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Reinvent Onboarding With Personalization

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Getting started in direct selling is exciting. The new enrollee is on the receiving end of intense focus by sponsors and the company, but that quickly passes for practical and understandable business reasons. Then, the new distributor too often is left on their own with no roadmap for success. Personalized mobile apps can step in to extend the one-on-one onboarding experience.

During the initial days in a network, a sponsor may talk with the enrollee daily. Learning must deliver the enrollee a sense of purpose to ground new distributors in company mission, policy, and how they will be measured for success. In those first days, there are many policies to remember and sales actions to start growing the funnel of prospects. But within days, sponsors are on to their next recruit and often leave an enrollee to fend for themselves, long before the Society of Human Resources Management’s recommended minimum of 90 days of onboarding.

With an app in hand, enrollees can dig into a library of company learning, be prompted to start sales activities, and receive feedback and recognition based on their success. These activities can be monitored and reported to sponsors or management, allowing them to reach out with encouragement and individualized next-step guidance with a single tap.

Reinvent your onboarding experience by taking the time to associate content and sales process steps to measurable events in a smart sales platform.

A smart sales content platform can shepherd new distributors and provide reinforcement of learning and company best practice with automated recognition messaging. Sponsors can also receive updates about their enrollee’s activities and reach out when it will make the biggest difference, saving them time while accelerating time-to-first sale by their newest team members.

Assembling An Onboarding Library

When breaking down existing training content for ingestion into a sales automation platform, a crucial step in a company’s adoption of smart tools, content should be linked to identified next actions the new distributor can take to become successful using brand content and processes. Early users of the Gig Economy Group-based LifeVantage App describe the resulting experience as “like having a personal secretary reminding you to follow-up,” according to Jacqueline, a reviewer on the Apple App Store.

Begin by separating basic company knowledge, product introductions and product knowledge sequences, as well as initial sales actions and related sales skills videos. Address each group of content assets separately, always thinking about where in their onboarding the enrollee will engage with each type of content.

“Great job” is the most potent phrase for extending onboarding, and your company can send that message whenever a recent enrollee takes an important step. Action cards, such as the content sharing recommendation to the left, can be triggered based on distributor actions, prospect behavior, or company policy, giving guidance and encouragement.

Action cards provide suggested content and messaging to distributors, which they are free to accept, reject, or modify. GEG’s platform tracks and learns what works best.

Gig Economy Group’s action card interface, for example, can be configured to respond to activity with recognition messages (“Attaboy!”), related information, or the what’s next activity necessary to progress. Recognition, in particular, should be tied to:

  • Viewing all of a video or an entire sequence of videos;
  • Adding a contact;
  • Sharing content or sending a message to a prospect;
  • Following up with a prospect after a sales step, such as sharing media or a shopping cart, and, of course;
  • Converting a sale or getting a prospect to increase their product interest.

The same triggers can be set to send the enrollee’s sponsor or a sales team member a message alerting them to how the onboarding is going.

As your automated onboarding evolves, take the time to return to the management interface to add new tracked events, such as a distributor’s lack of activity, difficulty moving a prospect along the funnel (signaled by repeated sharing without any change in prospect interest level), or positive results to spur the sponsor to communicate.

Reinforcing action, which more than 80 percent of new distributors fail to take, can dramatically improve early sales success. It’s also important to allow new distributors to decide for themselves.

“I love that you can delete suggestions [in action cards] since they aren’t always the right choice for a particular person,” wrote one Apple App Store reviewer, JudiPP, of the LifeVantage app.

When onboarding, and throughout the distributor’s relationship with a company, people want to know what to do next, not take arbitrary orders. Allowing people to experiment with their selling style is essential to their sense of efficacy, and the variations they introduce into the process is fodder for the smart platform to learn.

Sales and marketing leaders can use existing content and new data-targetted content production to create a genuinely inviting onboarding experience that creates a conversation between enrollees and their sponsors long after traditional welcome activities end. Well placed triggers in the onboarding and daily sales process can alert management and sponsors to distributors in need of help, or just a push toward activity.

