How Kahoot! helps Systel with their sales training and coaching

As the Director of Managed Services & Business Solutions for Systel, Kevin leads a sales force of roughly 40 people, primarily in the Carolinas and the Atlanta metro area in the US. With Kahoot!, Kevin can create engaging training content for 40 sales reps and build company culture in virtual happy hours for more than 200 employees.

Kevin was first introduced to Kahoot! by the learning and development group at his previous workplace, where he noticed a significant uptake in engagement among learners. When he first moved to Systel, he thought that Kahoot! would be a great tool to integrate into their sales training for that very reason. “We first introduced it at a sales meeting and saw a massive uptick in engagement. Since they knew questions were coming, they took better notes.”

Improve knowledge retention

Originally, Systel would bring everybody to the corporate headquarters and conduct the training in person, but because of COVID-19, they had to adapt to their new virtual environment. “Since I’m not in the room with somebody, and I can’t necessarily read their body language when I’m conducting training and coaching. How can I do a quick check for understanding?”

He wanted to have the possibility to check for knowledge when coaching his sales team, making sure that they fully absorbed the knowledge he shared. Kevin decided to use Kahoot! as a part of his training sessions, as it makes it possible for him to check knowledge retention and understanding with true or false questions and other question types. Kahoot! is now incorporated in onboarding material for new hires and sales training.

“We use PowerPoint, and then roleplay and practice. In the PowerPoint part, we integrate kahoots to make sure that they’re getting the foundational aspects of what we’re presenting. Kahoot! has primarily been a way to stay engaged, and then recently, we’ve evolved it to reinforce whatever training we’re doing. Kahoot! makes it easier to check for understanding and makes it possible for learners to improve on a specific skill. I check the results right after and go back at the end of the training to repeat that topic.”

Friendly competition turns learning into entertainment

Kevin hosts kahoots live on Zoom. He uses either a pre-existing kahoot from the library and customizes it to save time or builds his own with a specific theme. He has experienced that a way to captivate everyone’s attention and engagement is to share a fun fact, add a goofy joke, or add music to the presentation. Kevin claims that music can improve peoples’ moods, but if you do it subtly, it can also reinforce key messages.

According to Kevin, one of the main reasons why Kahoot! became a perfect add-in to their sales training, is the way it also encourages competition. As he trains sales representatives, who are very competitive people, Kahoot! makes it possible to heat up the competition.

Kevin shared: “You can make learning fun, and you can tie it into a show. Make learning become entertainment.”

Strengthen the company culture

But it is not only the onboarding and sales training that was affected during the lockdown. Systel also had another challenge; parts of the company were more disconnected from each other. In order to keep people connected and find a way to strengthen the organizational culture, Kahoot! also become a part of their Virtual Friday Happy Hour.

In addition to training sessions, they play kahoots every Friday with the sales team. Once a month, they get the entire company together to simulate the connections between employees in the company. In the beginning, more than 200 participants joined the kahoot session, which made it possible for people that usually did not meet more than twice a year to see each other more often.

“It’s been the key piece for us to encourage engagement and keep people together as we’ve been more and more disconnected. I used to see people only twice a year, and now I see them every Friday.”