“How To Shred Bumps in 5 Easy Moves”
“12 Ways To Add More Ride Time To Your Schedule”
“How to Get Back In-Shape in 8 Weeks” (aka 8 Weeks to Super Human You)

These titles clearly articulate the steps it takes to get you from point A to point B, or from a place of unfamiliarity to mastery. The messages are clear and concise. For the most part, the opposite is the norm with training events, regardless if they are web seminars (live or recorded), multi-day training sessions or quick-hit technical overviews. Typically, a high level agenda is communicated by the instructor or organizer outlining the high-level goals of the communication and not much else.

Audiences deserve more. Moreover, your audience deserves more. Their time is precious and the more detailed map you give them the more engaged they will be. This being the case, upgrade the agenda by adding time stamps to it. For instance, rather than plainly pointing out the sections of the presentation, communicate that in (1) hour they’ll be able to hand-idly complete ‘X’ task. In (2) hours they’ll be able to complete ‘X’ and ‘Y’ task and so the story goes.

This method benefits the audience, the content deliverer and content developer. Addressing the audience first, this method breaks the task of learning into smaller, predictable chunks of data that aren’t overwhelming. If maintaining your audience’s attention is important to you, this is one of the simplest and easiest tactics to implement. As it relates to the content deliverer and developer (because they aren’t always the same person) it puts them on the hook to be mindful of communicating intelligible, cohesive thoughts in a timely fashion. Tangents are a natural and powerful part of conversation however they also have the power to derail an otherwise well organized presentation. Knowing that by a certain the time the audience needs to be able to do ‘X’, helps in reining in sidebars that often have a mind of their own.

Time stamps…use them liberally, your audience will love them.

Understanding and success (for the persistent) are the yield of failure. Don’t believe me? Watch as a child learns to walk or ride a bike. Each misstep, each time they topple over, is another opportunity to figure out the wrong and right way of doing it. The sum of these experiences is success.

Learning how to deploy and maintain a software platform or application is no different. The basics are critical but understanding the how and why is what separates adequate administrators from rock-star administrators, who are cool under fire.

The fundamental difference between the two groups is, the rock-stars treat failure as an opportunity to learn. Each failure builds support for techniques that work and understanding around techniques that don’t. To no surprise, this makes them more knowledgeable about the systems they administer and ultimately more valuable to the organizations to which they belong.

Not all environments are forgiving enough to promote, allow or even believe in the art of failing. Likewise, if it’s unacceptable to fail in real life for the sake of learning where is failing ok? It’s ok in the classroom.

Technical courses have become the perfect sandbox environment for administrators to hone their skills. Tools made popular by VMware allow instructional designers to build courses and take snapshots of the classroom environment at various stages of the course. Snapshots enable students to attempt multiple fixes to a problem to ascertain which one works best, or if they know better than the instructor. If they completely break the environment or realize a proposed fix simply won’t work, they can open a snapshot from earlier part in the course. The benefit to the student is the ability to fail safely from multiple perspectives, multiple times without the pressure of a customer watching, a supervisor critiquing or missing a SLA.

The departments responsible for supporting the channel, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy assembling the right content and smartly organizing it. Too bad the neat and orderly organization of content is almost a complete waste of time.

The typical sales enablement experience progresses like this, a sales person, or customer, enters a portal and is presented a menu of all the available educational material. Often there’s an RSS capability that enables them to receive an alert when content is added or changed. Largely, this mechanism of consuming content is cumbersome, time consuming and most importantly it lacks personal context.

Personal context is the key to providing a rich learning experience. Succinctly, it’s the presentation of supplemental educational content to an audience member based on their previous actions. This includes, but is not limited to, the frequency with which they’ve consumed content, the recency of this consumption, and the basic clickstream data of website visits. Taken as a whole, their digital actions form their digital body language.

The ability to analyze behavior and deliver pertinent content that corresponds with the audience’s implicit or explicit interests moves content delivery away from a pull-action model to a push-action delivery model.

