How the Future of Workplace Learning Will Increase Employee Productivity by 50% with Spekit CEO

bright and early if you're in Pacific time. I'm Melanie Fillet, co-founder and CEO of Spekit. And my background is in revenue operations, business operations enablement. And I started Spekit as a modern digital learning and adoption solution really to solve for the challenges that I faced firsthand in my previous roles at high-growth technology companies. So super excited today to dive into what I believe the future of workplace learning looks like based on just a lot of different trends that are happening. So let's dive into what are some of the new challenges that organizations and enterprises are facing. You know, if you look at the modern organization, most enterprises are using upwards of 150 applications in their technology stack, which means that the average employee has anywhere between 8 to 9 applications. Now, while that in itself can feel a little bit overwhelming, the reality is that all these different applications are integrated to each other. Right? If you work at an organization that uses a CRM, it's likely integrated into your ERP, and your workflows go from one application to the next. Now, what adds more challenges for employees is that each one of those applications is uniquely customized to your organization. Your fields in your CRM relate to your industry, your complexity, your processes. And so as a new employee joining an organization, not only do I have to get up to speed on all these different applications that I may or may not have used before and learn their UI and UX, But on top of that, even if I have used one of those technologies before, like Salesforce, whether I use Salesforce or not in my last company is almost irrelevant because of how uniquely customized these different applications are to your organization with your vocabulary, glossary, et cetera, embedded throughout. On top of learning all your different tools and processes and technologies, it's bare minimum to do their job. They now need to learn everything about their roles, whether they're in sales and that's learning your different products and services and features and differentiating Now layer on all the different competitors in your space that are increasing by the day. And even if they have that baseline of knowledge, at the pace of change that most organizations are dealing today, you're rolling out new systems, new tools, new processes, new regulations, new compliance procedures on a monthly, if not biweekly or weekly basis. So when you combine this complexity of technology with all the information that employees need to know and the pace of change today, it can become super overwhelming. Now, on top of that, if you look at the way that most organizations train their employees, they're still leveraging technologies from the 1990s. The learning management system, the PowerPoint— the PowerPoint was invented in 1987, and I think most of us can argue that that is the most popular way that most organizations train their employees on new processes, your competitors, et cetera. Right? However, if you look at how employees learn in their day-to-day lives, you and I included, it's bite-sized. It's personalized. It's relevant. Right? When it comes to how we approach something in our day-to-day, right, at home, let's say you purchase a new set of furniture. Are you more likely to read that manual from start to finish on how to assemble the entire thing or to learn each page one by one as you go about building that furniture? Right? So if you look at the way that we learn in our personal lives, plus the technologies available to us, right, TikTok, It's bite-sized. You can look at DIY videos. You look at YouTube. All these different technologies are bite-sized. They're relevant. They're personalized. They're simple. They're easy. They're addictive. Yet at work, you're still dealing with day-long workshops when you roll out a new system like a CRM. You're dealing with your content out that's stored in SharePoint or in an LMS somewhere that no employee goes back to. It's not contextual to your workflow. And oftentimes because of the pace of change, that learning is out of date. And that creates a lot of friction and frustration. For employees. Now, the reality is that this is also a very expensive cost to companies, right? For a long time, training and onboarding has really been viewed as a cost center, right? Oh, we have to spend money here in order to get people up to speed. But I think the right organizations, the ones that are looking forward, are really seeing training and onboarding more of a tool— as a tool of retention. Because even pre-pandemic, job tenure was at an all-time low at about 1.5 years. 6 years per employee compared to 4, 5, or more over a decade ago. But with a pandemic, over 26% of employees today plan to look for a new job. And so that competitive advantage that you had as an organization because you were the only employer in town or the hottest brand name in your geographic location is gone because most companies are taking a digital-first approach. And so the employee pool and the number of jobs available to your— to employees is at an all-time high. So when you look at the consequences of poor onboarding, poor training on employees, seeing that an employee is twice as likely to leave if they have a poor, poor onboarding experience, or the fact that on the flip side, if they have a positive onboarding experience, they're 69% more likely to stay for 3 years or more. When you look at the costs relative to the benefits of, of good onboarding or good training, I think there's a huge opportunity to really reframe. Are we looking at training as this cost, or are we seeing it as a revenue accelerator? Now, where's the future of learning going? I see it as moving away from that traditional classroom-style learning that is very ineffective for retention and not scalable to moving towards a future that is integrated, personalized, and measurable. And we're going to dive into what that means here soon. So first, let's look at what we, what we can expect from the future of learning. With a more integrated and personalized and contextual learning experience that mirrors how we learn in our personal lives, I think that we're going to see a huge reduction in ramp-up time. The average enterprise sales individual takes about 6 months to ramp up. What impact would that have on your organization if you could reduce that by 1 month? If you look at more productivity and selling time, instead of having to stop what you're doing in your flow of work to go look for an answer in your LMS, digging, logging in, looking for the course, looking for the answer. What if instead that answer was surfaced to you right there? How much more time could you spend in customer-facing conversations, actually selling rather than stopping your workflow, stopping your flow and train of thought and looking for information. And then lastly, for the average CRM Salesforce rollout, for every dollar spent on a license, $6 is spent on implementation and professional services. So the cost of rolling out a new technology is immense for organizations. What would it look like if you could increase your adoption rate and success and ROI on the technologies because you created a more self-guided, easy, learning experience for employees by 10% or 20%? How did that impact your data quality as in your organization, the overall sentiment? I think there's a lot to be excited about. So let's talk about why I think the future of learning is integrated and what that means. First, I think that replacing LMSs, PowerPoints, and having to leave what you're doing, learning will be surfaced to you contextually relevant to your workflow when and where an employee needs it. If I'm in LinkedIn, perhaps information on my messaging and objection handling is is surfaced to me. If I'm in ERP, perhaps it's our policies and procedures around how to file quotes and invoicing. All that information is contextually relevant to me where I need it, saving time for employees so that they can learn by doing and stay productive. It's also connected, meaning instead of having your system and processes in one place and your learning completely disconnected, I think learning will start to integrate to your system so that as you make changes to your processes within your different applications, let's say you make a change to your quoting process in Salesforce, you will actually see your learning, pull in those changes, and stay relevant as your business evolves. I think it's also going to be data-driven, right? If you look at all the different applications that technology— that companies use today, right, if you take a modern sales team, they're using sales engagement, where data tells them what messaging is working. They're using a CMS that tells them what content is convincing customers. They're using conversational intelligence to see what are your reps saying and how is that impacting your revenue. But no data is really used in learning. Now I see that by having a more connected learning experience integrated to your systems, we can start leveraging that data in your systems, knowing what activities an employee has done, what behaviors they have, and start personalizing the learning to that particular individual in whatever step of the process they're in. I also think that by understanding where people are getting stuck, because learning is happening as they work, we'll be able to start recommending and looking at patterns to make sure that learning is optimized to that individual. And lastly, I think learning will be measurable. To me, this is what excites me the most about the future. I think if you're like me, you were able to cram perhaps the night before a test when you were in school back in the day, but likely forgot most of that information afterwards. I think in the workplace today, the best way that we measure learning is by looking at, hey, did someone take that course and did they take an assessment and how did they perform? But there's no way to correlate how they took how they performed on that LMS course on their first week, to how they actually perform 6 weeks in when they come across that competitor for the first time. So I think the future, by being able to time the learning at the right time, related to a specific activity that the employee is doing, will actually be able to measure, for example, hey, does reviewing a competitive battle card right before that first competitive deal in the moment impact the win rate on that first deal? Right? We'll be able to look at, hey, on average, your SDRs in their first week spend more time, or in their first 3 months, spend more time looking at this kind of training than this kind of training. Here's what you should be focusing on. So I think by leveraging data, we'll be able to measure the impact of learning on both learning, productivity, ramp-up time, and overall performance. So just to recap, uh, in this brief 10 minutes. I think one, if you look at most organizations today, they're woefully unprepared for the increasing pace of change, the number of technologies teams are using, and the rate at which employees are shifting jobs. I think that if companies don't proactively embrace these new modern technologies and ways of learning, they're going to stay behind. And lastly, I think that the future involves a more integrated, contextual, data-driven, personalized, and measurable approach to learning. Just as it applies to other technologies in our stack. So with that, with 5 minutes remain— remaining, hopefully that was helpful or at least piqued your, your thoughts in a few different ways. But this is something I'm really, really passionate about. So I'd love to open it up on the floor in here if any of you have any questions that I can answer.

