Author: Danielle Smith

7 Tips for Starting a Successful Corporate Podcast

As online chatter becomes louder due to technological advancements, it’s becoming more difficult to engage with your employees. If you’re looking for an innovative way to cut through the noise, you may want to consider implementing a corporate podcast as your organization. This medium is great for showcasing company news and culture, which humanizes corporate communications, making team interactions more engaging and friendly. Since listening is more of a passive action, it can be less of a burden for your workforce than reading or watching videos.

The stats are in: 70% of Americans are already aware of what podcasts are. It doesn’t mean they are all listening, rather, they’re aware of the medium. What’s more interesting is that 39% of small and medium-sized business owners are podcast listeners, with 72% reporting that their employees also listen to podcasts. 

If your company is thinking about implementing a corporate podcast, it can be difficult to know where to start or how to get everyone on board. In order to build a successful podcast that gains a community of supporters at your enterprise, follow these steps:

Plan 

The old adage is true: “The more you prepare, the less you bleed in battle.” Click To Tweet

When it comes to implementing anything at your organization, the strategy is key. This is the most important step when it comes to launching any corporate podcast. Start by getting your team together to define a purpose, an audience, and a goal. Then revise it at least three times to make sure you get buy-in from all members involved in the process. Don’t be discouraged if there are a lot of ideas that come out. A shortlist should be sufficient to help you narrow the focus of your content.

The next step in the planning process will be the find a podcast hosting service. A simple Google search can help you find some options, but it’s important to choose one that caters to enterprise users. Since you’ll likely need security for your internal communications, you may need to evaluate several to meet your budget and needs. 

During the evaluation process, you should ask yourself:

  • How many podcasts and episodes you plan to have 
  • When you plan to launch
  • Where employees will be listening: Are they all in your HQ or will they be listening on mobile devices in various locales, i.e. airplanes, on the road, etc.? 
  • How secure your content needs to be: Most enterprises have security needs and compliance requirements to protect the privacy of sensitive information
  • Who the podcast will need to be accessible to. Some may be targeted to a specific department audience while others might be suitable for everyone

Prepare Your Content

It takes time to create good content so when you go live, we recommend having at least five episodes in your backlog. 

Stuck on topics? Your internal staff can be a great source of inspiration. Start at the top and reach out to your CEO or department heads to find out if there is anything they’d like to communicate or if there are any industry trends they think teams should be aware of. Podcasting humanizes the leadership team and is a great way to bridge the communication gap between management and employees. 

Another great source to tap for content is your company’s all-hands meetings. You may have a distributed team, remote workers, and even sales teams out in the field. This can make it tricky for everyone to dial into calls due to other priorities or conflicting time zones. By recording the information and uploading it to your company podcast, workers are able to access the information at any time, from anywhere. 

Here are a few other content ideas to get you started (Hot tip: make something exclusive to each episode in order to keep people tuning in):

  • Training videos with good-quality audio
  • Corporate webinars
  • Brown bags
  • Team demos
  • Weekly department calls
  • Product launches
  • Announcements

Be sure to also consider internal and external resources for your podcast. There may be some thought leaders and subject-matter experts who’d be willing to be featured. Bonus if some of these guests come from within your own organization.

How long should an episode be?

It depends on your situation. Keeping episodes under 30 minutes is a good idea when starting out. Always leave room for improvement and experimentation, since strategy should never be set in stone. As the community shows more interest, you can use analytics to determine if your audience prefers longer or shorter run times. Content may also dictate how long an installment might be. 

Announce

It’s essential in this process to let employees know about your podcast and where to find it. Be clear about whether they will have to subscribe to an RSS feed or download an app that lets them listen to content on-the-go. If your company has an internal forum like Slack or Microsoft Teams, this is a great place to post about new and upcoming content. 

Give It Some Time

The success of a podcast is dependent on many factors, time being the most crucial one. Most enterprises will not have a shortage of topics and listeners, but you’ll need time and patience for adoption to happen. The key is to keep the content consistent and fresh.