The pull-action delivery model of learning is highly ineffective. It forces the audience—in this case the sales person—to be self-aware of what they don’t know. This is analogous to a shopping experience where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it. In this mode, you could be browsing for hours and from store to store. If you have the time, I suppose this might not be an issue, but who has that kind of time? We have an economy to support and deadlines to meet. Conversely, if you’re pressed for time, this ‘browsing process’ can be a nerve-wracking, highly inefficient experience that will probably end fruitlessly.

To apply this example to the behavior of sales professionals: if they are spending time browsing through your mountain of educational content, regardless of whether the content is readily available in easy to consume formats, or if it is neatly organization, they aren’t selling. To minimize their time spent toiling away in your content library, present to them content that is most relevant to their immediate needs. Be their personal shopper.

An effective personal shopper knows their customer’s purchase history and preferences, and is able to translate the subtle cues of what catches their customer’s eye into what they are most likely looking for. Effective personal shoppers thin-slice.

To truly enable sales people and technical people alike, it’s imperative to minimize their time spent searching for the right content and maximize their time spent consuming and applying it.

A large facet of solution driven marketing is its ability to enable contextual 1:1 (or what seem like 1:1) conversations with your prospects and customers. Their challenges are the focal point of these conversations. Likewise, the most effective conversations begin with an identification of what their business issues are. Often times, this means helping the audience to articulate a problem they didn’t know they had. This is referred to as, ‘the discovery of latent pain’. It’s good practice to leverage anecdotal stories to further align your capabilities to the discovered challenges. This process leads to the proof point that you can successfully address the challenges they are facing. If you’ve executed this process correctly they’ll be enthusiastically asking you for the solution.

Being able to conduct these investigative conversations face-to-face to a receptive audience is not always possible. This is precisely where your database of customer contacts, leads and prospects comes into play. The list below is a general guideline of the refinement I’m referring to.

• Position in the buying cycle
• Industry Vertical
• Geography
• Company Size
• Revenue
• Products of yours they currently own

The aforementioned segments help in determining how to position marketing resources and collateral. Case in point, the business issues faced by a manufacturer can be quite different than those experienced by pharmaceutical organizations. In some cases the businesses’ issues align closely. In either case the marketing and communications aligned with either situation need to be articulated using the correct industry specific vernacular. Using pharmaceutical language or case studies with manufacturers or vice versa, regardless of how close their issues are, is a sure fire recipe for failure.

The opportunity to communicate your subject matter expertise via this type of marketing is boundless, or at least more so than in traditional marketing.  Traditional marketing paints with broader strokes, whereas database, solution based marketing lives in the details. The latter of the two creates an opportunity for you to shine as a marketer, I mean educator (or do I mean marketer?). The education you’re instilling is 100% focused on the prospect and their needs. It culminates with you providing them with the tools to verify that your product and services do what you say they can do. Execution of this order requires you to build training disguised as marketing, which succinctly helps to insert your product in the prospect’s environment for the sole purpose of solving an issue they knew they had or you helped them uncover.

To keep the prospect focused and intrigued, the associated training must be delivered in bite-sized, easy to consume, multidimensional formats. In addition, topics need to be condensed into their core elements and delivered via videos, podcasts, and smart landing pages. Automated follow-up emails should be incorporated to renew interest as well as pass along contextual tips and tricks where appropriate.

Interweaving training with marketing handily aligns outbound communications with the needs of the prospect. Addressing their leads in a fashion that puts their challenges first makes you more relevant, your marketing more effective and positions you as a business consultant.

This intrinsic problem with typical assessment questions is unveiled when the learner attempts to apply the newly acquired skill in the real world and fails handily. As learning developers, how do we prevent this from happening? One solution is role-playing however this presents a laundry list of issues too long for this post. The solution that resonates with me is the conceptualization and deployment of better assessment questions. Karl M. Kapp, addresses this as well as provides a recipe for creating high impact assessment questions in his recent blog post.

I invite you to take a peek. It’s a good read and worth your time.

• What
• Who
• Why
• How

What:

This is the initial step in the process where the product or skill the audience needs to know is defined. Think of this as the central theme from which all else emanates. Definition of the central theme prior to commissioning development is key to building a focused and high impact training. Not doing so wastes the resources of both your development team and the target audience, not to mention damaging your professional credibility regarding your ability to conceptualize and execute on strategic initiatives.

