Industry insights, Lars Unneberg, Mohive CEO
2009 is time for change on the high street
2009 is turning out to be a very interesting year; certainly it’s one during which we all face tremendous change. Retail is one of the vertical markets most affected by the downturn, which is obliging businesses throughout the sector to find fresh ways to improve efficiency and cut costs across the board. Leading retailers are increasingly turning to rapid e-learning to achieve these efficiencies and cost reductions.
We recently carried out a study in which we asked more than 100 retail marketing experts to highlight the weak spots they felt it most important to address given the difficult economic conditions ahead. The experts we questioned all hold managerial or director-level roles in retail businesses. The data we obtained from these conversations revealed an urgent demand for more effective execution of sales promotions. More than 80% of our respondents believed that internal communication should be working harder to get information about new promotional campaigns out to sales staff as soon as the campaigns go live.
Moment of truth
The last point is close to my heart. The ‘moment of truth’ in retail, like any customer-facing business, is when a customer enters the store and interacts with a salesperson. The ability to present new product benefits, to understand the customer’s needs, to up-sell – in essence, the ability to get maximum bottom-line impact from every customer interaction – will be essential to success, if not survival, in 2009. With fewer customers walking into stores, customer-facing employees must be primed and ready the moment a new product is launched or a promotional campaign goes live. The last thing you want is a lag in communications at the critical juncture, because this can cause permanent damage to sales performance.
We have just released an executive briefing that explores ways to virtually eliminate internal ‘communications lag’ from your promotional campaigns, and discusses ways to use rapid e-learning to reduce training costs at the same time as improving bottom-line results. You can download a copy of the briefing here.
2009 outlook
We started Mohive in 2001, at a time when the e-learning industry desperately needed to break free from the attitude that effective e-learning projects were necessarily time consuming and expensive. Our first customers came to us because we did things differently. We replaced consultants and manual processes with a web-based software service, helping companies to achieve more with less.
We recently returned from the Learning Technologies conference and exhibition in the UK, where we had more people approach us than ever before. We spoke with a wide variety of customers, explaining the business case for enterprise rapid e-learning solutions both in retail and other markets. This surge of interest is why we’re increasing the size of the Mohive team by 25%, to be optimally prepared for a 2009 which looks like being a year in which rapid e-learning comes to the rescue.