Last week, I was in a meeting with the sales head of a major pharmaceutical company. As we were discussing sales training during the Covid pandemic, he showed me an internal company WhatsApp group, which included his distributed sales reps. He threw a challenge everyday to them, and the group members shared videos of themselves recording their pitch and approach as a response to this challenge. He was quite happy about the participation and the engagement. In spite of this, he had concerns. With the video-sharing on WhatsApp group, he did not know what his team was taking back from the exercise and there were no records.
This system has two major flaws. First, with a group chat, it becomes difficult to give individual feedback, maintain a record of the submissions or track discipline & improvement. It essentially becomes a one-way path where videos are dumped. Second, given that all reps see each other’s videos, they are exposed to both- good and bad pitches. Reps may create wrong benchmarks for themselves. Good reps, who are shy, may not post on the group at all.
The Challenges of Sales Training in the Post-Pandemic Era





