Competing in the world of selling today means understanding the changing world of your buyers and adjusting your sales approach accordingly. The biggest change for sellers is that the game has gotten harder, and sellers need to execute at a higher level than ever before to compete. Committing to this level of change is the difference between college sports and pro. The players are bigger. The game is faster. The conditions are more challenging.

Maturity can be defined in many ways for a training organization. There’s maturity in the sense of tenure and respect within your organization, as well as maturity in the sense of trainees taking your information and applying it to their jobs. There’s even maturity in recognizing you have a lot of areas in which you need to grow. But what about your digital content program? There is a path to maturity that will let you progress nicely along without getting overwhelmed with all the options—shiny, fun new technology—available to you. There is a way to plan a digital content maturity path that will eventually lead to impactful and engaging training methods.  

Improving Outcomes in the Age of Online Training If there’s one challenge every corporate trainer faces, it’s this: Creating a collaborative online experience is hard. The benefits of in-person trainings don't always translate well into virtual environments. Too often, there's no way to measure engagement or create the feedback loops that are vital to success. Thankfully, there is a solution. New virtual training software features are making it possible to create true-to-life online trainings that improve the in-person experience. This white paper will help you gain a greater understanding of the complexities facing corporate trainers today and the steps you can take to achieve better outcomes online.  

Video works. It generates buzz and gets results. Here are just a few reasons why video production is worth your time and energy—now more than ever before. At least 65% of people learn by seeing 75% of the workforce will be Millennials by 2025* 70% of Gen Z watches more than 2 hours of YouTube daily *Millennials are some of the heaviest consumers of video as a medium to date. WHAT’S IN THE GUIDE: A brief business case for microlearning videos Typical training video production roles What to expect during pre-production, production, and post-production Terminology you’ll hear throughout the process

Team selling today is no longer required just for blockbuster business-to-business sales pitches. Whether you are in consulting, investment banking, or technology or are a financial advisor, home remodeler, or lawyer, pivotal meetings with customers and prospects now often involve more people — on both sides of the table. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, "…the number of people involved in B2B solutions purchases has climbed from an average of 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today."

With the next full season of your favorite show just a click and a mindless weekend away, what could that mean for learning? If binge-watching is the new norm, is binge-learning next? Organizations know they need to do a better job of providing rich and interactive learning experiences. Download the whitepaper for tips on taking the characteristics of binge-worthy TV and applying them to your learning programs, including:   Five simple steps to keep learners engaged and coming back for more How to determine the right formula for the length and delivery method of your learning and development programs Tips for enlisting a stellar cast of characters to deliver the lesson

You’ve found your team’s next superstar — that new hire with the right mix of expertise and enthusiasm with a ton of potential to help your business do great things. But unlocking all that promise takes more than just handing them a laptop and assigning them a desk.   More compelling than a handbook and more cost-effective than on-location events and seminars, video is one of the best employee onboarding investments a company can make. With the right video platform and onboarding program in place, employees learn more, feel more connected and remain loyal longer — all at a significant cost savings to the company. Find out more in this new free guide to using video to support employee onboarding!

xAPI - The training industry is about to get a lot more exciting. And it’s about time. Every other function in our organizations has better data than the training department does. Manufacturing, sales, marketing, finance and logistics all have rich datasets to mine about the leading and lagging indicators of success. Over here in training, we have completions, test scores & questions, and time spent in training, and maybe data from a few other isolated tools. The Experience API, or xAPI (perhaps you know it as the Tin Can Project), affords us the opportunity to leap-frog this situation, giving us not only better data but industry-wide interoperable data like no other function has.   

Your journey and career can seem confusing and hard to define. Think about where you are and how you got there, and you’ll see that career paths tend to be crooked and accidental. Each person is unique and will have interest in their career, changing over time. No one can guarantee their future, but laying out a Career Map primes the pump and changes the way everyone sees opportunities. Use this fillable template to strategically and intentionally think about your Talent GPS career. Presented by: Lou Russell, Director of Learning, Russell Martin & Associates (a division of Moser Consulting) Click here to order.

Work looks completely different in 2017 than it did just a generation ago. Where we work looks different, how we work has changed, and the skills any given employee needs are evolving faster than we can keep up. The pace of change has created a gap between the skills employees have right now and the skills they need to be successful. Deloitte researchers have highlighted this issue, pointing out the "declining half-life of skills critical to the 21st-century organization." Click below to learn more about these trends.