Fuel the Engagement With Rewards

Regardless of the podcasting efforts, rewarding engaged team members is always a good idea. Your employees may already be experiencing “tools overload”, so tuning in to another platform may feel overwhelming for them. Encourage listening and engagement by using follow up quizzes for knowledge retention and incentivize listening with prizes for the best scores. Remember, rewards are not a substitute for quality content, but can assist in getting your company on board. 

Measuring Success

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. You should have a system in place to monitor how your employees are engaging with corporate podcast content. Ensure they’re able to access it in a user-friendly manner, regardless of where they are. They should also have a channel to voice feedback or suggestions.

When it comes to determining what success for your podcast looks like, download count isn’t the only metric to judge by. Here are a few other KPI’s to consider: Click To Tweet
  • Number of episodes listened per week
  • Number of episodes listened per employee
  • Top episodes for a given timeframe
  • The average percent of engagement per episode rolled up by a given timeframe

Make It a Team Effort

Rome wasn’t built in a day and, likewise, it’s very difficult to run a podcast by yourself. Your team will be the first evangelizers of your corporate podcast content and your greatest influencers when it comes to company-wide adoption. Don’t hesitate to collaborate and seek out ideas from them. Anyone in the company should want to be a part of it and leadership should encourage participation.

Bonus: Don’t Forget About Accessibility

When it comes to great content, you want to be sure it’s accessible to as many people in your organization as possible, that includes those with disabilities. Be sure your recordings are broadcast safe so the peak signal levels don’t exceed the nominal level by more than +10 dB. 

Additionally, while the audio is a great medium, it’s not always able to be heard by everyone. So it’s important to have an option that doesn’t solely rely on hearing. Consider transcribing the talks into text or making a video with closed captioning. An enterprise podcast hosting service like CircleHD allows you to host both video and podcast content and can automatically transcribe spoken words into text with closed captioning. This allows you to spend more time creating great content while the platform takes care of the rest.

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Want to learn more about podcasting? We’d love to hear from you and tell you more about how CircleHD can assist with implementing your own corporate podcasting strategy. Contact us today. 

Sales Enablement Tools Can Help You Train Your Team Faster

Sales enablement solutions are changing the sales operation landscape. Legacy, old-school learning systems are not user-friendly, and consumer-grade solutions don’t offer important security and access controls needed by enterprises. To create and maintain a well-trained sales team, companies need to explore ways to improve their onboarding, training, and information-sharing capabilities.

Today, a best-practice sales enablement platform should provide you with the ability to upload and intelligently organize video content, and to record training videos in a few clicks.

An enablement solution should make it easy for all team members to share content with each other, and with external partners. By design, these tools should be open, collaborative, and secure.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the implementation of technology to make the onboarding and training of sales teams more efficient and productive. Using a modern platform will allow sales teams to sell with far more skill, and maintains all relevant sales collateral in an organized, shareable portal.

Discover the Benefits of Sales Enablement

From small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, sales enablement solutions help streamline the on-boarding process and speed up new-hire training. These solutions empower companies to communicate their processes and procedures and share company updates faster.

1. 24/7 Training Availability

Because sales professionals are in constant motion, it can be difficult to get the entire team together for training, updates, and reporting. By contrast, creating videos and uploading them to a central location allows team members to view training content when they can give the material their full attention.

2. Faster, Higher Quality Onboarding Of New Hires

A sales enablement platform gives you the most effective solution for efficient, high-quality training. Training new team members, one at a time, in an ad hoc manner is not efficient. Asking salespeople to read one-dimensional training documents is a low-quality learning experience when compared with videos and slide presentations that combine graphics with audio explanations.

3. Keep Company Information Current

Whether there’s a change in business operations, changes to CRM software, product updates, and pricing changes, employees should be given an overview and some training.

The most efficient way to communicate these changes is to create instructional videos that can be uploaded and shared with the entire team; that remains available 24/7, and that can be accessed through any device.

Sales Enablement Manager

The Sales Enablement Manager plays a critical role by providing dedicated support to the team’s success. This person typically has prior experience with highly-technical and complex sales in the enterprise space. They optimize the sales process, create amazing sales playbooks, manage certifications, and drive revenue campaigns. This person should be adept at working with prospects as they are with working with customers.

