Like companies worldwide, our Sales Enablement team frequently rolls out new tools and processes to empower our reps to be more successful in their roles.
A few months ago, we purchased a new sales forecasting tool, Clari , to help give our reps better insight into their deal cycles.
But, every new rollout takes time away from a rep's day for training sessions they rarely remember . Employees are suffering from information overload and Zoom fatigue. The last thing they need is another lengthy session introducing a new tool they may only use for a few weeks.
At Spekit, we’re intimately familiar with the challenges of new tool adoption . Our platform is designed to automatically surface training and guidance in tools like Clari, ensuring reps are never more than a click away from the answers they need.
But, we’d never launched a tool without at least one introductory training session. We asked ourselves, is it possible to launch a new tool asynchronously?
Can we make our training so detailed and accessible that our reps can learn a new tool on their terms? Without any interruption to their day?
The answer we found was yes!
A defining insight by McKinsey revealed that employees only remember 10% of what they heard after a training session. In contrast, they remember 65% of what they learn by doing.
With that in mind, we designed our Clari training to allow every rep to learn by doing.
How we rolled out Clari 100% asynchronously
Think of a traditional workplace training you might attend and flip that on its head. No end-user sessions, no workbook, no lengthy PDFs, no LMS courses.
Instead, we broke down training content into small, digestible training cards called "Speks" and surfaced those directly within Clari.
Here’s how it worked:
1. When our reps logged into the new tool that day, they were automatically greeted with a welcome message linking them to an “Intro to Clari" Spek.
2. In a few minutes, they had an introduction and were ready to use the platform.
When and if a question came up, all of our Clari training was instantly searchable through our platform with Spekit’s Chrome Extension . We had quick answers written to address hundreds of possible questions.
3. We paired the rollout with a spiff and weekly in-app targeted Spotlights for reminders and updates to drive the right behaviors.
Instead of training our end-users by answering questions, we enabled them to find answers on their own - when and where they needed them.
The result?
This was the lightest-touch tool rollout our enablement team has ever done. Reps are logging into Clari and actively using it, and we’re not receiving any repetitive “how do I do this?” questions.
The measurable impact
First, adopting the tool allowed us to forecast our sales pipeline deals accurately. This has given us a methodology for driving predictable revenue for the business (by deal, category, historical data, and more).
By rolling out this tool completely asynchronously:
- Our Sales Enablement team saved 10-12 hours of build, training, and delivery time.
- We achieved 100% user activation and adoption within one week of the rollout - which is pretty unheard of!
- We’ve significantly reduced repetitive questions, saving countless hours that previously would’ve been spent by reps waiting for answers to questions or digging for answers on their own.
- We saved hours of the reps time that would’ve otherwise been wasted on a training session for the knowledge they likely would’ve forgotten when they finally used the new tool.
More than anything, though, I think we effectively stepped into a new era of training and onboarding. We proved that you can empower employees to be self-sufficient with the right training content and delivery methods.
We’ve essentially taken the scenario where you’re in the office and swivel to a coworker for help and replaced that with a digital companion that is always there, ready to answer your questions so you can get on with your day.
This rollout will now serve as a baseline for future tool and process changes and an example of what’s possible with just-in-time learning .
“I was a little surprised when the team told us we weren’t having a training session on our new forecasting tool. It’s a critical tool that I needed to rely on for forecasting and pipeline management. But then I got into Clari to submit my forecast for the first time, and a step-by-step guide our enablement team had prepared immediately surfaced. This walked me through exactly what I needed to do in the moment and WHY it was important. Instead of trying to remember a training session that took place weeks ago, I could have the exact answers I needed to use the new tool, right when and where I needed them. Shoutout to our RevOps team for making things easy and saving us time!” Rees Bayba, Spekit Account Executive
The consequences of poor tool adoption
A tool like Clari costs around $80 to $120 per month/per user. For a company of our size, that adds up to thousands of dollars a month which would go down the drain if the tool wasn’t adopted across the organization.
Poor tool adoption has meaningful consequences. A recent survey by Allego said:
- On average, companies said they wasted over $300,000 on sales tools that weren’t fully adopted.
- 76% of companies said poor adoption of sales tools is a top reason teams miss their sales quotas.
We're in an economic environment where every dollar counts. As such, it was more important than ever to have a successful rollout with this investment.
An asynchronous tool rollout was a massive risk but also a massive opportunity to prove what we believed in as an organization.
If you can surface real-time answers and guidance to your employees within their workflows, you can dramatically increase productivity, reduce repetitive questions, drive standardization and ensure your employees get the information they need when and where they need it.
“Rolling out a dynamic tool like Clari completely asynchronously, our reps were able to adopt the tool in their day-to-day quickly. Knowing that they could pull up quick guidance or tool tips while actually inside the tool empowered the reps to learn by doing, at their own pace. I’ve noticed this has resulted in fewer one-off questions and eliminated the need to pull reps off the floor for training, which means more time focused on selling.” Christian Schmidt, RVP Growth at Spekit
Ready to try it out for yourself? Let's chat!
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