Lessonly competitors: 5 alternatives to consider in 2022
Lessonly by Seismic is one of the most popular sales learning solutions available. However, many organizations find themselves looking for an alternative training software for their customer-facing teams.
That’s why in this post, we’ll review the five best Lessonly alternatives, including:
We’ll also discuss the four essential features to look for in a training solution, based on our 20+ years of experience working with companies like Zoom, Nike, and Samsung. Specifically, we’ll talk about:
- Simple content authoring (so anyone can create and customize interactive trainings)
- AI-powered video coaching (so sales managers get instant insights into reps’ sales skills)
- Readiness scorecards (so you can find skill gaps and see how training impacts sales performance)
- Advanced content management (so you can optimize and track content without changing your workflow)
We’ll start with our sales enablement platform, Brainshark, a Bigtincan company, and show how it delivers these four features.
Brainshark lets you empower your customer-facing teams with the knowledge, skills, and insights they need to perform at the highest level. Schedule a free Brainshark demo today.
#1 Brainshark
Brainshark is our sales enablement platform, used by thousands of clients including:
- Colonial Life, a country-wide insurance provider with a sales organization of over 10,000 reps. Brainshark allowed them to streamline their sales onboarding and training, going from an inefficient phone-based process to one where interactive courses are sent to reps via email. Thanks to Brainshark’s easy content authoring, they were able to create over 350 new training materials in the first year alone. (read the full story here)
- BTG (now part of Boston Scientific), which develops and commercializes products used in minimally-invasive medical procedures. Back in 2018, BTG was experiencing a high failure rate with new sales reps. Once they started using Brainshark, they were able to adopt an entirely new sales enablement approach, which led to their best product launch ever. (read the full story here)
- Zoom, one of the biggest communications technology companies in the world. Before Brainshark, sales managers at Zoom had to pull data from a combination of dashboards and spreadsheets to coach their teams and reps. This was time-consuming and prone to human error, as there was lots of manual work involved. Brainshark’s Readiness Scorecards consolidated training and sales performance data in one place, allowing managers to easily diagnose deficiencies by benchmarking each rep against their peers. (read the full story here)
In the following sections, you’ll learn exactly how Brainshark delivers the four features we mentioned earlier.
Feature 1: Simple content authoring, so anyone can create and customize interactive trainings
Brainshark’s content authoring:
- Lets you upload one or multiple assets to create one course.
- Allows anyone to create content, without requiring advanced technical skills.
- Offers various customization options like voiceovers, quizzes, and other interactive elements that can be added in a few clicks.
Many tools for creating and distributing training require advanced technical skills to generate new materials.
That’s why organizations often have a designated team that’s tasked with creating new trainings. Depending on that team’s load, requests for new content can be delayed by weeks, which can be a massive problem for sales teams.
After all, reps must regularly keep up with product updates and new competitor insights in order to succeed at the job. If they can’t get the necessary training modules on time (or have outdated info at their disposal), they can easily miss sales opportunities.
That’s why Brainshark’s content authoring tool empowers everyone to create interactive training content, without needing any technical expertise.
Creating training content in Brainshark is as simple as uploading a PowerPoint, Google Slide file, or another document.
Then, you can add voiceovers, attachments, hyperlinks, quizzes, surveys, and other interactive elements with just a few clicks. For example:
- You can get respected sales leaders to add voiceovers to training materials. This helps learners stay engaged and retain the info because they know it’s coming from an authority on the subject.
- You can add quizzes anywhere within a course or even create a final quiz to gauge how well reps absorbed the training. You can customize each quiz by limiting the number of attempts reps can make on a question, adding different types of questions (like branched and weighted questions), and much more.
- You can embed examples of real-world Gong sales calls directly within courses. That way, reps can learn by watching successful sales pitches.
We’ve already discussed these content creation functionalities in detail, so check out our article on building a tailor-made sales elearning program.
All training materials inside the Brainshark platform are accessible online or offline, on nearly any device, so reps can use them anytime, anywhere.
Lastly, all Brainshark trainings are also SCORM-compliant by default, meaning you can open them on our platform (like we just showed) or upload the content to a learning management system (LMS).
Feature 2: AI-powered video coaching, so sales managers get instant insights into reps’ sales skills
Brainshark’s AI-powered video coaching:
- Provides instant feedback on each rep’s communication and sales skills.
- Lets sales leaders easily create and assign coaching challenges to reps.
- Allows reps to record multiple takes of their assignments without deleting previous ones.
Coaching activities are a widely-used method that lets sales managers see how reps would do in real-life scenarios. While lots of tools help you create such activities, most of them give you a severely limited assessment of reps’ sales pitches.
This results in sales managers having to manually analyze tens or hundreds of sales pitches and provide feedback to each rep. Needless to say, this can be incredibly time-consuming, especially for larger sales teams.
To avoid this problem, Brainshark‘s AI-powered machine analysis analyzes each rep’s sales pitch and instantly gives you valuable insights into their skills.
Once an assignment is submitted, our machine analysis automatically answers questions like:
- What emotions did the rep’s facial expressions show?
- How often did they use filler words like “um”, “so”, “right”, etc?
- Did they include or avoid specific words, e.g., outdated product names or new brand terms?
As a result, sales managers get an automated assessment of reps’ pitches, which is a massive time-saver compared to evaluating everything themselves.
All they have to do is create the coaching activities and assign them to their reps. For example, the activity can be for reps to record a 2-minute video of themselves overcoming a common pricing objection.
