Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/611718
december 2015 / the tasting panel / 49 Deutsch, owning a roster of world-renowned wine and spirits brands, hired Bearbower roughly four years ago. "Even though our department is fairly new, we've had a lot of support in our company for training. It's helpful to have that backbone. I came in for lift-off and it's been really exciting to be part of something right from the begin- ning." Bearbower felt the need to develop a sales training program that would, "grow and evolve just as the portfolio does in the company. In an industry that is rapidly chang- ing, it's just as important how you do your job than just simply meeting goals." I asked if she had a younger sales force, pointing out that the gamification concept must be very effective with the youngins'. "If you think about the trends in the gaming industry and the trends around you, everyone is on their phone playing games through an app. And we thought if we could get people to have that amount of engagement in a training situation, then that's a major win." But even for the more experienced, Bearbower says, "With sales people it doesn't matter what age they are because they are inherently competitive. They can play this in a team environment too, which would help if someone wasn't quite as tech savvy." Although I pictured a bunch of gamers sipping on energy drinks tapping furiously on their remote control- lers, I asked what a typical gaming, err, training session looked like. Bearbower explained, "You're given roughly an hour to convey your training topic to your sales people usually at the distributor. Our company already uses Microsoft Surface tablets so everyone already has an inherent training device right there at their fingertips. It's played like a game on an app, either by yourself or on a team. The game itself takes only 20 minutes, but the idea is after you play the game you plug your tablet into the screen at the front of the room and show your colleagues what your score is, then other teams or attendees in the training can ask, 'Oh hey, how did you get 50 points, I was only able to get 35 points in the game!' You'll have this back and forth about which opportunities you got versus another team, and this provides a collaborative cross- learning opportunity." As for the game itself, the object of Josh Cellars: Operation Perfect Store says Bearbower, "is to make a sales call to an off-premise retail store. The game starts in the parking lot before you even meet the buyer. And everything in the game is based on choices you make in the game. If you make poor choices early in the game, it will affect and actually lock future opportunities in the store, which means lost points; so every decision mat- ters. Everything in the game is dynamic. You can even custom-create the sentence choices to make a sales pitch to a buyer. And the buyer will respond with a dynamic response. Through click-and-drag technology you can even build and detail displays and shelf sets." One does wonder though, with all the other brands in the Deutsch repertoire, why they chose Josh Cellars. "In the case of Josh Cellars, it's a huge opportunity and the fastest growing wine in the 10-to-15-dollar price range. It grew from 30,000 cases to nearly a million in just four years, it was named MarketWatch's wine brand of the year, so the opportunity is huge," said Bearbower. The response to Josh Cellars: Operation Perfect Store has been so positive they're currently in the process of gamify- ing [ yellow tail ]—which will work very much like a swipe technology trivia app using real life user-generated photos of [ yellow tail ] shelf sets. They're calling it T(roo)via. See what they did there, mate? The benefits of gamification are plentiful: Users can control their own learning experience; it boosts time- to-competency measurements; and let's face it, this type of training is way more engaging than going through a PowerPoint presentation. Concludes Bearbower: "The big win is that in your real-world sales environment, you can actually emulate what you just played in the game and actually get that kind of 'score' in a real world situation, i.e., getting the big displays, getting the big programs in the store, all of which would build on your real life bonus." Sounds like more than "bragging rights" to me. Elizabeth Ince, Senior Training Manager and Greg Corsaut, Chain District Manager, Northern California, emulate gamified sales training in Nob Hill Foods of Walnut Creek, CA. PHOTO: KAREN DE JAGER