After the short video introduction, please consider this post and leave your comments...

If you’ve been around sales and sales training long enough, you’ve seen and heard pretty much everything. But in the end, growing revenues is the ultimate proof of results.

And really, you’re still just qualifying, recommending, overcoming objections and closing...so what really changes?

Maybe it’s not the what that changes; maybe it’s the how.  In this case, I’m talking about how you prepare, to improve sales results.

With our clients, the change in how has become familiar, but for some it may be relatively new. You see, we’ve thrown out linear, page-by-page e-learning and replaced it with the one-two punch of exploration and experimentation.

Working from this approach, 76% of over 1,000 sales managers recently told us our courses had increased their sales by an average of 12.5%. Based on client revenues of approximately $8 billion, that would be an increase of another cool $1 billion. That’s exciting, but let me be quick to add that this is anecdotal data. Still, as I like to say, even if they’re half right...

Learning, naturally.

The way we naturally learn is by exploring the possibilities, and then experimenting and trying things out. In short: learning by doing. And learning by doing is at the heart of the approach we call PowerSims™.  Through PowerSims, our learners gain valuable practice by applying new knowledge within a simulated selling situation.

Practice...mistakes...feedback. The sims are a safe place to learn and build confidence. And I think they’re particularly appealing because of the avatars we use. The avatars lip-synch to the audio. And the emotion in the voices, combined with their body language, make the experience very real...very social and engaging.

From the same survey mentioned above, sales managers also “agreed or strongly agreed” that our courses helped salespeople to:

• 96%...recommend the right solution or product,

• 93%...overcome customer objections to close the sale

• 95%...avatar, simulation-based courses help salespeople overcome specific objections and close the sale

• 81%...characters and simulations increase the learning in a course

• 85%...actually meeting the customer characters made them more real for me

• 89%...it was helpful to observe the retail sales character’s approach to selling

• 92%...the avatar coach provided useful insights and advice on customers and selling

• 89%...it was useful to actually practice selling to the customers

Remember, by declaring war on ineffective e-learning, we’ve rejected linear, page-by-page organization as the default method of delivering content. It’s maddening that these outdated habits, and every converted PowerPoint and webinar have become the de-facto standards for e-learning. So please, help us keep making the distinction between x-learning and all that other stuff. Almost everyone can use some variation of x-learning to improve their results. And we intend to keep pushing the front line in that direction.

X-learning, as you may remember from other w/ blog posts:

• Allows learners to eXplore content at a pace, and in the order, of their choosing
• Provides avatar-driven eXplanations and demonstrations of successful approaches to common problems, and
• Builds eXperience through practice in a safe, simulated environment

• Their construction is based on business risk areas, where employees are likely to falter or fail, without additional training support.
• Risk areas represent top- and bottom-line strategic objectives related to brand, sales, marketing, customer service, leadership, management and production.
• We design a PowerSim to provide practice in differentiating between good choices and better choices. This helps learners to improve their decision-making...and results...when faced with the real situation.

• Served more than 11,000 learners (nearly all of whom are non-employees)
• Chalked up more than 100,000 successful online course completions, and
• Put the cost of learning at just dollars per course completion

The best part of these numbers is that 43% of 500 sales managers surveyed, told us that they believe our courses have improved sales from 11% to 18%. That’s anecdotal information, but even if they’re half right...

Some more numbers.

Each year we complete a program survey, at no cost to our clients, because we want to know what learners can tell us about how we’re doing. Here are some convincing numbers and comments, where learners “strongly agree, or agree”:

• 84%...Actually meeting the customer characters made them more real for me.
• 88%...It was helpful to observe the retail sales character's approach to selling.
• 92%...The coach provided useful insights and advice on customers and selling.
• 89%...It was useful to actually practice selling the products to customers.
• 88%...It was helpful to go through the selling scenarios more than once.

• This survey was done as part of launching the first avatar course in a long-established program of traditional e-learning.
• The learners’ ages range all the way from 20-something to 50-something.
• 650 of the first 700 learners to take the course voluntarily participated in the survey...and with a response like that, they were obviously eager to share their experience with us.

• 40 relevant options or points of view
• 14 learner inputs or decisions
• 16 expressions of customer preference
• 8 demonstrated coaching tips

Once a year, we like to ask our different groups of learners what they think about our courses. We ask them what they like and what they don't like. We also ask them what improvements in performance they've seen as a result. Then we go one step further and ask their managers what results they've seen. That's level 2 and 3 feedback...the best we can do without imperical measurments, which are tough to come by. So many factors come into play, it can be next to impossible to isolate the results of our elearning. Still, the feedback we do get can be valuable in helping us deliver the most effective solutions possible.

Recently, we asked a group of learners about the 3D immersive simulations and avatars we develop for sales training. Here's the data...

Nice results. The avatars and sims are valued. But what other results can we put our fingers on? Well, this is what managers told us they see in the behaviors of salespeople, as a result of our training:

Now, the big question: Did the courses actually increase sales? Again, this is the managers talking (with almost the same response as the salespersons themselves):

On average, the increase in sales is just over 8%. Even if this is half right, that much increase in sales turns out to be a great ROI. Now, let's turn to one more question, about what learners like best about the avatars and simulations.

