Phillips 66 Lubricants’ mission is to “keep the world running smoothly.” The company meets that goal by developing hundreds of formulations from high-quality base oils for thousands of applications in multiple industries.
Yet, when it came to educating its sales network about its product, Phillips 66 ran into some friction. Product information was either locked behind a password-protected extranet or shared via text-heavy PowerPoint documents in multi-hour in-person training sessions.
The company’s internal sales team and global distribution network lacked the up-to-date product information and training they needed to understand and sell both existing products and the groundbreaking new product lines launched from its research and development division.
In an effort to reduce this training friction, the company began looking for a learning management system (LMS) that could meet two key goals: deliver mobile-ready training to a vast network of salespeople, and deliver training in a franchise-style model with a central corporate hub and 70 field operators.
The company’s breakthrough to better product training came when Phillips 66 Lubricants leveraged Schoox’s learning management and engagement modules.
Overcoming Product Training Limitations
“Our introduction to Schoox began with a request for a better training program from our distributor’s sales and marketing team,” said Bill Brown, Director of Marketing Operations. “Our former training program was not mobile and so was not readily accessible to our external network. It also had other limitations, like no way to track training progress.
Our primary goal was to get sales enablement information and compliance courses to our marketing and distributor network, and to ensure that their sales teams were knowledgeable about all of our existing products and any new lubricants we develop. The training solution also needed to be intuitive, engaging, and able to track compliance.”
Bill says that three main capabilities convinced him that Schoox was the LMS Phillips 66 Lubricants needed. “We proved that a single administrator can deliver compliance, product, and marketing training to a vast network of managers, distributors, and sales people thanks to the robust Schoox LMS.”
“Schoox is easy to understand and use, it offers mobile accessibility, and it can support a franchise model structure. I can drive training out to our more than 430 distributors in 76 countries where their assigned unit managers can manage training within their own business.”
Accelerating Course Creation with Schoox Support
When the company began setting up Schoox, its training team included an LMS administrator. However, that role moved to another part of the company, and Bill was left on his own to manage and execute the implementation of the program. Support from Schoox helped him accomplish his goals and allowed him to launch the platform within six months.
“Schoox sent a solution architect and implementation specialist to give me weekly lessons on using the application,” explained Bill. “Thanks to that level of support everything moved along well. Before I knew it my team was converting text-heavy PowerPoint decks into videos with animated slides and voiceovers. With this new approach, we were able to produce content segments in smaller, digestible chunks that made it easier for learners to grasp.”
Today, Bill continues to build and distribute up-to-date courses and virtual instructor-lead training (ILT) sessions through the application. To date, he’s created four curricula and 121 courses, and uploaded over 350 forms of new content.
“The entire course creation process is simple and straightforward. I just pick a course template, name the course, set up the criteria, and dragged and drop content from our library. If a guy like me can figure it out, anybody can do it.”
Tapping into the “Schoox X-Factor”
“The Schoox X-factor for us has been the ability to deliver a leading-edge, mobile, and agile LMS that allows us to quickly put content into the hands of our marketers and sales people in a very relevant and current way,” said Bill.
In fact, every department in the company benefits from the Schoox training program. Sales team members gain easy access to all of the current product sales information. The company can track everyone’s training progress and compliance. Marketers can develop and upload their own training programs, and push them out to their teams, manage the courses, and track performance.
“Now that we know that we have nearly unlimited training capabilities, we have a lot more we want to accomplish with Schoox,” noted Bill. “We’ve been very successful — and we’ll continue to expand our training program to ensure it stays as leading-edge as our products.”
Key Takeaways:
- 6 months to Schoox implementation
- 121 courses created, 30 delivered in Spanish
- Automated and timely reporting to keep management informed
- Provided the capability to deliver 15 Virtual Instructor led sessions during COVID-19 lockdown to over 4,200 attendees