 

Product Knowledge Is Retention Power

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As companies like Best Buy add local service and home consultation, direct sales organizations must train distributors on every aspect of the products they sell to remain competitive. The personalized in-home selling trend will reach every corner of the consumer market over the next five to ten years, placing the direct selling one-on-one customer relationship advantage in mortal peril. Product knowledge training is the basis for improved sales, faster product and business process innovation.

But most companies struggle to keep their reps trained, let alone ingest the ongoing feedback from the field that can ignite higher revenue and profits. Too often leadership’s expectations are based on ageing practices that are obsolete in the era of cloud services.

As selling becomes personalized, mobile, and mission-based in the hands of values-driven generations, the tools needed to successfully mine the data created through these interactions are the highest priority for a sales organization. In direct selling, the imperative to gather and analyze feedback from representatives is rising in the face of aggressive retail investment in personalization, not to mention improving distributor retention rates in an increasingly mobile workforce.

Product knowledge is the foundation of customer engagement and trust. “87 [percent] of consumers said they would be unlikely or very unlikely to make a repeat purchase with a retailer that provided inaccurate product information,” according to Shotfarm.com, a Chicago content management company. Each sales rep who flubs a fundamental product knowledge question because they are selling outside their area of competence due to poor coaching runs the risk of permanently losing a customer for the brand.

Combining content management with machine learning to deliver personalized product training to salespeople in the field redefines the challenge of keeping product knowledge up to date. “Smart” tools assist in building product knowledge and coach salespeople toward the products with which they are most likely to succeed. As marketing, training, and sales content libraries grow, machine librarians will be poised to help distributors tell a consistently expert story about products.

Augmenting a sales rep with appropriate content and sales process coaching ensures a brand can deliver the right content to a curious prospective buyer at the right time.

Today, sales and marketing leadership is challenged to rethink the training process to accelerate sales conversion rates while building higher customer retention rates based on distributor engagement in the branded selling process. Every salesperson-customer relationship is unique and companies today must treat them as such. This is a new opportunity, one born of the information era and utterly foreign to traditional sales strategy that uses one training program across the entire company.

Starting with achievable expectations

It is not necessary to try to train everyone in an organization about every product in the same way. Instead, training is conceived as a personalized experience that addresses the specific learning and selling styles of the salespeople in the field. This groundwork lays the tracks to personalization of customer experience.

Tracking sales activity using automation turns organization-wide product knowledge training into a tractable problem. Since direct-selling representatives tend to specialize in niche areas within a brand’s product portfolio, targeted training allows sales management to fine-tune product knowledge investments. Knowing precisely which products a direct sales distributor is trying to sell, machine learning enabled content platforms can identify knowledge gaps and serve up training that addresses the individual distributor and their customer’s needs.

Instead of aiming for 100 percent product knowledge across the company, the platform allows leadership to treat product knowledge challenges in isolation, using the sales coaching process to move distributors toward complete competence in their area of interest. People in the field experience less frustration because they receive more information that is relevant to them, which leads to a higher retention rate among distributors. That product knowledge competence extends to the customer experience as distributors become deep experts who can answer every customer question quickly and accurately.

When great distributors stay, they keep their customers with the company.

Diane Valenti writing for the Association of Talent Development suggests managers develop “return-on-investment” expectations as a baseline for training investments. “Assuming that sales reps are applying what they learned, you can measure whether what they are doing is getting results using sales metrics that you already have in place,” Valenti said. “Don’t invent anything new.”

Direct sales companies can start out with the content and process they have today and modify it, rather than try to reinvent themselves from scratch. Existing training video, audio, and documents can link to assessments of how well a sales rep has learned.

