COVID-19 accelerated the rise of virtual learning. With many companies shifting to hybrid or remote work, they looked to remote learning as a way to upskill and train their workforce with the tools and skills they needed to thrive. We also know that remote and hybrid work isn’t going away any time soon, which means that virtual training is here to stay. 

In this episode of The Business of Learning, sponsored by Sales Gravy, we spoke with Jeb Blount, chief executive officer of Sales Gravy, to learn more about virtual training. 

Listen now to learn more on:

• How to shift in-person training programs online.
• What makes virtual training successful, and what doesn’t.
• How to engage learners in a virtual environment.

Listen Now:

Additional Resources:

• • Book: Virtual Training by Jeb Blount
  • Magazine: Virtual Learning 
  • Course: Managing Remote Learning Certificate 
  • Research Report: What Learners Want – Strategies for Training Delivery 
  • Article: From Classroom to Virtual Training: 5 Techniques to Upskill Facilitators 

 

The transcript for this episode follows:

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo:

Hello and welcome back to the business of learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, an editor at Training Industry.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

And I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz editorial director at Training Industry and your co-host. Today’s episode is brought to us by Sales Gravy.

[Ad]

Jeb’s brand new book, “Virtual Training,” is the definitive guide to delivering virtual training that engages learners and makes knowledge stick. Jeb is one of the most celebrated trainers and authors of our generation. You’re going to love this book, because it’s a step-by-step manual for how you can deliver a legendary virtual learning experience. “Virtual Training” will give you the tools you need to make a better impact on the people you’re teaching, whether you’re an instructor or a leader. You can get your copy of “Virtual Training” now, wherever books are sold.

Sarah Gallo:

COVID-19 accelerated the inevitable rise of virtual learning. With many companies shifting to hybrid or remote work, they looked to remote learning as a way to up-skill and train their workforce with the tools and skills they needed to survive the crisis and emerge into the future of work full-force. We also know that remote and hybrid work isn’t going away anytime soon, which means that virtual training is here to stay. To learn more about what makes virtual training successful, what doesn’t, and how it will impact training delivery in the future, we’re speaking today with Jeb Blount, chief executive officer of Sales Gravy. Jeb, welcome to the podcast.

Jeb Blount:

Well, thank you for having me on. You’re very kind.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Well, it’s great to have you here today. We know that many companies had to quickly embrace virtual training in light in the pandemic. Jeb, can you walk us through what that transition looked like for Sales Gravy?

Jeb Blount:

Well, if you think about companies embracing virtual training because of the pandemic, if we go back to March of 2020, it was, I think chaotic for pretty much everyone. We worked with a lot of sales enablement people, which are our professionals, which is training. If you’re an L&D, no matter whether you were a private third-party trainer like us or you were working for a corporate entity, it was a mess, because nobody was ready for it, people who weren’t set up, they didn’t have the video, they didn’t have the audio. And one of the big issues for a lot of companies was that, traditionally, virtual training itself had been a really awful experience for learners. And typically, it had been a voice that was talking over PowerPoints on GoToMeeting. And a lot of people weren’t even embracing Zoom at the time because Zoom kind of made it during the pandemic. So a lot of it was chaotic. Now, for us at Sales Gravy, we were a little bit ahead of the game because back in 2019, we had begun building sound studios specifically around virtual training. Part of that is because we’re an international training company. So we work with companies all over the world, but part of it was because I have a lot of trainers. And I came from the corporate world and I was concerned that if there was a recession, that training was the one thing that was going to get cut first. It always is. But not because of training, because of the travel. Because, traditionally, we thought, well, the only way to train people would be to do it in person or e-learning. And eLearning, traditionally, doesn’t really work. About 90% of learners basically abandoned eLearning programs before they finish. So, when you’re delivering instructor-led training, we thought it was supposed to be in-person. But what I couldn’t do is be in a situation where suddenly I’m laying off 30 trainers because we just quit traveling. So we began building, in 2019, production studios so we could deliver a high-level, differentiated virtual learning experience, a term that we eventually trademarked. And the concept was to do something that was different. So when the pandemic hit and we shut everything down, it was March 14th, and I remember just like a wave of things that hit the training industry, we really didn’t miss a beat. We were still unboxing things in our studio. We had not really planned on ramping up our virtual training studios for a while. It was a safety mechanism for us. And we figured we would start adding on more virtual instructor-led training. We were ready to go and we kind of stepped into it. And so as a training company, we did great. It was a really big year for us, but we didn’t lose a client. In fact, we added on training from our clients and we were able to help a lot of our clients make the transition because they were kind of freaking out what are we going to do? So everything stayed the same. And it was essentially at that moment being prepared for recession that allowed us to act like we knew what we were doing when we came into the pandemic. And a lot of people said, “You guys are really, really lucky.” And I was like, “Well, we were a little bit ahead of the curve, but we were thinking something else, but this happened to us.”