Hey, Mel, you're clearly passionate about learning. How would you say your, your view of learning has evolved from when you started Spekit to where it is today?

Great question. So I think when I started Spekit, my view on the problem was a little bit more narrow. It was really focused on technology and adoption, right? Because my experience was our company had implemented Salesforce. We had absolutely zero adoption a year in, a million dollars worth of investment in. And so I started looking for a solution like, hey, if we train our employees on how to if they can leverage their technology, they'll use it more. But the more I spent time really getting into this problem, helping companies solve that first problem, what I realized is adoption isn't just a problem of how do I navigate the platform, it's how do I know how to do my job in this platform, right? And so it's much more about integrating your knowledge and processes and procedures there into your systems as well. So I think the, my viewpoint changed from just a technology problem to an overall on-the-job learning and knowledge problem. And then the more I spent, I looked at over 80 platforms across LMS, knowledge management solutions, digital adoption platform, CMS, and realized that at the end of the day, like, all of them were very much the same kinds of technologies. They weren't contextual, they weren't integrated. It made me realize how much of an opportunity there is to leverage data to actually personalize the experience in a way that hasn't been done before. Great, thank you.

Hey, Mel, one question for me. Obviously, a lot has changed over the last few years. How are you seeing companies rethinking how they organize and staff their learning across the organization today?

