A leading alcohol beverage (Alco-Bev) company (The Company) in India with an outstanding collection of premium brands launched an innovative sales training program for its 1300+ frontline team in 2023.

In 2023, the Alco-Bev industry reached USD55 billion and as per a report, the market is expected to rise by 7% CAGR in next 10 years. A consumption of 5 litres per year is the per capita consumption of India; rising income, premiumisation, young and expanding middle class are likely to cause this market growth. This sector generates employment for 80 lakh people in related sectors such as agriculture, F&B, retail and hospitality. Every industry and business has a different set of challenges when it comes to matters of training frontline teams. The alcohol beverage industry operates through various Route-to-Market (RTM) strategies across diverse markets, each with unique learning requirements. Having conducted traditional and webinar based sales training programs, The Company wanted to move beyond the generic sales training approach and differentiate itself in the alcohol beverage industry with its unique sales team.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, The Company’s Commercial Team encountered a critical hurdle in enhancing the skills of their 1,300+ frontline team comprising Team Leader (TL), State Customer Marketing Manager(SCMM), State Customer Marketing Executive (SCME), Sales Executive (SE), Direct Sales Manager (DSM). SE and DSMs are third party employees. With most training sessions shifting online via webinars during the pandemic, the team grappled with webinar fatigue. The team’s commitment to continuous frontline learning necessitated an innovative approach.

Given the dispersed locations of the team nationwide along with the need for continuous frontline readiness, organizing frequent classroom sessions demanded intricate logistical arrangements and substantial financial and time resources. Recognizing the need for technological intervention in training design and execution, the team embarked on developing a sales training program that would be both effective and enjoyable for the frontline team. Their vision included integrating gamification to foster an engaging learning environment and cultivate a culture of ongoing learning.

Design Of Sales Training Program

This initiative aimed not only to address the challenges posed by the pandemic but also to future-proof The Company’s approach to frontline team development. The business need was to provide product knowledge of different SKUs and help the frontline learner teams with faster go-to-market thus enabling better productivity. Through this innovative learning program, The Company sought to revolutionize capability development, ensuring it remained dynamic, interactive, and conducive to continuous professional growth.

With numerous SKUs in inventory, having a comprehensive understanding of each product's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and its effective selling pitch becomes paramount. To address these points, The Company partnered with Master-O’s frontline readiness platform in 2023 to design a sales training program for the frontline teams.

To ensure a single, unified access for their salesforce, The Company integrated the Master-O platform with its internal learning platform. The Company’s  internal mascot for India sales was also looped in for the content dissemination and communications.

Given the salesforce had a basic education background (in many cases, just a 10th class diploma), it became imperative to design a sales training program that was not only engaging and effective, but extremely simple. To facilitate this, the content creation used a unique approach called Microskills®, to leverage a sales rep’s downtime for capability development. To ensure a rep’s downtime was effectively used, it became imperative to capture the mindshare of the rep by providing an experience that felt as engaging and psychologically effortless as consumer apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and others.

To achieve this objective, Microskills were designed keeping an interdisciplinary approach that blended interactive microlearning, game-based assessments, behavioural psychology and data science. This approach allowed The Company to repackage a traditional 40-page PowerPoint content on their product, into an effective Microskill that used a Learn > Assess > Practice approach to enhance capability & skills.

Implementation

The implementation initially started with 120 TLs to garner their confidence in the tool's efficacy, ease of use, and adoption. TLs used the platform for 2 months and achieved 100% completion. 5 Microskills, were launched for all the TLs across zones. The Microskills focused on enhancing product knowledge and behavioural skills.

Subsequently, the implementation was extended to Sales Executive (SE), State Customer Marketing Manager(SCMM), State Customer Marketing Executive (SCME), Direct Sales Manager (DSM) scaling up to include 1300+ participants. The TLs were also given responsibility for driving adoption for their teams in addition to completing the self-learning. This ensured effective learning transfer since the TLs often met with the sales executives and could ensure consistent product messaging during their daily or weekly huddles and thereafter ensure their teams reinforced their product knowledge via Master-O.

