Case Study

Part of executing this involves enabling the company’s sales force and client facing staff with guidance on the latest market insights and internal Finastra processes and solutions. The Sales Training team at Finastra is responsible for delivering this content through a variety of programs via classroom or virtual platforms. Since the organization doubled in size following the merger, the team began looking for ways to scale the training process while making it more interactive and accessible on the go. Anna Hiett, Global Head of Sales Training said, “With a small team of six and double the audience since the merger, I knew there was an immediate need to bring our learning into the digitally enabled 21st century. I also knew the solution would have to be an app that would allow my team to digitally facilitate ongoing field coaching, provide content accessibility on the go and offline, as well as promote knowledge sharing among company representatives.”

Buy Versus Build

Once the need was identified for a sales learning platform, Finastra’s Sales Training team then assessed whether to buy a solution or build it themselves. The team created an app ‘proof of concept’ in-house to ensure early buy-in from Sales leadership. After deciding to move ahead with the cost-efficient route of buying rather than building, the team evaluated five different platforms considering field learning and coaching functionality, ease of use, scalability, content management functionality, and administration.

“After careful technical and functional evaluation, we decided to go with Allego because of its user-friendly interface to create courses and upload content, its ability to be implemented rapidly, and specifically the video coaching functionality it offers. In terms of future state for our implementation, we were really impressed with its integration to Salesforce providing opportunity-based content recommendations depending on opportunity type, main product, and other deal attributes,” Anna said.

Sales Boot Camp 2.0

The first use case the Sales Training team conducted was to set up the new blended learning journey for onboarding. This journey comprises prework on Allego and a one-week face-to-face workshop at Finastra HQ in London, UK. Lucy Dillon, Global Sales Training Resource Manager, who runs the Sales Boot Camp program at Finastra said, “By having an element of prework on Allego reinforced by face-to-face training, it allowed us to cater to all learning styles. We have videos and presentations for the visual learners, recordings for auditory learners, pdfs for reading learners, and the face-to-face week where the reps apply what they learned for our kinesthetic learners.” The pre-work consists of six courses with content that includes messages from functional leaders, department overviews, and an overview of the Finastra sales methodology and process. According to Sriveena Rao, Global Sales Training Analyst at Finastra and the Allego project lead, “I saw a very neat opportunity to consolidate all the static content, like department overviews and our sales methodology and process that doesn’t really change from boot camp to boot camp. Packaging these into courses for new joiners to consume knowledge of our company whenever and wherever they are—that’s a big plus.” This blended learning journey, supported by Allego, has enabled Finastra to reduce the length of in-person workshops from two weeks to one week without sacrificing effectiveness. It also paved the way for Finastra to make a positive step towards reducing travel, enabling the company’s employees to access learning on the ground. In the first year alone, Finastra realized a $170K cost saving for travel and expenses. Commending this innovation in employee onboarding, Finastra received the Princess Royal Training Award, sponsored by HRH Princess Anne and the City & Guilds of London Institute, during a ceremony at St. James’s Palace. This award is for UK employers who demonstrate outstanding training and skills development programs that drive measurable business results. “Achieving this award for the investment we make in our people helps us on our mission to be the most admired employer in Fintech” Anna said.

Aligning the Field Around a Unified Message

After the huge success of launching Boot Camp 2.0, the team was looking to identify its next use case to deploy in Allego and the opportunity arose when Finastra launched its biggest strategic initiative, FusionFabric.cloud. This initiative will enable Finastra to deliver what it believes will be the #1 open platform for innovation in the world of financial services. To promote go-to-market message consistency across the globe, the Sales Training team deployed a certification course in Allego. Now, whether salespeople had been at Finastra for two months working out of Ohio or for ten years working out of Beijing, they’d all be telling the same story.

The certification consisted of blended content about FusionFabric.cloud and a video exercise where users were asked to record their own pitch promoting FusionFabric.cloud, and then handed in to their managers for coaching and feedback. The project was kicked off in a phased approach where sales leaders and frontline sales managers were certified in the first phase, and individual contributors in the second. According to Michael Leishman, Global Sales Training Manager at Finastra who runs the sales certification programs, “Leadership buy-in was imperative for the success of this use case, so we included an introductory video from our CEO as part of the certification content. This impressed upon users the importance of this exercise, and another video of him delivering the pitch himself inspired everyone and gave them a sense of importance around not only the certification, but also the FusionFabric.cloud launch in general.” The team decided to launch a best practices video channel with the 600+ video examples of company representatives, managers, and leaders demonstrating their FusionFabric.cloud elevator pitch. This way everyone could learn from and emulate the best submissions. As soon as the channel was launched, users were watching five or six videos at a time. “It was a great way to give everyone different perspectives on how to deliver that elevator pitch. We were thrilled with the level of adoption we saw,” Michael said.

Future State

Now entering their second year partnering with Allego, the Sales Training team at Finastra looks forward to driving more knowledge sharing and retention with further initiatives. “As a team, we’ve had tremendous success with Allego during the first 12 months in terms of cost-savings, sales effectiveness, and scalability. We are now looking at implementing overarching certifications, peer-to-peer learning, Flash Drills, and Salesforce integration.

There’s so much you can do with the platform; we’re very proud of all we’ve achieved in a relatively short time and are excited about the future,” Anna said.