Be sure to define your central theme with this in mind; only 25% of what you’re teaching on the first pass will be retained. The remaining 75% is retained via post activity supportive materials and activities. In short, your activity must be focused to be high impact.

Who:

Having clearly defined and articulated the learning activity’s focal point, it’s time to identity ‘who’ the target audience is. Doing so requires that you gather as much information about this group as possible, such as:

• Direct job responsibilities
• How they are compensated
• Are they disparate
• Where do they typically gather information
• What are the expectations of their managing group

The more you know about your target audience the more focused and contextual your training can be. Context yields relevance, which in turn creates ‘stickiness’. Remarkable content, be it courseware or reference documentation is what you should always strive for. Never fall into the practice of saying: “It’s just a reference manual” or “It’s only this or that”. Always think about how the consumption of the material can be made easier and how usage metrics can be extracted from them.

Why:

’Why’ speaks to justification. It’s imperative you be able to neatly articulate the benefits the audience will garner once they’ve consumed the training. Equally important is a clear message for your boss as to why and how resources will be consumed to develop this learning activity.

Tackling the audience justification first, a good place to obtain data points is in the ‘What’ section you walked through earlier. Using a new product roll out as an example, here is a sample list of proficiencies that clearly communicate what the audience will be able to articulate upon consuming the course:

• Business challenges addressed
• Market dynamics
  • Size
  • Competition
  • Trends
• Opportunity assessment
  • Good vs. Poor
• How the product works
• Up-sell opportunities
• Value to the channel

The second part of the ‘Why’ section is justifying the development time and the associated spend to your boss. Illustrate how training is aligned with delivering on his job responsibilities, how it will positively affect the audience’s job responsibilities and ultimately how it corresponds with revenue generation activities.

How:

The ‘How’ is the final step. To be effective it is tightly aligned with the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ stages. This is where the, “rubber meets the road”. The ‘Who’ stage culminated in the audience definition. This identification is instrumental in determining which tools are most useful for communicating with them. For instance, if the audience is geographically dispersed, creating face-to-face training content will miss the mark almost entirely. An audience of this type would be best served with virtual training and self-paced learning opportunities.

Possessing a deep understanding of the subject matter pays dividends when creating training accordingly. Multi-faceted complex topics are best illuminated using videos and diagrams. Effective training is partly about showmanship. Don’t force the audience to adopt and learn new technologies in order to consume your training. Doing so is similar to forcing them to learn Mandarin prior listening to or viewing your ‘awesome’ podcast.

Coincidentally, many sales trainings resemble weather reports in that they are infused with too much product specific information. The inclusion of this type of information doesn’t prepare sales people for business-related real world conversations. Consequently, where sales training should lower the execution risk associated with the act of selling, it fails by actually raises it.

This begs the question, what should sales training look like? Moreover, what type of information should it include and how should it be delivered?

From the top, think like your customer. News Flash: Customers don’t care about you or your product. They care about two things:

• How does your product or service help them fulfill their job responsibilities?
• How does your product answer a specific business challenge?

That’s it, plain as day. If your training doesn’t prepare your sales people to answer those questions (at a minimum) it’s nothing more than an exercise in futility. The natural inclination when thinking about sales training is to increase product knowledge. Enhancing product knowledge is not a bad thing, however, you can’t lead with it. The art of selling begins with uncovering the opportunity. Translated, this means, what is the real issue the customer is having? Furthermore, do they even know what their core issue is? At a higher level, what are the typical issues organizations in that market are having?

The only way to make a salesperson feel comfortable having a probing conversation is to arm them with holistic market data points. These are often referred to as market dynamics and they include:

• Market size
• Market trends
• Competitive landscape
• Typical customer pains (per vertical)

The conversation surrounding these attributes has nothing to do with your product. Of course there is a time and place to communicate how your product fits into the landscape and but this isn’t the first step by any means. The first step is 100% about mapping product/service capabilities to business challenges.

