Selling Power Magazine Article

This article is based on a conversation with and material provided by Mark Pollard, chief marketing officer at Altus Corporation, a provider of on-demand video search and management systems. He joined Altus after working with Silicon Valley Management Partners, a management consulting and M&A advisory firm, and has held positions of importance at numerous high-tech firms. He can be reached at Altus Corporation,
2105 S. Bascom Ave, Suite 135, Campbell, CA 95008.
Tel: 408/395-9154  Fax: 408/358-0304  Web: altuscorp.com


The Sales-Training Dilemma
Sales managers face a difficult dilemma: the need to create more revenue in a difficult economy without hiring more people. One solution to ensuring their sales teams perform at the highest level to meet sales goals? More effective, ongoing sales training. 

While company executives pressure sales managers to reduce the cost of sales in order to improve overall corporate profitability, they also want sales results. With classroom training and sales events running up costs and contributing to time away from the field, the cost of sales rises again. But there is another way.

First, let’s consider some challenging recent changes in the business world:

1. Companies are more global, creating broad geographical distances that increase the travel expenses associated with a sales-training event. 

2. Companies are more dependent upon channel partners, who are often unwilling to participate in events due to conflicting demands from multiple vendors. 

3. Product offerings are more complicated and hence more difficult to sell, increasing the demand for product-oriented sales training.

4. Training is offered on a corporate schedule, not when salespeople need the training.

As a result, many sales professionals are insufficiently trained when companies need them to be at the top of their game.

The Online Alternative
One way out of this dilemma is to move sales events and training online. Companies have been doing this for years with teleconferencing and more recently with Webinars, Web conferences, and virtual events.

Such online events provide a vehicle for sales training that costs far less than classroom events because there is no travel time involved. Furthermore, such events can be recorded for new hires to view and by attendees who wish to review the contents to refresh their memory.

Webinars, online events, and teleconferences, however, still have some of the liabilities of traditional classroom events:

1. They’re time-consuming. To get the full benefit of attending, the attendee must sit through the entire event, even if only a part of the event is of interest.

2. They result in poor retention. Numerous studies have shown that people retain only a fraction of what they hear in a classroom, whether online or in person.

3. They aren’t convenient. Even when they’re recorded for future playback, finding the segment that’s of interest generally requires spooling through the entire recording, watching for the part you need to see.

In addition, teleconferences only use audio, and most Web conferences only use audio and text (as in presentations). That’s profoundly at odds with the way that people are now consuming information, according to a recent report by the high-tech analyst firm Wainhouse Research, which points out the following:

In recent years, information workers have been inundated with rich media content – both at home and at work. Between videocentric websites (e.g., YouTube, Hulu, Skype), rich-media-powered news portals, and the use of digital signage in storefronts, shopping aisles, and malls, lobbies, and elevators, rich media has become an accepted part of our everyday lives.

The Importance of Video
Video data is particularly important when the content requires some kind of visual reinforcement or is intended to convey an emotional message. For example, listening to an awards ceremony, such as one honoring sales-contest winners, is a bland and listless experience. The emotional excitement and motivational value come from the delighted expressions of the winners, the victory gestures, and so forth. 

Just as emotion is better carried through video, there are many types of instruction, such as role-playing or showing how to demonstrate a product, that fall flat in a teleconferencing or Web-conferencing environment. But while the inclusion of video in the online experience is necessary in order to simulate anything close to the full impact of an in-person event, it tends to make the recorded experience even more impractical. An hour-long event, for example, might take several minutes to download, and even then the recipient would need to spool through to find the relevant segments. 

While that might work for a one-time viewing of an awards ceremony, it becomes a productivity burden when, every time a certain problem occurs, you need to refer back to the relevant content to view a demonstration on how to fix it.

Indexing Video Content
Incorporating video content into an online event isn’t difficult. Most Web-conferencing systems, for example, allow the display of such data, and even teleconference users can be directed to videos posted on a corporate Website or YouTube. The challenge occurs when segments of a live event are recorded for future viewing. To be practical, the data must be broken into small segments that can be located and viewed quickly. It’s possible to do this by manually editing the video data, uploading the separated files onto YouTube, and then entering index data in the form of keywords. 

