When formal learning finishes, we release learners back into their everyday reality, back into a structure that includes both formal hierarchies of support as well as social structures we can call “tribes.“ These are the communities where workers make sense of the learning and rehearse new behaviors. But we don‘t have to leave this to chance. If we understand how these tribes form, how these communities work, and the types of roles we play in them, we can better support learners in these sense-making activities. All too often, we rely on the technology to do this, while in reality it‘s a social issue. Technology can‘t deliver great performance support without functioning communities, coherent tribes behind it.

Delivering performance support tools for sales can be a challenge. There are many approaches to consider, departments to align, and technology options to decipher, all in an effort to create a strategy and provide resources that will effectively support the performance of sales reps. A successful performance support strategy is absolutely critical for optimal sales productivity.

We often describe the shift towards performance support as a linear journey, one that continues in a single direction. The reality is quite different. Over time an organization’s utilization of performance support rises and falls with the changing tides. Managing your journey over the course of time can be a challenge. 

In large organizations, learning and performance support content typically develops over time in an organic, ad-hoc fashion until one day the organization realizes it has an unmoderated mass of content stored on file servers, intranet sites, and the LMS. As a result, employees don’t know what’s available and can’t find the content they need when they need it, falling back on familiar and possibly incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated information. To the organization, the task of making this mass of content easily accessible, usable, and targeted to workflow performance can be daunting, to say the least. Where and how to start?

Strategize, design, develop, implement, integrate, roadbock!, re-strategize, re-implement … the realities of doing performance support unfortunately seldom match up with the idealized stories you hear. Join practitioners and leaders from KPMG, Wells Fargo, and Ontuitive in this candid conversation about learning by doing, about moving forward around roadblocks, about constant tinkering, and about some surprising successes, too.