Tips For Training Your BDC Team with Liza Martenson

Foreign.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally. Today I'm joined by Liza from our team. You all know Liza very, very well. She's joining me once again. We're going to talk about training for today's BDC and service rep. So we'll. Liza, thanks so much for taking the time with me. You bet. So Liza, really, when we look at this training, expectations have changed. What should BDCs do to keep up?

Yeah, so as I was prepping for this call, I was hesitant to bring up Covid. I hate talking about COVID but there was a shift there, right. To remote work and training. Training also right. Comes into play there. So post Covid, a lot of our customers have had to adopt new policies and adapt to new tools that they're using with their teams. I think remote training makes it easy to quickly roll out updates across an organization. We're also finding that a lot of our customers are leaning into technology, how they can leverage technology for training rather than kind of an old school side by side approach. We find that reps engage a little bit better with technology where they can sit right down at their device and follow along with instructor led, whether it's a webinar or it's a video that they're following along with just more engagement from those tools that they can log right into. And then, you know, there's also, we're finding with our teams there's a, a need or a desire for continuous opportunities for training and upskilling. It's challenging working that in. Right. When you have a rep who wants to level up, who wants to hit their bonuses higher than they have in the past, but fitting in that time, especially if you're doing it one on one when you've got a thousand other responsibilities pulling you in different directions. But if you have some type of tool that reps can use on their own independently, they can take that on. They can do their training, they can increase their skills uninterrupted while you have other daily tasks going on. So it's more autonomous in that way.

Yeah. And those are a lot of great insights into some of the macro things. You know, let's talk a little specific. What, what exactly are you seeing that's working?

Sure. So having rather than, you know, big long sessions, bite size training seems to be working well with our customers. A lot of our customers talk about utilizing like a daily huddle where maybe they pull everyone in for 10 minutes, something quick. Maybe they're addressing a policy change or maybe you're reviewing a common rebuttal and objections to those rebuttals. With customers offering up some kind of relevant promotion that's being run or some kind of value proposition to customers. In regards to tech, what kind of technology are people using? We have had a couple of customers reach out about AI or chatbot mystery shops. So, you know, mystery shops are not new, but having an AI tool or some kind of chatbot that's reaching in and doing the mystery shop a you can get a lot more outreach done that way. A lot more touches. So just more data points. Sentiment analysis is big AI call grading. Anything that can be used to kind of look over all communications. Again, just getting a bigger sample size and then a really big hit. Has been using chat GPT for everything. Right. But mainly for scripting, creating email templates, text templates, talk tracks for phone calls. That's been really big with our customers as well.

And another thing that people are using, a lot of our current customers that is, are starting to use Pulse. Liza, talk a little bit about Pulse and how that's helping with the training.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've had really great feedback so far on our accounts that have been utilizing Pulse. One of the huge advantages is that, you know, they can kind of sit back and take comfort in the fact that Pulse is listening to every single one of their reps calls. I know there's a concern a with listening to calls is time consuming, so I'm gonna have to cherry pick the calls that I listen to. Right. And am I getting a bad sample from a rep? Am I coming down on someone for one call that went sideways when every other call was perfect, or vice versa? Am I catching the one good call when I'm missing the call where we promise something to a customer that we never delivered on. So I think there's peace of mind with using a tool like Pulse where it's listening to every single phone call and then they can personalize what different triggers they want to be alerted on. So like I think I mentioned, if there's sentiment, right. If there's any sentiment flags on the call, they can choose to be alerted for those. If we are not setting a solid appointment, they can be alerted for those. So little bit of customization, they're making sure that they're touching the calls where they're needed most kind of thing. It's a fair representation of what the rep is working on.

Awesome. And are there any specific wins from one of our customers that come to mind with how they've trained and motivated their team to increase productivity?

Yes. So as Far as motivation, right easy way to motivate people is with a pay plan, but not fair to have a pay plan where you're not backing up the incentives with proper training. So one that comes to mind, somewhat recent. So we had one of our 20 group members, we had a, an awesome meeting. We were talking about what are KPIs, what does everyone hold their team to and how are they compensating for those APIs. KPIs, that person walked away from our meeting, totally going to change up their pay plan. So they went back, kind of set the standards, provided resources to train their team to their new standards, and after implementing the new pay plan, the new kind of motivation for the training that they had provided, they had a 30% increase in agent productivity. So huge and now they can easily steer their ship. Right. So they've got the engine pumping kind of thing and now they just need to put the right activities in front of their team.

So huge win, no doubt. And, and it just shows that with attention, focusing on these things and training towards the results you want to see as well as properly incentivizing, of course you can, you know, drive the business in the way that you want to. Liza, can you talk a little bit about Volley's specific training and support ecosystem?

Yeah. So some of this is, you know, not new, some of this is new. So we've added to our training repertoire what we have available. Some of the new offerings that we have are our agent and manager certification courses. The manager certification we've rolled out a couple of months ago. That course is going off really well. We've had really good feedback. We offer some tools like I mentioned, chat GPT for phone scripting and text scripting. So we have some baked in resources like that. In our manager certification course we also rolled out an agent certification course. Surprisingly to us it's been really well received even for veteran reps. So not necessarily just your new rep onboarding, but those reps who, like I mentioned earlier, want to get 1% better this month, are really digging into that agent certification course and taking, you know, the information back to, you know, to their daily work and seeing some wins there. We also have, you know, some of the things that we've had for forever. Right. We do have a YouTube channel that has hours and hours worth of content. As far as bite sized content, each video is somewhere between like three and six minutes. They're really easy to consume. Those are great for onboarding, but even better for just going back and getting a little refresher. You know for reps in the communication center, we have our help docs in there. I love to hear it. I just got a compliment earlier this week on there's so much in there for our help docs. So I always recommend that it's a good place to start if you're pulling up a new report that you've never dug into before or you want to dive a little bit deeper, get a little bit dangerous with our campaign builder, lots of good resources in there. Obviously we have my team, our team. So onboarding support all of those in person virtual trainings that we offer. So lots of different resources to increase your volley knowledge. And then we've seen a need also just for increasing industry knowledge or some of those just skills that are necessary for our rep who's who's working directly.

With consumers and specifically to Vale. You know, like Liza said, we're always posting YouTube videos and starting new webinars like the Volley 15 to show off and get you all knowledgeable about what's coming. So always trying to keep you all in the loop. Well Liza, thank you so much for joining me today. What as we wrap up here would be your number one take takeaway, your number one training tip for 2025.

I thought about this one, thought through a lot of conversations that, that I've had with our customers recently. All of this talk about AI, right. And different AI tools that are interacting with our customers. That's not going away. Right. So as it's becoming more and more prevalent in dealerships and really everywhere, those human skills, emotional intelligence, adaptability, just basic communication skills, those are going to be key differentiators for your team and your business. So my number one tip is to prioritize that human skills, human skills development. So that might look like role play. It should look like real time coaching and feedback for any customer facing roles in your organization.

Thanks Liza. What should anyone tuning in, how can they reach you or the volley team if they want to, you know, learn more about training tips?

Yeah. So Katie on our team is leading up all of our training. You can reach out to Katie. Her email is katiealli.com, it's an easy one. So it's Katie.

Never saw that coming.

K a t I eolli.com but please always I'm always available to all of our customers. It's fun to chat through some of this stuff. So you know you can always grab me. Mine's Liza Valley.com that's Liz Aoli.com sounds great.

Well thank you so much for taking the time, and I hope everyone tuning in has a fantastic day.