As a starting point, marketing and sales teams in direct selling organizations can base assessments of distributor competence on individual sales success, not just the all-up sales results for the organization. By capturing more feedback from each rep, such as asking them review questions a part of a daily or weekly briefing delivered to their phone or having them record customer interest level after each conversation, leadership can move quickly to refine training programs at the individual content asset level to improve overall performance.  This investment leads to improved conversion rates and average revenue per customer as the likelihood customers will become dissatisfied due to knowledge gaps in the organization is reduced because each representative is well trained.

Resisting investment in training is costly. Ignoring feedback from reps can be deadly. The Center for American Progress estimated that organizations with poor training see $13.5 million in costs due to poor skills, employee disengagement and higher turnover. For a direct selling network with 20,000 distributors, the direct costs and lost sales could be as high as $270 million annually.

Product knowledge training based on extensive feedback and personalization is a source of product and marketing ideas, not just a means to sell.

The ideas captured by listening intently to reps responding to customer needs can be used to redesign products and improve the customer journey. Insight at the field level will determine which companies win. Boston Consulting Group research in 2015 found that fast innovators are more successful, bringing new features and categories to market more quickly to generate as much as 30 percent of revenue annually from new products. Survivors of creative destruction don’t eke by, they thrive.

Successful training based on knowing “What’s Next?”

The training process itself is the map to organization-wide improvement.  An attribution modelling strategy systematically allows a company to lay out its expected sales journey and compare the resulting training and sales feedback with initial assumptions to pinpoint content and training gaps. The steps in the sales journey become a template for “What’s Next” in the representative’s day long after they have complete product knowledge. The same information used to train a rep can be repurposed to support their selling.

Product knowledge training linked to sales success or the setbacks experienced by reps in the field is also a leading indicator of customer issues. Following up on customer conversations with training material related to the engagement keeps the rep focused on learning and providing even more feedback about a product’s perceived value.

Automation leaves managers more time for understanding feedback, rapid, intuitive analysis of sales data, and improved content programming and product development. They can deliver more of what the field needs: Guidance and better resources. A What’s Next-based sales platform managed by a machine learner can experiment with the content delivery process, analyze the impact of small changes on conversion, and translate the findings into new sales journeys, as well as mine feedback for delivery to the product team.

A content platform with machine learning keeps the information stream to the distributor concentrated on what drives sales success for one person and one product, or an entire brand with minimal human oversight.

By making product knowledge the fulcrum of customer engagement, with personalized training for the distributor to help them move to better outcomes, a direct selling company reinforce its one-to-one relationship advantage in the market. Ultimately, the What’s Next design anticipates the customer’s questions, identifying their needs to give the representative greater insight into what drives the sales decision for each prospect.

The question every sales leader must confront is: “Are you confident that your sales team knows everything about your products that the customer will want to know before buying?” The answer at each step is found in laying out what the expected next step toward a close and measuring for success after each engagement.

The 70,000-ft. view of sales results is no longer sufficient in the personalized marketplace; managers must use automation to move along with their salespeople at the edge of the network.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send an email to schedule an interview.

 

Onboarding: Turning Training Into First Sales

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Direct-selling organizations have some advantages over traditional sales organizations during employee onboarding. Instead of being locked into a Human Resources-defined schedule, direct-sellers start people off in the field with experienced sponsors who collaborate daily. They can start to deliver training in many geographic locations every day.

Each direct-selling advantage also comes at a cost, especially as software and content delivery become central to onboarding. The lack of an established training program reduces consistency, which results in less effective communication of the brand and sales messaging, leading to poor conversion rates at a critical phase in the new employee’s experience.

If a sponsor fails to perform their training role, making the new distributor familiar with and committed to the company’s mission, the recruit is likely to leave within weeks of enrollment. A novice direct-selling representative, like 73 percent of employees who are brought onboard through a Human-Resources directed program, wants to start with an orientation to the company’s mission and policies. Early comprehensive orientation is essential to a new recruit’s sense of confidence.