WHAT’S THE Difference between A Sales Enablement Manager and Sales Ops Manager?

At smaller organizations, these roles may be interchangeable. But when a company is in “growth mode”, the Sales Ops Manager carries out many of the administrative and operational tasks required to run a sales organization. By contrast, a Sales Enablement Manager may be focused on accelerating the sales team’s productivity and efficiency, implementing processes and guidelines for aligned teams.

How Can Enablement Affect Your Business?

Sales enablement is the easiest way to train your sales team and keep them up to date. Creating videos for your team to watch and reference again as needed will provide them with the best opportunity to succeed in their roles. 

Learn more about video enablement and how adding it to your sales enablement playbook will significantly improve sales team efficiency.

How Can Managers Increase Employee Retention?

When it comes to employee retention, nothing is more important than a good manager. In fact, it’s often noted that workers don’t change companies, they change managers. This trend is applicable across almost all industries, too.

Take, for example, Google, which is already a pretty unconventional company. But it seems that was intentional, as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin laid out in their founder’s letter.

Truly world changes come from visionary leaders like Larry and Sergey.

Managers reflect your company’s culture and are often the first line of defense when it comes to determining a team’s success. That’s why it’s so imperative that you focus on developing the leadership skills of your managerial team.

So what skills make a manager effective? At Google, it seems they tend to focus on the “3 C’s”:

Coaching

This one was obvious. Managers who can coach produce the most effective and successful teams.

Communication

Whether verbal or non-verbal modes, this skill is key to ensure teams are aligned and able to move forward.

Collaboration

There’s been much ado about collaboration over the last few years: and it’s no wonder. When managers bring teams and workers together, they are able to increase output and problem-solving while also increasing employee happiness. That means your best team performers will stick around longer, boosting your employee retention rates. Read more about measuring business impact due to employee collaboration.

Read more at Inc.com

Common Enterprise Video Learning and Adoption Myths

It’s no secret that many people turn to video learning when trying to acquire a new skill. In fact, on Youtube alone, 1 million learning-related videos are uploaded and accessed 500 million times every day.

Enterprises often explore the possibility of implementing this format for their own corporate training but persistent myths surrounding video learning make some offices apprehensive about the technology. Many of these arguments were formulated before the development of advanced equipment and the video online support that we have now. Let’s bust these one-by-one.

“Video is Too Expensive”

Back in the days when shooting a video required big, heavy, very costly equipment that only video experts know how to use, this was true. Now, there are endless options for video recording and playback options, thanks to advances in modern technology. Smartphones have become powerful enough to create edit, and broadcast high-quality video content.

“My Team Won’t Be As Engaged If We Use Video Learning”

It’s a common misconception that video learning promoted individualism over group learning, something that has been addressed by online platforms by offering video conferencing and interactive webinars. Now, learners don’t have to miss out on opportunities to learn from colleagues, while also collaborating and building social connections with each other. By platforms like CircleHD take this one step further by enabling further engagement through quizzes and other knowledge checks in video content.

“Video Won’t Allow Me to Control the Pace of Learning”

The idea that learning with videos is fast-paced may have come from the fact that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster compared to plain text. Content paired up with images is also easier to remember because information goes straight to the long-term memory. Video courses allow employees to access the content at their own time and go through lessons at their own pace. They can pause the video and even playback a section as many times as they need to fully understand the lesson.

“Video Takes Up Too Much Bandwidth”

Many enterprises are concerned whether their internal networks will be able to handle the bandwidth requirement of video courses. There are concerns about the videos causing networks to slow down and get saturated. Truth is, it will take a thousand simultaneous views to cause problems to a network segment. Uploading video content to the internet requires compression which makes it easily accessible even by the lower bit rate wireless connections.

At CircleHD, we understand how video learning can help you achieve your employee learning and development goals. We help set up your system so that video content is easily uploaded, shared and streamed by anyone within your organization. Videos are searchable and accessible even on mobile devices. Book a demo with us and we will show you how video learning can transform your employee training for good.