While this do-it-yourself method is time consuming and labor intensive, many companies have made their sales-training programs available in (continued on page 2)

this manner. This process can also be automated. Altus, for example, offers software called vSearch, which combines digitally recorded video, synchronized slides, and scrolling transcripts to give users on-demand access to content. 

The application transforms every word spoken on a slide or in the notes into a searchable presentation, which allows users to find just the knowledge they need at the presentation, topic, or sentence level. It also allows the pointers to the video assets to be stored in a single central database, allowing them to be retrieved when needed.

Beyond Sales Events
While moving sales-training events online has a measurable financial benefit (see Classroom vs. Virtual: Cost Savings), it’s likely that future applications of video in sales environments will yield major productivity gains.

The real wealth of any organization’s knowledge typically resides in the minds and hard drives of its employees. Much of this knowledge is developed incrementally, as employees encounter and resolve day-to-day challenges; therefore it is not being systematically captured and made available to other employees.

While 70 to 90 percent of corporate learning is informal, the vast majority occurs within local work groups and is not shared across multiple interrelated functions. As a result, the same problems are often solved several times, separately in various groups throughout the organization with varying degrees of effectiveness and an overall loss of productivity.

Even when the transfer of information is formalized, the essence and richness of knowledge is nearly always found in the verbal interactions, rather than in the materials themselves. People share their knowledge by making presentations in a variety of settings, ranging from conference calls and sales meetings to new-product seminars and classroom training. But without the verbal content, including the important flow of questions and answers, these presentations lose much of their value. Therefore, the ability to record, archive, and conveniently retrieve video information, combined with social-media tools, such as salesforce.com’s Chatter, is likely to create a sales environment where “tribal knowledge” is more easily shared, making the sales team more productive even as it reduces costs.

The Business Case for Searchable Video
In a recent survey of purchasers by the market research firm IDC, 57 percent of respondents indicated that the sales professionals calling on them were either somewhat prepared or not prepared to have a meaningful conversation. This lack of preparedness resulted in lost sales 33 percent of the time.

Most sales professionals want to be prepared for meetings, but they often lack the tools to quickly research a prospect and understand how best to approach a given opportunity. The ability to quickly retrieve textual information such as industry descriptions and corporate data certainly helps sales professionals to better prepare, but often such generalized information is not sufficient.

Sales professionals are often on their own when it comes to finding the right piece of marketing collateral or the right set of presentation slides to most effectively address a given sales opportunity. Even if a particular slide is located, unless the original presenter’s notes are complete, it may not be clear how to use that slide effectively. In addition, sales professionals, especially those in channels that handle a wide variety of products, are often called upon to do demonstrations, even on products that they’ve seldom used.

The only effective way to overcome these challenges is through the use of easily retrievable video data. IDC defines sales enablement as “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place, to assist moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” To do this, it’s often necessary to leverage the collective intelligence of a company’s sales organization. Field personnel, including account managers, systems engineers, and technical account managers, must all be able to understand and position their organization’s products and services.

Recording knowledge from virtual teams and making it available to all sales-focused staff provides employees with just-in-time learning. In addition, providing the data in that format increases retention, because users can see, hear, and read presentations and demonstrations.

The vast majority of sales content is conveyed verbally, in sales meetings, Web conferences, and kickoffs. By digitally capturing these events and synchronizing the spoken words with video and PowerPoint slides, companies have on-demand access to the knowledge that the sales team needs to move opportunities forward.

Ideally, these presentations become a reusable corporate asset. Salespeople can search just for the snippet of information they need and find and view that information on demand, or they can download the audio, video, or presentation slides they need.

For example, a company might establish a sales-enablement program whereby experts make their presentations either live in classrooms, where they are videorecorded, or via a Web-conferencing application. In either case, the content is digitally recorded and synchronized with PowerPoint slides and verbatim scrolling transcripts, allowing users to both see and hear the rich media content. Having transcripts is especially helpful in cases where some percentage of the company’s workforce speaks English as a second language.

