Flügger triples sales on key campaign and builds learning culture with Sana

Challenge

Flügger is a company of 2,500 people with a 125-year history, but did not have a strong learning and development program (L&D). In order to meet their big strategic and commercial goals, and bridge competency gaps within the organization they needed a more structured approach to L&D.

Outcome

Flügger is building its L&D function from the bottom-up with the help of Sana’s end-to-end platform. Not only have they enhanced sales capabilities and leadership skills across the company, they are using the platform to inch closer to their loftiest commercial goals, and make training an integral, continuous part of employees’ daily work lives.

Building a learning culture from the bottom-up to bridge competency gaps

Flügger is both a small business and a big one, all at the same time. We have 2,500 employees. We’re also family-owned and small enough to build real relationships, bringing a personal touch. The business really matters to everyone; there's a lot of heart at Flügger.

But we have taken a lot of “small company” habits with us as we’ve grown. One of those is that we haven’t traditionally been a learning organization. One piece of recurring feedback from our employees was they wanted more L&D. But we realized that our traditional side-by-side approach to learning was not going to work.

In order to make the big leaps and achieve our strategic priorities, we needed to bridge our employees’ capability gaps, and better support ongoing employee development—particularly in sales and leadership. Those capabilities won’t come by themselves. That’s where Sana comes in.

We have really begun our L&D efforts from the bottom, and have been working our way upwards, starting with company-wide compliance training to get everyone into the system. Now, we host all of our training sessions and courses in Sana, like mandatory GDPR and IT security training, onboarding, and sales and retail campaign training. We also use Sana to host a toolbox for managers, templates, and HR processes. We have everything in there.

Idea generation, content creation and translation at lightning speed

Our strategy is to make the business owners the content creators for our training and courses. But you needed a PhD to put up a single piece of content in the system we were using before—a mix of Excel sheets and lots of manual work. And our employees are not digitally savvy. Whatever we chose needed to work and be simple. Sana’s UI was the best we saw.

The simplicity, combined with the AI tools, were also important because about a quarter of our employees have dyslexia. Features like Sana’s AI writing assistant are allowing the business owners to easily pull together courses and materials, so employees can start learning quickly.

Sana’s AI content translation feature is the second big reason we chose the platform. We have blueprinted commercial organizations in six different countries, and English is not yet a corporate language. We need the different versions of our courses to function smoothly—so we can manage follow-up for every language, and so we don’t have to develop the same content from scratch in all countries.

Our customer support functions in Sweden are taking content from Denmark, translating it automatically, and are then 80% done with the content—instead of starting from scratch. And the whole process takes 10-20 minutes. It’s now possible for us to handle the entire translation process internally at a lower cost because we don’t need to rely on external translation services.

We’ve gotten some of the usual resistance by introducing Sana; people are often resistant to new systems and tools. But content creation is just so easy. They all have had the realization that: “Wow, it's easier than PowerPoint.”

Now we have about 50 active creators at Flügger, who have made more than 450 courses since January 2023. We are producing content and generating ideas so quickly thanks to Sana’s AI editing features. It used to take us four times as long to create our annual compliance training, and our completion rate is now 99.6%. It’s extraordinary.

Structured learning and development at Flügger for the first time

For us, the challenge with adopting a new approach to L&D is not the tech or the platform. It is taking a commercially oriented group of people, and making training as tangible and practical—as well as sales- and product-oriented—as possible.

The most potential is on the commercial side. We did ‘mystery shopping’ in several markets to identify differences in sales approaches, and pinpoint areas for improvement. It gave us valuable insights into our sales process around the timing of sales questions, and making the dialogue more proactive and less pushy. Through this research, it became very clear where we excelled and where we didn’t. We know that if we can develop our capabilities in sales—both in retail and B2B—the potential is just massive.

We have used the results from the ‘mystery shopping’ to create tailored training programs in Sana that help salespeople learn the right core capabilities and product competency that we identified, and close the knowledge gaps. We have 1,500 employees, and a large chunk of that is sales, so this is an important focus area for us.

Many of our employees are very knowledgeable about our products, and proud of them. But they're not that comfortable “selling”. The training is helping them know how to take product knowledge into a sales dialogue without feeling discomfort. They feel like they’re experts and can answer any customer questions—without being the pushy salesperson they dread being.

The other big focus area for us in Sana is leadership development. We want to create a culture where training is a natural and integral part of what we do. And part of that is helping managers continuously improve their skills, so they can help us deliver on our strategic goals.

Being a sales manager requires a different set of skills compared to other leadership roles within the company. So we focus on developing those skills using a combination of personalized self-paced training, followed by interactive live Q&A sessions to answer any questions they have. We are also using courses to help them understand and feel informed about the overall strategy. It's a big win being able to run both live and self-paced training directly in Sana.

It’s hard to know for sure whether sales training directly leads to an increase in sales because there are multiple factors at play. But we think that’s the case because we get feedback that the training is important, and plays a big role in helping us reach our commercial goals.

Tripling sales with targeted training

We discovered a “secret sauce” for making our L&D efforts tangible and practical. It’s embedding the training responsibility within departments that employees already respect for their expertise.

We have a retail campaign for our Dekso interior paint once a year. This year, we did a practical and targeted course in Sana to teach salespeople how to bring the product into sales conversations, and remind them about the campaign. It did much better this year—even though last year’s campaign was longer and the markdown was bigger.

If you ask retail managers, they’ll say it was because of the training. The course was taught by a colleague they speak to every day, and that made the difference, helping them retain the knowledge. She was a product expert for the Danish market. She speaks their language, and knows exactly what they need to hear. We used Sana’s narration feature, so this familiar voice speaks over the course content, and she’s front and center. Our employees want to hear from someone they respect. They don’t want to listen to me talk about sales.

The reason why we love this example is because measuring the return-on-investment for training is hard. But we proved that with fairly little resources, we can have measurable success in reaching our targets. And we just smashed the potential out of it. The retail stores that did the training tripled their sales.

Making continuous learning a daily habit at Flügger

We see such potential in continuing to use Sana to meet our commercial goals, and develop our leadership and sales force. But beyond that, Sana is bringing us closer to a goal we have for our culture and ways of working—to develop a consistent training culture, where learning is as routine as customer service.

I would like to make micro-learning—short 5-10 minute sessions—a routine for every salesperson. It could be something they do in between serving customers on the shop floor. Or when they have 10 minutes to spare. Or it could be turning to a colleague and asking for feedback on the sale they just did.

It should feel like a natural part of the work we do. Because in order to increase people’s capabilities, you have to be learning all the time. Things can be forgotten quickly or they don’t stay top-of-mind. My goal has always been having the right tool that would make learning intuitive and easy, and help us build that culture. And now we have it with Sana.