Jaroslav Bělehrad, Global Head of HR
4 min read
A sales enablement platform for product marketing: In the face of a global pandemic, many of the old ways of doing business got off the table and made room for vast and opportunistic technological improvements. It did for Y Soft, too.
Travel and face-to-face encounters present serious health risks, so companies and the people who collectively represent them have needed to embrace new ways of presenting themselves. Addressing this challenge spurred innovations and hastened the development and adoption of new and safer tools.
The pandemic affected businesses worldwide, making new territory for modernization evident, especially in technology. Advancements in robotic tech, office solutions, and more have since been introduced to numerous markets. At Y Soft, we zeroed in on improving our learning experience platform, Clerbo.
Clerbo, the HR and learning experience platform, was already in development when face-to-face interactions were put on hold. At launch, it proved its utility as a safe and efficient way to attract and onboard new hires. IKEA Czech Republic, with its vast global need for staff, was an early and enthusiastic adopter. From that success, our development team started investigating other applications of this robust and versatile technology.
It soon became clear that Clerbo technology could provide an always-on, always-safe way to educate a sales force about new products or services and how to sell them. With that, we started viewing Clerbo through a new lens, as being a sales enablement platform.
Clerbo was built to streamline purposeful interactions, including:
- Parsing learning into easily digestible packets
- Delivering essential information virtually
- Supporting an individualized learning program without requiring in-the-flesh interactions
- Building in a way to authenticate the mastery of the learning materials
SALES TRAINING ON YOUR LAPTOP OR IN YOUR POCKET
Interestingly, a lot of the material you, the marketing team, used to be so good at parsing onto PowerPoint slides works extremely well on Clerbo because it perfectly fits the screen's format.
If you know how to “think” effectively in PowerPoint, you’re well on your way to using Clerbo as an even more powerful sales training tool—with the extra intimacy of personal, on-screen delivery and the added freedom of anywhere, anytime, and at-your-own-pace content consumption.
The storytelling strategy is similar, parsing material into discrete and sequential screens that proceed from introduction to presentation to summation to review. The delivery system is both more flexible and much more personal, though. Clerbo accommodates voice-overs and videos that make the material come alive and feel more human. And then, there’s time. With Clerbo, the learner controls the time, place, and pace of learning.
Once you think you’ve got it, Clerbo lets you self-test your mastery with quizzes that evaluate and reinforce learning. This is a win for all stakeholders, sales reps, and product marketers alike. It creates the possibility of an “always on” interaction that facilitates mastery and a continuous cycle of improvement of messaging and message delivery.
Because it’s not once and only once in real-time sales training, you can repurpose, repeat, and share material developed for Clerbo consumption as often and as widely as needed—to get new employees up to speed, introduce other non-sales parts of the company to new members of the product portfolio, refresh product knowledge for employees who’ve been on leave, and change the content delivery medium, as needed and at will.
In part 1, our very own Ben Fitzwilliams talked about how Clerbo became an integral part of our internal sales training, even for the launch of Dispatcher Paragon Cloud:
📖 Read on → A Finger on the Frontline Pulse: Clerbo for Sales Enablement
Ben Fitzwilliams, Partner and Sales Enablement Manager:
“In April 2022, our marketing introduced its first venture into using Clerbo to help launch Dispatcher Paragon Cloud. It offered a platform to introduce marketing—and sales-related materials for relevant frontline sales and support teams. This enabled Y Soft marketing to train Frontline teams on the solution and provide additional material to pass on to local partner dealers.
Because it was so important with this launch that the relevant Y Soft teams were able to evangelize themselves, we were happy to enable Clerbo to provide the management teams with reports on activity and achievement. These reports included statistics and allowed for questionnaires to highlight areas of confusion for us to address.
After the launch's success, I continued to use Clerbo to launch other hardware updates, including the recording of the MFX Ultimate card reader webinar launch with related product information that complemented the messaging we produced.
Clerbo has provided me with feedback important in my role that I required to report on the success of the viewing statistics of our sales teams. In this case, I know 60% of the invited audience has seen and digested the information provided.
Clerbo helped launch and provided vital statistics about the activity of the sales teams, which I am sure was a major factor in the massive increase in the sales of card readers from a European sales channel to a global sales channel.”
LET’S TALK TESTING
We mentioned this before, but it’s worth looking closely at what quizzes contribute to learning.
As long as the content is delivered in a passive learning environment—say, a hundred sales folks packed into an auditorium watching a big screen or listening to somebody hold forth on stage—it’s going to be tempting to check your phone, have a hushed side conversation with the colleague in the next seat, or doodling in your notepad. There’s no accountability built in.
When learning is carefully structured in sequences and mastery is measured and reinforced by quizzes, it empowers the individual learner to take responsibility for his/her own progress. It’s not an outsider imposing judgment, but you, the student, pursuing excellence—a powerful motivational shift for many people. The quiz becomes a tool of learning, not one of judgment.
Keeping quizzes short, as Clerbo does, transforms a test into a tool for mastery—helping ensure the sales team knows what they’re selling and how best to do it. This makes Clerbo an ideal sales enablement platform. What do you think?
Are we saying the app replaces people? Not at all.
But does it empower and protect them? Absolutely.
