Sarah Slade

The TRUST elearning programme is a set of comprehensive learning modules showing Thomson Reuters/Refinitiv sales staff how to process sales orders in Salesforce.

I was brought in to manage the instructional design of the programme in March 2016. Thomson Reuters is a global company: the stakeholder was based in Minnesota, the instructional designer in London and the developer in New York.  I worked almost exclusively on this project until July 2017.

Objective

The programme’s objective is to enable frontline sales staff to create and manage sales opportunities from initial call to customer onboarding in TRUST – a heavily customised customer management tool based on Salesforce.

Results

By July 2017 we had created the following:

1. A one-hour interactive course using scenarios and interactions to illustrate the end-to-end sales process for Thomson Reuters Eikon, the flagship product.
2. A one-hour course using scenarios and interactions for enabling and managing free trials in Eikon.
3. A two-hour course on the sales management process for Thomson Reuters Risk products.
4. A three-hour course covering the most common tasks performed in TRUST, including amending orders, full and partial cancellations, onboarding, obtaining contract signatures, contract redlining, applying discounts and renegotiating orders.
5. A two-hour course on the sales management process for Thomson Reuters FX products.

Approach

We convinced the stakeholder to adopt a modular approach; breaking down each process into individual tasks, which we then illustrated using scenarios  simulating the actual experience of a frontline salesperson.

Breaking the process down into constituent tasks, each lasting around five minutes, served to make the learning less daunting for the learner, allowing them to consume the learning in digestible chunks rather than a complex, long webex tutorial.

We also introduced interaction for some key tasks that we felt were not immediately intuitive.