Determining the tools used to create compelling learning activities is an important task but not the first step. Standardizing the authoring tool before identifying the objectives (the what) or audience (the who) will stifle creativity and diminish your ability to innovate. The right “step one” is determining the objectives, i.e. What do you want to teach? What do you want the audience to walk away with?

Objectives frame the conversation. A conversation without an objective is a meandering mess, which equates to a waste of time. Think of these objectives as the cornerstones of the “what” conversation.

Following the “what” is the “who” which predicates the “how”. This creates a three step process: determining the “what”(step one), outlining the “who” (step two), and determining the “how” (step three). It’s only appropriate to deviate from this process if you have an endless budget, cycles to burn and believe that generating a positive ROI doesn’t pertain to your deliverables.

Placing more emphasis on one step as opposed to another is impossible because each step is predicated on the one before it. Changing the pitch or length of one of the steps will throw your audience’s balance and no one wants that.

Knowing your audience, is invaluable. Developing a deep understanding of their job related responsibilities and how they consume information will pay dividends in the future. It’s these differences that will help you to determine the best way to communicate with them. If you’re hearing marketing speak, that’s good, you get it. Frankly, if you’re unable to understand how your audience listens you’ll be unable to connect with them and therefore ultimately your learning activity will fail.

The data points you’ve gathered in steps one and two culminate with the “how”.  How are you going to communicate your points? What is the learning experience going to look like? Is the material best delivered face-to-face in an instructor-led format or should you leverage the web? Is the audience expecting materials that they can use for reference later? These are the core qualifying questions that will help you to determine which authoring tool is the right one for the job.

Own The Content:

“But I didn’t design or create the content”. Frankly, no one cares if you created the content or not. If your voice is behind it, it’s yours and you own it, plain and simple. It’s best to visit with the author(s) of the courseware to get a better feel for the message they are trying to convey and to whom they’re targeting. Not gathering this information puts you at risk of misinterpreting key points, contradicting previous communications or worst yet, being off brand.

Command the Environment:

As a baseline, understanding the courseware is the first half of being prepared for a virtual teach. Understanding how the course will flow within the presentation application (Elluminate, WebEx, Saba Centra) is the second half. Situations that affect the presentation software of choice as well as flow are;

• Is instruction being delivered via PowerPoint only
• Are technical labs which include virtual machines (VMs) being used
• Does the presentation have slide builds (animations)
• Will an application be demonstrated
  • Is the application web based
  • Is the web based application secure (https)
  • Will the audience be expected to participate
    • How are the expected to participate (labs, quizzes, surveys)

These are some of the parameters that require consideration when scoping a presentation platform as well as understanding how the platform will be used. Regardless, it’s imperative you’re comfortable with the environment. Why? Simply, because you won’t have the time or the brain-power to concentrate on the presentation at hand and stumble around the environment trying to figure out how to share the desktop, take control of an application or start a lab exercise.

Lose the Distractions:

Everyone multitasks. No one multitasks when standing in front of an audience. When you’re presenting to a virtual class, treat the situation accordingly. Turn off instant messenger, the ringer on your phone, and close your email. Have in front of you the objects that are pertinent to the presentation, such as reference material or diagrams. ESPN.com won’t help you when some asks a question about extending the schema in generic LDAP.

Present in Manageable Bites:

Your audience will revolt if your plan is to lecture to them straight for 4 hours. This never happens, right? Think again, it does and somewhere there’s a soon to be unemployed instructor who’s planning to assassinate a class with PowerPoint. Don’t be that guy.

Content is consumed best when it’s broken into 15-20min chapters. Weaved into these chapters should be the corresponding demonstrations that enrich the conversation. Try out different sequences to determine where labs and demonstrations make the most sense.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of this 3 part series where we’ll talk though points five through eight.

5. Don’t skimp on equipment
6. Location, present in a quiet one
7. Be a student
8. Have a personality

1. Own the content
2. Command the Environment
3. Lose the distractions
4. Present in manageable bites
5. Don’t skimp on equipment
6. Location, present in a quiet one
7. Be a student
8. Have a personality