Training and Workshops Go Online

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Ed Medeiros, who is head of sales training at Clarivate. Hi, Ed, welcome to the show.

Ed Medeiros: Hi, Jessica. Thanks for having me.

Jessica Ly: Yes, I am delighted to talk with you because I know that sales training as been blended up until recently is now completely remote for almost all companies. And you've got 1000 sales reps that you actually have to help train and enable and onboard and all that for Clarivate. So I wanted to get your take on the shifts in the training, and then also some of the insights that you're able to see because Clarivate provides the data analytics and insights for a lot of the healthcare and biotech companies that are working during this COVID-19. So two topics we want to talk about. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to explain a little bit more about what you do in the company so please go ahead.

Ed Medeiros: Sure, let me tell you a little bit about Clarivate. Clarivate is only two years old. It was a carve-out from Thomson Reuters. So they took the scientific business units and the intellectual property business units, and they pulled them out and put them together as a stand that stood him up as an organization. The scientific pieces focus on researchers that are looking at molecules and compounds. And we work with them all the way till they bring a pharmaceutical drug to market. And then the back half of the business is around the intellectual property where we work with a lot of pharmaceutical companies, as well as other companies. And we look at how do they research patents and trademarks and protect the things that they have through patents and trademark research. And we do it through products, which are databases and we do it through services from consulting to different onsite services that we provide.

Jessica Ly: So now that you are involved in accelerating those research and development, to find solutions, treatments, hopefully, vaccines here and all that. I wanted to find out what has been some of the exciting projects that you're able to share with us of how your technology actually helps that process.

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, so we have over 100 products on the life science side, in all of the major players that are working on a vaccine or taking advantage of our databases. I can't do a justification with all the different products we have. But if you want to see more, you can certainly see Clarivate on any of the social channels.

Jessica Ly: I know you support about 1000 sales reps globally and most of your sales are direct. How does that shift that because obviously everybody's doing online training? But what has the shift been like for you exactly? What is the program now that you do online training?

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, my group is responsible for the onboarding, the continuing education, and even the management training. So the first thing we saw was, you know, we had a vast majority of our salespeople in the field. And we've got 98% of our organization now working from home. So we had a lot of focus on what's the right technologies, you know, a lot of these guys that were in the field just weren't used to using zoom or WebEx or Microsoft Teams. And we had to get familiar with the technologies. Second pieces, they had to start to really shift some of their sales skills, and focus more on front end things of how they're going to prepare for a call, get even more educated about organizations, and then get better at prospecting around specific things that we could help. And then finally, when they got into those meetings, asking better questions, and focusing their content better than they wanted to share, a lot of times, these meetings would tend to be quicker than you would have on onsite. So they had to get a lot more crisp at that whole sales process and doing those things. That from the delivery standpoint, there's a lot of changes going on, we had a blended program where we were doing virtual land onsite, and now it's fully virtual. So the focus now is finding the right tools that can empower that. And we use WebEx Training Center to drive that with a lot of it. And we've been able to mimic a lot of the workshops, a lot of the interactions that we did through the different tools that are available.

Jessica Ly: And now the content that you're creating exists, the more demand probably for you to create these interactive, small bite-sized content, creating them more relevant stories to address the immediate pain points of the prospects possibly.

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, we had to look at all of our content and work in a lot more interaction. You can get away and read the room a lot more in person. Online. You know, if you're going through a couple of slides, it's easy to hide. There’s a stat I think it's 85 - 86% of people really will open up another application and look at it. So you really need to keep people involved, make it actionable about their accounts, what they're doing today and make a participant. If so, you're calling them out by having them participate. What’s going on? Otherwise, you'll lose them really quickly.

Jessica Ly: You talk about instead of thinking about revenue generation should be more content generation at this stage.

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, I think that when I look at the salespeople and some of the approaches that I see even coming to me, it's very quickly people get to, hey, you should buy my stuff. And I think today, we have to have some sensitivity and empathy in how we approach that. So if you can't really find a problem that you can solve, and it might have shifted, but you've got to do homework and find a problem that you can solve and become more valuable to your prospects and clients. And I think you can do that by providing content and become a content generator. In view, if you think about that everybody's in an unchartered time where there's no book to how to get through this. So I know myself, I'm wondering, what are my peers doing? How are they getting through it? And I think salespeople sometimes miss that they have the insight of talking to all of the colleagues and peers of the people that they're calling on. So sharing that perspective, and how are other people approaching this? What are their challenges? How would they shifted their priorities have their strategy shift, and that's pretty valuable. And I think we could lean on that a lot more than we do.

Jessica Ly: I think prospects are also doing a lot of online learning on their own. And so the content that you create for your sales team is often content that prospects would also like to see, as I'm wondering if you're exposing some of that content that you provide to the public or consumption as they're learning.

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, and that's been a shift we've been seeing for a long time off, we think that's, you know, a prospect comes in, and maybe they don't know much about us, but prospects are much more educated than they used to be because of the amount of information they can get hold up. With Clarivate, we have prospect a lot of prospective-facing information, especially today. And some of our prospects come in pretty well educated about what we do and who we are.

