Allego: Transforming Enterprise Sales Learning

Overview | Selected Company Profiles

Allego: Transforming Enterprise Sales Learning

It is no secret that sales teams are the life-force of every organization. In the U.S. alone, companies spent over $161 billion on corporate training in 2015, with sales training accounting for over 50 percent of this budget. However, these same companies are typically using a perpetual recipe to pilot their sales division: “Flying out salespeople to a conference center for training, locking them in a room for two days, and pumping them with tons and tons of content that leaves the sales team with foggy instances of what they have learned,” says Yuchun Lee, “Ultimately, this forces them to scramble to find the materials during live conversations, and they seek refuge in their old PowerPoint decks and past pitches.”

These approaches cast a long shadow over the investments made by companies to muscle their sales arm. Few companies even attempt to identify hard ROI figures of sales meetings and conferences feeling that traditional methods and status quo will continue to work. But in today’s dynamic market where reps are faced with very knowledgeable buyers, especially in highly complex sales, such ambitious investments become a risky gamble that demands a change in the strategy.

For Yuchun Lee, the Co-Founder and CEO of Allego, the magic recipe to successful sales training lie with video-based “just-in-time” learning, which incorporates gains with the latest technologies. “The Industry needs a tool that can be used anytime, anywhere on mobile devices to ensure sales productivity and reliability, and retention of required training content and knowledge,” says Lee. Allego, the video powered platform enables salespeople to capture ideas from the field, integrate it with corporate content, share pitches with managers, learn from effective feedback, and enhance their spiels. “With the tool, companies can curate best sales pitches of their top reps, in online or offline mode, and bookmark them to replicate the quality across the sales force leading to greater message consistency and a direct impact to an organization’s bottom line,” says Lee.

Higher Absorption from Bite- Sized Sessions

Allego works on a simple notion that salespeople are motivated to learn while they are in the field. And while reps need to practice and hone their skills, traditional training methods and meetings don’t satisfy the need of today’s modern sales rep and buyer dynamic. Video is processed 60,000 times faster than text and as is evidenced by the consumer app, YouTube which has over one billion users and more than half of users watch video via mobile devices, the market is ripe to use video in the business sector as well. Through the use of “bite-sized” video sessions, sales organizations can build a video best practice library of pitches, which salespeople can tap into from their mobile devices when they desire to use for supporting deals and customer conversations. Designed for the on-the-go schedules, a sales rep can take a video of herself practicing with a slide deck, for example, and upload it for feedback from her boss. She could also take a video after a meeting, on the move, documenting a new idea or way of presenting a pitch that worked in the meeting. “Tenured sales reps can record and share their videos with senior managers who can provide point-in-time feedback and coaching to help them improve on their shortcomings. And more importantly, they can share relevant content among their peers for collaboration,” says Lee.

And while the traditional sales meeting isn’t going away, Allego customers have reaped the benefits of the app by making the most effective use of their time at National Sales Meetings (NSM).

Tenured sales reps can record and share their videos with senior managers who can provide point-in-time feedbacks and coaching to help them improve on their shortcomings

The Allego app has decreased the overall time for the meeting while increasing the value and relevance of the content for the sales team. For example, capturing key content in Allego at the NSM for reference and use by sales after the meeting is a great way to ensure expert content is accessible by all.

The power of keeping a pool of training videos in a mobile app helps organizations with the onboarding processes too. Whether a firm is hiring an employee or shifting the existing staff into new roles, Allego eliminates the need for conducting traditional classroom meetings for training or flying reps in from distributed sales regions. Sales organizations reduce the onboarding cost, cut travel costs, and reduce the amount of prep time associated with training new sales staff. One high-tech client of Allego reduced T&E cost by 50 percent and accelerated onboarding time by 20 percent, allowing reps to get selling in the field much faster.