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah. It sounds like you were definitely as prepared as one can be for an unexpected global pandemic, for sure. Of course, Jeb, like you mentioned, COVID-19 was just such, I think you said “a messy time.” I just love that saying. It really was just messy for a lot of companies … whether it was embracing remote work or of course transitioning these programs online. What were some of the challenges that organizations face that maybe weren’t as prepared? And do you have any advice for them on how they can actually transition their programs online?

Jeb Blount:

Yeah. I think that part of the thing that organizations face was this mindset issue. So let’s take a piece at a time, but one of it was this belief that virtual training somehow or another was a subpar way of teaching people. So suddenly you’ve got everybody in their houses, right? So everybody’s working from home. And that’s not new. Even when people work in an office as you had distributed workforces, so people were all over the place. And so the idea was if you really want to teach people, you have to do it in person. Look, I was one of the people that said that. I mean, I’ve got a leadership training that we teach that I told someone, a year earlier, there is no possible way that you could teach this in a virtual classroom. And today I would not think about taking it back to a regular classroom because it’s been better in virtual. So, one, it was mindset. People just didn’t believe it was any good. And by the way, their experience had been, it was terrible, because everybody has been through death by PowerPoint on a virtual meeting with someone who is not interacting with them and not engaging with them. So they were there. The second thing was technology and equipment. The good news was the technology and equipment already existed. So typically when you’re in a situation where it’s messy and it’s chaotic, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who’ll figure it out, they step up to the plate and they create technology that everybody’s just sort of catch up with. Or the technology has to catch up to the situation. In this particular situation, the technology was already there. I mean, think about it. We made the very first video call in 1927. Herbert Hoover made that at Bell Labs. It wasn’t like we didn’t have video. We had that. It was there. And Zoom, and Teams, and all the other [platforms, like] GoToMeeting, Adobe, all of the companies that provide this, were already providing that service. Most of the technology, in fact, this microphone that I’m on right now, that sounds pretty good, this thing’s been around since 1967. It’s a good microphone. And it just the go-to microphone for this type of an interaction. So that was all there. People didn’t understand cameras and understand how to be on video. They didn’t understand switching, which is, for example, if you’re watching virtual training, think of it like a TV show, right? If in TV show, you see switches between scenes. So they didn’t understand those types of things. So all of that was really tough. If you’re a learning development professional and you’re teaching, you’re an instructor, how do I do that? So you had mindset, is really, really bad. You had people that didn’t understand the technology, even though the technology was already there. And by the way, you had a workforce out there at the same time trying to learn how to work remotely. And a lot of the same technology that allows them to do that, allows them to attend training, instructors have to have a little bit of a different or a better level up to better technology in order to teach. So everybody was struggling to get into that. Then you got people that are just afraid of the camera. And I don’t know about y’all, but I think that almost everybody at the beginning of the pandemic, when we figured out we’re going to be working on video all day long, you struggled with making eye contact on camera, you struggled with looking at yourself instead of the other person. And when you were looking at yourself, you were like, “I don’t really like that person that I’m seeing in the cameras.” So you had all those things going on. So had that happening. And then, I think one of the biggest issues, and we found this as a training organization. We’re a sales training organization. So we basically, you teach people who are customer-facing, customer service, account management, salespeople, and the leaders who lead that group of people. All of our courses were built for in-person, classroom-based, instructor-led training versus virtual training. So virtual training is typically going to be modularized. It’s going to be short. We found that he sort of the Goldilocks Zone for virtual training sessions about 120 minutes. Longer than that, people begin to check out. And shorter than that, you don’t really have enough time to do interactive engagement. There’s just not enough time to teach. But our courses weren’t really built for that. So they hadn’t been designed. In my book, “Virtual Training,” there’s a couple of chapters on how do you design courses specifically deliver in a virtual environment. So we had those problems, too. And you saw it early on where trainers were trying to deliver a traditionally classroom-based training curriculum and content, all of the pieces that went with it, all the elements. And it was really awkward at first. So a lot of that had to be changed. So it required not so much a, we have to like completely rethink the way that we teach. It required everybody to stop for a second and take a breath and recognize that everything that you need to teach and be amazing in a virtual classroom was already there. We just had to retrain ourselves to think differently about it and to step into it and then learn. One story for me, personally, when we first started getting on camera all the time, and I traveled 300 days a year prior to the pandemic, which has a lot of traveling …. I mean, I would go to Malaysia and spend two days training and then fly to New York and do another two days of training. When I first started getting in front of the camera, I couldn’t sleep at night. The next day I’ll be coming in and I would be all night long, I’d be up nervous about how I was going to sound or look or act on camera. And today, it’s just normal. I don’t even think twice about it. But we had to learn those things. And that’s been tough. Now here’s the thing: We’re 18 months into the pandemic. And sadly, there are a lot of trainers and instructors that are just stepping into this. There were a whole lot of people, I’ll call them wishbones, that spent the last 18 months wishing and hoping that we would go back to where we were. And there’s a lot of leaders out there that are hoping that we can go back to where we were, but we’re not going back to the way we were because people have also learned it’s a lot easier to attend training when I can do it on a Zoom camera versus getting an airplane.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Those are all great tips. And it’s really, it is a mindset shift. And I really like to kind of touch on what you mentioned about the late adopters and those who are hesitant of virtual delivery. Some believe in fear that it doesn’t deliver the same results as in-person programs. How can companies really leverage virtual training for even better learning outcomes than they might get from an in-person program?

