Introduction
NOTE: This blog was derived from Episode 005 of The Rep's Journey podcast. To watch it, scroll to the bottom of this page, or click here 📺. If you prefer to listen to our podcast, click here 🎙.
The Challenge
You’d be hard pressed to find a training or onboarding team who doesn’t want to generate killer training content for their new recruits. The problem is, generating this content consumes a lot of bandwidth from teams who cannot devote the time and energy needed to both conceptualize the content and then create it. This is especially true for teams who find themselves needing to be reactive to daily issues while still keeping an eye on the more long-term project of content creation.
The Opportunity
We believe that you should have every tool possible to make the content creation process easier. What if you had a virtual “utility belt” that can take the pressure out of making ideas for content into reality? If these tools can save your team even an hour of productivity per day, we’d say it’s absolutely worth it.
Why Should I Listen to You?
We have been operating in the e-learning and recruiting space for quite some time, so we get a front row seat to what other businesses are using and how effective they are at streamlining the content creation process. Additionally, we use some of these products ourselves and can directly attest to how useful they are for our own team.
Planning and Collaboration Tools
ConveYour’s Training Outcome Designer
It’s often hard to know where to begin when it comes to creating effective training content. As with most things, starting tends to be the hardest part. That’s why we at ConveYour created the Training Outcome Designer worksheet. This PDF was designed to provide a framework for creating content by identifying desired outcomes and working logically outwards from there to develop training that is 100% geared towards achieving those outcomes. The process will leave you with objectives, a timeline, and the steps that you will need to take to make it all happen. From there, you can move on to mapping the journey that your new reps are going to take.
Whimsical
Before you can develop outstanding training content for onboarding your sales reps, you need to know what their experience looks like. The rep’s journey needs a map. Whimsical is a diagram building tool that is perfect for visualizing your new reps’ experience as they move through onboarding.  Once the entire journey has been laid out, you can begin to identify where the cracks are, or where you have room to optimize.
Workflow tools are nothing new, but Whimsical sets itself apart with a streamlined layout, unparalleled ease of use, and the ability to collaborate with others on the same flowchart.
Content Gathering and Project Management
Notion
The beauty of Notion as a virtual project management tool is its ability to combine the content-forward approach of Google Docs with the task management features of products like Trello. Each Notion page is essentially its own mini-webpage, with customizable text, imagery, links, databases, and custom fields. These “Notion Cards” exist within the context of a certain workflow or task, which can be assigned to and commented on by your team. With Notion’s exhaustive feature list, it’s the most effective work collaboration solution that we’ve found. It’s what our team uses!
Video Shortcuts
Vimeo
Vimeo is a widely popular video hosting and sharing service. It sets itself apart with its ease of use and the ability to capture recordings on the fly with a simple Google Chrome extension. With a click of a button, screen and webcam recordings can be generated and made instantly available for hosting, streaming, or embedding into a ConveYour lesson.
Vidyard
VidYard functions similarly to Vimeo, but is for those who need a little bit more information on the analytical side. Recording videos through VidYard functions largely the same process, but once your videos have been created, you have access to information such as when your video was first viewed and what percentage of the video was viewed. This is great if you need to ensure total viewership of your video content.
Wistia Soapbox
If your company is already utilizing Wistia for video hosting, they have a similar product to the examples above, complete with on-the-fly screen or webcam recording and the ability to immediately edit, upload, or restart recorded video content immediately. Soapbox also comes with some other bells-and-whistles features such as GIF creation and stylized text overlays for your video content.
SpeechPrompt by ConveYour
ConveYour’s FREE SpeechPrompt tool is our very own web-based teleprompter designed to help guide your speech as you generate recorded video content. First, you upload your script. Then, SpeechPrompt uses speech recognition to follow along while you record your audio, only advancing the text after you’ve said the word. This results in smoother, more natural sounding audio recordings that take less attempts to get right.
Mac Users - Quicktime
The Quicktime Player comes pre-installed on every Mac computer. Most people don’t know this, but built into this software is the ability to record your screen. Quicktime generates .mov files that can be easily uploaded and embedded. Just type “Quicktime” into Spotlight Search, or use a shortcut built into most Macs to open the screen recording menu immediately: command + shift + 5.
Mac Users - iMovie
Also pre-installed on every Mac  is iMovie, Apple’s own video editing application. While it isn’t the move feature-rich editing software out there, it does come free with your computer and is well suited for sequencing, editing, and organizing training content.
Mac Users - Screenflow
ScreenFlow, available on Mac, is a screencasting and video editing software tool. ScreenFlow is a great way to generate professional, well-edited video content while avoided the high licensing costs and steep learning curve of similar products.
Imagery and Content
Photopea
Photopea is a FREE web-based image editor with a similar feature set to Photoshop and Illustrator. While it is missing some of the most advanced editing tools available in the Adobe suite, Photopea holds its own and is ideal for businesses who want professionally edited imagery. Being web-based, it’s also extremely portable and can run on nearly any machine. If Photoshop isn’t quite in the budget, Photopea is here to help.
Free High-Quality Public Domain Stock Imagery - Unsplash, Pexels, Storyblocks
It can be a real pain to find stock images that both look professional and are completely royalty-free. This is where sites like Pexels and Unsplash shine. Both host libraries of millions of stock photos, all of which are freely usable. If you create an account, you can save the images that you’ve used, slowly compiling a content library for yourself. Storyblocks follows the same principle, but hosts royalty-free video clips, motion backgrounds, and After Effects templates.
Envato Elements
Elements is a service offered under the Envato umbrella of products, providing millions of different design elements for a relatively small monthly fee. This subscription provides audio, video, graphics, presentation templates, and more.
Slides
Slides.com is an online, web-based presentation software with a robust suite of customization and design tools. There are a variety of different presentation modes, collaborative tools, and their own asset library with images, videos, and templates available for use. There is even support for custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript within slides.
Canva
We’d love to tell you all about Canva, but odds are you probably already know about it. Canva is a fantastic application for editing content and designing graphics. There are more powerful tools out there but nothing on the market can compete with Canva’s ease of use, and the free version alone has lots of tools to help take your content to the next level.
ConveYour
All of the fantastic training content that you’ve generated with these tools is going to have to be hosted somewhere! ConveYour is our online platform designed to help you recruit, train, and retain members of your team. With a wide variety of lesson elements and content types supported, ConveYour is a great solution for getting your training content into your team’s hands quickly and easily. Beyond that, we also offer training automations, dynamic user groups, and results monitoring to really take your training above and beyond.
Want all of this information, readily available right on your phone? Do you have a tool that helps you in content creation that you feel like we’ve missed? Text us and let us know! Text #tools to (512) 379-5599 along with the name of your tool of choice and we’ll add it to the list.