Although now may seem to be the best time to move your classroom-based sales training to an online version, make sure you do it for the right reasons and do it the right way. Use this opportunity to see what works best for you, whether you want to turn your ILT to a Virtual ILT (VILT) or to an eLearning solution, considering factors like time and cost. But no matter what, here are the 10 things that’ll help you sail the endeavor in style.
- Recognize a Changed World
Many sales professionals will be operating in a world different from earlier. Sales discussions, meetings, and presentations may move away from field sales to remote selling: over the phone or video calls. Incorporate this vital aspect in your new training. How well your professionals are able to conduct sales in an increasingly online world depends a lot on how well your sales training is conducted online.
- Involve the Instructor
Irrespective of the fact that your new online training may or may not be delivered by an instructor, their views and methods will be more helpful than ever when you move your classroom training to online environments, especially for things like devising collaborative elements of your new online training.
- Continue To Involve the Expert
Your original sales or product expert will still have valuable insights. Their subject matter expertise will be even more relevant for guiding the creation and assembling of your online courseware.
- Enable Interaction and Collaboration, Including Role Play
Team work, when broken up in smaller groups, breaks the monotony of one-to-many communication models and keeps the learners interested to a higher degree of engagement. Many sales professionals are tactile learners, and need their immediate environment to be augmented and responsive for an efficient absorption of knowledge.
- Include Polls
Every learner has observations and opinions, and usually feels rewarded when these are addressed. Apart from discussion activities, polls have a unique way of engaging learners on a recurring basis with their tiny yet impactful consumable size.
- Break It Up Into Smaller Parts
Your current day-long sessions or week-long programs may prove to be an overkill in online training environments. Feel free to spread the learning over more time—allowing enough time for the learners to adjust and assimilate in ways that are new to them.
- Enable a Parallel Self-Paced Option
Even the best ILTs and online sessions cannot guarantee complete adoption and improved performance for all the learners. Analyze how this shortcoming can be overcome by employing eLearning tools that weren’t employed in your traditional training environments, allowing learners to select the best pace suited for their learning.
- Build Well-Structured and Engaging Content
The number one reaction to sudden move to online training is that learners feel everything is ‘optional’. The content will not only have to address this, but also make up for any other shortcomings that can make the training appear trivial and inconsequential. Much of this can be addressed by meticulous course design and precise pedagogies.
- Identify the Good and Bad Parts from Your Current ILTs
Use this as an opportunity to identify the strong and weak parts of your current ILTs. After you have determined, plan to carry over most of the good parts and fix the bad ones when you move them.
- Be Ready to Adapt
Not all of your online training is going to be a runaway success. Some parts are going to work out better than others. Insert suitable checks to evaluate your training to tweak certain parts of the program: it could be some of the content, the delivery tool, or the trainer.
Online learning has been long established as a proven method for efficient transfer of knowledge and skills. Don’t hesitate to explore and to brainstorm. When converted the right way, your ILTs will turn in to a powerful tool for converting adverse conditions like these to favorable ones, and with the desired outcomes.
