Long Overdue: The Complete Annihilation of Employee Sales Training

Hey I know you.

You're a creative person and a fantastic marketer. You work in consumer electronics. You believe in the products you're selling.

You should be doing groundbreaking stuff with Web 2.0 and interactive --- creating games and contests; building communities; flexing your brand; showing how smart, funny and beautiful you are.

But you feel stuck in an obscure corner of the marketing organization, the training department.

The consumer brand people at your company don't always see you. They're looking in a direction they believe is "up." Sometimes this means chasing after the next, great, award-winning broadcast campaign. They have full internal and agency resources at their disposal. What are you left with?

Employees and salespeople are also consumers. They have emotions and tastes and they buy stuff.

Working in retail is not always so rewarding. Every opportunity to make a customer happy presents a moment's relief from the sustained stress of dealing with the public day after day.

One way to make customers happy is by getting them a product that supports their lifestyle, achieved by communicating shared excitement over the possibilities it presents.

What kind of record-breaking sales would result if retail employees felt as excited about your latest device as consumers do?

I bought a Blackberry Pearl from someone who loved his Blackberry Pearl. He was smart, funny, a hipster. It's everything I'd like to think about myself. (Complete side note: I guess I'd also like to think about myself as being similar to Clive Owen, who is taller, richer and better-looking than me. He might also own a Blackberry. We're not sure.)

(Clive Owen possibly handling a Blackberry phone, courtesy of http://celebrityblackberrysightings.com)

The product training people at T-Mobile communicated something to the sales associate that became a shared excitement with me. It led me to buy a phone in half the time I would have elsewhere.

I was excited about the phone. I was more excited about taking funny movies of my kids and emailing them to Grandma, about enjoying the music I love without replacing my broken MP3 player (now that my bank account, also, is seemingly broken), about being able to work better and smarter while looking good, because I'm all about the presentation.
And, I got a rebate.

A sales employee told me all of that, not an ad.

Good creative and interactive can be applied equally to employee training, which is really about "internal marketing," in the same way they are applied to consumer brand campaigns. What needs to happen is a cultural shift within the marketing organizations at consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers.

This involves making a business case to merchandisers and product managers showing that employee excitement translates into consumer excitement.

It also involves being aggressive and visionary, getting to the table at the big conversations, arguing for the reinvention of employee communication as a bottom-line marketing issue.