1 Brainshark for Technology Introduction Technology providers face a broad range of challenges when training and communicating with their sales teams, customers and prospects. Product offerings and information are constantly evolving, so distributing the most accurate and up-to-date material is critical to the organization s success. Companies need to reach a distributed customer base, product managers must efficiently train sales teams on ever-evolving product information, and marketing and sales have to better engage prospects. All this requires an agile, easy-to-use and robust video presentation solution that also provides in-depth reporting capabilities. Inside you ll find success stories written by Brainshark customers who have overcome the constraints of time, budget and geography with a powerful solution that complements their innovative thinking. We hope you enjoy Brainshark for Technology!
EMC Enables Channel Partners with a Demo Cloud Brainshark for Technology 2 Cathy Kenneally, Quality Program Manager, EMC At EMC, we are all about enabling our Channel. Making it easier for our partners to do business. Making sure they have a continual quality experience with us. Ensuring our partners sales forces are fully prepared for selling to their customers. Brainshark has helped my company enter the Cloud. Well, not so much the cloud, but the world of virtualization. We sent our video to our partners to learn how to use our Demo Cloud a virtual data centre with several demos set up. With a simple URL and a short 12 minute presentation, our partners could complete the Demo Cloud training. We re ensuring our partners sales forces are fully prepared for selling to their customers. We had previously done 1-hour webcasts showing how to use our demo cloud. But as with everything, you will always have people with prior engagements. You can never suit everyone. So our 12 minute Brainshark presentation eliminated the need for these live webcasts. People could take the training at their own discretion. It s a great mobile solution. This saves on time and money. And to accommodate those people for whom English isn t their first language, Brainshark allows us to create our video in many different languages. Or if they chose to take the English video, they could do so at their own pace. We created Demo Cloud accounts for almost 400 partners in just a few weeks! We sent our Brainshark video to partners globally, so we have added people from all geographic locations. Brainshark is great for so many reasons time, money, convenience, ease-of-use and tracking. We all want to know the success of our work, and can easily track all those who have taken our video training. There is nothing more boring than watching a long training video, but this is straight-to-the-point, 12 minutes well spent. We can choose to animate it as we like, no messing with pointers and stopping for background noises. A winning solution!
3 Brainshark for Technology Just-in-Time Learning for Technical Sales Enablement Carol Cohen, Learning Program Manager, Advanced Enablement Services Group, Hewlett Packard I focus primarily in the design and development of collaborative learning solutions for the enterprise sales force. My projects have been recognized by ASTD, STC and Brandon Hall for innovation in learning technologies. HP s employees are increasingly mobile, located all over the world and we knew we had to insinuate our training into their busy lives by giving them easy access to modules on the exact topic they required right at the moment they need it. Most sales people are mobile, so our content needed to be mobile-ready so they could access it while in the field. And one of the best ways to achieve that is to tell the story in a video format. Most sales people are mobile, so our content needed to be mobile-ready so they could access it while in the field. And one of the best ways to achieve that is to tell the story in a video format. We provide them with a continuous but invisible training path that enables them to bring training into their work day in a seamless manner. Sometimes creating that simple and elegant solution involves many moving parts whereby the simpler it feels to the student sometimes the more complex the solution actually is. To create those invisible learning paths, we leveraged many systems and create very short, engaging learning elements. For sales we leverage three components: the Sales Fitness Center hosted in Microsoft Sharepoint, the Mobile Café based on Brainshark, and HP Connections, based on Jive social business software. The Sales Fitness Center is a platform for customer-scenario-based sales practice. Like an actual gym it has rooms that provide different virtual machines where sales people can work out. One type of activity is a challenge called You Make the Sale. We create a short movie that provides a situation where the learner can post the next question or statement that should be presented to the customer. My team began creating these with actors, lighting, camera shots and video editing. We transitioned to Brainsharks and saved money and time and allowed us to track all the viewing activity. One of the rooms in the Sales Fitness Center is The Mobile Café, providing mobile access to training content so that people could transition from their PCs to their mobile device with a clear understanding of where they were going. We also direct learners to the Mobile Café on the Brainshark portal where the content extends the reach of our Sales Fitness Center to our mobile workforce. We launched a social business platform called HP Connections that is targeted for the enterprise sales force and support teams. The account teams form private groups where they can work on account business plans and other preparations for sales activities with their customers. The platform provides quick access to subject-matter experts and the best content, Improved, real-time information on account activities, Improved customer intelligence using a real-time news feed for each account, and it enables the teams to seamlessly collaborate globally on deals.
