retention and recall.
By implementing mobile learning, an organisation gets the benefit of ensuring that the learners retain and recall the learning content. For example, after a training session on the newly launched product, the organisation can push e-learning assessment to evaluate the recall and retention of the learning topics by the learners.
The organisation can even send reminders to motivate the learners to visit the content from time to time enabling better retention and recall.
The organisation can include quick summary of the learning topics in the form of pdf documents, infographics etc and share it with the learners that helps them as memory reinforcements.
3.Just-in-time learning
M-learning enables the organisation to support just in time learning by delivering the learning contents at the required point and time. For example, if the salesperson prefers to refer back to a product training module before meeting the client , the learner can easily login from his mobile device to access the required content.
4.Micro learning.
With reducing attention span of the learners and due to the lack of time to attend training modules, the organisation can implement micro learning as a learning strategy as they are well-suited for imparting training through mobile devices. The small size of the learning content are ideal for the busy salespersons and he don’t require to go through an entire lengthy module.
5.Personalized learning experience
M-learning has opened the opportunities for delivering customised learning content
For example, advanced mobile learning platforms , LMS , mobile apps etc allow the learners to create individual learner profile.
6.Collaborative learning experience
An ideal salesperson is a social being and enjoys the conversation and building relationships with others. With mobile learning, the organisation can use the option of instant messaging , chats to enable collaborative learning.
7. Use M-learning to build competition
Competition is an important element in the sales environment, A healthy competition can motivate the sales team to compete and outperform the others . The organisation can use m-learning to induce competition among the learners.
For example, the organisation can include leaderboards
8.Ownership of learning
By implementing mobile learning for your sales team, the learners will enjoy the ownership of learning. In a traditional classroom training, the learner has got no control of the learning experience . With mobile learning , the learner can learns from their device at their convenience which build up the responsibility and ownership of their learning experience.
9.Learn through multiple devices
There are the various organisation which distributes mobile devices like smartphones, or tablets to their sales team. By enabling mobile learning the sales staff can access the modules across the devices. The learners can access and continue the learning process even from his personal device. For this, the learners just require to login to the webportal or download the app on his device if any.
10.M-learning enables continuous learning
For every organisation, it is important to build a strong learning culture that promotes continuous learning. Continuous learning is very important for the sales team to ensure that they are competitive in the market.
With mobile learning, the organisation can enable continuous learning for the sales team.For example, recently we developed a series of animated videos for the sales team ofa a leading Insurance firm . The organisation plans to upload the videos on their LMS and the sales team can enroll into the course. As the learner progresses, new course gets unlocked.