To us, these numbers are pretty satisfying. It says we're on the right course, and we'll use the feedback to go even further in this direction.

We'd love to hear what results you may have gotten with simulations. Or, if you've got any questions we can answer, we're here to help. What's the right strategy for using avatars? How is the instructional design different in simulations? How can we take these results and apply them to our specific needs? Just post a comment here, or connect with Jack, at the phone number or email address below.

I recently had a client who had been reviewing different avatars tell me that they all seem the same. Granted, this person is in purchasing, not in learning, but the comment does bring up an interesting issue. What makes a good elearning avatar?

We've learned by experience that characters that are too photorealistic are creepy. That's because the rigging and animation always fall way short of the visual features, causing a distracting Max Headroom kind of dissonance.

Simpler characters compliment learning, rather than distract from it...and yet, too simple also gets back to being a distraction. So not photorealistic, and not the rather crude talking heads you sometimes see. And while there is certainly a place for 2-D characters, we prefer 3-D, for most applications.

Just as the voice can convey important emotional cues that add significant depth to a message, so can body language. That's why we like to see a character that can walk and gesture, and of course lip-synchs with the voice. 

When it comes to production, a good avatar is easy to work with and keeps ROI in mind. That's one of the main advantages to the Codebaby characters we use. We can change clothes and hair pretty easily...and they come already rigged, with a broad selection of movements and gestures for us to plug in.

Bottom line? The avatar is there to help create a more human experience. They make practicing a learning objective much more real and powerful. You need them to do that job without being a distraction, and without causing you more work than the project is budgeted for.

Prospects are always impressed by our full-body avatars, and for that reason we're quick to demonstrate them.

But as I joined in the selling process with a new client recently I was reminded that, while we're always thinking sims, that doesn't mean that we should always be thinking avatars. Here's why:

• A sim is used to, literally, simulate real life decisions to provide a learner with practice. Here, by the way, we design in options for failure. If learners don't have a good chance to fail, they don't really have a good chance to learn, either.
• But sometimes the failing and learning have to do with software or with repairing machines. When there is no interaction with people, there is no call for an avatar...no matter how powerful they are.

So, while we're always thinking in terms of sims these days, we're also quick to determine what soft skills are in play. No soft skills, no avatars.

And depending on the audience, we may choose to use avatars in only one section of the course. That would be true with boomers, more than any other age group. They appreciate working with an avatar in a role-play, but tire of having them around when it's not necessary.

This post summarizes a Stanford University study that was published in 2002. Like a lot of academic papers, it's well, pretty academic reading. But it makes a very strong case for the use of animated characters, or avatars, in online learning. And it has a ton of impressive research behind it. You can (download) this study from us, but below is the short version.

First of all, we are all familiar with the concept of social intelligence. It's well documented that the quality of facial and emotional expressions, along with speaking ability and other personal skills, result in greater or lesser degrees of engagement, trust and satisfaction during a social interaction.

According to the Stanford study, a significant body of research shows that the presentation of social intelligence is just as critical in online interactions as it is in interpersonal interactions. They make the point that people do not discount interactions as unreal, simply because they are on screen. Further, it asserts that interactive media automatically engages brain systems that are meant to evaluate social experiences. Therefore online characters that speak and interact with learners can create a more meaningful experience, increasing trust, satisfaction, memory and learning, and a willingness to return for more learning.

The study goes on to say that online characters can create a positive feeling towards the organization that sponsors the interaction, make people feel special, rather than one of a multitude of learners, and make the web less lonely. The study goes on to fortify these assertions in a list of 10 benefits to using online characters:

1. Characters make explicit the social responses that are inevitable in online interactions, giving us more control over outcomes.
2. Interactive characters are perceived as real social actors; we know they are not real, but we treat them as if they are.
3. Interactivity increases the perceived realism and effectiveness of characters, as it simulates human-to-human conversation.
4. Interactive characters increase trust in information sources, and research shows that when characters guide interactions, people trust the information more than in identical interactions without characters.
5. Characters have personalities that represent brands, create predictability and help to build relationships.
6. Characters can communicate social roles, thus making their function--as a teacher, coach, teammate, salesperson, customer service rep--clear, and improving the message and experience.
7. Characters can effectively express and regulate emotions, responding appropriately to learner interactions and adding impact and meaning to what is being learned.
8. Characters can effectively display important social manners, with polite greetings, effective encouragement, and even simple apologies...all making the interaction more human and more effective.
9. Characters can make interfaces easier to use because they make it more obvious where to find help, and more like getting help from someone down the hall than from a manual or help file.
10. Characters are well liked because they make online interactions more personal. When presented with only a single character for interaction only 15% of users dislike the character. When presented with a choice of multiple characters, more than 90% of people prefer interaction with the character, to no character at all.

The Stanford paper is well documented, referencing 36 different studies, articles and conference proceedings. It is well worth the read, if you have the time, but this summary gets to most of it. Bottom line, if you're wondering about using characters in your online learning programs...you can probably erase any doubts you previously had. Online avatars can crate immersive learning.