Using Video Role-Playing for More Effective Sales Training

This bit of military wisdom not only applies to actual war, but to business as well. In any endeavor, proper preparation and training are the keys to success. And in the cutthroat battlefield that is sales and marketing, the more prepared and trained your sales and marketing representatives are, the more money they make. And of all the myriad methods of training available today, nothing is perhaps more under-utilized or maligned than role-playing.

“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”

Sales training utilizing role-playing techniques – when done the right way – is one of the most effective methods of preparing your staff for any situation and any customer. Properly conducted role-playing sessions can sharpen your staff’s skills and significantly increase your sales volume. In particular, video role-playing combines the effectivity of actual role-play with the reliability, knowledge-retention appeal and reusability that is inherent in pre-recorded video learning material.

Introduction and the “Swiss Army Knife” Video

Most potential sales situations will involve customers who have at least a mild interest in availing of your products and services but need that last push of persuasion to see the value in your offerings and convince them to finally open up their wallet. In most such cases, a well-scripted “swiss army knife” role-play video that depicts the “usual customer” that will enable your staff to practice the knowledge they have learned in your onboarding resources is a good way to kick off learning using video role-playing.

Situational Videos and “Leveling Up”

Aside from the “general role-playing training”, you can also utilize video solutions for specific situations, using your staff’s innate skills, characteristics and quirks to emulate such customers or situations. Perhaps, one or two of your team members excel at being bitchy or irate? How about another team member who’s a stickler for the smallest of details? Another one may be the lawyer-type who loves using his or her opponent’s arguments against them. Still, another one may be an expert on “non-commitment”. All of these situations can be captured and stored on video for repeated training sessions. And once all these initial scenarios become “easy mode” for all your staff, you can tell them to construct more difficult scenarios to role-play and learn from. This way, everybody improves and your staff actually develops the sense of anticipating the most difficult scenarios possible in every encounter. Subsequently, everyone will be prepared to deal with even the most nightmarish of situations, quite possibly turning a losing encounter into a buzzer-beating sales victory!

Critique Role-Playing Videos

Evaluating a live sales training role-playing session right after it finishes is a good way to learn. But people are bound to miss some of the details that can sometimes make-or-break the sales pitch. One of the major advantages of video-recorded role-playing training is that they can be repeatedly evaluated by you and your staff down to the smallest of details to pick out which areas to improve. This is similar to how pro sports teams go through film sessions of past games (and even of opponents’ games) to get every possible advantage in future match-ups.

Importantly, the goal of the critique should not be punishment, shaming or calling out “bad” performances. Rather, it must be seen as a way to improve your performance by trying to improve the – as sports coaches love to call them – “little things that matter”. After all, business is a professional sport in its own right, and to become a champion you need to be the best.

Centralize, Organize and Share the Wealth

A centralized platform, like CircleHD, enables content creators, corporate executives and managers to make all their video solutions readily available and accessible in an organized manner, within a secure digital environment. This means that all of your sales training role-playing videos can be just one click away anytime and from almost anywhere.

Schedule a demo with us now and unlock your sales team’s potential with the power of video platforms.

3 Key Factors to Consider When Computing Your Intranet Cost

It is not easy to determine the exact cost of setting up an intranet system for your business. It is not as simple as comparing the cost of your system to that of your close competitor. Each business is unique. So are their intranet systems. Here are a few important factors that you need to explore when determining the cost of your intranet project.

What do you need from your intranet system?

Before starting an intranet project, you should be clear on what you’re trying to achieve. What needs and issues are you trying to resolve? How can your intranet provide the solutions to these concerns? A system purely for internal communications is less expensive than something that integrates all functions across all departments. Each situation is unique that is why it is extremely important to determine your intranet requirements. Ask everyone who will be using the system about their needs and suggestions. This process will also help you avoid spending for a feature that you’ll end up not using. 

How far are you willing to customize?

There are a lot of options when trying to set up an intranet solution for your company’s specific needs. Will your hosting be on premise or cloud-based? Are you using your own resources to build your own system or are you purchasing out-of-the-box solutions? Unique requirements often require highly-specialized solutions that would cost you more. Decide whether you really need these customizations or you can find other applications that provide better solutions.

