When you measure the effect of your sales enablement, calculating the impact of your sales training is vital. But what’s the best way to learn? Research shows that enabling users to learn in the flow of work can have far-reaching impacts.
You might have heard the term “learning by doing” or “active learning,” which means people learn through engaging activities rather than simply by reading material or watching presentations.
According to a Harvard study, people learned significantly more when taking part in active learning strategies rather than through traditional lectures. Which makes sense, right? Imagine you're trying to learn how shoot a three-pointer. Would you learn best by listening to a PowerPoint presentation of how to align your three-point shot? Or, would you master that shot by standing on the three-point line and practicing repeatedly?
From arts to sports to music, we understand the value of learning by doing. But, something happens when we get into the workplace. Suddenly here, we're expected to learn by reading through lengthy PDFs, suffering through LMS courses, and enduring weeks-long training presentations. How we learn as humans hasn't changed, but the practices used to teach other skills often aren't applied in our day-to-day work environments.
At Spekit, we know that employees learn best when they're able to learn by doing. That's why we've designed our entire platform around enabling teams in the flow of work —a term we coined and trademarked six years ago. In this article, we’ll break down how Spekit enables users to learn what they need to know, when, and where they need to know it.
What is learning in the flow of work?
Learning in the flow of work means accessing learning tactics, resources, and knowledge directly where you’re working—rather than having to interrupt your work to find learning content or learning separately from the tools and processes that you use every day.
Spekit coined this term to describe the process of offering contextual learning resources and content in any tool or platform that a sales rep works in. This feature ensures continuous learning rather than making learning separate from a sales professional’s everyday duties.
What is enablement in the flow of work?
Enablement in the flow of work takes learning in the flow of work a step further. As a sales enablement professional, sales training is just one of the ways you give your sales representatives the resources they need to succeed and close more deals.
Sales enablement in the flow of work also means providing knowledge, answers, and content right where your sales reps are working. When offering enablement in the flow of work, your sales professionals will get the content that they need to convert prospects, both internal content that focuses on things like messaging and sales processes and external content like case studies and white papers.
But enablement in the flow of work doesn’t just apply to sales enablement. It also assists your revenue enablement efforts. By sharing learning content with not only the sales team but other customer-facing, revenue-generating teams, you’re building better alignment between different parts of your business. You’re also helping these teams with their own professional development and providing them with knowledge to increase customer retention, engagement, and more.
How does it work?
Two of the key principles of enabling users to learn in the flow of work is to make sure that the learning resources are contextual and continuous. To be contextual, these resources must be directly related to whatever process or workflow the sales rep is currently in. For example, Spekit might surface your opportunity stage guidelines within the opportunity field of Salesforce to guide your sales reps as they're converting an opportunity from one stage to the next.
To be continuous, they must also be embedded into the flow of work, which means being accessible within the tools and processes they use every day.
Those connections also provide sales professionals with in-app instructions and coaching. This guidance ensures that learning is more personalized and tailored to the unique needs of the individual at that point in time.
Spekit’s just-in-time learning provides users with multiple ways to access learning that is both contextual and connected.
1) Sales reps can hover over the embedded Spekit icon within tools like Outreach, Chorus, Gong, or Salesforce to access quick tips and guidance related to a field or process.
2) Sales reps can open the Spekit Chrome Extension within any tools they're working in to see recommended content and resources or search your entire knowledge base for answers within seconds.
3) Sales enablement teams can trigger in-app notifications in real-time to notify your sales reps of a change in your process, a new policy, new content, and more.
Enabling users to learn in the flow of work also means offering real-time learning. The idea behind this tactic is to provide sales representatives with the information they need at the moment of need, which is why Spekit’s learning resources arrive just in time to help them overcome a challenge and learn and hone a new skill.
Learning in the flow of work would not work if sales representatives were bogged down with information overload. To learn in the flow of work, they need to be provided with quick, bite-sized answers that they can easily reference to the answers they need and move on with their day. With Spekit’s just-in-time learning, sales teams get bite-sized bits of information that are far easier for them to digest.
