Workable Drives Collaboration and Faster Ramp Using Allego

“Mobile is the Most Critical Piece”

Manzi looked at several options, including Brainshark and MindTickle, but these didn’t seem like the right solutions for a mobile sales force. “I needed something that could focus on the human aspects of training. Something that could help me bring my geographically dispersed team closer together. Other solutions were limited in their content creation capabilities, particularly compared to Allego. Allego is like YouTube for training videos,” Manzi said. But the main reason for choosing Allego was its mobile video capabilities. “Mobile is the most critical piece for our organization. Ninety-percent of our day is spent on our phones, so if we have a training tool that doesn’t fit our lives and the way we want to learn, we will never use it.” Since adopting Allego, lack of use hasn’t been an issue. In fact, many reps have grown so fond of it that they are using the platform in unexpected ways.

A Substitute for Other Collaboration Tools

Before rolling out Allego, for example, reps in the different time zones expended a lot of effort trying to schedule meetings and collaborate via email or Slack. Today, “we actually use Allego videos to talk to each other,” Manzi said. “We share our screens, show each other what’s going on, and ask each other questions.”

In addition, managers are taking just-in-time coaching to a new level, using mobile video to coach actual sales calls and provide dictated audio feedback. “They’re delivering very quick feedback using the mobile app. While it’s fantastic to give people feedback via text, it’s even more powerful when I can listen to a person’s call and immediately start saying what I want the rep to say next time.”

Manzi also uses the platform to ensure that everyone absorbs key information from the Monday-morning meetings no matter where they are. Before Allego, meetings were typically attended by three-quarters of the global team because of time zone differences. Now that the team records the meetings in Allego, salespeople can listen via smartphones and tablets when convenient—putting the percentage of reps tuning in closer to 100%.

“For the first time, I can actually send that meeting to every single person. Allego’s reporting gives me visibility into whether people are watching and paying attention.”

Peer-to-Peer Training

Another benefit of mobile video is facilitating peer-to-peer training. Armed with the ability to record short “how-to” videos whenever the need arises, many reps now serve as ad hoc trainers and coaches. For example, when someone has a question during a meeting, another attendee invariably volunteers to create a quick training video to answer the question. “Recently we rolled out three new types of slides we wanted to show. Originally, my plan was to train the team myself, but thanks to Allego, my team leads were asking me, ‘Can I help be involved in training the team?’ So instead of training the team solely with content created by the enablement department, which we know is not trusted as much as content created by other reps, my team leads created content for each one of those slides. “For the very first time, team leads have the ability to score other people’s videos. So my team is getting scored by their peers on the things they are doing right and wrong. This not only helps get the messages across more effectively, but helps the team learn faster. It also helps the team leads learn and retain new skills.”

Higher Engagement = Faster Learning

Whereas Manzi once had trouble motivating team members to read learning content and perform skill-development exercises, Allego has driven engagement through the roof.

“I would tell everyone to do something, and it wasn’t getting done. So I asked one of my team leads to create a video. They created a quick video on Allego, and shared it with the whole team. When I looked at my stats on Allego, I saw that the video was viewed more times than the number of people on our team. Everyone ended up referring back to it.”

“Every single time someone has a good sales call, they are putting that into Allego, and they are putting it right into the ‘Account Executives’ channel so everybody else can get access to it. Instead of reps having to schedule calls with other reps to hear what they are doing, they listen to it on the subway ride home, and learn all the same skills without me trying to do anything. They are just seeing other reps and saying, ‘How do I do that? Oh wait, I can go to Allego.’”

“Because we are a global organization, we have global challenges. One of those challenges is people who speak English as a second language. Because of the closed caption functionality within Allego, people are able to follow along more easily when they can’t listen as quickly as a native English speaker can talk,” Manzi said. “And we’re really excited for Allego’s upcoming text translation feature to make this even easier for folks.”

As a result of increased engagement and asynchronous communication, reps’ learning time has accelerated. The average onboarding training duration has dropped from 14 hours to four hours. Ramp up time has decreased from nine months to six months, “and those deals have been for three times the average value that they used to be.”

“In our Allego environment, we have all the sales components that we want someone doing for onboarding. We have tips and tricks—one-minute videos for someone to get better at their job. We also have operational content—a whole video channel on how to create an opportunity, how to create a quote, how to get a HubSpot email set up, and how to do everything in Salesforce.”

“It’s all in there in small snippets, so people can quickly pick up what they need to learn instead of spending hours in a training session,” Manzi said.