A comprehensive marketing and communication strategy was crafted to sustain project success. Weekly activities included teasers, user guide, support chat resolution, MIS dashboard reports at individual, regional and cluster level and email reminders. Success stories from the ground on both the experience and end outcomes acted as a force multiplier to generate momentum from the ground up. Skill Gap Analysis was utilised to understand gaps in skill sets, reinforce the right knowledge and to generate new content to address the resulting gaps and thereby make capability development more pinpointed. To ensure effective governance of the project, a weekly, monthly and quarterly cadence was set with the project team, project head and head of commercial excellence respectively.

It was observed that the end learners found the gamified learning experience extremely engaging and more effective than traditional classroom trainings or conventional webinars. By equipping the team with the necessary knowledge and skills, this initiative aimed to enhance their performance in navigating the complexities of the market and effectively promoting the products.

Challenges

Tailoring content to specific regions posed a significant challenge. To address this, The Company established an internal Training Needs Analysis group for each region, facilitating the recommendation of region-specific modules.

A major hurdle was instilling a culture of continuous learning among third-party resources, often resistant to change. To overcome this, consistent reporting and acknowledgment of completion were crucial. Highlighting areas needing improvement further incentivized participation. A structure was devised to maintain momentum in driving adoption.

Training adults presents obstacles and encounters resistance to change. Sales mascot helped in raising awareness, engaging the team at all times, highlighting achievements on the leaderboard which facilitated adoption and sustained enthusiasm, ensuring high energy levels throughout the learning journey.

Impact of New Sales Training Program

The key measures of success were 100% adoption rates (login and completion rates), 100% learning completion across all Microskills for every individual, Skill Gap Analysis to understand strong and weak skill sets which will help in modifying existing content and launch new content, post completion re-attempts and overall feedback.

The Microskill with gamification enabled training led to a notable 12% enhancement in the Width of Distribution (WOD) of the products – a key metric to improve market share and deepen outlet penetration. The mobile-based learning  received an impressive average rating of 4.8 out of 5, indicating high engagement levels among participants.

To ensure authentic capability development and not merely course completion, The Company also tracked Attempts Post Microskill Completion (APMC). At an average APMC of 4.1, it meant the 1,300+ learners would on average attempt the Microskill 4.1 times post completing it for the first time. This gave the leadership team the best indication on the level of engagement & effectiveness of the initiative. The microlearning app also clocked 600+ Monthly Active Users (MAU). Skill Gap Analysis revealed strong knowledge in "Understanding Characteristics" and "Understanding History" but identified "Range of Products" as an area that required ongoing improvement within the team.

Following positive feedback from field leaders, the tool has recently been deployed to a wider audience. Anticipated outcomes in the coming 12-18 months include a projected 20% increase in WOD and a 16% sales impact due to the training interventions.

The innovative sales training program marked The Company’s commercial team’s first initiative in detailed product training for all learner groups and not just TLs. Given the challenges that adult training presents, implementation of the sales training program garnered positive feedback from all learner groups, improvement of product knowledge and high engagement throughout the implementation.    

The significance of driving daily initiatives lies in the necessity for consistent promotion, fostering a culture of continuous learning, cultivating a positive environment around such behaviours, and persistently nudging individuals to ensure tangible results.

Master-O®, a frontline sales readiness and gamification platform, has powered several sales enablement & frontline readiness programs for enterprise customers and been a key driver of sales strategies for leaders across industries. To make capability development, sales enablement & engagement more personalized, Master-O® empowers sales managers tap into various data points and analytics for coaching & upskilling their frontline reps. This gives sales leaders and managers much-required objective perspective to reimagine their sales coaching, capability development & enablement approach and realign it with performance metrics.

To learn more about Master-O®, please visit masteroapp.com or schedule a demo to discover how Master-O® can redefine sales readiness & frontline capability development for your organization.