Direct-selling organizations that have continued to rely on manual training tools and sales reporting leave management detached from individual training outcomes, unable to respond to gaps in the onboarding process with new content and process refinements. The result is an industry-wide distributor retention rate that trails the economy as a whole. Meanwhile, retail and brand marketing companies are rapidly adopting digital training tools, raising the stakes for direct-selling brands that want to remain competitive in the age of personalization.

According to Training Magazine, 22 percent of companies increased onboarding spending in 2017 while 17 percent added to ongoing product knowledge training expenditures. The same survey also found that sales onboarding using online tools was embraced by 91 percent of sales organizations last year, compared to 80 percent in 2016. Sales managers using platform technologies are tuning into each challenge faced by new reps and tracking how new hires perform overall to optimize their training programs.

Paper- and sponsor-based training don’t deliver the feedback required to continually improve onboarding outcomes. With emerging sales and personalization platforms direct-selling companies can transform sales training into sales activity, not hypothetical presentations and sales exercises, from the first day a distributor joins.

Onboarding First Action: Sell

Recruiting is expensive. Attrition steals valuable sponsor-distributor time that could be spent on revenue-generating selling. Quantum Workplace estimates that the cost of recruiting a new employee averaged $4,129 in 2017. For direct sales organizations, a lost recruit is a tax on the sponsor and the company. The fastest-growing sales networks focus new, often impatient, distributors on selling activities from Day One to reduce attrition.

The new distributor who makes a sale in the first two weeks is likely is likely to stay engaged with the company for six years, while almost all their recruitment cohort will depart the program within five years because of lack of success. Success breeds confidence in the program. Direct selling companies have 90 days to ensure their overall return on recruiting investments, they must engage with new distributors through mobile-first tools that maximize feedback and personalize training.

Sponsor-distributors also need tools to help engage, train, and retain new enrollees. Every moment spent on non-selling activity during that time is potentially wasted, so sponsors don’t have time to watch over each recruit’s shoulder to ensure they follow the training process. Platform-based software using machine-learning can step in to support sponsors during the onboarding process, offering the trainee supportive messages and video to address day-to-day process issues. Mobile tools connect sponsors to recruits based on data-driven insights about enrollees’ progress against goals, ensuring they receive human support when it is most needed. This augmented human training approach can extend systematic training for months, exceeding the Society of Human Resource Management’s recommended three-month minimum.

Blending real sales activity with content and sponsor messaging that reinforces company values and policies is an antidote to the high attrition rates in direct selling. The experience of selling a product can turn a doubtful recruit into a long-term contributor. Because most sales reps fail to follow-up with prospects more than once, rather than the five to six times engagements required to close a sale, early training must reinforce the importance of daily sales activity. Those actions and the conversions produced will sell the enrollee on the importance of following the company sales process.

The keystone of early sales success is consistent personalized training delivered in real-world sales tools.

Sandy, Utah-based LifeVantage provides new distributors free iPhone or Android apps that begin onboarding at enrollment, including real sales actions they can take on Day One. Serving a customized stream of video training combined with tasks such as entering contacts and sending outreach messages, the LifeVantage App encourages new distributors to take steps that help speed initial sales. The LifeVantage app alerts distributors immediately when a prospect responds to a message or media shared, an important factor in converting sales. The Harvard Business Review reports that sales follow-ups within an hour of an expression of interest are seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation that moves the prospect toward a closing.

Constant Improvement

Today’s economy exacts a harsh toll on companies that fail to adapt. Younger workers are more inclined than previous generations to move on from organizations that cannot demonstrate a commitment to their success. Because it takes as long as eight months for employees to achieve their full productivity, “technology can save onboarding from itself” by extending training at scale, as Robert Ferrazzi, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2015.

No company can afford to have an informal and unmeasured onboarding program. The rise of new technology platforms lets managers, marketers, and data scientists look into their onboarding process to understand where it works and where it falls down.

