Seeding success: How TalentCards boosts DISAGRO’s field sales revenue

DISAGRO is one of Latin America’s biggest agriculture distributors, operating in eight countries, and championing technological innovation. With over 45 years in the business and nearly 5,000 employees worldwide, the company’s product portfolio spans seeds, fertilizers, disease-fighting fungicides, precision agriculture, and animal nutrition solutions.

Since 2021, Alex Garcia, DISAGRO’s Marketing Excellence Manager, has used TalentLMS to train field salespeople, through what the company has named, DISAGRO University. Their video-based training and follow up tests help new hires master the company’s products, services, sales techniques, and marketing strategies.

After establishing this foundation, Alex began exploring how to bring training directly into the field. He was searching for a way to empower sales reps, often miles from their laptops and out of cell range, to access resources right in those moments when they need a quick refresher before meeting with a potential customer.

In 2023, he discovered the answer: TalentCards.

The problem

DISAGRO’s salespeople truly put the word “field” in field sales. With employees spread across Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Dominican Republic, these salespeople are travelling out directly to farms and fields, offering DISAGRO’s products and services to farmers and agricultural businesses.

While every employee has completed their comprehensive onboarding on TalentLMS before heading into the field, it was unreasonable to expect that they’d remember every product feature and detail on the spot.

“We did have a training gap when it comes to users not having their PCs with them all day. Whenever they're visiting a customer, they’re travelling very far away, and their cell has no connection. So we were trying to figure out, how can we take this learning to the field? And that's when I came across TalentCards.”

Why TalentCards

When looking for a way to make product knowledge and training resources available on-demand for field sales reps, there were three core features that made TalentCards the obvious choice for Alex:

Offline access

It’s not uncommon that a salesperson will want to show a potential customer some product information, or a video demo on their phone, while explaining the usage and benefits. This gets particularly challenging without stable internet connection.

“Just imagine trying to show a video to a customer, and it’s buffering, and then you’re trying to get a signal. That's not good. When we saw TalentCards’ offline mode feature, that you can download your card sets, and then view them on your phone without connection, that sealed the deal. I knew TalentCards was what I had been looking for.”

Push notifications

With TalentCards’ push notification feature, Alex can push out product updates and new training content to field sales teams in just a few clicks.

“The push notifications are very cool. We send them out, and it’s so easy for the team to read them on the spot. They tap the notification and go right into the TalentCards app, where they access their new training content. So, that’s something very cool to see.”

Microlearning delivery

Long-form courses are ideal for onboarding, but in-the-field scenarios demand fast, focused answers. Microlearning delivers concise content that reps can access instantly, bridging the gap between formal training, and on-the-job support.

“Here’s the main difference: TalentLMS is classroom oriented, while TalentCards, it’s field oriented. When a salesperson is out in the field, they might need to know something very specific about our product before positioning it to the customer. Instead of going to TalentLMS to watch the whole video again, they just pull out TalentCards, search for the product they need, tap on the card, and they get a quick crash course.”

Rolling out TalentCards

From long-form training to microlearning

The first step to DISAGRO’s successful rollout of TalentCards was to adapt the company’s long form content and videos from TalentLMS, into microlearning, flash card-style training in TalentCards.

“We had a lot of content, and we needed to make it smaller. What we wanted to do was extract the specific, key points of our training videos, and translate them into easy, readable cards. We took the time to summarize the key points, and now it’s easy and smooth for the learner to understand and remember.”

The first step to DISAGRO’s successful rollout of TalentCards was to adapt the company’s long form content and videos from TalentLMS, into microlearning, flash card-style training in TalentCards.

“The AI-powered quiz creator is a very cool feature, because it reads out content, and then it creates tailored questions and answers. We tested it out, and it actually helps a lot!”

From a single country, to continent-wide reach

The second step to DISAGRO’s successful rollout was giving learners access to the TalentCards app, country by country.

“Our plan was to roll out in phases, one country at a time, and that’s how we started. But then the more users we were getting into TalentCards, the more the managers in other countries were discovering it, and the more people wanted access! With word of mouth, people got really interested, and now we have TalentCards available in all of the countries DISAGRO operates in.”

How DISAGRO uses TalentLMS & TalentCards together

New salespeople begin in TalentLMS’s DISAGRO University, completing product knowledge and sales and marketing training on their laptops.

Integrating TalentCards lets Alex deliver reinforcement training by country, with card sets tailored to each market’s product lineup, regulations, and positioning nuances.

“We create card sets that are specific to the products that are available in the country that the specific salesperson is working in. Not all regulations are the same per country, so while everyone receives a unified onboarding experience in TalentLMS, TalentCards allows us to deliver location-specific training after the corporate onboarding.”

“When it comes to our global training strategy, TalentLMS allows us to deliver training across the board, and then TalentCards lets us deliver location-specific training to maximize results in the field.”

The results

Increase in sales revenue, and range of products sold

Since rolling our TalentCards, Alex has seen a boost in the variety of products that are sold to customers:

“One of the biggest things that we wanted is for the salespeople to have top of mind the full scope of different products that they can recommend to buyers. Sometimes, when we’re pushing a specific product or marketing strategy in one country, they tend to forget about the rest of the things we offer. With TalentCards, they keep all of our products in mind, and are now able to offer customers a complete solution.”

To date, DISAGRO has seen an adoption rate of over 75%, and salespeople are passing quizzes with an average score of 90%. The average length of a learning session is three minutes, highlighting the effectiveness of brief, recurring refreshers in the field.

“The feedback we’ve gotten from users has been nothing but positive— they like the ease of use, and the offline access is a game-changer. I think a mobile-first tool like TalentCards is what the future looks like.”