When the development of your Cortexa Assets is complete the project to maximise your returns is only beginning, we talk about “Build Once Use Many” but how does that work? Here are 10 ways to maximise your returns:

1.      Internal Staff Communication

It is important that all your own staff (particularly customer facing) are made aware of your e-learning module. Have a link ready to email to customers who show an interest. If needs be get CD’s or USB stick of you module for your sales force to use where there is no intent access. Create a promotion in your email footer to raise awareness.

2. Target the academies you want to reach

You may want to consider phasing the roll out of your module to Academies so you can support the “new arrival” and get the message out to the branches about expecting delivery!

3. Talk to your Merchant customers

Advise your merchant customers during meetings and correspondence that you have invested in e-learning to help educate their staff to help them sell more of your products. Discuss with your merchant what is the best way to promote to their staff. Sometimes the best way to drive this is at a regional level.

4. Cortexa can help you Market your elearning

Talk to us about ways in which we can help with a marketing campaign to promote your e-learning module to end users and direct traffic to your website.

5. Your Website

You will be provided with a web version of your e-learning module, make this available to visitors to your website. You might want to add the fact you have invested in e-learning in a ‘News’ feature on your website.

6. Use the AutoRun Version

Load the ‘auto-run’ version of your elearning module onto your commercial team laptop(s). Ensure they are proficient using it, aware of its contents and know how to navigate it to enable them to demonstrate it to merchants. Your sales team can be pivotal in promoting the module as they will have more face to face contact with your merchant staff and will encourage them to use it during meetings with customers.

7. Tell everyone!

Use the fact you have commissioned your own bespoke elearning module at every opportunity and make a reason to talk to your customers. A pictorial link on all company email signatures to the web version would be a good way to get contacts to have a look.

8. Incentives:

a.      Sales Team Incentive - Consider offering an incentive to create some competition between your salespeople to see whose area has the best e-learning completions or cumulative score for a set period of time. This serves to ensure it is always promoted by your customer facing staff.

b.      Merchant Incentive - Whereby you pay a ‘bonus’ to the staff member for completing your elearning to a satisfactory standard. This can be done nationally or regionally and aimed at specific merchant(s). Alternatively you could allocate a fund per sales person and he/she can use it to promote where needed.

9. Point of Sale and general launch activity

Consider traditional marketing methods to promote your elearning, flyers,  mugs, mousemats, give-away CD’s all help to get  your message out.

10. Statistics

Use your usage stats to maintain energy in your campaign and ask us for detailed breakdowns of usage at key campaign points.

I always like a good headline and I don’t really mean that we should replace our external salesforces with virtual reps, I have this vision of Max Headroom in a Builders Merchants branch on a screen behind the trade counter, and at the end of the day it would be very difficult to create an online application that will deal with complaints and pick up orders!

Having said that there are a few things that a Cortexa presence can do that a rep can’t.Our most popular modules get up to 300 hits a week, how many reps do you know that can do that? An online presence also excels in getting key messages across consistently and when the customer is receptive and wants to know; not purely when the rep is there and in ‘broadcast’ mode.

There is also the issue of leveraging that precious contact time, when your sales people are face to face with customers you want them adding value with their insights and experience, coaching and problem solving, not delivering basic product knowledge. If the branch team have all the basics of product and range architecture you can then play to the reps’ strengths and build on sales strategies.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I’m in a presentation with other people and I don’t get something, I wished the presenter had a pause and a rewind button – I know you can always put your hand up and stop the show, but when you are all also waiting for the bell, it’s not easy being the one to stop the show and ask a question. With a virtual rep you can interrupt and rewind as much as you like and no one will get irritated with you or sigh and look at the clock!

Finally there’s the issue of cost: you can cut the numbers any way you want but a rep visit can cost anything from £90 upwards, irrespective of the quality or outcome of the call. The cost of the virtual visit is less than 10% of that if you get the delivery strategy right, and what’s more your virtual rep doesn’t take holidays, crash his car or get distracted talking about football.

In all seriousness though, as with many business issues it’s about balance. A Cortexa presence won’t build personal relationships, and we all know that “People buy from People”, but it will give you long term and persistent presence in the branch, a broad base of product knowledge and enough training to head off some of those expensive customer call outs arising from poor product selection or bad installation. Not quite “Max Headroom” but the next best thing.