Vendor Content Guidelines

Vendor Provided Content Guidelines

Our purpose in training is to teach our learners the knowledge & skills they need so they can deliver on their behaviors. Now more than ever, our employees have less time, more customer demand and are navigating new environments, meaning we have to make our training quicker, clearer, and concise for the employee.

To make learnings more impactful, it’s important that training is quick, clear, and concise for our learners. We heard this through our research and analysis with our employee audience. Therefore, most of our vendor content is On-Demand versus Required, putting our employees in charge of their learning journey.

As a key partner, helping support these guidelines will also increase viewing times, outcomes, and completions which will play a large role in delivering on our employees' learning experience.

Mobile-first Design

Employees are taking trainings on multiple platforms, most notably on mobile devices. When creating training, ensure they are built with this experience in mind.

Bite-Sized Learning

The most successful training is concise while remaining impactful keeping employee seat time in mind. All content needs to have clear course objectives with on-the-floor activities that support improved behaviors.

• Videos should be up to 5 minutes, with 2-3 minute videos as the sweet spot for our learners.
• eLearning modules should have a total seat time of no more than 6 minutes.
• PDF documents should be no longer than two (2) pages.
  • If your document is only used for knowledge, please work with your business partner to have these posted to our Knowledge Management pages versus the Learning Network.

If content is unable to be bite-sized, we ask you to break it out into multiple learnings (chapters, episodes, or stages) to meet the module timeframe.

Links to studies we used around Bite-sized Learning solution:

• Why Microlearning Is A Game-changer for Corporate Training
• Microlearning: A Pathway to Effective Training Retention and Behavioral Change 
• Traditional Training vs the Bite Size Approach Infographic 

Create Learning Styles

Here are some creative ways to bring your training to life. Many of these styles also allow you to combine different modalities.

• Dual Facing Content: Learnings/commercials styles that both a customer and employee would be able to watch to learn more about your products/services.
• Unboxing: Depicts the user unboxing their product. Most of the unboxing videos are detailed to let you know about the packaging, what is included in the box, and how the product works.
• Social Media: Quick videos with an informative and entertaining format to keep viewers engaged with your brand. It should contain the power of words, the magic of images, and the beauty of sound in one remarkable training.
• Interview style: Features a Subject Matter Expert or an authority figure within an organization speaking candidly to an interviewer who may or may not be included in the frame. The interviewer should keep the audience engaged and repeat back the benefits and features they learn.
• First Look: Customer testimonials on how they use the product, what they love about it, and what the product does to enhance their lifestyles.
• Interactive Learnings: Learnings/quizzes that allow employees to choose how they should react based on what they lean. Their answers lead the learning which allosw multiple outcomes based on choice.
• Activities/Product Guide PDF’s: Guides that allow employees to engage their audiences with tech and spec and also give different customer scenarios to practice selling. These should include demos, customer types/scenarios, and product tech/spec.

Bring Your Content to Life

This section will provide ways to bring your learning to life. You may not always be able to include them all the time, but these ways will help the employees relate and understand your learning materials. It will also be important for your learnings to support the strategy your business partner wants to bring to life. Understanding how the learnings supports the knowledge, process, and skills will ensure the end user can bring the behaviors to life.

• Course Objectives: Are required and should quickly describe learning outcomes for the user to take away.
• Brand Stories: Quickly share 2-3 interesting facts of what has brought the organization to this point.
• Customer Highlights: How can this product/technology better someone’s life or make it easier?
  • Examples: Customer testimonials, verbatim comments, customer reviews
• Pro Tips: Examples on how to sell/demo the product or services
  • Examples: Demo guides, product set-up guides, vision of good videos
• BBY/Employee Benefits: Are there any additional benefits for employees in selling your products or services?
  • Examples: Individual sales productivity, higher average selling prices, additional attachments needed, how it may get the customer to return
• Take-Away Guides (PDFs): These would include customer scenarios, product comparison guides, and demo step-by-step guides. PDFs may also be used as take-away guides at the end of learnings.
• Inclusion & Diversity: Ensure videos or pictures represent a diverse mindset and reflect all the learners.

Approval Process

1. Meet with Business Partner team around scripts/outlines
   • Up to 2 Learning Objectives aligned with Best Buy goals
   • Confirm learning objectives meet the Best Buy strategy
   • Content is in line with Best Buy category strategy
2. Meet with Business Partner to approve learning before submitting to Learning Network
   • Ensure learning objectives have come to life in content
   • Ensure vendor guidelines are met around time and content
3. Send to Learning Networking for Enterprise Learning Approval for Guidelines above.
   • Business partner reviews final content and ensures close captioning, time frames, and strategy are correct.
   • Ensure endorsement is at the end of content/groups of content. (Examples: Quiz, activities, simulations)

Vendor may NOT do any of the following in content submitted to Best Buy:

• Mention another vendor
• Vendor A vs. Vendor B comparisons
• SKU/Product from Vendor A vs. SKU/Product from Vendor B
• Compare technologies either directly or indirectly
• No self-proclamations such as:  “World’s best…,” “Best in the Industry...”

Loading Content

File Size
File size cannot be no more than 100MB when loading in to the Learning Network. If you have a file that exceeds the maximum size, verify the video settings are 1280 x 720 as the Learning Network will compress down files to that size. VBR 2 Pass should be set as low as .77 when exporting and audio files should be .mp3.

Key Words
When loading content into the Learning Network, it is important to follow standards for course description and keywords to help improve search results in the Learning Network.

• Course Description: The description should include a high-level overview of what will be learned during the course. This would also be the place to call out what model numbers are covered within the learning.
• Keywords: Keywords help organize content into the right catalog and filter.
  • 1st Keyword – Vendor Name
  • 2nd Keyword – Product Category
  • 3rd Keyword – Product Line / Key Technology
  • 4th Keyword – Product Line / Key Technology
  • 5th Keyword – Intended audience for learning