The combination of onboarding and real sales activity creates previously unimaginable incentives for the new recruit to concentrate on their training. Tools like the LifeVantage App provide actionable feedback about the new distributor’s progress. Smart salespeople know what to do with actionable information, they will use it to sell.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

Can you train contractors without becoming a legal employer?

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The gig economy is a powerful force in commodity service markets, such as driving or “ride sharing.” More sophisticated services that require training, which courts have repeatedly ruled put companies in the legal position of employer, creating liability and increasing costs, especially legal costs, will reshape the development of business tools. The evolution of software – it is “eating the world” – points to the solution.

Federal District Court Judge Michael Baylson ruled in mid-April that UberBLACK drivers are not employees of the company because Uber doesn’t exert enough control over their schedules and they do not have to report to Uber employees. The Uber app controls the entire engagement between UberBLACK drivers, who can work when they want.

The ruling treats the Uber app as a tool used by the driver to fulfill the contracted service rather than a system of control. While the case may go as far as the U.S. Supreme Court and be reinterpreted many times, this distinction is critically important to the future of gig work arrangements.

The Society for Human Resource Management summarizes the scope of control issue: “If the employer will rigidly prescribe the manner in which the work is performed, that weighs toward employee status. Hiring an employee would be the safer course of action. If the organization is concerned only about the final product and does not need to dictate how the worker gets from point A to point Z, an independent contractor may be the preferred approach.”

We need new tools to enable professional-level services, not just simple commodity services, provided by contractors.

Brands have extensively documented, constantly evolving business processes that contractors must be able to follow reliably to deliver a customer experience consistent with their value proposition. With driving from place to place, the problem is simple. Uber and Lyft coordinate three things: Drivers; Cars, and; Passengers. Getting a passenger together with a car and driver to reach a destination is a relatively simple process, though hugely valuable, as evidenced by the companies’ more than $40-billion gross revenues. Likewise, dog-walking, package delivery, and other simple logistical markets.

More complex business processes, such as a sales engagement, retail interactions, professional services such as medical or therapeutic services, however, require a form of knowledge that has not previously been embodied in a simple app, a tool rather than a scope of control. These new software tools require sophisticated inputs, the ability to ask questions or provide information based on the customer’s circumstances and personality, and in many settings, a great deal of unstructured data needed to deliver the experience the way the brand requires.

These interactions cannot demand training before the contractor begins work. Based on repeated rulings, that training imposes a system of control.

Instead, a competent contractor needs to be prepared with general skills that can be applied to using a software tool that guides them through the brand experience in real-time. This demands software developers deeply understand a brand’s business processes to:

  • Guide the contractor through the correct information to share. For instance, if a medical worker on contract talks with a patient, they may need to be able to explain a HIPAA-related document and share it in the form the hospital company requires.
  • Understand feedback from customers inputted by the contractor to suggest media assets, next steps in the brand’s sales process, and other facets of the customer experience to the contractor as they exercise their skilled work.
  • Validate that processes are followed, as well as collect relevant data needed to refine the process in response to customers. The rapid evolution of brand experience demands that this measurement take place, or the company will miss key feedback it needs. The contractor can be coached to capture this data but may not be trained to do so in advance.

This merely summarizes a complex evolutionary challenge for on-demand services. Gig tools will certainly evolve from commodity services to refined high-touch services, such as prepared food delivery or online human services like legal services or therapy, which can be significantly improved by a greater focus on process. The transformation is just starting. I

Scope of control is a changing concept. The more easily a trained human can respond to process-led software, the less likely that person is to be treated by an employee. By moving the process to the edge of the network, into the hands of a skilled human who is able to modulate a branded experience, brands, retailers, and professional services firms can reduce centralized costs and move more compensation to the human provider.

Process-based apps are the path to improved contractor experience and brand experience. It also has the benefit of being less likely to result in labor litigation. We need better tools to complete the foundation of a prosperous gig world where flexibility is the primary driver of when and how people work.