Anticipate unexpected complications that will add to your cost

Regardless of how great your hired consultants are at their jobs; unexpected things can happen. Certain processes may take longer than expected. Realizations that certain features are missing or incompatible with your current system may surface along the way. Your employees may have a harder time adapting to the new system than you anticipated. All these issues can significantly add to your costs.

Conclusion

Setting up your company’s intranet system will eat up not only your funds but also your time and effort. Considering these factors can help you save money where you can and get the most value out of your investment.

The Power of Employee Video and Self-Broadcasting for Enterprises

At CircleHD, we believe opportunities made available by employee video can transform knowledge into company wealth. While many are moving the needle with self-broadcast in video, it often does not go past the top 10% of performers. In order to break through that barrier, a newer, faster experience is needed to replace legacy roadblocks to adoption.

There are some best practices organizations are implementing to operationalize video into learning, while encouraging peer-to-peer and knowledge sharing to encourage team skills growth. Here’s just a few:

  • Cambridge Engineering & CircleHD: I believe the epicenter for employee generated video is in Chesterfield, Missouri. Marc Braun is a primary lead in a consortium of 500 companies, hacking culture with video.

    As President of Cambridge Engineering, Marc doubled revenue and tripled operating profit in an industry with a CAGR of just 6.62%. Marc’s employees are told, “if you see a problem or waste, you have the job autonomy to fix it.” Just shoot a 1-min before / after video, and it’s played next morning at the all-hands meeting.

    “I have learned video takes courage to make. There is mastery in self-broadcast. And when video is given a purpose, the gift is people that outgrow the company.”

    This video interview was released to LinkedIn, where it got 7,600 views, and 69 likes.
  • Dell: Video lets employees bypass the organizational chart and connect with colleagues in other silos in the pursuit of better customer experiences. Dell uses Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite to connect its salespeople with subject-matter experts.

    “There are a lot of salespeople at Dell, but there are only a few ph.D.s in big data or machine learning,” said Lawrence Grafton, Solutions Product Manager at Dell. “Those ph.D.s can post an explainer video so that sales can better understand the topic. 
  • Moffitt Cancer Center uses an enterprise video platform to deliver content externally. The Moffitt Cancer Center uses its enterprise platform from vBrick to deliver video externally to patients.

    “We use it internally but also use a guest portal for external use,” said John Maass. He added that a doctor could curate or record videos to help patients understand their specific prognosis, “rather than go out to WebMD and get scared.” 
  • Video for Sales Training: ‘In fact, peer-to-peer instruction is one of the main pillars of modern learning programs and the majority of reps prefer peer knowledge sharing over corporate or manager-generated content. 

    Our survey of sales reps and their managers found the majority (65 percent) of sales representatives agree that sales pitch advice from peers is more effective than training from the corporation and that top-performing sales organizations are 76 percent more likely to utilize peer-generated video content for training than other firms. 
  • CISCO Shorty Awards: While more social in nature, the results from Cisco in 2016 for employee-generated video and content are outstanding. Get tips from this Shorty awards entry. 
  • Video in HR: “Employees want that guidance in an easy-to-access format to help them translate a complex topic in a way that will lead them to the right decision. Advanced HR teams have picked up on this, making video their medium of choice and incorporating into their open enrollment communications strategy.” 

CircleHD is the first cloud-native enterprise video platform for employees and teams of any size. For more information about how we can help your organization implement video learning, schedule a demo.

Creating an Inclusive Culture in Large Organizations

Creating an inclusive work culture when you have a large organization can be tough, but it’s an even greater challenge when you have several offices across the globe. The norms and traditions are different in each country your company has an office in, which Can make it tough to build that inclusive culture across your entire worldwide organization. But creating an inclusive work culture is important for the success of the enterprise since it allows employees to feel more comfortable and engaged with your company. Although it’ll be challenging, you can still create that needed inclusive culture with these useful tips:

Look For The Gaps

To be more inclusive all across the board, it’s important that your company find the caps in your company’s workforce so that you can see what sort of trends there are for an inclusive culture and equal representation for all sites. Maybe you need more women in leadership or minorities in your company’s workforce? Finding these gaps will provide you with the answers needed to create that inclusive culture. Because the company is so large and spread across the glob, it’s crucial to look for things that might be under the radar and that you’re not aware of.

