One Sales Process, Understood the Same Way Company-Wide

iNStep replaced an out-of-date sales training course. The sales process itself was documented, but new electronic sales tools and years of inconsistent habits meant that documentation wasn't translating into consistent behavior in the field.

iNStep rebuilt the course from the ground up: a scenario-based eLearning program that gave more than 950 sales employees one clear, shared way to work the sales process and the tools behind it.

Client

Global technology company

Audience

Sales executives, sales managers, branch leaders, sales administrators, and other employees supporting the sales process

Reach

More than 950 employees across North America

The Need

The client engaged iNStep to replace a sales training course that had gone out of date. The course needed to align the many roles behind a single sales process, since that process was the foundation of every customer relationship the company built.

A deal moved through a lot of hands before it became one of those relationships: sales executives, managers, and administrators, then operations and customer service once the sale closed. The company needed those handoffs to work cleanly, with everyone working from the same understanding of the activities, roles, approvals, and tools at each stage, so information and decisions carried forward from one department to the next.

Part of that need was about the tools. The company had rolled out modernized electronic sales tools since the last time the course was touched, and employees needed to use them consistently to document client interactions. Teaching those tools, and getting everyone using them the same way, was part of the brief from the start.

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Nicole’s instructional design approaches have consistently guided our team to produce top-quality training courses.

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Nicole’s attention to detail when guiding groups and getting to the core of the need has been a constant boon for the projects she works with us on.

Our Solution

iNStep designed the course to carry the full employee lifecycle: onboarding a new hire, realigning a ten-year veteran, and serving as a refresher, years down the line. The course walked learners through the entire sales process end to end, connecting the roles and handoffs at every stage and calling out the specific activities that moved a deal forward.

iNStep invented a customer and a set of leads that carried through the entire course, from the first stage to the last. Learners built a history with that customer as they progressed and saw firsthand how an early decision or conversation shaped the work still ahead.

iNStep built short tool demos that showed learners where to find information in the company's sales tools and what kind of information lived there. That same information mattered to operations and client services roles who depended on it once a deal closed, so the demos served multiple audiences. Scenarios layered on top asked learners to make the calls a salesperson has to make: what to do next, where to document it, which tool to use, and whether an opportunity was strong enough to advance.

Our Process

Inside Our Approach

Diagnosing the problem

iNStep started with what already existed: the old course, its storyboard, and the wiki pages employees leaned on for guidance. None of it could confirm whether the documented process matched how people worked day to day, so iNStep ran discovery interviews with contributors across sales, operations, and customer service. Those interviews found that people could be following the same sales process on paper and still executing it inconsistently, because their sense of the process itself varied.

An interaction might be a LinkedIn message, a conversation at a conference, or a phone call, and employees didn't agree on when one was worth documenting. Some waited to log an interaction until a lead became a prospect, reasoning that anything earlier wasn't relevant yet, and since people didn't agree on when that shift happened, some interactions never made it into the system at all. Those gaps showed downstream too, in the incomplete sales records a client services or operations manager inherited once a deal closed.

The old sales process didn't formally account for lead management or activity management. Discovery showed that was exactly where the largest gaps lived: without a defined stage for either, work happened inconsistently and went largely undocumented. iNStep added lead management and activity management as their own stages of the sales process, giving every role a defined place to capture interactions during the sale and after it. The engagement grew from updating a course into updating the sales process itself.

iNStep then brought the SMEs back together to work through the findings as a group, a conversation that surfaced process gaps several stakeholders hadn't known were there. Out of that work came a shared definition for every stage of the process: the key activities needed to move a deal forward, the basic terms everyone needed to agree on, and clear guidance on which interactions needed to be documented and which didn't.

Building practice around real decisions

iNStep fictionalized the customers but pulled the situations and the wrong answers straight from what discovery surfaced. A learner deciding how to document a conversation with a prospective customer might choose the correct sales system, a personal calendar, an unrelated tool, or nothing at all, the same choices employees had made in the field.

iNStep built the required path around the decisions that mattered most and moved detailed procedures and wiki references into an optional area so learners could reach them without losing their place in the scenario. iNStep also built assessment questions that mapped to those same decisions, so the final assessment tested the same judgment the scenarios had been building throughout the course.

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Establishing a repeatable interaction model

iNStep mapped the learner flow for the first sales stage before building anything else: scenario context, a decision point, targeted feedback, optional guidance, reference material, a decision gate, and assessment criteria.

Once the client signed off on that mechanic, iNStep reused it across every remaining stage, swapping in new scenarios and content while keeping the experience consistent and the development timeline realistic.

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Managing ten SMEs, a moving scope, and a deadline

iNStep built the task breakdown and course outline, then ran the discovery and review meetings needed to get roughly ten SMEs, and the client's training coordinator, aligned on a single scope and develop measurable learning goals. iNStep pulled specific SMEs in only when their expertise was needed and filtered a steady stream of stakeholder input against what the course had committed to cover. iNStep delivered a storyboard, script, screen-level wireframes, and interaction guidance. Using findings from discovery and the final course content, iNStep designed a final assessment and prepared the course for the client's learning system.

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Impact

iNStep's course launched to the full sales audience and is still in use five years later. It gave our client one consistent introduction to the sales process for new and existing employees alike, and the discovery process itself handed several SMEs a clearer picture of gaps they hadn't known to look for. The client later pointed to this course, specifically its scenarios and engagement techniques, when it needed an example to win approval for follow-on training. The client secured that approval, and iNStep built a second required eLearning course covering the handoff from sales into operations. The relationship has grown since into additional web-based training and instructor-led technical courses.

This project reflects how iNStep works. Matching training goals to business needs during discovery is what let this course succeed, going beyond what the original scope document could have specified on its own. That discipline built the kind of trust that turns a single project into a lasting relationship, the kind where a client keeps returning because they know the next project will get the same care as the first.