They’re given smaller, less time-consuming assignments that help them work and learn at the same time.
Why do we need to offer enablement in the flow of work?
According to Gartner, B2B sales reps forget about 70% of the information they learn within just one week of learning. Continuous, contextual, and personalized learning efforts can improve retention. American companies spend $20 billion per year on sales training—but 90% of these initiatives have no lasting impact after 120 days.
A study by Spekit also found that sales reps are asking for more opportunities to take control of their learning. When asked how they like to learn, 75% of sales reps said they want to learn by doing, significantly outperforming any other training option listed in the survey.
Offering enablement in the flow of work empowers sales reps to learn at their own pace and in their own workflow.
Benefits of Enabling Learning In the Flow of Work
Let’s get into why enabling users to learn in the flow of work benefits your sales team and beyond:
Shorter Ramp Times
By learning in the flow of work, your sales reps can jump into their expected duties faster, improving their onboarding. Spekit users experienced a 30% faster ramp-up time with just-in-time learning.
Higher Retention of Information
According to Gartner, 27% of employees experience information overload at work, which can have many negative impacts on companies, including lower retention. By offering bite-sized bits of information spread out over time rather than a lot of information delivered all at once, your sales teams will get a boost in their information retention.
Engaged Learners
By enabling users to learn in the flow of work, you’re letting them work at their own pace with a more personalized training program that understands their unique needs. Research has found that more customized learning leads to higher employee engagement.
Improved Productivity
Research shows that continuous training, such as learning in the flow of work, results in 50% higher net sales per employee, giving you both a sales and revenue enablement boost. Learning in the flow of work allows sales professionals to save time as they don’t have to stop their workflow to do their sales or product training or search for answers to questions that their training would have covered.
Spekit users spend 69% more time selling on average, letting them spend more time with customers and less time training.
Streamlined Change Management
According to Spekit, only 29% of sales reps say that a rollout of a new sales process or methodology was “excellent.” Meanwhile, 41% say learning how to use their company’s tools is the most challenging part of their job training.
Whether you’re looking to train your team on a new process, methodology, or tool, learning in the flow of work makes it easier to make these changes and put them into effect more quickly.
Cost-effective
With 26% of sales representatives saying that their sales training had little to no effect, it’s time to start looking at training and onboarding in a new way. By learning in the flow of work, your employees will receive all the benefits here without the need for overly complex and expensive training programs and seminars.
How to Enable Learning In the Flow of Work
We’ve talked about why enabling users to learn in the flow of work is beneficial, but now let’s talk about how to put it into effect:
1. Create Bite-sized Pieces of Content
Too much content and data at once can lead to information overload. Instead, utilize smaller, bite-sized bits of content that are easier to understand. Your sales reps will experience higher retention and won’t feel bogged down by trying to learn too much at once. The Spekit onboarding and implementation team will guide you in breaking down your content into digestible bites. They also offer hundreds of out-of-the-box templates on the most popular tools and playbooks so you can hit the ground running fast.
2. Embed Learning Within Your Processes and Tools
A crucial part of enabling users to learn in the flow of work is to make sure that those learning resources are contextual and integrated into the workflow itself.
Your sales training should be relevant to your sales team’s needs and must be provided in a way that doesn’t interrupt their everyday tasks. Equip sales reps with bite-sized answers, training, and content embedded directly into the app they’re working in—exactly when they need it.
Add bite-sized quizzes to track progress and embed FAQs, process guidance, and support to guide reps through changes and updates.
3. Prioritize Accessibility
Over 70% of sales leaders say they spend four or more hours per week answering questions about the tools, processes, and information that sales reps need to do their jobs. By making training content more accessible, you’ll save both sales reps and sales leaders time.
You may also want to consider if your enablement efforts are available on mobile devices since this allows your sales team to take their training on the go. It puts training in their own hands—literally.
4. Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence
Integrating artificial intelligence opens up a world of training and enablement possibilities. With Spekit AI, AI-powered content recommendations automatically surface where sales reps are selling, based on the context of their sales interactions. You can also use Spekit AI to instantly summarize content into more digestible pieces for both sales reps and their prospects to better understand, and generate content with just a simple prompt—all ways to boost your enablement in the flow of work efforts.