Tackling Audience and Information Complexity Brainshark for Technology 4 Mohan Mailvaganam, Program Manager, Xerox Global Services I am the National Program Manager for the Enterprise Print Services offering for Xerox Global Services in Canada. Xerox Global Services is the outsourcing services arm of Xerox which focuses on providing Document and Output management solutions to large national and global organizations worldwide. I have been with the organization for 12 years and have had the pleasure of working with Brainshark technology throughout. My team has embraced Brainshark technology as a vehicle to deliver knowledge to our field organizations such as sales, assessment & consulting, transition and operations. The Brainshark technology has been critical for our program s success. The offering we are taking to market is one that is complex and has many moving parts. The offering we are taking to market is one that is complex and has many moving parts. My team touches over a 100 field resources 2-3 times a quarter with the Brainshark technology. Our Brainshark sessions are primarily focused on communicating our offering and capabilities, new initiatives and programs, software and platform updates, back office processes, and at times connecting with customers to deliver our value proposition. Brainshark provides us with reporting metrics that highlight who attended the sessions, their roles and managers names and track participation and, more importantly, provide closed-loop feedback to team managers. Another important capability we leverage is the replay feature. This helps us from a program as well as field perspective since we can deliver the session once and for those who had conflicting appointments and time zone challenges can go in anytime to view the session at their own pace. In addition, we are also able to incorporate the recorded sessions into our Learning Management System (LMS) so that we can apply course codes for the sessions as well as develop test outs for completion of course. The ability to bring the recordings into our LMS and incorporating test outs gives us ultimate control and visibility of who has viewed the content and those who truly comprehended the material. Brainshark has been a great technology for me personally as well as my team to deliver content to a wide audience cost effectively and efficiently.
5 Brainshark for Technology Large Multinational Technology Company Plugs Into a New Way to Train Training Manager, Large Technology Company When it comes to training our employees, we need to effectively train them in the shortest amount of time. We were looking for self-paced and visually appealing modules with detailed reporting levels, and the ability to quickly make changes and updates on the fly. This is hugely valuable to a company like ours. We ve done this in a variety of ways and evolved our approach over time, taking advantage of the web and Flash. But the set of tools we have created generated problems with storage and bandwidth. Brainshark solved all our issues with a user-friendly database of training to get my team up to speed on the tool quickly and the ability to integrate any multimedia element. The easy distribution wows us every time and doing it all in minutes rather than hours! We were able to leverage our portal on SharePoint and our LMS, which we needed for authentication. Our instructional designers were able to get up to speed and all get certified as authors quickly. We use it mostly to train our sales team, but ultimately we d like to use it to market to customers too. Our sales force tends to require quick-response training. Brainshark fulfills that need and adapts well to their lifestyle. It cost us very little compared to the tens of thousands we were spending on video. The difference was huge and immediate. We save a lot of time and money with Brainshark. We base most of our training on simulated customer scenarios and would film actors performing various sales scenarios. We would then embed the videos in our blogs or have an online discussion this cost us thousands of dollars and was time consuming since it required that we download and review gigantic files. It was a multi-week process. We applied the same concept in Brainshark, but created the same deliverable in a week, reducing our time invested by 5. It cost us very little compared to the tens of thousands we were spending on video. The difference was huge and immediate. Even if you hire someone, you have to host the content yourself, becoming a storage burden to host the files. Compare that process to Brainshark and the support team, and it all adds up to tremendous savings in time and money. It s really all about content. Brainshark makes creating content easy, reporting easy, but if you re just bringing in standard wordy presentations, it s still going to be a standard wordy presentation. Shorter is always better. As Mark Twain said, If I had more time, I d make it shorter.
Serving up On-demand Technical Product Training to Geographically Dispersed Sales Team Brainshark for Technology 6 Mary Rapaport, Director of Product Marketing at GN Resound We first started using Brainshark at ReSound when it was crunch time during a new product launch. Time was short, and we had a need to train our entire national sales staff on our new product, but didn t want to fly them all into headquarters for a training session. We knew our Sales people (students) and even our subject matter experts (located across the globe) didn t want the hassle of learning new software to view or produce these courses. I had brought the Brainshark platform to the last 4 companies I ve worked with I knew it would be an easy sell because it is quick and easy to get up and running requires no software, no training for either the course developers or the students. After we d had success in the training arena, I could use Brainshark for Marketing activities. It seemed like almost instantly we had a new and excellent way to get our sales team up to speed on the technical elements of the new products. PLUS, we were able to train Sales in key messaging, positioning and how to demonstrate the product. The built-in quizzing helped us validate that our sales representatives had the technical skill and messaging know-how before they got in front of customers. Our parent company decided to roll it out to the rest of the organization. This subscription expansion gave us the ability to offer Brainshark courses to customers all over the globe. We continue to use Brainshark with every product launch and when onboarding new customers. Today, we use it as an awareness and lead generation tool in our marketing campaigns. Our marketing campaigns include a URL and a QR code that drops the prospect into a Brainshark presentation. We use the guestbook feature to ask a few questions to better qualify the lead before we pass it on to Sales. Almost instantly we had a new and excellent way to get our sales team up to speed. It is an agile, easy, robust and constantly-evolving solution, and the people at Brainshark continue to keep up with the market needs. Whether it is for a more robust learning management system needs, or support for mobile devices and offline learning options, at ReSound, Brainshark is indispensable.