Every word in the presentation – whether spoken, in the slides, or in the notes – becomes searchable data. Using familiar search functionality, the company’s salespeople can find the data they need and retrieve it from the exact point in the presentation – to the sentence – where the knowledge was shared.

Once content is (continued on page 3)

produced, it is made available in vSearch, linked from the corporate sales and education sites on the company intranet. This gives sales personnel a single, centralized destination for the latest sales information. All content is fully searchable, with downloadable PowerPoint slides (with embedded transcripts), MP3 audio, MP4 video, or transcript.

Because they can easily access all the downloadable assets, salespeople do not need to interpret the meaning of the slides or notes, since the presenter’s exact words are provided for every slide. The result is a technical database of multimedia content searchable down to the spoken word.

As a result, in many environments, video is becoming the medium of choice for knowledge transfer and thus for sales enablement. Video is a particularly effective tool for communicating competitive intelligence and strategically managing and engaging customer references.


Classroom vs. Virtual: Cost Savings
The cost-effectiveness of a virtual meeting versus a face-to-face meeting is often underestimated. The cost of airline tickets and hotel rooms are easily calculated, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Travel time is usually unproductive, so the company pays a “travel tax” for every employee who’s on the road. In addition, the larger the event, the larger the venue required to hold it. These costs add up quickly.

The following table compares an event for a 500-person sales organization. The first column shows a traditional event that everyone attends. The second column shows a virtual event, with a smaller in-person attendance and the majority participating virtually. The cost savings in this case is nearly $600,000.

                          Classroom    In-Person/Virtual

Number of physical attendees	500	100
Number of virtual attendees	0	400
Travel (average 10 hrs/person)	5,000	1,000
Manpower cost ($50/hr)	$250,000	$50,000
Travel (average $800/person)	$400,000	$80,000
Venue rental	$100,000	$25,000
Totals	$750,000	$155,00

Even when taking these factors into account, there is an additional financial advantage to the virtual meeting: the ability to leverage the event on an ongoing basis. Because the virtual event is archived, employees and new hires can review the material at their leisure.

 

CASE STUDY: Oracle’s Global Sales Kickoff

Company: Oracle
Profile: software vendor
Size: 345,000 customers and 86,000 employees worldwide
Revenue: $23.3 billion
Problem: Oracle’s yearly field-readiness event involves bringing thousands of sales and marketing personnel to a single venue. The company wanted to reduce this expense while still providing a positive experience for its employees.
Requirement: Because of the different time zones of the geographically dispersed sales team, Oracle needed an on-demand event that didn’t require everyone to be online at the same moment.
Solution: The company opted to limit attendance to the event but included the highlights in video format so that field personnel could download the content and view it at their leisure. A reporting mechanism allowed managers to see who had viewed the content and who hadn’t.
Benefits: Oracle saved more than $10 million dollars by taking the event virtual while still providing Oracle sales personnel with valuable on-demand knowledge that they can view from any location at any time and through a variety of media, including their cell phones.

 

CASE STUDY: NetApp’s Technical Sales Conference
Company: NetApp
Profile: systems integration
Size: 8,333 employees, with a sales force (including channels) of about 5,500
Revenue: $5.9 billion
Problem: NetApp historically held worldwide technical sales training events, but the increasing costs of travel, lodging, and meeting venues required the firm to downsize its live-meeting schedule.
Requirement: NetApp’s sales force is highly technical and consists of system engineers (SEs), rather than typical sales professionals. Because of this, the team needs significant technical and sales training in order to continue to be effective.
Solution: NetApp held a live, three-day sales conference, or technical event, with more than 90 sessions led by subject matter experts imparting knowledge on 200 products. The events were archived on the Altus video portal (vPortal) for those who could not attend or who joined the company after the event had been held.
Benefits: The cost of the live event was reduced by 90 percent, and an estimated $1.5 million was saved. In addition, the material was usable on an ongoing basis, thereby leveraging the initial investment.