Jeb Blount:

Great question. This whole concept, this whole idea that virtual training is somehow inferior to in-person training has been disproven over the last 18 months. We’re seeing better outcomes, better learning outcomes from the people that are engaged in virtual learning. Plus, we’re seeing productivity, so the people that are supposed to be doing their job, that doesn’t decrease either. So instead of pulling someone out of their job for, say a day or two days, or even three days, and putting them into a classroom where there’s no productivity happening and they’ve got a fire hose pointed down their throat, we’re not doing that anymore. We’re actually breaking training up into the way that academic say that humans learn best. We’re chunking it into small pieces. So if you think about it in a virtual environment, if you’re delivering good virtual training, that means it’s interactive, there are breakouts, it mirrors what you do in the classroom. So instead of a slide on screen, there’s a human being on the screen. In other words, the instructor standing in front of the screen. We’re on video, and this is a podcast, but you guys can see me. There’s a smart board behind me like in breakout groups. Every breakout group has a page on that smart board. So, like you would be in a classroom, if you had breakout groups and people were writing on the whiteboard and we just have a virtual whiteboard, but I’m able to engage with them. And I’m able to download that and send them back their notes as a PDF. You can’t do that in a classroom. You can’t send people pages off of a little writing board. What we’ve seen is that by breaking and chunking up content into smaller pieces, people are able to consume it differently. We’ve also, because of the way virtual training is consumed, we’ve had to sequence things a little bit differently. So we’re sequencing more engaging content upfront. So we’re getting people engaged a little bit earlier. So that’s been part of virtual training design, is being able to just re-sequence the way that we deliver [the] curriculum. But the whole idea is that they get a little piece and then they go try stuff. And that’s where we’ve really seen the benefit. Because people learn in small chunks and by doing things, right? By experiencing things. So they see it, they hear it, then they go do it. In a traditional classroom, when people are learning, they’re learning it all at the same time, they write notes, they put it all together, and they’re trying to remember that. And we know that human beings aren’t going to remember everything that they learned. And then they go back to where they were doing before, and they’re supposed to go practice it. But they don’t always go practice it the same way. They come out learning different things. Sometimes they just go back to their old habits. So the return on those training hours that you’re delivering in the classroom aren’t as high as in a virtual classroom where, let’s say that we take 120 minutes, we focus on one subject, and then we give you a series of exercises to go out and try in the field in your regular job. And then they’re [getting] coaching in between, so you have access to the instructor. So if you make a mistake or you got a question or something’s not working, you go back to the instructor. And then when you come back to the classroom, you’re able to have a conversation with all the other people in the classroom about what you did when you were trying the new concepts that you were learning. And if we feel like everybody’s got it, we can keep moving. If we feel like we need to go back, we can stop. And that’s what we’re seeing, is that the pickup from people in the classroom learning this way is just better. Because if you think about it, what we also are able to do is layer. So every time you come back into a virtual session, we’re layering old lessons. So we’re repeating repetition, repetition, repetition. You’re trying things hands-on, so you learn through doing. And then we’re chunking things into small pieces, which is easier for people to learn. I mean, these are all the promises of eLearning, of course, except for people won’t finish e-learning courses because they’re all by themselves. So the thing about that classroom, so going into a physical classroom, is we say, “Okay, well, we can see each other on virtual, but we’ve got the social piece of it.” Which is true, right? There is a social learning piece we’re all together. And the very best way for human beings to communicate with each other is in person. It works better that way. But if you’re in a classroom with a group of people and you’re interacting, and you’ve got an instructor that understands how to engage people in a virtual classroom, it may not be as perfect as being in a physical classroom, but it’s almost as good. And so when you add the other elements and the ability to chunk content, the ability to sequence it in a meaningful way for people, and the ability for them to go try it in the field, and you have the social aspect of in-person learning, which is being done through a virtual classroom, is just as good or better. And the fact that you can save the environment because virtual training has been proven to produce 90% less emissions than a physical classroom. And by the way, and I think the people that are listening to this might get this, who have budgets, about anywhere from say 50% to 80% of the cost of in-person classroom training are costs that have nothing to do with training. It’s putting people in a car, or a plane, or a train. It’s feeding them, it’s renting a room, it’s putting people in a physical place. That consumes almost all of the budget for training. Well, think about it. In a virtual classroom, you don’t have those things, which is one of the reasons why our clients have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and even 10 times as much training as we’re delivering, because suddenly, the budget’s not being absorbed by these other things. So for the people who say, “I want to go back, it’s not as good,” a couple of things for this, and people don’t shoot the messenger here. Part of it is trainers who are uncomfortable delivering in a virtual classroom. So they’re making an excuse for themselves while they want to be there. That’s like most of it. The other part of it is leaders who feel like they can’t have as much control unless everybody’s together. And I see that through some of the leaders who are booking our training, when can we all get back in the classroom? And my question is, “Why do you want to do that? I mean, your productivity is higher. People are selling more, they’re contributing more to the organization, and they’re doing it virtually. Why do you want to put them back in the classroom again?” It’s a control thing. Like, if I can get my hands around people, I feel like I have them. So some of that is our own trepidation, our own emotional, our own mindset about virtual training that causes us to say, well, virtual training is not good. Some of it is because some trainers just don’t know how to do it. And a lot of it’s about control. But the truth is, and the fact is, and if you go look inside your heart and look at your learners, you’ll know that virtual instructor-led training absolutely delivers. It absolutely works. And it is one part, by the way, of a complete system that will include classroom-based training. That will include eLearning. That will include going out in the field and doing things and getting coaching. And we’ll include virtual training. It is a part of the complete ecosystem.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah. I love that. Especially what you said about kind of weighing those benefits and costs. It’s just a clear cut answer when you look at it on paper. You touched on this a bit, Jeb, but are there any other common pitfalls that you think people are making when trying to take their in-person programs online? What can kind of, in other words, make a virtual program of fail?

