UL is a global independent safety science company with more than a century of expertise innovating safety solutions from the public adoption of electricity to new breakthroughs in sustainability, renewable energy and nanotechnology. Dedicated to promoting safe living and working environments, UL helps safeguard
people, products and places in important ways, facilitating trade and providing peace of mind.

UL University is the learning and development organization for UL that exists to drive a competitive advantage for UL through people.

UL chose to partner with HCLTech to create a CRM training program that would efficiently facilitate teaching UL sales teams CRM and business processes across the globe. To do this, HCLTech developed a Train-the-Trainer program that allowed 60 UL trainers to learn and understand the CRM system and
roll out effective training to their 600 sales representatives.

To make the training program work, HCLTech’s education team and the UL University team came up with a blended learning approach that included instructor- led training and also a series of videos that were created as pre-learning materials. Taking a blended learning approach minimized the time that sales people were in the classroom. This allowed participants to understand the theory around the sales process and how the tool enabled the process to allow them to get a visual demonstration on how to leverage and use the tool. It also allowed them to apply the skills that they learned during the class.

“HCLTech and UL University had to be very creative in how we created this learning experience for the participants,” says TJ Covington, Global Learning & Development Program Manager at UL. “A blended approach seemed like the best solution as this is a change initiative. It’s very important that we have our
sales leaders in front of the class, not only teaching the class, but really inspiring and educating and helping to lead the change initiative.”

The training program also included rolling out a social collaboration tools to enhance the experience for trainers and employees. During the training rollout, Yammer served as a repository for ongoing questions regarding the deployment of training and a go-to place for real-time information. Both HCLTech and UL had a team member dedicated to monitoring and moderating the site. Share-Point was also utilized to function as an archive where all questions and answers were stored for reference.