I just recently celebrated my first year at Tribal Impact… and what a year it’s been.
Since starting last May, I have quickly had to learn the ins and outs of Social Selling, Employee Advocacy and Inbound Marketing – I had a vague idea about it, but not necessarily that there were names for them! And really the idea is simple, right?
You help people – educate them, offer value, they trust you, then when the time is right – they come back to you and refer others to you, as they trust in what it is you have to offer.
I have seen this time and time again in my twelve months with Tribal and it never fails to amaze me.
Another thing that is brilliant about Tribal and our team is that we are given the freedom and flexibility in our roles to grow – so if we see an opportunity – we can go for it. This happened just last month, we were due to go to Germany to deliver Social Selling training and our Train-The-Trainer program and obviously due to the Corona crisis, this was cancelled.
We quickly adapted our Social Selling training so that we could deliver this via online webinars, but Train The Trainer was a bit more of a challenge…
When we reviewed the agenda with our customer it was clear that this just wasn’t going to work for their needs. They have built a Social Selling upskilling program over the past year and a huge part of the success of the program is to have a nominated Champion that activates social sellers in the teams locally.
What they needed was a program that would help the Champions understand their role within the larger upskilling strategy.
A learning experience that would enable them to become a Social Selling Expert who would be able to share their own knowledge and support colleagues through their Social Selling journey by building case studies and actively sharing best practices.
So in just a few weeks, we adapted and came up with a whole new Champions training program. Yes, it was hard and lots of hours were put into getting the content just right – especially for delivering an engaging and educating (10-hour – we broke it up, don’t worry) program via webinar, rather than face-to-face, but it worked and here’s why:
- We listened to what it was our customer needed
- We were able to use the digital tools available to us to create a workshop environment
- We kept it engaging by using video
Listening To Our Customers
Here at Tribal we have what we refer to affectionately as our ‘F words’ one of those is flexibility – being able to stay agile is so important, because it gives us the ability to flex our offering.
Being a small team and having a flat hierarchy and structure means that we don’t have the layers of process that can often stilt innovation. It means we can listen to our customers’ needs and adapt our offering in a very short space of time.
Using Digital Tools To Create A Workshop Environment
We were lucky that Tribal has been set up as a digital business from day one – we’re an entirely virtual team, so when COVID hit we had a bit of a head start on a lot of businesses, but even we still have things to learn when it comes to delivering online learning.
We very quickly got to grips with all the added Zoom features – adding backgrounds, adding polls and surveys, but one of the gems for this training was being able to use breakout rooms. It was such a great way to enable small group work as part of a larger session.
You can send people off with a discussion topic and then bring everyone back as a big group at the click of a button. It gave people a break from listening to me and a chance to embed their learning through discussion with their peers.
Keeping Engagement Up Through Turning Video On
After the first session – we noticed that the engagement could have been a bit better, so we decided that we would try turning video on. We thought it wouldn’t be very fair to spring it on them and gave the group notice beforehand, so that they could be camera ready and make use of the ‘touch up my appearance’ option in Zoom.
The majority of the group joined the rest of the webinars with video on and it made such a difference! Just being able to see people’s faces and their reactions – seeing them nod in agreement or getting ready to say something – you could allow them to chip in with their ideas. It’s something you miss on voice calls; I am definitely a convert.
Through this I also learnt something about myself - I thrive when I am pushed out of my comfort zone. It’s pretty scary delivering something that is brand new in front of people you don’t know very well, but you have to start somewhere, right? As one of my very wise colleagues once said – if you operate out of your comfort zone and keep doing it – it becomes part of what you do and isn’t uncomfortable anymore.
So, keep pushing those boundaries and say ‘yes’ every now and then, even if you want to say ‘no’ – you never know you just might find out that you were able to do it all along.