5. Use Enablement Software Tools
Sales enablement tools offer easy ways to integrate learning in the flow of work into your sales training. When you implement Spekit, you can boost your sales performance by providing your sales teams with just-in-time learning, giving them the information and training they need right when they need it most.
But Spekit goes beyond training, as it delivers content recommendations for better conversions, provides analytics on everything from prospects to content, and has short quizzes that give higher-ups insight into knowledge and skills gaps.
6. Offer Training and Support
From CMS platforms to MEDDIC methodology, your sales reps have a lot that they need to learn. While learning in the flow of work empowers them to learn at their own pace in the way that works best for them, providing support is still vital.
Spekit found that support from sales leadership is the most important factor in a sales rep’s ability to always or often hit their sales target. Although learning in the flow of work can be very self-guided, collaboration and mentorship are still keys to success.
Challenges of Learning In the Flow of Work
Learning in the flow of work requires creating resources relevant to your sales team’s needs, which means monitoring their skills and knowledge gaps and creating the content they'll need to succeed.
It also requires having the technology that will enable you to surface the right content, at the right time. The minute you take a sales rep away from their workflow to dig through a content repository or Slack a colleague for an answer, you've broken that train of thought. This is called context-switching, one of the greatest drains on sales rep productivity.
Spekit surfaces answers, guidance, and content sales reps need to drive revenue based on what they're doing and where they are. That means personalized answers and content right at their fingertips—right when they need it.
Examples of Enablement In The Flow Of Work
The company, Data Axle, faced significant challenges when transitioning to a remote work environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With sales teams operating from home, the visibility into day-to-day operations and the ability to provide real-time support diminished. This lack of accessibility to information led to inefficiencies, reduced sales time, and increased frustration among the sales reps and managers.
Recognizing the need for a solution that could centralize information, provide quick access to resources, and promote self-service among sales teams, Data Axle decided to implement Spekit. Spekit served as a one-stop source of truth for all information related to sales, marketing, and analytics.
Driving Adoption and Behavior Change
To ensure successful implementation and adoption of Spekit, the company focused on driving behavior change among sales reps and managers. By emphasizing the importance of using Spekit as the first point of contact for information, the company encouraged a shift in behavior towards self-service and efficient resource utilization.
Measuring Success with Spekit
Data Axle measured success with Spekit by tracking metrics such as time saved on searching for information, number of searches conducted, and the impact on sales productivity. By analyzing these metrics, the company was able to quantify the ROI of Spekit and demonstrate the value it brought in terms of increased efficiency and streamlined operations.
Leveraging Spekit Features
One of the key highlights of utilizing Spekit was the incorporation of knowledge checks to reinforce learning and ensure information retention among sales teams. The platform's ability to provide just-in-time learning, in the flow of work, and address specific needs of sales reps contributed significantly to enhancing productivity and reducing response times.
Impact on New Hire Training and Onboarding
Spekit played a pivotal role in transforming the new hire training and onboarding process at Data Axle. By providing easy access to resources and supporting new hires with additional tools, the platform streamlined the onboarding experience and received positive feedback from new employees.
Through strategic adoption, behavior change initiatives, and leveraging key features of Spekit, Data Axle exemplifies how organizations can optimize sales enablement processes and empower their teams to do more with less with learning in the flow of work.
Enable Your Team to Learn In the Flow of Work
Enabling users to learn in the flow of work is a sales enablement best practice that should be put in effect by any sales team looking to crush their quotas, ramp faster, drive higher employee engagement, retention, and ultimately more revenue. Now, your sales team can learn while doing—preventing them from breaking out of the zone and losing productivity to find the knowledge they need to close deals, when they need it.
With Spekit, you get AI-powered just-in-time learning that ensures your sales reps have personalized, contextualized enablement. Leverage the power of Spekit to surface the answers, content, and training sales reps need just-in-time, in any tool or workflow.
