Measurable impact on sales associate expertise
Sleep Country boosts sales teams’ knowledge with innovative product training
How this specialty retailer uses Axonify to drive bottom-line growth and enhance the customer experience
17%
product knowledge lift
75%
user participation
Users log into Axonify 11.8x/month
22%
increase in sales initiatives
Significant reduction in missed sales opportunities
3
successful product launches
Smoother execution of strategic initiatives
The problem: Keeping pace with constant change on the retail frontline—and avoiding information overload
Sleep Country, a national mattress retailer, faced a challenge familiar to many growing businesses: keeping its frontline sales associates informed and engaged in the face of constant change. With frequent product launches, evolving sales strategies and a diverse range of sleep offerings, ensuring consistent knowledge and application across all locations took a lot of work; it was difficult for sales associates to keep their knowledge up-to-date and apply it effectively.
Jory Solomon, Sleep Country’s National Director of Sales Training, knew traditional training methods—like sales meetings and workshops—weren’t enough to combat information overload and knowledge decay. While these methods provided initial training, they lacked the ongoing reinforcement necessary for long-term knowledge retention. Sales associates had difficulty retaining critical information, impacting their ability to present products effectively, apply new strategies and, ultimately, drive sales.
“The core problem we were dealing with was that there was just so much change. In fact, the only thing that was consistent was change,” said Solomon.
This lack of effective knowledge reinforcement led to inconsistent customer experiences, challenges in onboarding new hires and reduced sales effectiveness. Solomon’s leadership recognized the need for a solution that could deliver engaging training and provide continuous reinforcement in a manageable and measurable way despite the constant influx of new information.
About Sleep Country
Sleep Country is a specialty sleep retailer dedicated to helping people achieve a better night’s sleep. With over 280 stores across Canada, Sleep Country offers a wide selection of mattresses, pillows, bedding and sleep accessories from top brands. The company is committed to providing expert advice, personalized service and a comfortable in-store and online shopping experience.
The solution: Personalized learning and enablement that’s engaging and delivers data-driven supervisor insights
Sleep Country needed a creative approach to keeping its sales associates on top of their game, especially since new products and strategies were constantly introduced. That’s where Axonify came in.
Axonify’s unique approach to learning and enablement takes into account the realities of frontline work—employees are dispersed across shifts, locations, regions and often countries, without company email addresses, making consistent training a challenge. Axonify’s engaging bite-sized learning uses AI to serve up personalized paths so the information is highly relevant. Instead of long, one-and-done training sessions, Axonify delivers information in quick bursts to make it easier for busy sales associates to access what they need to know when it matters, even when they only have a few minutes to spare.
The use of points, rewards and leaderboards in the platform makes learning fun and motivating, especially attractive to the sales team at Sleep Country.
“The cool thing about Axonify is with the gaming and the point system, it appealed to our commission sales associate. That natural competitiveness fed into it,” revealed Solomon.
Coaching opportunities are also easier to spot with leader insights that show who’s excelling and who might need more support, something that Solomon’s teams were keen to incorporate.
“If somebody is having a challenge or a difficulty on a particular topic, it really highlights that for the supervisors,” he said. “So when they’re doing a store visit and they’re going to have a conversation with somebody about coaching, they have one or two specific things they know that associate needs some additional help with.”
“When supervisors are doing a store visit, and they’re going to have a coaching conversation, they have one or two specific things that they know that the associate needs additional help with. [Axonify] really highlights that for the supervisors.”
– Jory Solomon, Director of Sales Training, Sleep Country
The results: Hitting snooze on product knowledge gaps
Solomon also shared that implementation has been a breeze, with support from Axonify to ensure administrators not only understood the tool but how to optimize it for their purposes.
“We had amazing help from the team at Axonify. They really helped train our admin teams to work on the background of the system and helped us work through building our first few modules. They showed us a lot of the stuff in the behind-the-scenes learning and how to present questions so that it stays in the brain longer and reinforces more. And then truthfully, once the day came to launch, we hit the button. From that time on, it’s been extremely smooth.”
Even more than just smooth sailing, the team is seeing a significant impact.
“We found that knowledge growth has gone up in all of our topics by roughly eight percent,” shared Solomon. “Even more impressive on our product knowledge pieces, where it becomes a little more technical and there’s a lot more to remember, that’s grown by 17%.”
When it came to keeping associates engaged with training that informs without the overload, Axonify delivered on that front, too.
“We’ve seen a 75% participation rate. And even more impressive than that is those participating do so almost 12 times a month. It’s become part of a habit,” said Solomon. Product launches have also become more streamlined and successful thanks to associates who are properly prepared with necessary product knowledge and the confidence to share it with customers.
“We’ve launched three separate new products that have been reinforced with Axonify. And all three of them launched very, very successfully,” boasted Solomon. “Not just people knowing how to use the product, but the result at the end of those launches went very well. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to the frontline staff knowing the product better.”
Deliver and reinforce sales knowledge to make a bottom-line impact
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