Performance Management Needs a Better ROI The verdict is in. Traditional performance management isn’t producing the results needed. "Despite years of research and practice, dissatisfaction with performance management is at an all-time high." "PUTTING PERFORMANCE BACK IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT", SHRM-SIOP WHITEPAPER Then there’s the employee perspective. Research by Tiny Pulse found that 64% of employees surveyed wanted a supervisor check-in at least every two weeks, with 42% of millennials wanting feedback every week. It’s time to move beyond traditional performance management. Leading HR experts recommend getting started on a fresh look at performance management, emphasizing real-time, agile and a focus on results.

Organizations that leverage learning beyond traditional on-boarding and mandated compliance training reap the rewards of a more engaged, more skilled and more productive workforce. But getting today’s distracted, impatient and busy learners to participate in training and development activities isn’t easy. Dealing with the realities of low adoption rates are a reoccurring nightmare for learning and development (L&D) teams. THE COLD, HARD FACTS ABOUT THE DISTRACTED WORKFORCE It’s no secret that you’re competing for your learner’s attention, but here are a few facts that might startle you: • 67% of organizations struggle with low learning management system (LMS) adoption rates1; • 88% of employees don’t have time, or make the time, to engage with L&D oerings, • 64% of managers don’t encourage, enable or follow up with L&D, and • 64% of people are not aware of what is available in their LMS2. The concept of "if you build it, they will come" doesn’t hold true for learning organizations. If you build it, they will not come. Not unless you come up with a solid marketing, content, delivery and engagement strategy to get them there. THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF AN ENGAGING TRAINING PROGRAM The nuts and bolts of an engaging training program really come down to a well thought out strategy focused on the learner’s experience. Many learners forget - or were never really made aware of - the benefits of learning and development. They don’t realize the resources available at their disposal that are designed to polish their skills and advance their careers. It’s your job to make them aware.

Download this interview with memory expert Ida Shessel to gain a deeper understand of how our memories work and how your can help yourself and others use your memory more effectively to improve how well you learn.

CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report compared the win rates on forecasted sales opportunities between companies with a formalized approach to coaching—meaning there is a standard approach used by all sales managers—to those companies where coaching strategies were entirely left up to the manager or done informally. Their findings provide proof as to why a sales coaching initiative at your company is so important: companies who had adopted a formal approach to sales coaching achieved a win-rate on forecasted deals that was 19% higher. In short, developing a strong sales coaching culture offers a great ROI. And great leverage: Each sales manager trained is then empowered to improve the win rates of every sales rep on their team. Here are seven keys that will move you in that direction.

There are dozens of studies and surveys each year reporting on the "state of the training industry." With some modest differences, these reports are consistently reporting very similar data. Among the data points routinely reported are the following: annual per employee spending on training, how many hours of training are available to employees, what training areas organizations are emphasizing, the ratio of training budget to overall expenses or payroll, etc. In other words, you can find a myriad of fascinating metrics all telling about the training industry from the organization’s perspective. What about the employees’ perspective? Aren’t we all supposed to be training employees?

No matter how fun your game-based solution is supposed to be, you will still need a plan for launching it, promoting it, and measuring it. How will you communicate about the game? Will you require players to play? How will you incentivize play... or do you need to incentivize?

Goal management is among the most powerful methods companies have to execute business strategies. Thousands of studies have examined the impact of goal management on workforce productivity.  The common finding from this research is: Effective use of goals often increases employee productivity levels by 25% or more.  The financial value of goal management is staggering given the relatively low cost associated with implementing goal management methods. Because the value of goals is tied to fundamental psychological principles of employee behavior, the benefits of goal management do not depend on being in a certain industry or market.  If a company employees people then it will benefit from better goal management.

NeuroTracker evolved out of a pure science approach through years of research at Prof. Faubert’s Visual Psychophysics & Perception Laboratory. Designed to uniquely measure and enhance high-level cognitive function, it has become established as a valuable research tool for understanding human performance. The not-for-profit CogniSens Applied Research Center (ARC) supports an increasing number of NeuroTracker research projects across a variety of science disciplines. To date, published studies discovered important neuroscience findings in the following areas. Measurement NeuroTracker provides objective cognitive metrics on brain functions fundamental to human performance, and also relevant in cognitive conditions. High-level mental processing is required to perform NeuroTracker at increasing speed threshold, as such, measures have been found to differentiate elite performers from amateur, reveal characteristic of brain development with age, identify impairment with healthy aging or learning related disorders, and possibly to help to detect function-related brain damage, such as with concussions, and reveal non-contact sports injury risk.  

