Smith & Nephew’s U.S. Sales Training and Education launched an ePOA (electronic Plan of Action) initiative for one of the company’s three divisions, Advanced Wound Management (AWM), in December 2016. This division encompasses 510 sales team members located throughout the U.S. and across four major product lines. With nearly two dozen products, its vast services portfolio assists with chronic and acute wounds, enabling improved patient outcomes, as well as reduced costs for health-care providers.
Program Details
The ePOA program was designed as an opportunity for the sales and marketing teams to leverage training in order to support business iniatives and bring high focus to three to five key areas that would help drive business. Through the program, sellers were able to further develop their selling skills, mitigate common issues, and improve their product knowledge. Dynamic training modules and follow-up quizzes were implemented and pushed out to sellers over a 12-week period. Incentives and prizes also were incorporated to further create excitement and engagement in the program. The mode of delivery for the program was entirely mobile, using a learning app specifically designed for the training organization. This prevented disruption of selling time and easy accessibility.
The mobile app utilized for this program provided analysis on the most preferred content and the highest rate of engagement by day and time. The results showed the highest levels of engagement on Mondays and Fridays, right before lunch and early afternoon. This level of data provides the Training team with a wealth of knowledge on when to push future content to enhance engagement.
Results
Over a three-month period, sellers accessed the learning content nearly 19,000 times for an average of 42 access points per seller. Analysis of sales performance showed that sellers in the organization who completed all of the ePOA assets increased sales at a 13 percent rate versus 5 percent for the sellers who did not complete all the learning assets.
