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Today I’m excited to share our long-awaited launch of Knowledge Checks. Knowledge Checks are the new, quick, and easy way to reinforce learning and assess your team’s retention in the flow of work.
Spekit Knowledge Checks are bite-sized check-ins that you can create in minutes and that your team actually enjoys taking. Knowledge Checks are contextual, so they are surfaced in the moment of need inside the apps the team is already working in. With a single click, your employees are engaged and completing the assessment in less than a minute. And the best part is that you’ll see what is working and where your team needs help.
Why Knowledge Checks?
Let’s face it. While technology has brought a lot of efficiencies to the workplace, these efficiencies have also accelerated the pace of business at a rate that many teams have a hard time keeping up with, especially in a remote environment. Technology has led to information overload. There is simply too much information, and too much noise distracting the simple act of productivity.
It’s harder than ever before to ensure your employees are maximizing the benefit of all of the tools available to them. Driving operational excellence and good data has gotten harder. Finding answers at work has gotten harder. Keeping everyone on the same page with all the changes has gotten harder. Getting employees up to speed on your thousands of workflows, processes, resources, and more has gotten harder. In today’s environment, it’s harder than ever before to hit sales targets, retain top talent, and keep your customers happy.
That’s why Knowledge Checks couldn’t come at a better time. They give your team time back by eliminating long training sessions. They let you see how well your teams are absorbing these changes and give you the confidence that you’re removing as much of the friction and wasted time in your employees’ day-to-day searching for information.
When we started Spekit, it was because of our own personal experience with this frustration and the realization that learning at work is broken. So we imagined a world where learning was integrated into an employee’s flow of work. Where training and resources were contextualized, personalized, and instantly accessible. Where learning in our professional lives was as easy and joyful as it is in our personal lives.
Our focus has always been simplicity. Everything we have built has been centered around making learning at work easier — whether that be simplifying the complexity of Salesforce, change management, or helping sales teams to be more efficient and productive. Work is hard. The current economic environment is hard. But Spekit is easy.
That’s why I couldn’t be more thrilled to share our new release — Spekit Knowledge Checks. Knowledge Checks are a quick and easy way to assess your team’s knowledge retention in a fun, low-stress experience for your employees.
Empower your team with Agile learning
Knowledge Checks were built on the foundation of Agile learning. Agile learning is continuous and incremental training that helps your employees adapt faster to changes or new knowledge. Agile learning helps your team become more adaptable, increasing both their technical and soft skills so they can be more effective, productive, and efficient. Ultimately, this approach helps them to better respond to new challenges.
Why Agile learning? According to eLearning Industry, 61% of organizations experience three or more major changes every year, but only 17% of companies consider themselves highly effective at managing change, and only 30% have change and learning teams that support employees through this process. Agile learning lets you measure, analyze, pivot, and then iterate.
This is a stark contrast to the more established, traditional Waterfall learning model. Waterfall learning focuses on a step-by-step design process in which each step must be completed before moving to the next. While Waterfall learning is a tried-and-true method, it is rigid and doesn’t allow for change to happen easily. Research also shows that this is not how our employees like to learn at work. In the State of Sales Training and Onboarding, we found that only 31% of sales reps like to learn by taking online courses (LMS), compared to 75% of reps who want to learn by doing.
The reality is that you can design the most amazing onboarding boot camp or the best-designed Salesforce rollout webinar ever. Your team won’t remember it, and there’s a reason for this. It’s called “the Forgetting Curve.” Essentially, once humans learn something, there is a steep dropoff in retention if we don’t reinforce what we’ve learned. Sound familiar? If you have built the most perfect training sessions, webinars, emails, and more and people still aren’t remembering it, it’s not your fault.
Knowledge Checks are designed for how people actually learn
Reinforcement is critical to learning and achieving understanding. If your team attends a comprehensive webinar about a recent change in process, will they retain the information three days after the webinar when they are actually in the job? At that point, they are actually in the flow of work and need that information at their fingertips. Spekit allows you to test their understanding in a quick and easy way without your team ever needing to leave their flow of work.
