Customer Overview:
Intuitive Surgical is the global technology leader in minimally invasive robotic-assisted surgery. The company’s DaVinci ® Surgical System offers optimal performance of minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Intuitive Surgical has more than 2,400 employees worldwide.
Challenge:
Intuitive Surgical sales reps attend national sales meetings several times a year at significant cost to the organization. As time goes by until product features are released, knowledge retention can drop off substantially. Executives faced the challenge of how do we know that important new product information will be retained over time?
Verifying a rep’s understanding of a complex product set however is difficult. Intuitive’s training teams tried emails, webinars and re-training to help reps retain key product knowledge during the months between the initial training and when a product is launched. Regardless of the approach rep’s knowledge upon retest would decline.
Solution:
Intuitive Surgical commissioned
a program to benchmark three approaches to driving sales rep retention. They divided participants into three groups post-training:
1. “Light-touch” participants received traditional follow-on support to the training
2. The “Uber-touch” participants received follow-up support from a subject matter expert directly, such as the product manager.
3. The final third used Qstream to respond to 3x weekly “challenge” questions delivered to their mobile device or laptop.
Results:
“Qstream showed the same results in a delayed post-test as 1:1 mentoring for less time, resources and money.”
-The light-touch group scored an average of 76% on a re-test
-The Qstream and the Uber-touch groups scored virtually identically – 83% for Qstream users, compared to 84% for Uber-touch group.
Reps had access to their own Qstream dashboard on-line, making them self-sufficient in their own knowledge retention and creating more motivation, with details on how they were progressing through the program and how their performance ranked against their peers.
“Qstream kept pace over time with folks working directly with our subject matter experts. We got the same results without having to dedicate as much time, energy, resources and money, and we reached reps who we didn’t reach before with this program, and now we have data as well.” – Instructional Design Manager