Sales Soft Skills

PROBLEM

• The organization had never created a program that relied on soft skills

• Soft skills are critical in sales—but notoriously hard to teach and assess asynchronously

• We needed to prepare learners with zero experience for junior sales roles in just three months—without live instruction or live assessments

PROCESS & SOLUTIONS

• Developed a capstone assessment simulating real-world selling and interviewing:

  • Multi-modal content supported diverse learning preferences

  • Learners created a slide deck summarizing key learnings and reflecting on case studies

  • Learners recorded video responses to interview prompts, practicing verbal delivery, confidence, and on-camera presence

  • Human graders provided actionable, personalized feedback

• Anticipated common student challenges and addressed them by:

  • Writing clear, detailed instructions for challenging capstone submissions

  • Creating supporting GIFs and images to guide learners through new formats

  • Led beta testing of the entire program—the organization’s first full-program learner test after years of advocating for this approach

  • Targeted testing of capstone instructions and materials with learners matching target personas to ensure clarity

• This innovative approach:

  • Solved challenges unique to the organization’s first asynchronous soft skills course

  • Established a template used for future programs

OUTCOMES

• Delivered on time and launched successfully

• Provided a scalable framework later adapted for other soft skills programs

• Marked the first time a course was fully beta tested end-to-end—an approach I had championed for years and which influenced QA processes

By writing effective instructions and leading rigorous beta testing, we helped learners build real-world sales communication skills entirely online.