Industry Partnership CMR Institute, IC Axon (A Division of GP Strategies), Proficient Learning, Remap Consulting & Scrimmage

Collaboration is often foundational to building great training. The five companies named as finalists for the Industry Partnership honor at the 5th Annual LTEN Excellence Awards certainly know how to work with clients to produce results.

CMR Institute

CMR developed a series of eLearning courses for clients on pediatric nutrition and health, a program available and promoted to thousands of pediatricians around the globe in key markets identified by the client.

The content was so well received by the client’s pediatrician customers that CMR was asked to translate the 50+ eLearning modules and associated exams into five different languages: Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and French. The client also wanted to offer CME credit for pediatricians, requiring CMR to submit the content for third-party review and approval.

“This partnership provided the opportunity for our client to provide education to over 3,000 pediatricians as continuing education opportunity at no cost to the physician,” said Carrie Garrett, learning and curriculum development manager for CMR. “The goal of the program was to inform as many stakeholders as possible on the importance of proper infant and childhood nutrition across the globe. The quick uptake and positive feedback indicated that this content was meeting an unfilled need. The physicians were able to access information in their native language that would satisfy CME requirements while providing valuable knowledge that could be integrated into practice.”

IC Axon, A Division of GP Strategies

IC Axon and the AbbVie project team partnered closely to bring a learner engagement platform to 400 new sales representatives and new medical science liaisons with varying backgrounds across products and indications.

The platform tailors the learning journey for each new hire. Using Chicago – where AbbVie is headquartered – as a model, each franchise area within the platform is represented by a building. Learners click on their building and use the virtual elevator to navigate training assigned to them. The platform also serves as a consolidated repository of learning assets for the entire franchise, helping them to leverage assets and drive down costs.

“Each learner was able to navigate to their assigned training easily and find the assets they needed,” said Lisa Adams of AbbVie, nominating IC Axon for the award. “The interface had an engaging and inviting visual design and theme, which helped make the site easy to use and intuitive to navigate and increased the level of expectation and excitement around the training. The underlying curriculum design focused on core training development, minimizing redundancy and reducing training time for each learner.”

Proficient Learning

Proficient Learning partnered with a global healthcare company to develop and implement a tailored coaching system within its U.S. division.

“This has transformed the way our partner’s sales business unit runs, and resulted in increased field development coaching and engagement, well-defined field expectations and consistent coaching among managers,” said Pam Marinko, CEO of Proficient Learning. “We received complete top-down buy-in, including sales heads, leadership team, directors of sales and sales managers.”

The process began with a coaching excellence training roadmap that presented a gap analysis, multiple touch points for training, video rehearsal reviews for sustainability and a custom competency rubric and rating based on the client’s unique environment.

As a result of the partnership, field coaching reports are now being consistently written for all sales managers — and sales managers are providing updates on the action items from the prior coaching session as well as the goal and agenda for the  next field ride.

“This partnership has reiterated that face-to-face training with built-in practice is necessary to fully ensure people are comfortable with the process and tool,” Marinko said.

Remap Consulting

Remap Consulting worked with Amgen to develop a highly interactive pharmaceutical pricing and market access training program consisting of e-Learning modules aimed at more than 300 commercial and cross-functional team members around the world. The aim was to enhance participants’ understanding of pricing issues, in order to improve commercial outcomes by making better business decisions.

“Pharmaceutical pricing and market access is the critical challenge for successful product launch today,” said Lou Countryman of Amgen, nominating Remap Consulting for the award. “This topic had been identified by the global learning & performance teams and raised to senior management, which gave the green light for a training program to be developed to enhance the business outcomes.”

Participants had a wide range of expertise, so the challenge was to find the right training balance, as well as reducing complex topics to easy-to-understand eLearning modules.

“The modules received excellent feedback from teams using them,” Countryman said. “This has resulted in enhanced awareness of pricing and market access across the affiliates and improved discussions between global and affiliates teams, who have a clear language and platform for discussing pricing and market access challenges.”

Scrimmage

Helping a client company prepare for a national sales meeting, Scrimmage put together a training program with a March Madness basketball game theme to increase pull-through. The strategy incorporated head-to-head competitions, leagues, leaderboards and customized looks to support engagement, play and reporting.

“With a March Madness Basketball Tournament theme, the practice supported a continuous learning environment, encouraged knowledge retention and identified skills gaps,” said Sharon Steeley, director of marketing and communications for Scrimmage. “However, its design, immense user engagement and robust reporting showed a glaring knowledge gap in market segmentation that literally upended and changed the training for the rest of the year. Ultimately, it saved the company unknown lost revenues by understanding this key learner issue existed, sooner rather than later.

“Quite simply, the partnership exceeded expectations on many levels,” Steeley added. “In the end, there was 99.9 percent engagement and 40,200+ interactions across the 11-day period when the teams needed to compete in at least two rounds. However, in all, among its 130+ learners, a vigorous 54,383 answers were submitted across all of the challenge games and rounds for the full three-week tournament period.”