When Canal+ trains its salespeople in Africa with Didask

Training salespeople remotely is possible!

At first glance, it may seem complicated to create a sales training course when your learners are thousands of kilometers away, with markets and technological uses that are very different from those in the city. But Virginie Rochard knows the subject well because she has trained many times in the field and in different countries. Going digital required finding a fast and effective design format to design a granular and effective digital journey in terms of learning.

Explanations with Virginie Rochard (VR), Sales Management Training Manager at Canal+ International

Can you present to us the project on which you tested the Didask method?

V.R. As a training manager for Canal+ International, I am in charge of the design, and sometimes the animation of training systems for distance sellers in all the territories where we are present, namely Africa, overseas territories and Asia, i.e. nearly 40 countries. I am attached to the group's sales department, and am exclusively in charge of distance training for our sales teams.

In Africa, a large part of our salespeople are itinerant, and not in store. We had training devices available, but not really adapted to this population of specific salespeople. So I had the project of creating a course dedicated to them, more adapted to their needs, to their daily lives, because we don't sell in the same way on the street as in the store.

For this population, nothing had ever been created digitally. We were only on face-to-face, and a lot on top-down information rather than training. We presented them with our offers, our products, our services. We tried to highlight their advantages. We also made them aware of our highlights, our programming in general, etc. It was a lot of information that we communicated to them in a single day. Moreover, practices were not necessarily aligned between countries; each subsidiary did a bit as it wanted. Our aim was to harmonize the training system between the various subsidiaries, but also to make it more interactive, more dynamic, and more fun for salespeople.

I met a person from the DIDASK team at a trade show in January. She contacted me again to show me what you do, your training design methodology. It was while talking to her that I said to myself that Maybe you could help me write this digital training course that I had in mind for several months already to train salespeople remotely. Christmas was approaching and it is the biggest commercial period of the year for us. This is where we thought it would be appropriate to accelerate and move on to the design of the pilot of this digital training. It was a first for our teams!

“What impressed me the most about the training was the customer's grip. Because when you manage to win the customer's heart, it's possible to make the sale happen.”
- Canal+ learner

How did the collaboration with Didask happen on this distance learning project?

V.R. Initially, the idea was to delineate together the macrostructure of the course and its tree structure thanks to your methodology focused on “errors”. Once the structure was clarified, what interested me was to create a first module, a first “seed”, that I could quickly deploy to my salespeople.

Philip, the educational engineer with whom I worked, gave good advice, and explained to me how to build the practical cases of the module. When we got into the concrete “profession”, it was quite easy for me to answer his questions, because I knew what a salesperson did on a daily basis during his day... And Philip had questions that kept coming up: “What would really happen if the seller didn't know this information?” “What would happen if the seller didn't say that argument in his speech?” “What would be the impacts of this behavior on customer potential?” And it is true that I had never before thought of building a training module in this way, thinking in this way. I found you to be very responsive. I found the result very appropriate, very concrete.

The “trial and error” aspect Once we really become aware of certain things, we will go and look for information ourselves because we understood that we had to do this or say this. Certainly, by providing top-down information as we did, we did not generate this awareness at all before.

How did the deployment of the Didask modules happen?

V.R. As we were able to create a course of 6 seeds (editor's note: 6 Didask modules, i.e. a short hour of content) we were able to embark 12 countries, i.e. almost half of the African countries where Canal+ packages are marketed. In some countries, they were able to communicate the link (NDL: access to the modules) more easily and the sellers were able to make the modules by themselves. But what you need to know is that these salespeople are not necessarily equipped with computers or tablets. Some may have smartphones but this is not the case for all, and even for those who can, there may be problems with credits, accessibility to the Internet network, or even a poor connection. As a result, some of the salespeople worked on the Didask modules during face-to-face group sessions led by a trainer.

Initial feedback from learners was very positive and encouraging. They found the situations to be very realistic. They also really enjoyed the illustrations, which were simple but very concrete!

What do you learn from your collaboration with Didask and what are your future prospects?

V.R. For me, the main thing was that we were in co-construction so that everything was adapted and really corresponded to the needs of the field, whether in terms of profession or culture. What I liked, and if I remember one thing, it was really the support in writing my career with a methodology that seems relevant to me: trial and error and questioning. What I like more is this co-construction side rather than sharing my needs with you and waiting for delivery. I think that it is really this co-construction that makes us aim right.

“I was very satisfied because it describes what we experience on a daily basis in the field”
- Canal+ learner

What I was also looking for was a method to gain skills and autonomy in writing these modules in order to be able to do it tomorrow independently, and without always having to use a service provider. Once you have the right approach and a good methodology to apply, you can then more easily duplicate it independently.

As I understood the Didask approach pedagogy, I will know how to use it in other territories and on other subjects.