Carlsberg: Blended Learning is the way to go!

 

There is no doubt that Blended Learning is the way to go for many companies. The combination of the different tools makes it flexible to use, while at the same time you as a manager have really good ways to follow up on the training your team is doing.

Without a doubt, the following three things will be improved in any company that chooses to implement Blended Learning:

1. Standardization of educational tools

Will ensure greater effectiveness and speed, which will provide better utilization of the expenses the company pays for education.  

2. Increased employee satisfaction

Carlsberg is convinced that increased employee satisfaction is connected to increased turnover / better earnings. When the Carlsberg Group compares employee satisfaction with company profits between the different countries, a distinct picture appears. For this reason it is very important to create a culture of winners at Carlsberg.

3. Increased customer satisfaction

Customers appreciate that you get to know their business and can discuss how they can improve their sales. The DiSC profile in combination with work on how to deal with objections has without a doubt provided Carlsberg with good results in terms of getting a better and more professional dialogue with our customers.

All three KPI's have been fulfilled at Carlsberg On Trade efter the implementation of Blended Learning.

How the co-operation started

In 2006 when Carlsberg wished to train their phone salespeople in sales technique they chose LADEGAARD A/S as their partner. This co-operation with targeted training of Carlsberg’s employees has existed ever since.

The objective of the training was to provide the participants with a tool tailored to help them prepare in the best possible way for the sales call so they can ask the right questions and argue in favour of the different products, thereby differentiating work in the different segments and ultimately increasing sales.

Scope

120 Carlsberg employees were trained during the course of a year.

Layout

The Carlsberg solution took its starting point in the LADEGAARD system ‘The Key to Successful Selling’, which the layout came from. The solution was customized with a Carlsberg logo which was repeated on all pages.

The e-learning modules were constructed as a classical web site with a search function and a dropdown menu at the top of every page. Under the menu ‘your training’ the users could find the nine lessons they were to take. Each lesson consisted of articles, video clips as well as downloads to be studied before the users could take the final tests belonging to each lesson.  

With the ‘Statistics’ function at the bottom of the page, Sales Managers could see which sales people trained online, when they trained, how often they trained and what results they achieved.

Design

As mentioned, the whole education was carried out with the LADEGAARD Blended Learning system using ‘The Key to Successful Selling’. In the Carlsberg solution the following elements were blended:

•         Kick off in the form of a peptalk
•         DiSC personal profile completed online
•         Training of inhouse Carlsberg coaches
•         5 days of classroom training done ‘on location’ at Carlsberg
•         ‘The Key to Successful Selling’ (book, online training, video and  audio clips, cd)
•         Learning Manager, which  means that the Sales Managers can see who is training, when they are training and what results they have achieved atwww.successfulselling.info

The training was a great success, and the increase in sales could be measured. An extra bonus was that the phone salespeople continued to train online even though the actual training process with LADEGAARD A/S had come to an end.

As a long term effect, online sales training has become an everyday tool for the phone salespeople at Carlsberg.