Jeb Blount:

Well, one of them is setting up rules in advance. So the thing about training in a classroom is… And I’ve been a classroom instructor my whole life. I’ve spent most of my career either leading people or training people. And in a classroom, when I walk in the door, just for me personally, I know how to project confidence and I know how to own the classroom. I only have two rules in a classroom, come back on time for breaks and turn all your stuff off, turn all of your devices off. Nothing’s on. And most people don’t cross me in this situation. So I’m able to keep control of my classroom. I know all the tricks and tools that most trainers have learned for managing a classroom, managing individuals in the classroom. It’s way harder to do that in a virtual setting. So one of the things that we learned really early on was we need to move engaging content up. So, for example, in a regular classroom, let’s say that we start a training. What we’re typically going to do for adults is we’re going to set the stage to tell the adult learner why they should know this information and what’s in it for them. That’s basic training 101. The problem for virtual is that particular process of teaching people why they need to know the information and what’s in it for them, what the outcomes are that they’ll experience, that typically is a trainer broadcasting. So that’s a trainer just talking at them. In a regular classroom, the trainers moving around. There’s an expectation that that’s going to work. There aren’t any distractions because all the devices are off. In a virtual classroom, if you begin with content like that, it’s boring. So you’ve got a trainer. Broadcasting is very boring. So it’s learning how to front-load with exercises. So typically, I’m in introductions, real quick introductions, and we’re moving right into a breakout. And so I break all my groups out. And I run breakout groups just like we run them into classroom. We’re cycling through them. We’re seeing people. We’re on the whiteboards. They’re working together. And they love breakouts. So we move directly into a breakout, anything that’s engaging. And then we frontload with content that we know that they’re going to lean into and that they want to hear. And what we’ve done with the, why do you need to know this? And what’s in it for you content? Is that we’ve sprinkled that in as we go. So what we’ve done is we’re not getting rid of that content, but we’re not delivering it all at one time. So we’re teaching that through the modules. And has worked very, very well. And the second thing is rules. So the thing about a virtual classroom is you got to have rules. There’s just too many things that are happening in the learners environment if you don’t. And those rules, by the way, begin with their leaders. So if the leaders aren’t bought into the training, then it’s not uncommon that you’ll have a person in your classroom, right? And then you’ll see them talking to somebody and it’s their boss, right? Their bosses going, listen, I know this training is going on over here, but I need you to go do this. Well, the boss would never walk into your physical classroom and grab somebody out and say, I need them. They never do that. Maybe once in a lifetime. But in a virtual classroom, they don’t even think twice about it. So it’s upfront to the leaders. Here’s what’s happening. For 120 minutes on Wednesdays, your person’s going to be in classroom, they’re not to be disturbed. And by the way, you’ve got to make that environment. A lot of that’s the instructor getting that buy-in from the leaders. Like I’ll go meet with the leaders, typically on a conference call or on a video call and explain, here’s what’s going on, here’s why they need to know this, here’s why you’re paying for it, and here’s what we can’t have any distractions. And the same thing with the learners. Here are the rules for 120 minutes. I need a hundred percent of your attention. I need you on screen. Everybody’s on camera. Everybody’s on their own cameras and I can see every single face. And if you walk into our studios I’ve got one studio, I’ve got 11 monitors. So everywhere I go, I can see faces, because I’m teaching, and I’m standing, up and I’m working with them. And I’m teaching just like I’m in a classroom. I’m on my feet for seven hours teaching. I taught a bunch of different groups, but I’m teaching. So it’s making sure that everybody gets the rules. Everybody understands them. And they were clear about them. And we’re nice, and we’re not mean and ugly or anything, but you get those. And here are all the things that matter. So you’ve got to manage that up front. So it’s the making sure that you’ve got the content down so that you’ve got engagement early. Because if you get engagement early, everybody steps into it and says, “Wow, this is great. I love it.” And you got to make sure that you have good rules. And then along with that, a couple of my clients who have done a really, really nice job with virtual training, and I’ve got fortune 200 clients that have quadrupled the amount of training that we deliver and we’re training for them every single day because they see the value of this. But one of the things that they’ve done very, very well is that they’ve had training sessions on technology. So they’ve done virtual training sessions on their own on how do you use the technology? How do you do this? How do you do that? We’ve created many videos. Even before our virtual training, we create these animated videos to just teach people the ins and outs of what to do. So they’ve just made sure everybody is clear on the technology. That’s becoming less and less of an issue simply because as we progressed to the pandemic, most people have figured out, here’s how you do this. Here’s how you do that. Here’s how you turn Zoom on. Here’s how you use a webcam. So that’s gotten a lot better. We still run into issues of having to teach people lighting and audio so we can see them and we can hear them. But again, you’re talking about, instead of half your class having a problem, you’re talking about two people out of 30 that have an issue. So the biggest issue I think, is you got to have rules and you got to get content frontloaded that gets them engaged.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah. Those were all some great tips, especially what you mentioned about kind of laying down the law, so to speak, and making sure that that learning space really is protected because of course you can’t focus on learning if you’re being pulled in a million different directions. So super important to keep in mind. I’m wondering, Jeb, though, with all of this, the benefits for job training, what does it really mean for the future of in-person programs?

