Professional Education

We’re honored to announce that the Blackboard Professional Education team was recently awarded the 2012 Institute for Excellence in Sales & Business Development (IES&BD) Award for Sales & Business Development Training! IES&BD serves to develop excellence in sales and business development across industries, and is generally considered a preeminent group that recognizes excellence in organizational sales and business operations.

For this reason, we are not only honored to have received the award itself, but are also proud of the many ways our solutions drive results in the corporate and sales industries. This is our second IES&BD Excellence Award, following on our 2011 Excellence in Customer Partnering Award. Customer partnering is a form of collaboration that combines Blackboard solutions with the customer’s specific needs to deliver the optimum results in development, integration, and ultimately, outcomes.  As a customer-focused and results-driven organization, we were thrilled to have been recognized for our achievements in this area!

Recently, my colleague Paul Terry was featured in TrainingIndustry.com to discuss how to effectively leverage training for sales. In his article, Paul describes how companies are only beginning to understand the ways integrating sales training into an existing customer relationship management (CRM) solution can simplify and enhance the learning process.

By bringing together training and the CRM, he argues, sales teams will better align sales training with business goals and account needs, while maximizing retention of critical information. What’s the end result of this integration of training and the CRM, Paul asks? Better preforming sales reps!  Below is an excerpt from the article that focuses on measuring sales training effectiveness:

Measurement should be meaningful and demonstrate improved sales performance. With this insight and ability to tailor training, a company can train better prepared sales reps in the field. Sales managers can measure the affect of training on sales growth, certify reps on new products, deliver training to geographically dispersed or traveling teams, and create targeted courses for reps needing improvement.

This year, The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) is hosting their annual conference in Denver – will you be there? If so, be sure to add Blackboard booth #425 to your conference agenda so you don’t miss out on any of the fun!

1. Find out how to take your training & development programs social and mobile At the Blackboard booth, you’ll find out how to use the latest technology to add a more social and mobile experience to your training programs. We’ll showcase: • Sales Training Integration with salesforce.com • Mobile Training • Live Virtual Training Sessions

We live in a time where much of the information we need in our daily lives is available on demand through one-touch access to the Internet.  This is in turn is causing many of us to expect similar instant access to work-related information anytime, anywhere. Since we are used to having this vast array of resources and knowledge available constantly at our fingertips, it comes as little surprise to find that a growing trend in professional education today is the use of on-demand or self-paced learning.

You may have already heard about the flipped classroom or Khan Academy concepts, which embody one form of a self-paced learning.  In these models, learners listen to lectures and read classroom texts and home while completing assignments in the classroom (under the guidance of an instructor).  In other words, homework and lectures are “flipped,” allowing learners to take in material at their own pace and maximize time spent with their instructors. But how can we go even further to extend such self-paced learning in the workplace? We want to increasingly meet our learners’ desires for on-demand information, but still retain a high quality educational experience.

When members of the Blackboard team attended Cloudforce last year, we had recently announced the integration of salesforce.com with our Blackboard Learn platform.  A year later, we are excited to report that Blackboard Learn for Sales™ is already helping businesses leverage learning for sales results– and we took that excitement back to Cloudforce.

This year’s Cloudforce keynote address was delivered by the dynamic Vivek Kundra, former CIO of the U.S. federal government and current Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets at salesforce.com.  Kundra is an innovator in cloud computing technology and policy, and has a wealth of experience in helping organizations streamline digital resources to increase efficiency. At Cloudforce, Kundra spoke on the future of cloud computing and the impact of today’s “social revolution” across industries, from governance to sales.

I was especially interested in the discussion that took place throughout the day on leveraging social networks for business, especially examples of companies that build social networks specifically to engage with their clients.  This seems like a great way to implement the social enterprise in a holistic way, allowing sales team members and clients to foster relationships and maintain open channels of communication. Here are some of my favorite #Cloudforce tweets from the day: