‘The Cube’: How Natus Medical Scales Training Globally to Direct Sales & Distribution Partners

At Natus Medical, the sales enablement strategy is built on ‘The Cube’, an overarching program providing onboarding, continuous sales training, new product launches, and sales meeting training and support.  Now celebrating its seventh year, Brainshark’s platform is at the core of The Cube, providing online and video training, instructor-led training and reference materials to their direct sales teams and distribution partners worldwide.

Dr. Kathleen Hill, AuD, global sales training program manager, initially rolled out The Cube to sales and clinical specialists in the U.S. and Canada for the company’s Hearing & Balance product family. In 2019, Kathleen was chartered to expand the program to the Newborn Care and Neuro product markets, and to do it globally.

Shortly afterwards, the decision was made to further expand The Cube to enable and train Natus Medical’s worldwide distribution partner network. With Brainshark, Kathleen knew she had the right platform to meet these challenges, saying, “It is hard to believe what started as a concept has now become an essential tool we could not do without.”

Scaling The Cube globally comes with challenges. Each country sells different products and have their own selling methodology, market conditions and regulatory guidelines to consider. To handle the demand for each country, Kathleen and team relied on Brainshark’s guest authoring capabilities; working with the clinical specialists in each country to deliver customized training.  “It’s not hard at all with Brainshark,” says Kathleen, adding that the countries like the fact that the content isn’t so “cookie cutter.”

Natus Medical now offer courses in German, French, Spanish and Italian. China is also online with the sales team quickly creating content for their teams in Asia. Kathleen also relies heavily on microlearning.  For certain products, something as simple as a software update can be made up of 25 videos, but they are all manageable in length, making it more “digestible” for the reps.

Natus Medical’s network of distribution partners are spread out across the Americas, EMEA and APAC.  The partners share similar training requirements as the direct team – such as the need for continuous training to keep up-to-date and sell more efficiently – but there are differences too.  Because the partners sell competitive products, Natus Medical creates different versions of the trainings for their direct sales team versus distribution partners. Kathleen says, “The beauty of Brainshark is you can build the structure for this on the backend; it’s not hard at all to customize.”

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Prior to launching The Cube, traditional training methods took 1-2 years for reps to achieve a desired sales competency and productivity. Today, a rep is fully productive and hitting sales targets and quotas after 6 months of intense training.  In addition, Natus has reduced the time and cost of training by utilizing remote learning with The Cube and Brainshark.

The Cube has truly become part of the Natus Medical vernacular and has a life of its own.  With the pandemic shifting virtually all learning online, and the expansion of The Cube globally to all product markets and distribution partners, Brainshark is now seen as a “mandatory, must-have, can’t do without it” solution, according to Kathleen.  All their teams are on the same page, because with Brainshark’s regionalized, on-demand training available 24 hours a day “there is no time zone.”

The success of The Cube has led to expanded usage of Brainshark; for example, CRM training, “how to” videos for submitting a PTO request or creating a job requisition, and many more.

• The need to scale globally for the entire direct sales organization and distribution partners
• Create custom training requirements for each country
• Keeping reps up to date with clinical, product and sales training