Jeb Blount:

I don’t personally think that you’re going to lose in-person programs. I think that what it really means is that the cost we have learned that this particular channel works. So the virtual instructor-led training works. And it allows us to scale training at speed. It allows us to try things. I mean, think about in a physical classroom. Let’s say that you’re delivering a training, Sarah, and you got 50 people coming in and they’re traveling in from all over the country. I’ve got a client of mine. They traveled in from all over the world. So I’m delivering a two-day training. I got people in who they’ve been on an 18-hour flight to get to me. So I don’t get to experiment in those situations. You can’t go in and try something and fail at it because it costs too much money to have those folks come in. But if you’re in L&D and you go, you don’t want to really try one, try this workshop out and see if it works. You can get a group of people together and spend a couple of hours with them in a virtual classroom. And the risk is minimal to be able to innovate and try new things and work on some material with your learners. We found that we can accelerate the pace of curriculum development and testing and piloting in virtual like we couldn’t do in the physical classroom. So I think that in the physical classroom, what you’re going to see is you’re going to see us choose the training that matters the most. So there is time in place. So, for example, there are some sales onboarding programs where we’re working with brand new sales reps. And they’re just learning from the ground up. Those particular programs I would keep in a physical classroom. There’s a reason for it. There’s no productivity hit for the person not to be in the field because they’re not doing anything anyway, because they’re brand new. And there’s a cultural piece there, right? So we want to indoctrinate them in the culture of the organization. And the clients that I work with, that we do their new hour training, we’re part of their company. So we’re part of what they’re learning. There is a big benefit, a social benefit in connecting all those folks together. Because as they progress with their career, they’re going to all remember that they were together in that place, and they’re going to learn together, and they’re going to build deeper relationships that keep them linked and connected in the organization, and allow them to help each other. Plus, they’re going to meet people, leaders and coaches, and trainers, and people in their corporate headquarters that are going to help them get anchored to the individuals that they’re going to be interacting with. So in those cases, it makes a lot of sense to have people together in a physical classroom. There’s going to be situations, for example, let’s say you teach people how to work on a machine. If you’re teaching diesel mechanics, that probably needs to mostly be in a physical classroom. Although there are some supplemental training that you can deliver in a virtual classroom. And we’re experimenting with VR and AR now. I mean, we have our own virtual reality classroom. It’s amazing. It’s an amphitheater. And there are some things that we could teach in that classroom if it was like a diesel engine where we can pull the whole thing apart. Although still you need to get physical and touch it. And so I expect that there are particular skill sets that make the most sense to be in a physical classroom. And there are some skillsets where it makes the most sense to be in a virtual classroom. Let me tell you the fallacy of my beliefs prior to really leaning into virtual training. And that was, I’d believe that it wasn’t possible to teach soft skills like emotional intelligence and how to handle a customer, or how to sell something, or how to ask better questions, how to interact with other people [in a virtual environment]. I mean, most of what I’m teaching is customer-facing work. They’re soft skills, people savvy, like how do you do this [online]?

