20/12/08. To generate sales, your front line team need to be up to date on what you sell, and how you want them sell it. Every organisation needs to do it – but how to do it at speed, keep it up to date, and stick to your budget? Kineo recently shared its innovative approach to product knowledge e-learning at Online Educa, the largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors.

Kineo, the leader in rapid e-learning, has partnered with many organisations to deliver e-learning at speed in response to real business needs. In a recent talk at Online Educa in Berlin, Kineo’s Managing Partner, Steve Rayson, focused in on the particular challenges of product knowledge and how e-learning can help.

Companies face a major challenge when products are sold by large, globally dispersed sales teams or by a range of resellers. The challenges include

• Keeping up to date: products change rapidly. For example there have been over 60 new versions of the Blackberry since its launch in 2002, that’s one every 5 weeks. Traditional training can’t keep pace.
• Keeping it short and focused: sales people who need product knowledge information work in challenging, fast paced and often noisy retail environments. The learning has got to get to the point, quickly.
• Making it engaging: Delivering ‘just the facts’ about the product isn’t enough to increase sales. Learners need to know the benefits, how to recognise customer needs for a product, and how to close the sale.
• Keeping costs down: Given the pace of change, product knowledge e-learning has got to be cost effective, otherwise the maintenance costs will be prohibitive.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Steve Rayson showcased Kineo’s rapid approach to product knowledge e-learning. The approach, which Kineo has most recently used with Vodafone, enables

• Rapid response in a matter of weeks, with prototypes developed in days
• Short, focused modules: 20 minutes or less to ensure it fits with the job pressures
• Engaging e-learning: Using customer challenges, stories, and a range of interactions to ensure variety, pace and learner engagement
• Easy updates: Kineo’s approach uses updatable flash, which means that clients don’t need an authoring tool to edit the content, it can be done easily in xml, so the client has complete control when it comes to changing product information.

Commenting on the approach, Steve Rayson said “You can’t stop training your people on the products you sell in a recession - in fact it becomes more important. We’ve worked with clients to deliver more for less, and to keep complete control of their product knowledge e-learning to help sales people deliver results.”