Every company has them, the employee who just gets it. The salesperson who knows exactly what to say. The veteran who handles difficult situations without breaking a sweat. The top performer whose numbers make everyone else wonder, “Okay, what is his secret?”
The problem is that you can’t duplicate people. Or can you? Not literally (that would be weird), but you can identify what makes your best employees successful and share those behaviors, skills and knowledge with everyone else.
That’s exactly what Lease End set out to do.
As the auto finance company rapidly scaled its sales force, leaders didn’t just want more salespeople: They wanted GREAT salespeople. Using Tyfoom, Lease End turned daily microlearning into a workforce engagement strategy that disseminated the habits and knowledge of its highest performers across the sales floor.
And it worked! Lease End’s #1 sales performer last year would rank just 10th this year.
How did they do it?
The Growing Pains of Growing Fast
Lease End is disrupting the traditional auto lease buyout journey by helping drivers purchase their leased vehicles from the comfort of their couches. No dealership visit required. Sales reps digitally handle paperwork, DMV requirements and financing, turning what can be a nightmarish dealership experience into a pain-free process.
“When our sales team is on point, lessees only need 10 minutes to get through the buy out, which would take up to 4 hours at a dealership,” said Trevor Gosar, Vice President of Sales. “But there are a lot of nuances that each salesperson must know in order to be quick without making mistakes.”
And Lease End needed a lot more salespeople who knew those nuances. FAST.
The company grew its salesforce from 35 to 180 reps in just 18 months – an astounding 500% growth – with dozens of new hires coming into the organization each month.
Rapid expansion can be exciting, but it creates a tricky workforce engagement problem: How do you bring new people in without lowering the performance of the team as a whole?
Lease End needed a way to get new employees up to speed quickly while maintaining its consistency, culture and customer experience across multiple locations.
What If You Could Clone Your Best Employee?
Think about your best salespeople. What makes them successful? Maybe they ask better questions. Maybe they understand the product inside and out. Maybe they know how to handle objections without sounding like they’re reading from a script. Maybe they’re consistent. Maybe they simply approach every day with a different mindset.
Whatever it is, that knowledge becomes incredibly valuable when it can be transferred to someone else.
Lease End worked with Tyfoom to create a system for identifying the best practices of its highest performers and distributing those lessons across the organization through daily microlearning.
“If we understand the data and we’re tracking what the highest performers are doing and how they’re doing it,” explained Gosar, “then we can repeat that, we can scale that.”
Traditional workforce engagement often focuses on getting employees to participate. Lease End went a step further. It used engagement as a vehicle for performance. Employees weren’t simply consuming content. They were repeatedly being exposed to the skills, behaviors and mindset Lease End wanted to see replicated on the sales floor.
Little by little, the gap between the company’s best performers and everyone else began to shrink.
From #1 to #10
On one Lease End sales team, the top-performing salesperson from the previous year would now rank as only the 10th-highest performer this year. Not because that employee suddenly got worse. Everyone else got better.
“So we have 10 individuals in the company this year that are performing better than our highest performer did last year,” said Gosar. “Tyfoom has literally helped us clone our best employees and share best practices across the entire organization.”
Instead of measuring the success of workforce engagement solely by whether employees completed training, Lease End could see the impact where it mattered: On the sales floor. The organization’s performance ceiling had effectively become the new benchmark for everyone else. All while the company was onboarding dozens of employees every month.
Rapid hiring usually pummels productivity because experienced employees and managers have to devote more time to teaching newbies. But Lease End was able to add employees while simultaneously raising the performance of the whole team – a rare feat indeed! How was this possible?
Two Minutes a Day Adds Up
Lease End didn’t put everyone in week-long seminars. Instead, the daily commitment was tiny.
As part of its revamped training strategy, team members watched two-minute training videos every day. Instead of dumping all the information on employees in one go, important concepts and best practices were planned out in a playlist and continually reinforced.
That consistency became an important part of the company’s workforce engagement strategy.
“As good as I believe I am at training, I am not consistent; I’m not predictable. There are things on a daily basis that affect me, whether it be home life or my energy level that day. Tyfoom keeps training consistent, predictable and scalable, which is the only reason we were able to go from where we were 18 months ago to where we are today,” explained Gosar.
The lesson doesn’t depend on whether a manager has time that morning. It doesn’t change based on which trainer delivers it. And employees in different locations aren’t getting different versions of the same message.
Everyone gets the reinforcement they need, every day. Over time, those two minutes become part of the rhythm of work.
“You get a skill set, a mindset,” said Gosar. “Training every single day will keep you on the right path. Now it’s a treat to walk the sales floor in the morning. Everyone’s got their phone out and they’re watching their daily video before the day begins.”
Training Becomes Coaching
Daily microlearning also gave Lease End a way to intervene when performance started slipping. Instead of waiting for a formal training session or asking a manager to reteach an entire concept, leaders could direct employees toward specific content addressing the problem they were experiencing.
One salesperson, for example, was struggling to handle customer objections.
“We recently had a rep who was struggling with prospects’ objections,” related Gosar, “but he turned his performance around after completing the ‘Objection Handling 101’ badge. And that was the catalyst for him to get through that sales slump. Without that badge, we probably would have lost him.”
If leaders can identify the skills gap and give the employee the right resource at the right moment, they have an opportunity to improve performance before frustration turns into turnover. Training becomes less about correcting failure and more about continuously coaching people toward better performance.
Creating a Culture That Wants to Win
Of course, you can’t create a team of top performers with sales techniques alone. Performance is also driven by culture.
Lease End wanted employees who were coachable, hungry to improve and willing to hold themselves accountable. Daily learning helped reinforce those expectations until they became part of the everyday employee experience.
“Naturally, we attract people we want to be around. People who are like we are, or what we want to become,” explained Gosar. “Tyfoom has developed that culture of accountability and production and it attracts the people who hunger for more, who naturally want to improve on a daily basis. These are the individuals who will do their best in any situation they’re placed in and really help a company grow.”
When learning happens every day with consistent workforce engagement, improvement becomes normal.
Employees aren’t waiting for the annual training day to think about getting better. They’re receiving small reminders every morning that reinforce what good performance looks like, what the company values and what’s expected of them.
Training stops feeling like something separate from work and becomes part of how work gets done.
Making Great Performance Repeatable
“The dream of any business owner or company leader is being able to take their top performer and recreate them 20 times over. Tyfoom gave us that. This is how we trained our top performers; these are the attributes they have,” said Gosar.
That’s the real opportunity behind workforce engagement. The goal isn’t simply to get employees to click on training. It’s to identify the knowledge, habits and behaviors that make your best people great and make those lessons available to everyone.
For Lease End, that approach helped the company grow from 35 to 180 sales reps without watching productivity fall apart. Instead, the performance bar moved higher. And now every new employee gets access to the same knowledge from Day One.
As Gosar put it, “Tyfoom is how we scale our people. It gives every new hire a shot at being our next top performer – because they’re learning from the best, every single day.”
You may not be able to literally copy your best employee, but with the right workforce engagement strategy, you can get surprisingly close.
See how you can take what’s working for you and make a whole lot more of it by scheduling a meeting to speak with a Tyfoom training consultant today!