Incremental changes to sales enablement tactics are no longer good enough. This is as true for highly regulated and competitive industries like pharma and financial services as it is in the often cutthroat, complex sales cycles of high tech industries. Selling models have changed, and reps have only minutes to demonstrate value or put revenue and reputation at risk. For companies like these, sales enablement tactics must be nothing less than game changing.

So what’s the problem? Keeping pace with the speed of business, product cycles, customer demands, regulatory changes, etc. is overwhelming. Reps are inundated with information pushed out to them daily by product and marketing teams, and have little time to sort out what’s most relevant, best ways to apply the information, and often where to find it. Traditional sales reinforcement methods, such as email, video and e-learning modules, are not optimized for the way your field reps actually work. Field-based coaching is effective, but time consuming and costly.

Qstream’s approach to sales reinforcement is different. Combining game mechanics and social collaboration to engage reps, core messages in the form of simple questions and answers are pushed to mobile devices in spaced intervals. In less than three minutes a day, Qstream is proven to increase message retention and durably change on-the-job behaviors.

For our customers, Qstream is the game changer. Following are six best practices from our users to help your reps keep core messages and selling skills top of mind long after your next sales training or kickoff event:

1. Planning for pull through is critical. The ideal time to roll out a sales reinforcement solution is after your initial knowledge transfer programs or training events are completed; the timing of which can vary by company. While solutions such as Qstream can be used to teach anyone anything in just three minutes a day, the primary benefit to an organization is long-term retention of sales-critical messages and skills that impact revenue and company performance.

2. Users, particularly on-the-go sales representatives, enjoy the experience more when given simple tools with game elements. Adding leaderboards, and even prizes, can appeal to the natural competitiveness of a sales team and increase engagement.

3. Keep the overall number of questions relatively low (10-25), course timeframes short, and emphasize the most relevant, scenario-based information. When reps are bombarded with too many training resources, they tend to screen them out, viewing your efforts toward knowledge retention as just more corporate noise without real value.

4. While reinforcement programs are ideal for the reuse of existing content—such as material created for eLearning modules or assessments, it’s easy and fun to create material using different question types to achieve different results. If you are creating a reinforcement program for the first time, start by asking yourself what information you want rolling off the tongues of your sales team. And remember, if you can effectively put these core messages and skills in the form of a question, you can create an effective Qstream out of it!

5. Use Qstream’s analytics to identify sales performance issues before they become, well, sales performance issues. This includes identifying reps’ grasp of core messages and how to properly apply them in sales scenarios. However, be sensitive to how this data is distributed and used. If the performance results are used for punitive purposes, engagement and the quality of the feedback will decline precipitously.

6. Experiment! Even small changes to your approach can dramatically improve engagement and retention. Simple browser-based authoring tools can give you the flexibility you require, including the ability to update live Qstream content and questions on the fly.