One of your sales organization’s biggest challenges is to develop and nurture an ongoing learning environment for field reps. Your goal is to make every rep as good as your best rep by providing tools and training that raise the playing field to its highest level. The secret lies in continuous, contextual, and engaging learning and training that moves away from traditional approaches, like spending the traditional, monolithic, two-weeks-in-a-classroom, that don’t deliver a whole… Sidebar: Why Tablets? Expert Jay Goldman, Senior VP Innovation, Klick Health. Klick Health delivers superior strategic digital solutions on time and on budget to help companies achieve their business objectives. For more information, visit klick.com. The tablet market is expected to continue growing over the next several years, with one-third of the total American online audience projected to have a personal tablet by 2015. Tablet benefits include… » Tactile, responsive, interactive interfaces that create new storytelling opportunities » Intuitive design, reducing the intimidation factor of innovative solutions » Always-on connectivity, meaning dynamic and updateable content » Application support, allowing for nearly limitless capabilities with a strong existing software ecosystem, and the possibility of dedicated development » Location awareness, allowing information and presentation to be targeted geographically » Powers up instantly, perfect for limited HCP meeting times » All-day battery life (up to 10 hours in most conditions) » Capability to truly deliver on closed loop marketing (CLM), feeding data into CRM systems live from the field. Being able to access all training materials, anywhere, instantly, offers a huge benefit to a rep needing to hunt down a specific piece of information. Truly interactive materials offer the promise of changing experiences from being presented to, to being interacted with. Being able to hand a tablet to someone, and have them complete a quiz, interact with an animation, or delve into the details of a chart, has a lasting impact. With the ability to make follow-up actions part of the process, such as letting HCP’s request further information, a more natural experience can be created for both parties. Finally, with increasing HCP desire for digital-only information, tablets allow for a simplified, paper-free experience. Information can be selected and packaged, with custom informational packages delivered via email. Your Teachable Moment is Now One of your sales organization’s biggest challenges is to develop and nurture an ongoing learning environment for field reps. Your goal is to make every rep as good as your best rep by providing tools and training that raise the playing field to its highest level. The secret lies in continuous, contextual, and engaging learning and training that moves away from traditional approaches, like spending the traditional, monolithic, two-weeks-in-a-classroom, that don’t deliver a whole lot of value. We think of this as return on learning, measured by the resulting behavior change that occurs in learners as a result of their new training. Traditional methods, including classrooms and long seat time e-learning modules, have significant content retention issues. Most of this training is delivered on a yearly cycle with regular but infrequent compliance testing and updates. People don’t remember information delivered to them when they don’t need it — continuous and contextual training is best served up in what we call teachable moments. To capture that moment, training must be taken into the field and systems need to be taught to identify appropriate learning interventions. Teachable moments happen when a rep has 10 minutes in a waiting room before seeing a physician or 30 minutes in their car between appointments. Small, digestible, and highly personalized and contextual tips are delivered and put in to practice immediately, shortening the time gap between learning and execution, reinforcing lessons, and driving retention through application. Real-time field training isn’t intended to replace highly valuable on-boarding experiences and traditional home study programs. There is a time and a place for those, particularly as new reps are brought up to speed on your company, disease states, and products. This knowledge is a required baseline for their job and retention will be high because of its importance and use on a daily basis. The real driver of performance excellence, however, lies in those bite-sized, in- the-moment, just-in-time training snippets. Living in a Mobile World We live in a data rich world filled with mobile devices. Successful field-based training relies on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets running apps like iConnect. Technology has now been engineered to identify teachable moments based on the rep’s previous experience, behaviors, skill level, and context. Software running in the background on a smartphone might, for example, use geofencing to identify that a rep is arriving at an HCP’s location. It could then look that HCP up in the CRM or SFA system, understand the context for the visit, then cross-reference with the rep’s own experience to identify useful and contextual callouts and notes for them. Imagine if every rep arriving at an appointment got a reminder that popped up on his or her phone and a five-minute snippet related to who they were about to visit. The snippet could include things like the HCP’s history, previous visit notes or objections, and tips from colleagues on how to address questions and concerns. The rep is no longer slowed down by extensive standard operating procedures and regulatory practices. It’s essentially an intervention before the appointment equipping the rep with everything they need to be their best. High value personalized real-time training is the innovative secret to your rep’s ongoing career development.
