From a "one-off" training to a structured program for ongoing mentoring, at scale
I was brought in to redesign an internal training program aimed at upskilling a new sales team to handle incoming customer inquiries via web chat. A third‐party firm had originally been hired to teach chat‐specific communication and sales skills, addressing how text‐based chat’s impersonal nature can make building customer rapport difficult.
The Original Training
The initial program spanned seven hours across two 3.5‑hour live webinars. It paired a PowerPoint presentation with hands‐on Zoom chat exercises where learners practiced sales pitches and demonstrated key concepts.
Consulting Request
Stakeholders wanted to convert this live training into an asynchronous, fully online course that could scale repeatedly without needing a live facilitator.
Analyzing the Delivery
The original facilitator was engaging, but her reliance on long anecdotes and digressions stretched out the sessions. I realized we could save significant time by converting the core instruction into animated motion graphic videos paired with interactive online practice.
However, the original course succeeded at eliciting authentic practice from learners—a design element I wanted to preserve and extend. The challenge? Our existing LMS and authoring tools lacked built‐in features for peer interaction or automated performance feedback. How could I give learners opportunities for live practice, reflection, and personalized feedback within the constraints of our course tools?
Stay Human – retaining the human dimension in training
I advised stakeholders against “automating away” the interactive elements. Learners still needed opportunities to reflect on their pitch, practice new techniques, and receive feedback aligned with desired outcomes.
So how do you deliver personalized, hands‐on feedback at scale with minimal facilitator intervention?
Leveraging Manager‐Learner Coaching
The key was integrating managers directly into the learning loop. This had never been done before in our team’s history – simply asking managers if they wanted a prebuilt tool for structuring their ongoing mentoring and coaching conversations with their team members. In fact, there was a hunger for exactly that. The goal became ensuring that the desired outcomes from the course would persist through the following months of performance evaluation and coaching.
I streamlined the course from seven hours down to two, combining clear motion graphic videos with interactive online activities. As learners completed these exercises, the courseware generated a downloadable PDF summary of their performance.
To turn this data into action, I authored a Manager’s Handbook to guide two months of post‐training 1:1 coaching. Managers used the PDF reports and structured rubrics to reinforce core concepts, mentor salespeople, and evaluate real‐world performance. In this way, I was able to give managers an easy set of guidelines to follow in their regular work with their team members, evaluating them against rubrics with clear, transparent performance levels that can form the basis for productive coaching conversations.
Results
- 70%+ Reduction in Seat Time: Training time dropped from 7 hours to 2 hours.
- Increased Accountability: Managers gained structured tools for ongoing coaching and evaluation.
- Scalable Delivery: Asynchronous modules freed up facilitation resources while preserving meaningful human feedback.
Conclusion
This is just one example where I was unwilling to accept the constraints and conventional wisdom that usually forces us to deliver the same kinds of eLearning deliverables over and over again. In this situation, the answer was to leverage and enrich the existing conversations that were already happening around performance, ensuring that employee performance matches management expectations, and giving them clear language and methods for alignment.