Jeb Blount:

I just didn’t believe you could do it in a virtual classroom. And it turns out you can. It turns out you can do role-plays. It turns out that you can teach those skills just fine. And people learn and they can go out and do them. And they operate exactly the same level as everyone else. So what we’re teaching, though, is we’re teaching people who have already probably been through the training at some point, and then we’re honing those skills, we’re building on those skills. So if you’ve got a distributed sales force that’s producing at a high level, but you really want to work on their questioning skills, their discovery skills, it doesn’t really make sense to pull all those people out of the field for a couple of hours of workshop focused on a narrow slice of their job. It just costs too much money to do that. So now we’re able to do is add on. We’re able to do ongoing training, keeping those skills tight, upskilling people in the moment. All of that lends itself very well to virtual training, high-quality virtual training. So what we’re going to see is probably a deeper blending of virtual self-paced learning and in-classroom instructor-led training. I think we’re going to see all of that’s going to come together and we’re going to create a much stronger platform in which to train people. But I think primarily for organizations, what they’re going to find is it costs a lot of money to deliver in-classroom training. So you’re going to choose wisely before you put people on an airplane. And by the way, the people that you’re putting on the airplane, they’ve already figured this out, and they don’t really want to go leave their families for something that’s not really going to deliver value to them. So you’re going to be better deliver more value in the physical classroom. And with virtual, you’re going to use virtual when it makes sense to keep people in the field and accelerate your learning and add on more and more and more because you can just do more training with virtual. So I think it’s all going to work together. But I do believe that trainers and instructors, and I say this in my book, “Virtual Training,” I see this early on, if you don’t learn how to do this, you are going to go extinct. So you’ve got to learn how to master high-level virtual training that is delivered at a quality that most people are not used to seeing. You’ve got to get that down.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

That’s great. Those are all really good points because at the end of the day, really, it’s all about delivering value to your learners. So next thing I’d like to talk about is with more learners being able to access training anywhere, any time, how do you see remote learning, driving a more equitable future of work?

Jeb Blount:

Well, I think that when you say anywhere, anytime, so anywhere, anytime, primarily is going to be self-paced learning. So that means that, on your phone, or your tablet, or your computer, that you’re able to jump into the LMS, go grab an eLearning program, and go through that process. We’ve been doing that for a really long time. So essentially, for really forward-thinking organizations that are building high quality e-learning programs, which by the way, are expensive to build and very hard to build high quality. I mean, anybody can do a webinar that bores people to tears, but to really build good training takes effort. You’re talking about probably $25,000 per finished hour to build good, solid, self-paced eLearning courses. So whether they’re micro- courses or full courses, that’s been there. And that has leveled the playing field somewhat in terms of learning being equitable, people being able to all experience the same thing. The problem is that, essentially, if you think about it, 90% of eLearning courses are never finished. 90%. So for all the money and all the effort that is put into those courses, most of them aren’t finished. The only ones that are finished in mass, at a high level, are ones that you were required to take it to get certified to continue to do something in your job, and someone’s watching you. But other than that, people aren’t really going on. So from an equitable standpoint, there is a massive amount of training and content that is available for people. Most people don’t access it. What virtual training is doing, though, from an equitability standpoint is it’s opening the door for more people to learn. And I’ll just give you an example from our world. So this morning I was having a conversation with a franchise group and their training team. And they’ve got a big training event coming up virtual. They would typically do this in a big convention center, but they’re doing it virtual. And the head of learning in this particular situation said, in the past we’ve only been able to involve about a hundred people because it costs so much to do this, but we’re going to have a couple of thousand people on this. And that is what’s changed. Everywhere I go, I would use to… If I was going to a sales kickoff meeting, we’re doing workshops, maybe 170 people, 200 people would be there. Today, 2000 people are there. They’re bringing everybody in the organization in. What it’s doing is allowing us to reach into parts of the organizations that typically would never see this. And they’re getting training. Now, even better with virtual training is that it helps extend the culture. So if you’ve got people in, say, I worked with a couple of banks and they’ve got people in mortgages. So you’ve got the loan officers. We’re training the loan officers. Now they bring in the underwriters. So now the underwriters are experiencing the same training as the loan officers. And all of a sudden you see these “Aha” moments, the light bulbs are coming on. So from an equitability standpoint, what it does is it opens the door for people who would typically not be traveled in for training because it was too expensive and the organization didn’t feel like they could get a high enough return on investment for sending that person in. Now that person can attend training because the cost of adding one person, because you’re not spending the money for travel, is very, very small, because it’s really, pop onto a Zoom meeting or in our case, we’re doing VR training, just pop your headset on and we’re ready to go. That’s what I think is so exciting about this. And that’s why I wrote the book, “Virtual Training,” because I really believe that if we can show organizations, here’s how you do it, here’s the playbook, the handbook for how do you deliver high-quality virtual learning experiences, then exactly what you said, even more people can experience high-quality training than ever before.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Definitely. That’s a really good perspective that virtual training just really does open the door for more people to learn. It extends the culture, like you mentioned, definitely. Another challenge I think it’s important to address here is learner engagement. There are so many distractions for learners in the virtual classroom. And you touched on this earlier, but do you have any tips to keep learners engaged throughout these virtual training experiences?