The idea of keeping whole training sessions in one single mobile app resonates well with the young workforce that sees PDFs or PowerPoints as fading methods of training. Millennials are a forcing factor in sales organizations as they are much less apt to learn via classroom-based training; they are well-versed in both mobile and video. The Allego app, being intuitive and consumer-like, is easily adopted and embraced by this new workforce. “The problem lies in the form factor of these resources that is hard to retain. Research has proven that within 90 days of traditional training, 84 percent or more of the content is forgotten. Videos remain vivid,” highlights Lee. “Through Allego, even after months of training, reps still have access to content-the expert content, sharp-witted responses, and smart pitches - remain in the pocket of salespeople,” explains Lee. Allego provides a platform whereby sales organizations can develop content that satisfies the key learning areas for sales: curriculum-based (core knowledge), reinforcement (boosters to retain information) and just-in-time (collaboration and coaching). The Allego app ensures the retention and absorption of relevant sales knowledge.

Creating an enterprise level video library demands underlying analytics and reporting to ensure compliance and visibility. The Allego app keeps tab on the flow of information throughout the organization through its Reporting feature, which measures engagement, highlights level of adoption and can help identify which content is most valuable to the sales organization. The app allows for controlled archiving and auditing needs, ensuring compliance is part of the content approval process as dictated by the demands of customers in highly regulated industries. And organizations use Allego for certification processes for new product introductions. One such pharmaceutical client reduced their certification timeframe across its sales force from about 7 weeks to 1.5 weeks.

Inspiring and Revolutionizing

Organizations of all sizes have reaped the benefits of Allego to certify, coach, and enable their sales team. Allego’s clients range from the heads of sales, sales enablement, sales training and sales operations staff across industries including financial services, healthcare, medical devices, pharmaceutical, and high-tech.

At one instance, a major player in the staffing and recruiting business adopted Allego to provide a centralized platform to its globally distributed sales team. The client intended to enable its global sales force to share their selling practices and collaborate more effectively. “By using Allego’s app, the client captured these practices into short videos of pitches from its top sales performers delivering key sales messages and insights,” says Lee. By using Allego and enabling collaboration among the team, a salesperson can access pitches at the point of sale, thus driving higher performance and competitive differentiation. A financial services client saw additional 10 percent of their sales people hit quota through the use of field-generated best practice pitches via Allego, and reduced the time of financial advisors moving from junior to senior roles from a year to a few months.

The Importance of Customer Success

“We are highly focused on customer success,” Lee unravels the reason behind his company’s high success rate. “We have a ‘blueprint methodology’ that we use on ensuring that clients successfully adopt and implement Allego. These standard procedures have been developed from working with tens of thousands of users around the globe where we’ve studied our clients, their businesses, and challenges closely.” Lee and his team feel strongly that it’s more than just software that they’re offering. By ensuring alignment between their customers and what Allego can help them achieve, that’s when Allego moves forward with the client. We are in a software business, so anything we build can be copied. At the end of the day, it is our culture and values that draws the line between us and our competitors,” highlights Lee. Additionally, given Lee’s previous success as CEO and Founder, at Allego, mistakes are not considered synonyms of blunders, but rather opportunities. “Making errors is a good thing as long as it comes with learning and opportunity to help our customers,” adds Lee.

Unica’s Experience, Today’s Wisdom

The experience and leadership poured into the development of Allego comes from the success and failures Lee faced in his entrepreneurial journey. Before Allego, Lee founded and raised Unica, an enterprise marketing management firm, which was sold to IBM for a staggering $480 million. The lessons Lee learned while leading a sales team of 2000, are now the foundation of Allego.

In its 3+ successful years of business, Allego has made inroads into markets with potential and scope. “When it comes to growth, it is important to swim in the right size of pond,” says Lee. So far, the company has raised its flag in the continents of America, Europe, and Australia where Allego is redefining learning for the modern sales reps.

The concept of video-based learning can easily be seen across the enterprise and across myriad of industries but Lee wants to stay focused on the sales training market first. “One of the lessons I learned from Unica is that focus is good,” he says. “The paradigm is not limited to sales training. Allego wants to nail the hardest problem with the biggest payoff first. Eventually we’ll move beyond sales, and down market.”

For the future, Allego will accelerate its momentum in other geographical areas, and market segments outside the sales ecosystem. The roadmap also involves keeping pace with the emerging trends in the mobility sector, which can increase the potential of video-based training tools. The company will tap into new technologies to stir an evolution of video education, which will go beyond corporate YouTube channels and e-certification programs. Although, it would be early to map the position of Allego in the coming years, Lee is leaving no stone unturned to bring the next big wave in the sales and mobility sector.