Smartforce Launches Virtual Sales University

SmartForce today announces the launch of its Virtual Sales University (VSU) SolutionSet for the development of sales professionals. Available in the first quarter of 2002, it is claimed that the VSU SolutionSet helps companies to drive business growth and competitive advantage through greater sales force productivity.

Following a strategy strikingly similar to that originally adopted by US rival DigitalThink last year, Smartforce is seeking to more fully exploit the market for salesforce education and optimisation solutions. Whereas DigitalThink offers their Salesforce Effectiveness Performance Solution, Smartforce will offer The Virtual Sales University SolutionSet.

The Smartforce VSU SolutionSet is designed to meet the needs of as those charged with consistently and efficiently educating their sales forces and channel sales partners and keeping them up to date on new products, company vision, sales strategies, processes and product launch information.

"The Virtual Sales University SolutionSet addresses sales productivity, which is a specific and tangible business concern of many organisations," says Michael Brennan, IDC senior analyst. "Well-targeted offerings such as this make it easier for organisations to realise the benefits of e-Learning. By helping address such pain points effectively, vendors such as SmartForce are providing a foundation for customers to use e-Learning across their organisations to achieve measurable business results."

The VSU SolutionSet aims to accomplish this by developing the core competencies of the sales organisation, increasing productivity through skilled sales professionals and by ramping new hires faster.The platform delivers consistent messages, sales strategy and vision and enables companies to replicate best practices throughout their organisations. This allows companies to educate their sales forces on specific products and accelerate the time necessary to bring those products to market.

The traditional instructor-led training (ILT) approach tends to be geographically limiting, time consuming, and often results in delayed or outdated information. The time it takes to train sales reps effectively using traditional methods can negatively impact a company’s revenue. For example, the time to competency for a sales rep may take as much as six to nine months from date of hire to becoming profitable with traditional training methods.

A six-month delay in getting a product to market can seriously decrease the lifetime profits of a product. The Virtual Sales University SolutionSet, which can be used in concert with traditional methods, can help companies drive revenue by significantly decreasing time-to-productivity for sales reps and by accelerating product launches.

“As companies manage change in their organisations, increasing productivity and driving growth require a significant transfer of knowledge to sales professionals when and where they need it most,” said Paul Henry, senior VP of SmartForce. “The SmartForce Virtual Sales University SolutionSet enables the sales process and directly helps companies to achieve tangible business goals by consistently distributing knowledge in the context that is relevant to their businesses and to their objectives.”

The Virtual Sales University SolutionSet covers topics relevant to

• one-to-two call sales cycles representatives
• territorial and strategic account sales
• vertical market industry knowledge
• salesforce automation (SFA)
• customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• desktop skills
• product and process knowledge
• core sales skills.

February 11th, 2002