7 Brainshark for Technology Grandstream Networks Uses Brainshark to Go Global Michael Rybacki, North America Inside Sales, Grandstream Networks When you re a small technology company, it s hard to get prospective customers to understand the value of your products without being able to physically put the products in their hands and take them for a test drive. Brochures and spec sheets simply don t cut it. Webinars are great, but then you re limiting your audience to those who can commit, well in advance, to spending a specific hour with you. That s where Brainshark comes in. Our marketing team was over the moon! You can t buy that kind of reaction from your customers. With Brainshark, we are able to generate professional on-demand web trainings that customers can view on their own time. Plus, Brainshark s exceptional audio recording features allow you to skip the crowded conference bridge and avoid using that free software that drops calls and fuzzes out. You can record clean, crisp, production quality audio and time your slides to create a dynamic web presentation. Just three days after my company, Grandstream Networks, uploaded our first Brainshark presentation, a Canadian customer called to complain that we didn t invite him to our Quebec training seminar. I m sorry, I told him, but Grandstream isn t hosting any trainings in Quebec. Sure you are, he replied. You re doing it right now! Unbeknownst to us, another customer had done a simple web search for the name of one of our new camera products, found the new Brainshark training, and scheduled a small conference with his agents. At that very moment, he was sitting in a Quebec auditorium, playing our Brainshark videos and taking questions. Our marketing team was over the moon! You can t buy that kind of reaction from your customers. It was so creative, so spontaneous and best of all it didn t cost us a dime. We hit the phones right away to tell all of our customers worldwide about these presentations and encouraged them to host their own trainings. Some customers even went so far as to create their own Brainshark videos so that they could share exclusive on-demand content that pointed right back to their websites for more information. Today, we even use Brainshark for some of our internal events. We re a small company, but we re global, so it s hard to schedule a presentation that everyone can attend from Boston to LA to London, Mumbai, and Shenzhen. Thank you Brainshark for helping us reach more customers worldwide with rich on-demand content. Just a few months ago I d never even heard of you, but now I can t imagine living without you!
Autodesk Keeps up with Communication Demands of Constant Change Brainshark for Technology 8 VP of Worldwide Channel Sales, Autodesk At Autodesk we focus on customers all around the world in manufacturing, architecture, engineering, construction (AEC), media and entertainment with our global distribution network. It s really easy to create a Brainshark, so I use the tool pretty regularly. I created three last week and I m not tech-savvy. We used to use a more cumbersome tool that required a dedicated microphone so only one person could record at a time it was a big process. Now we use Brainshark for internal and partner messaging and training, utilizing the tracking capabilities to determine who completes the training and is certified to sell our products. We use the solution to create presentations for end-users and to track which end-users have opened, reviewed, or forwarded the presentation. We sent out a Brainshark to 500 potential customers and saw that 312 viewed them. We provided this information to our inside sales organization and partners for follow-up. Through this recession, we ve had to be leaner with our travel budget but we needed a cost-effective way to get in front of our partners and get them up to speed on the latest product and marketing information. We recently launched a new product and sent out a Brainshark presentation to show partners how to position and sell the product s benefits. We can really impact our partners when we provide information in this format. Plus, with Brainshark s mobile capabilities, partners can be out in field and still get trained on our products. Since we re implementing a change management initiative I want to make sure I m communicating with my team in real-time. Trying to set up conference calls at a time that makes sense for everyone in 24 time zones is next to impossible. Conducting two or three different calls takes up a lot of time and I m they done get incrementally better since you lose some passion for the topic. I ve replaced conference calls with Brainshark to keep my team up to speed and I ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. Consistency of communications and viewing metrics are also important benefits of using Brainshark. Now we re taking fewer people out of the field for skills and product training. We also use Brainshark to replace repeated face to face instruction. Now we re taking fewer people out of the field for skills and product training. Tracking allows us to know whether training has been completed and successful. Autodesk has acquired companies, introduced new technology into our product portfolio, implemented program changes change has been more extreme and rapid than usual. We have so many things going on at any given moment, so we use Brainshark video presentation to get people s attention. The proof is in pudding we re using it more and more frequently as part of our success formula.
9 Brainshark for Technology For more information: www.brainshark.com Toll Free: 866-276-7427 Brainshark, Inc. 130 Turner Street Building 1, Suite 100 Waltham, MA 02453 (781) 370-8000 2011, Brainshark, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks belong to their respective companies