How Frontier Saved $175,000 on Sales Training with Brainshark

Leading the sales enablement team at Frontier, Shana Mallin, had a lot on her plate. Not only did the team manage 2-week, in-person sales academies for new hires, but they were also responsible for all the content, training and readiness programs for the 200-person sales team.

The sales academies were costly ($375,000 per year), time consuming and didn’t produce a clear picture of rep readiness. On top of that, Mallin relied on other employees for content creation because she didn’t have access to the corporate LMS.

Mallin decided to seek out a sales readiness solution that could address these challenges and alleviate the workload of her team. She wanted a platform that could give her confidence and confirmation that reps were trained, message-ready and certified to present to buyers effectively, without losing time out of the field.

Mallin identified Brainshark because of its all-in-one capabilities. Not only did the platform provide new content, training and coaching capabilities, but it allowed her to show sales managers and leaders the readiness state of the sales force and identify rep performance issues.

For example, with Brainshark’s video coaching tool, she could enable managers to coach reps in any location on key messages and provide feedback. From there, she could provide insights to leaders as to how well reps were performing and managers were coaching.

Mallin was also excited by the efficiencies the technology offered her team. They could finally create engaging, video-based content themselves, while preparing reps more effectively without impacting selling time or incurring such high costs for in-person sessions.

Initially with Brainshark, Frontier’s SVPs led a 2-week training curriculum to test the sales team’s knowledge and message delivery. The group scored 93% in the training and 90% in the assessments, giving leadership proof that sales could share a consistent message with customers and confirming the effectiveness of the Brainshark platform.

Frontier has now moved a significant portion of its onboarding processes to Brainshark, resulting in a $175,000 cost savings. Today, at the outset of onboarding, new hires are given an initial assessment via Brainshark to test their product knowledge. That way, Mallin and her team can identify gaps early and assign learning paths accordingly.

In 2020, the company is evolving its new hire onboarding program to a blended learning approach that includes in-person training augmented by remote eLearning via Brainshark. New reps will receive pre-work for the classroom training and post-work for reinforcement, all through Brainshark.

Mallin and her team also provide continuous training and coaching, which reps can find through Brainshark or Salesforce. Salesforce provides reps with access to in-context product training content, which makes it easy to quickly find what they’re looking for.

For other product training like that of Frontier’s Ethernet product line, reps attended a webinar training (which was made available as a recording in Brainshark afterwards) and were tasked with completing reinforcement activities. Following that training, reps were able to increase Ethernet sales across every region.

For the sales enablement team, Brainshark has allowed them to benchmark the sales team’s readiness, see the impact of the training they’ve created and increase their efficiency 10-fold.

• In-person training was too costly and time-consuming
• Lack of visibility into knowledge retention, training effectiveness, rep readiness
• No mechanism to coach or provide feedback remotely