About SalesRoads
SalesRoads is one of the fastest-growing B2B appointment setting and lead generation providers in the U.S. They also offer full sales cycle outsourcing. Established in 2006, SalesRoads has some of the most experienced teleagents in the market, with an average of 14 years of experience.
The training challenge
SalesRoads were in an enviable but demanding position. The company was growing fast. Customers were wowed by their service, and Director of Program Management Sara Bishop needed to ensure that the already established training could scale.
As the teleagents are the core of the business, Sara ran company-wide training every few months on four key aspects of the sales and appointment-setting approach. For new hires, she and the Director of HR were also responsible for onboarding training. She knew she would need software to be able to ensure everyone received timely, thorough training, but she didn’t want to give up the live aspect of that training.
As the head of the Program Management department, Sara also needed to train a second group of people: their program coordinators. At SalesRoads, program coordinators are heavily supported trainees who are on the path to becoming managers. The majority of the training in the early stages is on the intricacies of the CRM.
Once they’ve become coordinators, trainees move on to begin management training to help them learn skills like time management, coaching, and advanced excel training. Sara wanted to create and deliver soft skills courses, so managers could better learn how to be independent.
Before pivoting to sales, Sara had been a licensed music teacher for years. Because of her experience as an educator, she was responsible for choosing the software they would ultimately use to administer training.
And she knew exactly what she wanted it to do.
“I knew what kind of things I wanted in an LMS. There are various ways of presenting and testing knowledge that are more effective. I really like anything that can help our people learn in manageable, bite-sized chunks, and get very hands-on as they’re doing it.”
On her list of LMSs to review were: Mindflash, Litmos, a platform intended to supplement K-12 schools, and TalentLMS.
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Why SalesRoads chose TalentLMS
Ideally, Sara was looking for a system that was easy to learn. Especially for someone who had never used an LMS before. “We wanted something where our employees could see that, ‘Oh, I have an invitation? How do I do it?’ And then just figure it out”.
As a former teacher, Sara was also particular about the variety in question types. “Not everything can be answered by a multiple-choice question”, she explains. So, question types were one of the features she was looking at quite closely as she began the LMS review process.
Sara’s company had tried Mindflash a few years prior. She felt it wasn’t at all intuitive and so found it very difficult to get everyone on board with using it. She remembers: “To figure out Mindflash, we had to build a long course about how to use Mindflash, and most people couldn’t even figure out how to access that training. It was difficult to assign people courses. At the time we tried it, it wasn’t user friendly”.
Litmos was cut early in a free trial, because Sara was not impressed with the service she received. “After we started working with the system, we found that their descriptions (and our expectations) of how the system worked didn’t match our experience.”
She also briefly flirted with the idea of using an LMS designed for use in a K-12 environment. It had much potential, but as she played around in it she realized it would take people far too long to learn.
“I thought this has the features I like but it’s intended to be used every day, and to learn it will require more time than my management team has.”
So, it’s no surprise that the first thing she noticed about TalentLMS was its ease of use.
“TalentLMS is extremely user friendly. I know this because even our most technically challenged team members have been able to successfully maneuver the courses.”
Next, she looked at question types. She was delighted by what she found.
”Even though there aren’t a slew of 800 different types of questions, the types of questions there are can be customized in a lot of ways that make sense for our team.”
The results
When we ask Sara to describe how TalentLMS has lived up to her expectations, she laughs. “I’m embarrassed to say that we’re probably not using it to its full extent.”
But, she lists her favorite features and how they’ve helped her perform her job.
On course creation
“The whole process of putting things into TalentLMS is delightfully easy”, says Sara. “And I love how easy it is to edit courses, should we need to. When we’ve decided that we’re changing a process, for example, I can just go in and take that part out of the course.”
On reliability
“I love that I have never, ever had a problem accessing the content from TalentLMS, and neither has anyone who reports to me (which is about 96% of the company). The system has never gone down. We’ve had problems in the past with an LMS, so TalentLMS is very near and dear to us for this reason.”
On tracking training
“Our trainees on the management track take online courses to learn the CRM with live training in between. We’re still quite hands-on with them at this point and have meetings with them regularly. The further along the management track they get, the less live training they need from me, so it’s nice to be able to measure and determine how much interaction they need from me.”
The ease of TalentLMS helps Sara save time and focus on her other areas of responsibility. She explains:
“Training people is only one small part of my job, so my ability to actually train all these new folks who are coming in without TalentLMS wouldn’t be possible. I would need to solely focus on training.”
From onboarding to management training, TalentLMS is ready to scale alongside SalesRoads as they keep growing.