Another great question. Yeah, it's interesting. And I, and I talked to, you know, Chief Learning Officers, CROs, all the time about this, because it's interesting. Some organizations are still keeping learning relatively centralized, where they have a centralized L&D or enablement department, and then they're supporting the entire organization. But many, many teams are starting to move towards having a decentralized model where they have sales enablement, which is different than their customer success enablement. So they have department-level enablement teams, and the centralized learning is really more of like an HR and security standpoint. More interesting, one of our larger clients, JLL, for example, moved their tool training under IT. Under their CRM team. And I'm seeing more and more organizations actually hire Salesforce trainers, CRM trainers, etc., under the actual CRM team so that they're uniquely responsible for building the training and documentation on their CRM and not relying on a third party in learning or enablement to do that. And I do see that happening a lot more. I think roles like learning operations are going to come together that are really designed to connect IT or business system teams with learning teams, given that that's becoming such a huge component to the journey as an employee and their success.

It's helpful. Thanks.

Yeah.

I'm curious to hear from, from any of you in your organizations, as you think about, you know, everyone coming back to work, whether that's in a digital-first kind of environment or whether you're going back to the office, like, how have your teams shifted their thinking on training enablement? Have you seen budgets increase? Have you seen new technologies being invested in to help with that? I'd love to open that up to the floor. Anyone?

Yeah, I'll jump in. One of the things we saw pre-COVID, right, a lot of people started eliminating their learning L&D budget or moving it to like things that are a little more virtual. And I'm actually just curious from your perspective, like, how have you seen budgets shift from like a centralized model to decentralized? In other words, like, are you seeing like people like moving some of that budget into their like sales enablement, customer success enablement teams, or are more and more companies like increasing both?

So I think first, companies are increasing both. I think organizations are realizing like the value of training on their, their overall numbers. But it's interesting, like in, in our enterprise sales cycles, what we're seeing is that it's typically a department that's evaluating the technology. And in some cases, they'll have the budget to make the purchase themselves. But oftentimes, I think a lot of organizations have been stung by this challenge of SaaS proliferation and all these different departments purchasing the same tools and not being able to manage that in a centralized way. So then they're having to go to the corporate team to ask for budget, at which point they're then running a full evaluation. And in some cases, we've seen corporate teams have their own budgets, so corporate L&D, and, and end up paying for the entire user base. Or we're seeing them go to the respective departments that they're supporting and getting their budget. So frankly, there— I haven't seen really any consistent answer. I wish I had a better one. It really varies, but I do see budgets increasing across the board, which is pretty exciting just in terms of the value association of strong, you know, enablement and training on your results. So this is Andrea, and I have a question about In-app learning like Specit coexisting with traditional learning environments like LMSs, can they, can they peacefully coexist? Do they compete with one another, and how does that work? Excellent question. So absolutely, we consider, at least I'm speaking for my, for our company here, definitely a complementary solution. Most of our customers have LMSs, whether it's a corporate LMS like a Cornerstone or let's say like a SABO, or whether it's a department-level one like in sales, it's typically Brain Shark, MindTickle, Westleanie. And so the way that I see it is it's important for organizations to distinct between what is on-the-job knowledge. So the kind of knowledge and learning that an employee needs as part of their day-to-day versus the kind of learning that you can consume and kind of learn once and be good with. So I think when it comes to LMS, what the biggest shift we're going to see is that the kind of content and that you creating courses in LMS is going to be more so, here's our introduction to our approach to sales. All right, here's our approach to these different things. And it's going to be a little bit more theoretical with some practice. I think when it comes to the kind of content that's going to live in in-app learning, it's, hey, I'm a rep, I'm in Salesforce, I just created my opportunity. Remind me, what is the actual— what is our playbook around what we need to do in stage 1? Where can I find those discovery questions that I need to ask that customer? Oh, looks like the prospect said that we're competing against competitor XYZ. Where can I find the battle card on how I need to position against that competitor? I think all of that on-the-job knowledge that people need, that employees need in their day-to-day is going to live in more contextual in-app learning solutions, and then link out. By the way, if you want to refresh your course on all of our competitors, go to this LMS course. And I can speak for our technology, we plan to actually integrate with LMSs, and going back to, you know, having an integrated and connected approach, I think we'll be able to trigger courses. Hey, looks like you just are, you know, you just read this battle card, how to make micro-quiz, take this refresher course in your LMS. So I think there's interesting ways that we can coexist. That's great. Thank you. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, I appreciate the question. Looks like I do have to wrap up here. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Always looking to connect with, with people thinking about this problem, learn from each and every one of you. And please head over to our booth if you're looking to learn more. Our booth is called Spekit. We are an in-app digital adoption and enablement solution that I am really, really passionate about building and always looking for feedback on. Thank you again for attending and have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. Bye.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Melanie, for a great session. We have a lot more great content coming up and we hope to see you guys in the next one.