Elearning! August - September

2013

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

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SuccessFactors: Driving Sales Performance When SuccessFactors executives said they needed their sales metrics to improve, the team from SuccessFactors University (now SAP Cloud Talent Success) went to work. And their plans worked so well that the company placed frst among private-sector corporations on this year's Learning! 100 list. THE CHALLENGE In January 2012, there were three main challenges SuccessFactors executives needed to address: sales attrition was signifcantly higher than industry average; new hire sales rep time-to-quota was painfully slow; and too few representatives were achieving quota. "Executive management needed the learning and enablement organization to move the needle," says Manette Chadwick, senior director of SAP Cloud Talent Success Content Development. Te team started by identifying the key skills of highly successful sales representatives and built the sales training program around pre-identifed skill sets. "We commissioned two external studies to identify why some sales reps were successful and some were not." Comprehensive competency research was conducted to identify top sales skills, abilities, knowledge and actions. A skills profle model was also created. THE SOLUTION In order to achieve the results that executives demanded, Chadwick and team instituted Boot Camp for onboarding new sales personnel and built it on their company's social platform Jam and the company's LMS. All instructor-led courses have a blended design with pre-course work, course homework and post-course work in Jam. "An insight we gained from our Boot Camp was that learners love the social aspect of using Jam," Chadwick notes. "Tey stay together as cohorts on their Boot Camp Jam site throughout their frst year. Tey share stories, post pictures and share information. Tey're no longer alone afer that frst week." Te learning team also devised a go-tomarket product "playbook" for each product and built it on a mobile Web application platform. Te new playbooks take sales people through the entire sales cycle, from identifying potential customers to closing deals. With a trio of recent successes, SAP Cloud Talent learning professionals have their "heads in the clouds." Everyone in sales takes the playbook webinar, two LMS assessments, then delivers the corporate pitch for that product. Tey record their pitch in Jam and request, through the LMS, an evaluation from an accredited evaluator. "We drink our own champagne when we use our own products," she adds. "Classes are robust, on-demand and virtual — it's like a Khan Academy performance support model." Boot Camp, the product playbooks and all enablement activities drive the competencies identifed by independent research and aligns to the business objectives specifed by executive stakeholders. THE RESULTS "We focus on business impact results, not traditional training measures," says Julie Abel-Hunt, director of Learning Delivery and Measurement at SAP Cloud Talent Success. "We align with our client's metrics like decreasing time to quota, lowering attrition rates, increasing deal size, decreasing sales cycle time and driving new hire ramp ups. We align the competencies taught with the competencies needed to drive a business metric and are then able to show the results of our sales enablement eforts. "In 2012, new sales rep ramp time was cut in half, three times more sales reps met quota, and overall sales attrition was down 80 percent compared to 2011 sales new hires." Abel-Hunt, who was a lead Boot-Camp instructor, is particularly excited about the results: "Reps who attended Boot Camp in their frst 30 days of hire created 20 percent more pipeline with 173 percent more deals won than reps who did not attend." Chadwick summarizes it well: "When the learning experience is good and the learning is aligned to our business metric, learners are successful. And being successful keeps them engaged and happy. We take our jobs of driving success, engagement and fun very seriously." AREA OF PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE Elearning! August / September 2013 21

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