Jeb Blount:

Yes. So let’s think about a classroom. So it’s a physical classroom and the trainer goes into the physical classroom. So here’s tip number one. In a physical classroom, the trainer goes in, and you set up in the morning, you get your laptop on, you hook in the projector, or your slide deck for whatever you’re teaching is going to go up on the projector. And so all the people come in and they sit down. And the trainer goes and walks behind screen and starts talking. That would never happen. If you did that, by the way, everybody would leave. So why would you do that in a virtual classroom? In a virtual classroom, the trainer gets on and all you see as a slide. And they’re talking, you hear their voice, but you see slides. And I saw one trainer do one where she talked for 30 minutes or five bullet points on one slide. The slide never changed. So if the screen isn’t moving, people are not engaged. So you never do that. So number one, show your face. So put your face on the screen. Now, this requires you…. In the book, I give you all the equipment that you need to do this. So it requires you to have good switchers. So you can switch from picture and picture. You can switch to full screen. You can switch the slides. And you can do that with your finger. You can have just a button that you can do that with. So all the equipment’s there. But you have to learn how to do that. So you’re constantly changing the screen, but they can see your face. Because in a physical classroom, the trainer is the center of attention, not the slide. And it should be exactly the same way in a virtual classroom. Number two, if you think about a physical classroom, how do you keep people engaged? Well, I can tell you how you bore people to death. And you’ve probably been in one of those trainings where you have a trainer or a college professor or a teacher, and you’ve got them and they’re reading bullet points off of slides. So they’re talking at the people that are sitting in their seats and they’re talking, they’re broadcasting, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And they go, anybody got any questions? And nobody enters. Nobody goes, no, I got a question. And then the trainer goes, okay. And blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Anybody got any questions? Nobody answers. Well, that happens in a physical classroom, [but] it’s more acute in a virtual classroom. So if you’re talking at people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you go, does anybody have any questions? On a Zoom call, no one will ever answer you ever. Because that’s not what people do. So what you have to do in a virtual meeting, our virtual training is that you step in front of the slide and then you have to stop and engage. So it would be like this. You would say, blah, blah, blah, blah, and would say, Sarah, what does that mean? And that’s how I would do it in a virtual call. I mean a physical classroom. In physical classroom, I would throw up a concept on a slide and I would point to the slide and say, Sarah, what does that mean? And then you would answer me. And I would move to the next person. So in a virtual classroom, one of my rules is everybody’s up and your names are on the frames. Just like in a physical classroom, I’ve got a tent curve that has your name on it. So what I do is I reach out and I ask the person a question. Sometimes I make everybody put all your mics on, nobody’s on mute. And I’ll just have like a round-rubbing conversation really, really fast. I’ll role play with people. Part of being able to switch is that if I’m role-playing, I’ll put your picture up, my picture up, and the other person’s picture up. And then we’re role-playing together while everybody watches. So the same thing that I would do in a physical classroom, I’m going to engage people in a virtual classroom. It’s also important that you are keeping things moving on screen. The more things move on screen, the more people are engaged. Because that’s the way the human mind works. Right? We have this little part of our brain called the amygdala. The amygdala looks for anything on the screen that’s an anomaly. So as things change, people are leaning into it. So you can’t have a slide that has five bullet points and spend 20 minutes on it. You got to be moving. In my world, I create transitions in the slides that bring people in, that keep their eyes moving, but I’m constantly engaging people. And then breakouts. So people love breakouts. When we first started doing virtual training the way we do it now, I believed in my heart of hearts that if we send people into a Zoom breakout room, they’re all going to disappear. I was thinking, as soon as you go to the breakout room, you’re going to go get something to eat, you’re out of here. Nobody’s paying attention to you. It was just the opposite. We would put people in breakout rooms and they would be in there and they would be completely and utterly engaged. So our goal is to have at least one not two breakouts every hour. So this is a breakout session. So we have our producers. When we bring people in and we are signing to the breakouts. We send them in the breakouts and they worked. Now I use a smart board. So every single breakout has access to the smart board. They have it on their computers, on a tablet, on their phone, doesn’t make a difference. I always have a smart board behind me and so do my trainers. And that allows us to keep people engaged in the breakout rooms. And then if you’re the trainer and you want to keep your breakout rooms engaging, then you need to cycle through the breakout rooms. You cannot be this trainer that says, okay, everybody’s in a breakout room. This is my opportunity to go get a cup of coffee. It doesn’t work that way. If you were in a physical classroom and you broke everybody out, the trainer wouldn’t leave the room and say, have a great breakout. I mean, that would be foolish, because they would all disappear on their phones. So in a physical classroom, if you’re running breakouts, you’re walking from breakout to breakout, engaging, coaching, having conversations. So you do the same thing in your regular breakout sessions. So if you start thinking about it, what I told you was, the same way that you keep people engaged in the physical classroom is exactly the same way that you keep people engaged in a virtual classroom, except for one thing, and this is super important, you cannot ask broad questions like this, does anybody have a question about that? Because it will never ever answer you. So you have to engage people by name and pull them into the conversation exactly the same way. In the book, “Virtual Training,” I actually walk you through that process. I even take you through a process of switching so you can keep the screen moving, and the process of how do you get people engaged. And I also take you through what happens when you have people who aren’t engaged. And very similar to a physical classroom, there are going to be people who are either disruptive or not engaged. I find that I don’t get a lot of people who are disruptive, but the lack of engagement. And it’s just being able to see them and pay attention to them so that if you see people drifting, you very quickly [bringing] them back in by asking a question, by getting them to give an opinion, by whatever. But as long as you keep them focused, they’re going to be fine. The one thing I will tell you, though, is that as a trainer, it’s a lot more intense. It’s a lot harder than in a physical classroom because you have to be aware of so many things that are happening. And there’s these little screens. I typically have a really big screen people’s pictures in front of me, but there’s all these little screens. So you just have to be able to train your brain and your eyes to be aware that if you see someone looking down and you think, oh, they might be looking at their phone, they’re watching cat videos, yank them back in. No different than I would do in a physical classroom.