Let’s say you want to confirm that your sales team understands the new exit criteria in Salesforce. Or a field change in CPQ. Or maybe you just updated a battle card and want to make sure your team understands the new differentiators. Send a Knowledge Check.
“Nobody likes taking long, formal quizzes. Knowledge Checks are easy to create and take, and our teams enjoy them. They’re taking these assessments without even being asked.” – JEN ROGERS, MANAGER, SUCCESS ENABLEMENT | SHIPBOB
Knowledge Checks are so simple to create. The possibilities to evaluate your team’s progress are endless.
Reinforcing macro changes vs. micro changes for your sales team
Change happens. It’s a fact of life. In fact, over half of sales leaders have rolled out a new sales process or methodology in the past four months, but only 16% are very confident that reps are following them. And when your team isn’t in lockstep, that affects both you and your team negatively. Research shows that 70% of sales leaders spend more than four hours every week answering questions about processes and information reps need to do their job. And conversely, reps spend up to 11 hours each week searching for information about processes, tools, or new information — hours that should be spent selling.
So how do you manage change effectively in your organization in a way that helps to keep your sales team as efficient and productive as possible? It helps to look at the rollout in terms of macro change vs. micro changes. For example, let’s say you are rolling out an entirely new instance of Salesforce — that’s a macro change. For that level of change, some in-depth learning modules or webinars are likely in order, followed by Knowledge Checks post-launch to assess retention. However, let’s say you are changing your order process in CPQ. That is a micro change and can be assessed with a quick Knowledge Check alone.
“Knowledge Checks are the perfect way to reinforce hands-on training rather than passively sitting back and listening. This is especially powerful for onboarding in a remote-first world. We don’t want our teams to go to another application and possibly get lost just to take a brief assessment.” –KIRSTEN LENNOX, TRAINING MANAGER | ROAD SCHOLAR
Do I need an LMS if I have Spekit?
One question I often hear is: When do I need an LMS, and when do I use Spekit? Do I need both? I would say that depends on your organization’s Content Maturity Curve. I see most organizations scale this maturity as they grow as illustrated in the below graphic.
For smaller companies, you should invest in Spekit before an LMS. The LMS isn’t dead, but for small customers, it might not make sense for your organization’s needs quite yet. Spekit is lightweight and is easily managed by a single person.
If your organization is further along the Content Maturity Curve and already has an LMS in place, Spekit plays perfectly with the learning modules you have already created — making it easy for you to reinforce what you have educated your team on and ensure they are retaining that knowledge within their flow of work.
When it comes to designing an effective learning or change management strategy, the reality is that humans are used to having access to information and answers we need on the go. Going back to the Agile vs. Waterfall style of learning. Knowledge Checks are Agile, while LMS learning is Waterfall. Spekit is to your LMS what the iPhone is to your desktop. Both are helpful, but only Spekit delivers answers when and where you need them most. It’s in-the-moment learning.
Simplify your training, simplify your life
If you’re spending your days creating modules and quizzes to roll out knowledge or process changes only to find that no one is retaining the information, you’re not alone.
That’s why when we created Knowledge Checks, we did our research and gathered input from our customers to make sure they solve our customers’ needs. The goal of Spekit has always been simplicity. That goal didn’t change with Knowledge Checks.
So for this release, our focus was to make learning a habit — make it easy, make it short, make it quick, make it fun, and set expectations with your users. When developing new features, we always strive to reverse engineer them to how your users will actually want to learn. We strive to remove the friction and make learning at work easy and enjoyable.
Ready to learn more? Say goodbye to intimidating and time-consuming learning modules. Say hello to the future of learning with Spekit Knowledge Checks. We’d love to show you just how simple it is. Feel free to reach out to me or request a demo today.
