Case Study - Smartphones

CCS' CyberScholar Online Training Level Correlates

with Sales Lift in National Retailer

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SUMMARY

A leading smartphone manufacturer was challenged to keep retail salespeople up to speed on its ever-changing products. Through the CyberScholar program, the manufacturer was able to efficiently increase salesperson knowledge of its products while also demonstrating that stores with associates passing more of its training sold more of its products.

CHALLENGE

Beset by increasing competitive pressures from many quarters, the smartphone manufacturer has to constantly refresh, introduce and explain new features and services available on its handsets to the people selling its products to consumers. But in the ever-changing smartphone environment, it is a challenge to support products at retail with effective training that provides:

1. Cost-efficient, expeditious delivery of product knowledge
2. Measureable learning by retail salespeople
3. Demonstrable ROI (sales lift)

STRATEGY & SOLUTION

The manufacturer partnered with CCS to deliver its product knowledge training to a targeted national retailer’s electronics sales associates via CCS’ CyberScholar training site. The manufacturer also partnered with CCS to measure the  effectiveness of its training.

The learning improvement (“learning delta”) of salespeople who completed the manufacturer’s technology-based training modules was measured by testing the product knowledge of the salespeople before and after they were exposed to the information within the modules.

To analyze sales lift, for the period of January 1, 2010 through July 31, 2010, participation in the manufacturer’s CyberScholar training was measured at the retailer’s 3,442 locations. Once training levels were determined at each store location, the stores were ranked by training consumption. Then, sales of the manufacturer’s products were compared at the stores with the top 20 percent of training consumption against the stores in the bottom 20 percent of training consumption.

RESULTS

Results were impressive by all measurements:

• Of the locations included in the study, stores with high training consumption outsold stores with low training consumption by an average of 47.5 percent more units
• Stores with a larger average learning improvement sold 30.4 percent more of the manufacturer’s products by unit sales than stores with a lower average learning improvement, which demonstrates that the high-training stores weren’t inherently “smarter” and better able to sell the manufacturer’s products
• The average pre- and post-training learning improvement for retail salespeople that completed the manufacturer’s modules was 53 percent (salespeople knew much more about the manufacturer’s products after completing the online training).