Sarah Gallo:

Those are all some great insights. Jeb, I know I would not dare look at cat videos in your classroom for sure, in person or online. Well, that all sounds great, great tips, great insights. Do you have any other key takeaways you’d like to leave our listeners with before we wrap up today?

Jeb Blount:

I think the most important thing for trainers is this, virtual training for instructors, for people who… This is our profession, this is what we love to do. We love to make an impact on people. We love to teach. Virtual training has opened up the world. And my company in our studio complex here, we have five studios and I have nine other studios across the country that we built, purpose-built specifically to deliver virtual training. We start early in the morning. We’ll start in the morning and we’ll be in Europe. And we’re training in Italy, for example, at seven o’clock in the morning. And then we’ll basically follow the sun, hit the United States, go to the West Coast. And then we’ll be in Asia. So it’s not uncommon that our producers and trainers in here at nine and 10 o’clock at night training people on the other side of the world. We can literally step into any country, anytime, anywhere, anyhow, through virtual. And we can impact people. And we can do the things that we love the most. And so I think for trainers, it’s understanding that. And it’s getting connected to what is our mission. So our mission as a trainer is to make people better, to just develop them and help them reach their potential. And if you don’t wake up every day and that’s what you want to do, like that’s what you’re driven to do, if you go scrolling through the motions, nothing that we talked about on this podcast is really going to matter to you. But if you wake up every day and that’s what you really dig, you really love that process, now, all of a sudden you can do this at scale. You could do far more than you’ve ever done before. And in our case, because we’re a third-party trainer, we’re not a corporate, I’m not working for a corporation. I’m working for multiple corporations. In the past, if I do a training, I’m going to train one company and one group of people. That’s all I’m going to get in a day. And these days, sometimes I hit four different companies in a day and train four different groups of people. I could never do that before. So it’s just opened the door to so much. And if we look at where technology is going, and especially around virtual reality, and I really wish I could take you into our, we have a training amphitheater that we built in a virtual reality environment. And the avatars look just like our trainers and our mouth’s mood and somewhat like minority report. We can pull a video in, or pull a framework in, or grab a slide. The future is, it’s insane what we’re going to be able to do. And as instructors, we’re going to be more important than we’ve ever been before. Go back to what I said earlier. eLearning is important. We get it, we understand that companies spend billions of dollars in it and nobody finishes it. And that’s dirty little secret. Everybody’s who’s an L&D knows it. Even though we need to have it, we got out of those libraries. I get it. But this is why trainers are more important, because when you’re in the classroom and you’re training, and you’re doing a great job, you truly are impacting people. And they’re staying connected to the training all the way through to the end. That to me is where virtual training is really earning its stripes. And I’ll just go back to the environment. If you’re a person and you say I want a better environment, I want a better place for my kids, I want a better future, I just say this again, 90% less emissions, less CO2 in the environment through virtual than through in a physical classroom. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth making that investment from time to time, but if this is something that you care about and everybody’s got different things that they care about, but if you care about this, then it just doesn’t make much sense to, unless, like I said, you’ve got some classrooms like your new hires, it just doesn’t make sense to spend the money and spend the carbon on the environment, otherwise, when you can deliver just as high as an ROI in a virtual classroom.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah, for sure. It seems like there’s benefits all around, whether it’s for the bottom line or for individuals, or like you said, even the environment. So, super exciting. Thank you again, Jeb, for speaking with us today. How can our listeners get in touch with you after today’s episode?

Jeb Blount:

Sure. My company is called Sales Gravy. So you can find us at salesgravy.com, G-R-A-V-Y. There’s some people that live north of the Mason-Dixon line that’ll put an “E” in there, but it’s gravy, like gravy. So that’s a weird name. People don’t forget. It’s salesgravy.com. And my email address is jeb, J-E-B, @salesgravy.com. That’s jeb@salesgrippy.com. If you want to connect with me directly. And you can find my brand new book. It’s a handbook for how to deliver virtual training. It’s called Virtual Training. So really easy to remember. And you can grab the audio book on Audible or anywhere audio books are sold. And the hard copy or the digital book is available at Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, and wherever books are sold.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Great. Jeb, thank you so much for speaking with us today and really showing us the full potential of virtual training.

Jeb Blount:

Thank you.

Sarah Gallo:

For more insight on all things virtual training and to view today’s highlights from the episode and animation, check out the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

And as always, please take a moment to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. We love hearing from you. Until next time.

Speaker 1:

If you have feedback about this episode, or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com. Or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry Podcast.