Once assigned, these activities appear as new training on reps’ homescreen who can then record a video or upload an already recorded video from their device. Reps can also create multiple takes without deleting previous ones, allowing them to submit the best take to their managers. Before they send it for official review, they can share the video with their colleagues, which is a great way to encourage peer learning.
Besides being useful for managers, coaching activities also benefit reps, because:
- Reps can practice their skills before they start pitching to clients.
- Reps receive individual feedback from their managers on what they can improve.
Feature 3: Readiness scorecards, so you can find skill gaps and see how training impacts sales performance
Brainshark’s readiness scorecards:
- Let you find skill gaps fast.
- Allow you to track and compare training progress for reps and entire teams at a glance.
- Can be used to monitor training progress and sales performance KPIs in one place, thanks to our Salesforce and CRM integrations.
Brainshark’s readiness scorecards show you individual and team training completion rates and scores in one user-friendly report.
As a result, you can easily compare training progress between reps or even entire teams and find skill gaps fast.
As you can see in the screenshot below, readiness scorecards give you insights into reps’ training performance, like how many activities the reps have completed, their average scores, and more.
With our Salesforce integration (or by integrating your CRM), Brainshark’s readiness scorecards can also show each rep’s sales KPIs right alongside their training performance.
Having all of this information in one place allows you to:
- Compare reps’ training progress and sales performance at a glance.
- Understand the impact of your training on sales results (which is also crucial for evaluating your program’s ROI).
For example, say you have 10 reps that started work around the same time and so far have generated similar results. Then, you assign an additional coaching challenge on upselling clients on bonus features to five of those reps.
Readiness Scorecards can show you the exact impact of this additional training on metrics like pipeline, closed deals, and revenue which is the key to making a data-driven assessment of your training’s ROI.
Feature 4: Advanced content management, so you can optimize and track content without changing your workflow
As we said earlier, Brainshark is a part of the Bigtincan family. This means you can also easily gain access to all Bigtincan features including the Content Hub.
Bigtincan’s Content Hub:
- Offers comprehensive version controls.
- Let you connect all repositories without moving content.
- Scans all text (not just metadata) with our advanced search feature.
- Comes with tons of advanced features like digital sales rooms, document automation, and in-depth content analytics.
Oftentimes, different teams in the same company use different content repositories. This results in reps wasting time and effort searching through multiple repositories to find the content they need.
Also, finding relevant content is made even more difficult by the fact that most content management systems require everyone to follow organization and filing rules (which is rarely the case). As a result, unless reps remember the exact file name or location, they can spend hours searching for a specific piece of content.
To overcome this problem, Bigtincan lets you connect multiple repositories to one search bar. Then, that search bar scans all text, even text within PDFs or footnotes, so that you don’t have to remember any metadata.
For example, results may include a PDF pulled from Google Drive, a spreadsheet pulled from OneDrive, and a PowerPoint presentation pulled from Dropbox — and none of these would need to have metadata to appear.
Additionally, our AI ensures that each searcher gets useful information, based on their role, region, historical preferences, and much more.
To learn more about Bigtincan’s offerings, as well as explore other alternatives to Seismic’s content management, check out our article on the best Seismic alternatives.
Brainshark can help you empower your client-facing teams with the knowledge, skills, and insights they need to perform at the highest level. Schedule a Brainshark demo today.
#2 Adobe Captivate Prime
Adobe Captivate Prime is an enterprise learning platform, designed for:
- Customer Education.
- Sales, Partner, and Franchisee Training.
- Employee Reskilling and Compliance Training.
The platform has a content marketplace with over 70,000 courses and in-depth performance analytics. It also offers API-based connectors for apps like Zoom, LinkedIn Learning, Workday, Power BI, Slack, and more.
#3 LearnUpon
LearnUpon is an LMS designed to help you build online training materials for employees, partners, and customers. Some highlights of their offering include:
- Easy creation of online courses.
- Training program management automation.
- Training progress reports, scheduled and sent via email.
- On-demand training with real-time feedback about the learning experience.
- Integrations with popular CRMs, automation tools, and other SaaS apps.
#4 TalentLMS
TalentLMS is another cloud-based online learning software. It helps customers build and scale customizable trainings across sales, marketing, and customer support teams. TalentLMS is also designed to support trainings in various industries, including:
- Retail
- Software
- Healthcare
- Automotive
- Manufacturing and more
TalentLMS can also be integrated with popular eCommerce software solutions (like Stripe and Shopify), video conferencing tools (like Zoom and MS Teams), and more.
#5 SAP Litmos
Litmos has been developing elearning technology solutions since 2007. In 2018, the company was acquired by SAP. Today, SAP Litmos is a training platform that offers two main eLearning solutions:
- SAP Litmos Training — an easy-to-use LMS that’s used in over 150 countries and supports 35 languages.
- SAP Litmos Training Content — a course library with over 2000 engaging courses that you can use to quickly fill skill gaps or create different learning paths for reps.
Prepare your customer-facing teams to perform at the highest level with Brainshark
To reiterate some of Brainshark’s benefits, our platform:
- Allows anyone to create and customize interactive trainings without needing advanced technical skills.
- Provides sales managers with instant insights into reps’ sales skills.
- Shows skill gaps and lets you see how training impacts sales performance.
- Helps you streamline and track content without changing your workflow.
If you feel that Brainshark is the right solution for you, book a demo with our team.