Jessica Ly: Yeah, and I feel like right now, with online training, shifting to do an in small groups, you got to have the right tools to enable the large classes. And then also small classes, in particular, make it seem as if you are onsite new and small training like before, but virtually,

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, that's a great point, probably one of the hardest things to replicate, are those workshops in pieces. That really, you know, a turn allows you to hide in the big groups. In that WebEx training center that I mentioned earlier, it's been a great tool for us to work with that. It has the ability to create breakout groups where you can if you had 100 people on the call, you can preset groups, break them out into 10 groups have leaders in those groups, and it's out a push of a button, you can pull them back in, you can do polling, you can do whiteboard and charts. So there's a lot of different ways you can get people involved in the training, the only thing I would say is, you know, if you were it was easy to navigate and run and facilitate on site with one person, it's really good to have a couple people, or at least one other person to help you facilitate with the breakout groups and run the technology, compile questions, do the breakouts with the other person, a facilitator, you're just focusing on the content.

Jessica Ly: So you're learning what works and what doesn't work? Sounds like certain things don't work. So well. Do you want to share that lessons learned?

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, that was one of the biggies was you can't do it all yourself. So you have to pull somebody else into it. The other pieces, I could get away with a lot longer on site, because you can do breaks in series. But I think there's a saturation point when you do it online. So you have to try and limit yourself to the amount of time that you're pulling people out. And I would say if we could do a good half day training on site, probably about an hour and a half, two hours, I think is pushing it. So really, you know, working breaks gives people some time to go back to their day to day job. If that's interesting, keep your sessions no longer than they have to be to get the point across that you want to be shorter is better in this world.

Jessica Ly: Do you feel that some of the exercises you're doing now the infrastructure the tools will remain as part of your program even after the COVID-19 is over?

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, I do I. That’s a great question. Because I think we're learning in an accelerated using some of these tools doing things more virtually. And we're learning that it can be done and it can be done pretty effectively. So I think not only will we see it on the training side where we do more virtually, I think we'll even see it when we move back to the offices that we can run our business pretty well from home. We miss collaborating. We need to get together as a group to collaborate. But you might see less having a desk in the office and maybe more of a hot desk or a collaboration area. Because I think, for us specifically, we've been doing pretty well with driving our business in offsite locations.

Jessica Ly: Do you see any additional projects that you would actually put in place during this time?

Ed Medeiros: We're a newer company. So there's still projects every day. And they're more projects and more priorities than we can get to. The biggest thing are you talking about would you say projects related to some of the changes that we've seen? Or?

Jessica Ly: Yeah, I'm wondering, because now that you were shifting to 100% remote online training, and some things were, well, some things don't. Are there any innovations, any additional initiatives that you're going to take, to do the more effectively?

Ed Medeiros: I would say from a strategy prefers perspective? No, we were kind of staying with what we wanted to do, some of our priorities and projects we've had to kind of thin out. Because it's a little longer if we can't deliver courses, as long as they take a little longer to deliver, we're making sure it really stuck. We’re doing a lot more education with the sales managers to make sure they're reinforcing these things. So like I said, we probably, our timeline has gotten a little bit longer. But I don't think our priorities have focused or will make any other big investments outside of what we planned on.

Jessica Ly: A lot of people are doing that, not only training them but allowing them to take quizzes or allowing them to share best practices. Maybe you have one champion, who was very good at a certain pitch, to then do the pitch and have others try to copy and get scored on their performance as a way to share the learning.

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, that is, and that's always been part of what we do. I think people learn best from their peers, and people in the field are a great asset. So we work that into a lot of our programs. One of the new technologies that we've kind of steered toward is a new LMS system that has that ability to do some kind of teach back. So you go through something, you can record it, it allows for a little easier distance viewing of it, you can have more people judging and taking a look at it. We always work with some of our key performers in our training sessions to show what good looks like and how they do it. And a lot of the work that we talked about is how do you take the concepts and make them my own are really adapt them to what you do. I think it's a great practice if you can pull those, those either leaders or senior salespeople in that do it really well as a guide to set the pace.

Jessica Ly: And since you have such a large Salesforce of 1000 folks, and you have your own data analytics tool, I'm wondering, are you actually using your technology to do any of the analysis and like recommendations or automation.

Ed Medeiros: I think I touched on this earlier. But now more than ever, taking the time to fully prepare in using anything like that, that gives us a little bit of competitive advantage. Something we highly recommend is to go in and understand who the company is, what are those critical priorities that they focus on at every level? How do they cascade through the organization and using different tools from our internal sites and access that we have? Even things like public Googling LinkedIn, obviously, and public filings are another great source where you can start to understand what is this company focused on? What's their strategy? How are they performing against that? That's a concept we call it slowing down to speed up. But if you really take the time to understand that stuff internally or externally, you can become much more pinpointed with your approach and really tap into value more with your customers.

Jessica Ly: Overall, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of companies are putting their purchases on hold because of the uncertainty. They're not moving forward. And you're finding that's the case too, except in the science and healthcare research that area, they're actually investing more, right?

Ed Medeiros: Yeah, there are definitely some bright spots where we'll see more investments. And you see at some of the organizations out there. Few are actually their stocks performing really well. They're doing very well. And I think that shines a big light on how we need to prepare more as we go into this. You're come across really lacking sensitivity and empathy. If you don't have that targeted approach and you're just kind of blanketing or doing canvassing of your prospecting. And that's even with your customers, you probably have a good understanding of what they're focusing on, what's good and what their priorities are. But a lot of that shifts, especially with what's happened to them, so can't make any assumptions. I find now the work that you put in on the front end pays dividends on the back end, and then you have to confirm all that with everything that you find you there are hypotheses to really confirm what the customers.

Jessica Ly: Thank you so much, Ed, for sharing the insights that you're seeing in your industry and some of the best practices that you're actually learning right now as we're doing this online training 100% globally now, so I appreciate you being on the show.

Ed Medeiros: Thanks for having me. It was great to talk to you today.