Executing talent management activities before they’re needed is an earmark of a successful business. With aging workforces and a shortage of critical talent being among the biggest challenges facing today’s businesses, strategic workforce planning - the discipline of forecasting future gaps between demand and supply of critical talent, to ensure that you have the appropriate workforce mix three, five or ten years from now - has become one of HR’s most important responsibilities.

Analytics are at the heart of a modern data-driven business. When it came to content, we used to rely almost entirely on anecdotes and guesswork. That is no longer good enough - content is at the heart of the sales and marketing process and we must know how it is being used and how it is performing.   Marketing Automation tools made that a reality for marketing content. They let marketers analyze and optimize content marketing efforts during the first half of the sales cycle, providing analytics to show how effectively content moves customers through the funnel. But until recently, as soon as a deal was handed off to the sales team, it entered a content black hole.   There has been no way to answer very basic questions about sales content. Do reps have what they need? Do they use it? Do customers pay any attention to it? Does any of this actually generate real revenue? Even in our increasingly data-driven world, sales content has remained back in the days of guess and hope. But an emerging set of Sales Enablement platforms has changed that. They manage sales content throughout your sales engagements and use analytics to give you full visibility into how that content performs. This guide walks through eight reports that answer the key business questions about sales content and shows how to use them to optimize the way your company engages with customers.

AN EXCERPT FROM FROST & SULLIVAN’S ‘ENHANCING OMNICHANNEL AGENT PRODUCTIVITY’ REPORT - NOVEMBER 2016 There is no substitute for the human touch provided by omnichannel contact center agents when connecting virtually with customers for complex service and sales support issues. Agents are the linchpin to successful and profitable Customer Experiences. But it’s costly to hire, train, manage, accommodate, and equip agents to perform these essential tasks. Wages and benefits comprise the lion’s share of operating expenses (65%-70%). Moreover, having contact center agents work on premise incurs significant real estate, facilities, and equipment outlays. In today’s competitive environment, organizations (businesses, non-profits, and government agencies) must delight customers and control costs in order to exceed their goals and spur growth. Ensuring that contact center agents are productive and engage with learning is essential. Recommendation: Click below to download

Tracking and assessing workforce-diversity programs shouldn’t be hard work, but it should be a top priority. Because businesses benefit when they employ highly engaged workers with different backgrounds, HR leaders and hiring professionals contribute directly to a company’s success when diversity programs meet their goals. The opposite also is true: Workforce-development professionals who do not effectively measure the outcomes of their diversity programs are in danger of having the programs — and perhaps their jobs — deemed expendable. Ongoing competitive pressures are driving business leaders to demand that all investments return bottom- or top-line improvement, including workforce diversity programs.

Most organizations agree that talent is their most important asset, but the results of a new survey show that most businesses are not in tune with employee perceptions around key talent imperatives, including engagement, training and career development. Reaching 1,800 HR leaders and employees across the U.S. and the UK, the recent 2017 State of Employee Engagement Survey conducted by Saba Software highlights the challenges many organizations face in capturing consistent employee feedback and accurately assessing engagement across the organization. The survey also warns of gaps between the perception and reality of talent management program effectiveness, and the impact on critical talent outcomes. This report delves deeper into the survey findings, providing insight organizations can use to close potential gaps that exist between business leaders and employees in critical areas, including feedback and engagement, training, performance management and career development.

The BIG Question for 2017: Have companies built a workforce strategy where employees become a competitive advantage? More than ever, today’s CEOs recognize the tremendous competitive advantage in a workforce that’s highly motivated, excited and tightly connected to business goals. Building a powerful workforce strategy remains front and center for HR teams. The BIG Challenge: Technology For many companies, talent management technology was supposed to offer the answers. And it did in many ways: less paper, lower costs, saved time. You know the drill. However, traditional talent management technologies focus on automating HR functions, often ignoring business goals and the most important consumer, employees. Brandon Hall Group research indicates a high dissatisfaction with technology and a need to go beyond traditional approaches, engaging today’s savvy employees with more than an automated process to align with business goals. The BIG Shift: Moving Beyond Processes to Experiences As HR leaders look ahead to 2017, attention is shifting. Processes remain important, but a new emphasis emerged on moving beyond activities to creating an employee journey that attracts, motivates and connects to company results.