Lately, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with ASTD on several occasions to discuss trends and best practices in sales training. The first was a webinar hosted with ASTD’s Christina Mandzuk to discuss our joint report, State of Sales Training 2012. The report looks at various aspects of sales training, including obstacles, metrics, and expenditures, with the goal of giving those in sales training community valuable data to help them improve their sales training strategies.

Here are just a few of my top takeaways from this report:

• Time is of the essence, so provide flexible training methods whenever possible
• Develop training based on audience and to maximize learning
• Sales managers need to be strong leaders and a model for their team
• Provide opportunities for sales tram members to connect and share experience

You can watch the entire presentation in the video below or by clicking here:

A few weeks later, we built upon our sales training research with two presentations at ASTD’s annual conference. The first presentation focused on one of the key opportunities that sales teams have for training: the onboarding process. Our experience has shown that while the profession of selling has increased in complexity with the influence of the Internet, companies have decreased their investments in effective onboarding.

During our presentation, we discussed how the process of continual, bite-sized learning can help new employees best prepare for the new position by spreading training out over longer period of time, instead of a few days of “data dumping” information they are unlikely to remember. This continuous learning strategy can help employees retain more information and better apply training to their day-to-day work, which leads to real results on sales. If you’re interested in seeing our full onboarding presentation, click here.

Just because your company has a successful onboarding process, however, doesn’t mean that your training stops there. Our second presentation at the ASTD conference focused on best practices for measuring sales training metrics in your CRM. When sales training and the CRM are linked, sales managers can see what impact training is having on sales, what kinds of training individuals reps need to improve, and can even measure the ROI of your training program.

We were lucky to have team members from ShoreTel Sky and LivingSocial with us for this presentation, and they shared their experiences with leveraging sales training in the CRM through our Blackboard Learn for Salesforce platform.  To learn more about ShoreTel Sky and Living Social’s case studies or to read the rest of our presentation, click here.

Did you have the chance to see any of our presentations at the ASTD conference? What else would you add to the thoughts above? I’d be interested in hearing from you in the comments section below or on Twitter at @lperlis and @Blackboard ProEd!

Later this month, ASTD will be hosting their annual conference in Dallas,
Texas. This conference is a great opportunity to meet with learning and training experts across industries to see what technologies and innovations are improving the way we learn at work.

Whether you will be attending the conference in-person or will be following along online, there are plenty of ways you can engage with Blackboard during ASTD 2013. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Attend informative sessions on “On-Boarding Best Practices: Ramp Up, Report Out” on Monday, May 20^th and “Your Missing Link: Measuring Sales Training ROI Through CRM” on Tuesday, May 21^st to learn key strategies and technologies that can help your company align business goals with training.

2. Learn from training technology experts at the Blackboard booth 227, who will be on-hand to discuss your professional learning needs and to demonstrate some of our latest training solutions.

3. Put your social media skills into practice by following @BlackboardProEd and #ASTD2013 throughout the conference, including updates from our sessions and the keynote presentations.

See you in Dallas!

We’ve all experienced it before: professional training that feels like information overload, where instructors pile on as much information as they can in a short period of time with the hope that something sticks. While this may seem like the only way to give employees all of the information they need during limited training time, it’s evident that learning is more impactful when the focus shifts to identifying  the most pertinent information and breaking it down through the “bite-sized” training method.

Blackboard’s own Paul Terry recently discussed his thoughts on this new approach to learning in a Training Industry Quarterly article entitled “Improving Learning Outcomes with a Bite-Sized Strategy.” In the article, Paul discusses key best practices in bite-sized training that can help companies overcome the “data dump” method with more effective, engaging corporate learning.  These strategies include moving training to mobile devices and fostering in social learning, both of which help to streamline information in a way that is more relevant to the way today’s employees learn and work in their daily lives.

You can read the entire article in Training Industry Quarterly by clicking here, and tell us about your experiences with bite-sized corporate training in the comments below!

When it comes to finding the right learning management system (LMS), many associations struggle to find the right solution to meet their needs.  But in their new Association Learning Management Systems report, the leaders of Tagoras highlight some of the top LMS’s that can help associations educate and engage with their members. Those of us at Blackboard were proud to be featured in this list, and our own Paul Terry had the opportunity expand upon our work with associations in a recent interview with Tagoras Managing Director Celisa Steele.

In his interview, Paul emphasized the importance of social learning in associations, as this peer-to-peer engagement is critical to fostering strong relationships between association members. By capturing the highly relevant information shared through such social learning, LMS solutions like Blackboard can help associations meet their constituents’ needs while unifying the group towards their common goals.

You can listen to Paul’s entire interview with Tagoras by clicking here, or visit our website to learn how Blackboard can help foster social learning at your association.