Streamlining Financial Services Onboarding & Increasing Employee Retention

Modern Woodmen of America is a member-owned fraternal financial services organization. With over 700,000 members, the company has been securing futures since 1883. Modern Woodmen of America is the nation’s third-largest fraternal benefit society in terms of assets. Its representatives provide financial products to help members protect their families and their futures. These products help fund member programs, including social, educational, and volunteer activities that identify and meet local needs. Modern Woodmen of America has over 1000 representatives across 46 states.

Financial representatives are integral to the fraternal services organization and are widely spread across the United States. They are not only financial representatives to members but are custodians of a particular X factor—the organization’s unique brand and fraternal nature. It is important that the salesmen and women speak a consistent language. Specifically, three types of conversations, or sales scenarios, are imperative with every member client:

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• An introductory conversation, an elevator pitch
• Planning for Life, a sales need analysis 
• Favorable Introductions, leveraging momentum and success with referrals 

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With a clear vision of facilitating the sales training process, L&D Managers wanted better control of the training matrix to generate meaningful data and infer learners’ and mentors’ engagement, which contributes to the overall business goals and objectives. The original—and lengthy—process relied on YouTube as a medium to upload a video, generate a URL, and share it with the L&D team. This was usually recorded by the mentor. Modern Woodmen of America also needed to address a higher attrition rate; therefore, the organization was keen to infuse culture and motivate the sales force from the beginning.

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ELB Learning proposed Rehearsal, a video-based coaching and practice platform built to support and deliver sales training needs for Modern Woodmen of America. Leadership rolled out the learning tool to help the field managers and financial representatives. 

The key highlights of the implemented strategy:

• Learners have access to the three main modules through the Rehearsal platform. The video-based learning provides excellent clarity on the language, the pitch, and troubleshooting avenues for a comprehensive self-learning session. 
• Learners then practice, iterate, and generate responses to scenarios to gain confidence and get comfortable with these experiences in the real world. 
• They record themselves and can instantly share the recording with their mentors—all within the platform. It gives a structured process to work within—something not available with Youtube.
• Mentors provide feedback—either typed out or through a recorded video response. 
• Learners can complete the three crucial onboarding modules within a timeframe as their mentors prescribe and check progress. 
• L&D Managers import new participants each week and can instantly send across templated assignments.

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Learners experience a flexible learning program that can meet them wherever they are. At the same time, L&D managers can view engagement from learners and mentors to provide prompt feedback while learning remains continuous and consistent. The templated assignment feature helps L&D managers scale training quickly and efficiently. Learners navigate the curriculum and reevaluate their submissions with absolute ease, providing a conducive learning environment. 

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The simplified yet effective onboarding process fosters greater engagement and a sense of belonging with the company’s brand, culture, and values, improving employee retention. The organization successfully promotes training that keeps this specific language at the forefront of every sales pitch. 

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Modern Woodmen of America has 375 members utilizing Rehearsal at any given time. The organization is witnessing significant improvements with all stakeholders—-learners deliver better presentations that align with the brand, the feedback mechanism ensures mentors ramp up the time-to-productivity and time-to-proficiency of their team members, and the L&D team drives better learning through the ease of the tool and insights generated.  Through advanced analytics, L&D Managers can get a comprehensive overview of how many learners have commenced their learning path, recorded responses, and mentors’ involvement with mentees’ training program.

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The Future of Modern Woodmen of America with Rehearsal

“This learning platform has been instrumental in streamlining our sales training and onboarding process. The instant ability to run reports and see who is doing what and gathering information about how they like it and ways it has helped them—it’s been great for us.

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For the success we’ve had, we envision it evolving into a leadership training medium too. Training, recruitment language, practice, and more are things we want to expose our leadership team through Rehearsal. It is a clear winner!

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We are excited to try the AI feedback mechanism and experience what it adds to the learners’ journey.”
- Hannah Dingman, Education and Training Associate, Modern Woodmen of America

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