Field sales e-learning solutions focus primarily on increasing the speed-to-competency for new procedures and product offerings, enabling a more productive and prosperous remote sales force. Sales-focused e-learning generally includes asynchronous content for IT application and soft skill training, synchronous learning (live virtual meetings/classrooms), community and collaboration tools, and skill assessment tools to track and measure ROI (e.g., time-to-competency on a new product offering, increase in product sales due to just-in-time training).

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Organizations should look to sales-focused e-learning to tie into marketing e-learning initiatives, enabling more effective product launches and lead management (see table). Successful players in the field sales market include Brainshark, Presedia, and Presenter, which offer the ability to produce, manage, and deliver training through a mix of rich media and audio, enabling field sales representatives to train on their own time and play back training as needed.

During 2002, traditional LMS vendors such as Docent and SmartForce will continue to forge ahead in the sales training market via tighter integration with recent acquisitions (e.g., Docent's acquisition of content creation vendor gForce; SmartForce's acquisition of sales performance vendor IMPAXselling.com). During 2003-04, LMS platform vendors will increasingly build on their sales-focused technologies and build direct application programming interfacess into CRM applications.

During 2004-05, companies should expect CRM and ERP vendors (e.g., PeopleSoft, Siebel) to deliver sales-focused and, eventually, enterprise LMS platforms. To prepare for this transition, IT groups must ensure that architecture frameworks evolve to include learning services exposed as embedded components within applications, content, community, and other types of collaborative systems.

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