How to get everyone “plugged in” during a training session and make it really impactful? That’s probably one of the biggest questions corporate trainers face. It gets even more challenging in large organizations spread across several offices.

Leonardo (Leo) Silva, ‎LATAM Sales Training Partner at Facebook, has an answer. He solved this challenge with Kahoot! and game-based learning. According to Leo, this was a strategic way to keep people involved and paying attention to the content of training sessions. Here’s how Kahoot! helped him disrupt sales training at Facebook LATAM and reach maximum engagement in his sessions.

Sales training, virtual teams – how to get everyone “plugged in”?

In his role, Leo collaborates with the Facebook LATAM sales managers and cross-functional teams to understand their learning needs and work with global program managers to build training programs aligned with those needs. He runs training sessions every week with participants from several locations – São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Miami.

When you train teams remotely, it’s even more challenging to get everyone engaged. You can’t really track how “plugged in” participants are if you’re not in the same room with them. According to Leo, Kahoot! was a great solution to this: it helped him bring people closer together by getting them excited to compete with each other.

Adults enjoy learning through playing

Leo tried game-based learning methods before – but it took a while for him to find the perfect solution:

“One of our learning partners is a big believer in learning through playing, so, before we discovered Kahoot!, we made some attempts to gamify training. The solution was far from optimal: it consumed a lot of time to print sheets for participants, install software locally on our computers, get approval from our IT for everything. Besides, I had to analyze all the results manually, instead defining winners in the real time.”

When Leo tried Kahoot! for the first time in 2016, it immediately became his go-to training tool thanks to its ease of use and flexibility. Adult professionals enjoyed learning through games just as much as school students! Starting from the very first sessions with Kahoot!, Leo got very positive feedback from the teams.

It works even if teams aren’t in the same room

Leo uses Kahoot! to train both co-located and distributed sales teams. It helps him and other trainers review how well content was learned, with a mix of easy and difficult questions, makes it easy to recap on the info, interact with the audience, answer their questions and make sure that they effectively learn.

Based on his experience, here’s what Leo thinks makes Kahoot! so helpful for trainers:

• Saves time: creating a quiz for your session only takes minutes. During the session, neither you, nor the trainees need to install or configure anything.
• Gives immediate feedback: you can see the results and immediately spot if some questions need additional explanation.
• Engages any audience: trainees pay more attention because they really want to win!
• Improves knowledge retention: the interactive format helps people remember more of the content covered in the session.

More teams at Facebook LATAM started Kahoot!’ing

In addition to training sessions, Leo’s colleagues played Kahoot! in a sales conference with all Latin America employees, with more than 300 participants joining the game. Leo described it as “one of the best experiences with Kahoot!” and said that the energy in the room was amazing.

After his team’s success with using Kahoot! for training, several other departments adopted it for their sessions with clients and in events. For example, the Marketing Science team started playing it in their global internal training, so people all over the world learned about Kahoot!

Besides, Facebook LATAM often uses Kahoot! at offsites, answering questions about people on the team, so everyone gets to know their colleagues a little bit better and have some fun.

“Sales training, meetings, events, team offsites – in all of these scenarios, Kahoot! connects the audience and keeps everyone engaged,” Leo concluded.