Case Study: Toll Global Express invests in gamified online learning platform

Toll Global Express, the logistics and transportation division of freight company Toll Group, has digitised its learning and development programs to support hiring managers with onboarding and scale the programs nationally.

Pre-Covid the business conducted eight instructor led, face-to-face training sessions for 300 sales staff weekly, before lockdown demanded a remote way of delivering employee development.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Michelle Goyen, divisional training & development manager and Ashleigh Wendt, training and development coordinator at Toll Global Express to discuss the organisation’s deployment of Salesforce’s gamified learning platform Sales Enablement.

According to Goyen, “The impetus for change was that we really wanted to create a robust, repeatable training and onboarding methodology to ensure that we were really delivering impactful, relevant training to our sales team of 300 plus. While at the same time, what we wanted to do was actually support our hiring managers in a more timely manner.”

Toll Global Express is deploying the Salesforce solution across three stages of learning, to deliver the right content when employees are ready to absorb it. All the material is developed in-house.

The first phase focuses on the Salesforce content, with reference to products, processes, tools and technologies, the second phase surrounds the sales capability framework and the third is the enhanced onboarding experience, said Wendt.

The gamified nature of the platform has transformed learning and development for the sales team said Goyen, as it plays on the competitive nature of the sales and marketing departments, and “introduced that corporate learning can be fun.”

Wendt described the gamification of the platform stating, “When you move up in the Sales Enablement ranks that the system has, they will receive a prize. We also have a leader board on all of the sales teams’ dashboards. And we present that in an information session we run once a month as well. So that keeps everyone wanting to move up the ranks. And it really encourages the teams to continue to learn and earn those points.”

Toll Global Express saw an 88 percent adoption among the sales team in the first three months, with 8000 modules completed by the sales team to date. The business also estimated a 10 percent uplift in speed-to-market for new employees.

“It's always hard to quantify exactly in the training space. But we are seeing some really, really positive results. And I only see that being emphasised with the phase two and phase three that we've spoken about. Nobody in our business is unhappy with the upskilling that's occurring through the platform,” said Goyen.

“No negative feedback,” Wendt added.

According to Goyen, Toll Group is also looking to expand the platform into other areas of the business.

“There are some other parts of our business who are very keen to go into Sales Enablement. At this stage my brief, or my remit is only the sales and marketing team, but we are looking at our customer excellence team and also some of our operational team. So I'm just working with HR at the moment to see how that would work and what would make sense for our business holistically,” she said.