Canal+ chooses Didask to train its online sales representatives

What are your missions?

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.

What challenge did you have to take on? 

Creating a sales training course is not easy when your learners are thousands of kilometers away, with markets and technological uses that are very different from those in the city. Going digital required finding a quick design format to design a granular and effective digital journey in terms of learning.

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.

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How did the collaboration and deployment happen?

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!

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 “granule”, 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 you really become aware of certain things, you yourself will go and look for information because you understood that you 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.

As we were able to create a course of 6 granules (editor's note: 6 Didask modules, i.e. a small 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.

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What assessment do you draw from this?

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.

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.

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What feedback did you get from your learners?

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 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

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

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