Give Your Leaders Inclusion Training

Your workforce most likely is comprised of employees from different backgrounds so it’s important that your company fosters an inclusive culture. Training your leaders how to respect and include other cultures will make employee feel as if they are part of true team that treats them fairly. Give leaders the right tools so that they can go out there and represent for your company as they promote inclusivity to all employees under them.

Make Diversity Important For The Whole Company

Diversity and inclusivity shouldn’t just be a task you place on your company’s HR team, but something that everyone needs to foster. Make your company a place where all employees at every level and at every site can do their best work. An inclusive workplace is the responsibility of everyone in the company – from executives to leadership and new hire.

Building a Scalable Corporate Culture & Infrastructure

A strong company culture can make all the difference when growing from a mid-size to large-size enterprise. With the support of all your employees, your company can obtain massive success, which can allow it to expand and grow in ways you never thought possible. But in order to do this, you first need to build a corporate culture and infrastructure that makes your employees go above and beyond for your company’s success. Without their support and backing, your company will stay stagnant as a mid-size enterprise and will never reach its full potential. Here are some tops to build that corporate culture and infrastructure for your business:

Find Ways To Measure Transparency and Trust

Try to find ways that will allow you to measure how trust and transparency flows inside your business so that executives, mangers and leaders within your company can be more connected to the existing culture and see where they can expand and grow. This can be done via leadership interactions or employee surveys to see how your employees are connected to the company’s goals and values. Take those results and utilize them for the success and growth of your business.

Highlight Those Who Live Up To Your Company’s Core Values

If your company doesn’t have core values, create some and let your employees know what they are. Then highlight individuals who live up to them so that others will want to do the same. And remember that’s it’s also important to reiterate those core values and represent them yourself.

Hire Right

The best way to have supportive employees of your company’s culture is to hire right. Although you can easily train someone to fit the skills of the position, you can’t change their attitude, which is important in building a positive and successful company culture and infrastructure. So make sure that your company is hiring the right people who will fit well with your business’ long-term vision of growing to a large-size enterprise.

Know your employee

As a leader in your business, it may be hard to really interact with all of the company’s employees, but if you want the right culture, this is imperative. At least try to remember the names of all the employees and get to know some on a personal level so that they see that you genuinely care about their interest and well being and think of them as just an employee.

Should You Choose a Learning Management System or Video Platforms for eLearning

eLearning constantly evolves to adapt to the changing needs of the organization and its learners. Once upon a time, a Learning Management System (LMS) was enough to handle all your training needs. But since video has become an integral part of corporate learning, the LMS deemed quite inadequate.

If you’re still contemplating whether getting a dedicated video platform is worth it, this list will help you decide.

Many Learning Management System’s are not designed to handle video requirements

Sure, there are LMS that support video but when it comes to features and functionality, they are very limited. Since LMS cannot support large video files, there are often bandwidth issues and no HD video capability. It also has compatibility issues with different devices and video conferencing tools. If you require on-screen video capture or live streaming of lessons, you’ll probably need a more powerful video platform.

A Learning Management System is not conducive to social learning

Video learning encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing among peers and colleagues. By recording and sharing his own video, an employee will be able to contribute his own inputs/feedback to the learning system. Retiring subject matter experts can also use video to capture their institutional knowledge which will be stored and be shared with generations of employees to come. An LMS won’t be enough to handle the creation and sharing of videos and therefore would limit your social learning potential.

A Learning Management System does not support video analytics

If you want a more comprehensive analysis of your employees’ viewing behavior, you’ll need an upgrade from your LMS. A separate video platform not only tracks whether a video is clicked but also whether the videos were watched until the end. Knowing at which part of the video the learners stop viewing will help course creators tweak the course content as needed.

A Learning Management System cannot build interactive video features

Games and other interactive features such as tests and quizzes make video courses more fun and engaging for learners. LMS cannot make these modifications due to its limited video support capabilities.  

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A Learning Management System is a good reliable platform for your corporate learning. But if your e-learning modules are heavy on video content, you might want to get a dedicated video platform. Not only will it be able to provide all your video requirements and customizations, but it also manages video-related issues way better.