Spaced repetition for product knowledge
Product knowledge is the cornerstone of any good sales team. Understanding the products that you are selling is really the 101 requirement for onboarding new sales staff and ramping up their skillset – until they become contributors to the bottomline. One of the keys to growth for any company is speeding up this onboarding timeframe to add sales to the P&L as fast as possible. One proven way to speed up the retention of information by new sales staff is to use spaced repetition for product knowledge. Here are our four tips to improve the speed of onboarding sales staff with spaced repetition.
Set a baseline for time to onboard
With any change that you are looking to implement, it is good practice to set a baseline so you can see the effects of what is done. Setting a baseline for the time to onboard sales staff is as simple as looking at the past data of how sales staff have performed. Find an average for the number of months it has taken for sales staff to be adding enough in new sales to become cashflow neutral (the new sales are equal to the payroll cost of having them). Your definition of onboarded may differ from this, but cashflow neutral is a fairly standard metric. This timeframe will be the baseline to improve on.
Create product specific courseware
This may seem like a simple step but, as with any project it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Creating a planned outline for each product in the company’s portfolio and ensuring that the key points are conveyed is important. This can be done by organizing lessons in the EdApp authoring tool into courses.
With this laid out you can used EdApp’s spaced repetition for product knowledge tool – Brain Boost spaced repetition app – to learn from the users’ interactions with lessons to deliver the information in different forms and templates automatically.
Track engagement with analytics
With the implementation of any change, we need to track and understand the results of this change. To do this you can easily track engagement and course completion rates within the EdApp analytics function. You should also keep track of months to reach cashflow neutral for all sales staff being onboarded.
Test and Iterate
Here is where spaced repetition comes into its own. In the background of your lessons, a learning algorithm based on the forgetting curve will be constantly running. It will pick up on the information that learners retain and don’t retain, based on their answers. It will then use this information to reiterate information that the learner is struggling with on a regular basis to drive and speed-up information retention.
Want to know more about spaced repetition for product knowledge?
If you’d like to know more about spaced repetition for product knowledge, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try EdApp’s Mobile LMS and authoring tool for free by signing up here.
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