About Giant Bicycle

Headquartered in Taiwan, Giant Bicycle, Inc. have been building widely-loved bikes for nearly fifty years and currently stand as the world’s largest bike manufacturer. Distributing through over 12,000 retail partners worldwide, Giant Bicycle relies on a large network of dealers as well as teams of internal sales staff to sell their products; a web of employees that requires an efficient means of communication.

Giant Bicycle USA, based in California, have been utilizing Myagi by Rallyware as a central component of their communication and training strategy since late 2019. This meant that when the COVID-19 pandemic led to restrictions on travel and events, Giant Bicycle USA had the tools to adapt quickly and carry on with business operations.

As a digital platform, Myagi by Rallyware presents an effective means of delivering information without needing to travel. The platform’s core functionality is as a network tool for educating dealers on new products and brand stories — dealers can connect with their suppliers to receive content and make sure it reaches the right staff, at the right time. In addition to communicating with their network of channel partners, businesses can also use Myagi by Rallyware for internal communications, as Giant USA have done for their summer National Sales Meeting.

Giant USA’s National Sales Meetings are semi-annual events that would typically bring up to 50 staff members from across the country to their head office for three days. Converting this to a digital event on Myagi by Rallyware not only allowed for the meeting to take place during adverse conditions, but also cut costs significantly for the company, in immediate and long-term ways.

Results

Increased Collaboration

Improved Learning Outcomes

Decreased Costs & Saved Time

Meet the Team

Managing the project of digitizing the National Sales Meeting were Jolie Hershey, Bill Miller and Patrick VanHorn. This team generally ran the Giant Retail Academy, Giant USA’s staff training program. Jolie Hershey is Giant USA’s Visual Space & Training Manager, responsible for managing Retail Services which encompasses Giant Retail Academy, the Giant Retail Partnership program, visual merchandising and in-store support. Bill Miller was the Giant Retail Academy Program Leader, who worked closely with Digital Content Producer Patrick VanHorn (now retired) on creating video content for the program.

The Event

The prospect of planning and creating digital content to replace a 3-day in person event seemed massive, even for Giant’s team of experienced content creators. But after some brainstorming and advice from their Myagi by Rallyware customer success manager, preparation was underway. The next 7 weeks were spent collaborating with the managers who would have been presenting to instead write scripts, film videos, and structure lessons.

Starting from scratch, it took 5 weeks to edit and consolidate the content for the NSM, which consisted mainly of videos by staff members, followed by questions to test understanding and occasionally PDFs with further detailed information. Beginning with videos to explain content creation equipment and processes, the team then worked through a range of videos about internal updates and new product ranges.

The plan in the NSM channel containing lessons about content creation & operating the necessary equipment.

​Many presentations were recorded via Loom, singularly or in groups, while product videos were created from a range of clips and content. The visual standard of the 10 product videos was the most important, in order to keep staff engaged through the information, which alongside time constraints prompted VanHorn to entail a videographer’s help with editing. The final result was 37 videos with supporting questions, organized intuitively into lesson plans. 

The National Sales Meeting event was carried out over two days, beginning with a video-call introduction over Zoom. Staff were given windows of time to work through the lessons, watching videos, answering questions and providing feedback, with the ability to pause and be available to respond to their retailers if necessary. Following this were recap and Q&A sessions over Zoom on both days.

Better Content

Despite the new process, Jolie Hershey found that the quality of content had improved compared to the in-person meetings, because preparing videos instead of presentations “forced everybody to really look at what they were saying, how they were saying it and how to get things across effectively,” At previous NSMs, some presenters could overrun their slot by up to an hour—but with advice from Bill Miller to plan videos by the number of words in your script, “it worked. The videos were much more engaging and they got the key information across. So I couldn’t be more happy with how this is going.”

By tasking people across different departments to work together to prepare videos, a wider variety of ideas went into the process, leading to more creative and informative presentations. Preparation for in-person sales meetings was often last minute, and review sessions for presentations lacked considered and constructive feedback. “It was the opposite of collaboration,” says Bill Miller about previous years, “this time around, it was real, it forced people to collaborate.”

Multiple deadlines coupled with the time-limited format of pre-recorded videos, meant presenters really had to plan in advance. Jolie Hershey recalls how before, “everybody was always so focused on our own content in our own presentations, that a lot of us weren’t super aware of how it came across, or how it would sound to the audience.” Comparatively, conducting the NSM over Myagi by Rallyware meant presenters were much more focused on the audience’s experience. This extra effort and consideration meant content could be repurposed for Giant USA’s Dealer National Sales Meeting, and incorporated into the Giant Retail Academy channels. 

Better Engagement

With more concise, creative and considered content comes better learning outcomes. Rather than feeling like staff were “drinking from the firehose” sitting through up to 16 hours of presentations in subpar conditions for concentration, the team found that attendees got more out of the content and were more likely to remember it. Patrick VanHorn noticed that by the final Q&A session, staff had very few questions – a massive contrast to prior NSMs where presentations were frequently interrupted by queries, or later clarification was needed – which indicated to VanHorn that knowledge retention was much better. Following in-person NSMs, VanHorn often received emails asking questions “that we knew had been dealt with ad nauseam live, but somehow they either didn’t retain it, or they didn’t pay attention.” But with the inclusion of quizzes and the ability to make each lesson ‘required viewing’ before proceeding to the next, the team could reliably ensure that staff had viewed the content and drawn out the key information. 

Reliable Information, Easy Feedback

As well as this format for NSM content being more memorable, the fact that AE’s knew they could go back to a video or download a PDF was hugely helpful and reassuring. Not only could staff refer back to content to confirm a piece of company data or product specification, but the team could rest assured that the information had been delivered to the right people and would remain accessible to them. “In the past,” says Bill Miller, “all the presenters would put their data together and give it to the National Sales Manager, for example. Then in theory, it would get distributed. But based on some of the phone calls I would get, I would often wonder if it actually got distributed… I feel a lot more secure that the information and data is going to stick with the team better because of Myagi by Rallyware.” 

The digital medium has further benefits in making it extremely easy to review engagement data and to collect feedback from staff, which according to Jolie Hershey was “overwhelmingly positive. People felt like they got a lot out of it. They learned, they’re engaged and they’re excited.” Myagi by Rallyware’s easy feedback submission also meant people could point out minor errors that helped the team when repurposing content for retailers. 

Savings

Alongside improved collaboration and content quality, increased knowledge retention, and accountability over the delivery of information, Giant USA’s digital adaptation of the NSM also saved a considerable amount of time and resources.

Where the regular meetings brought from 45 to 50 attendees from different regions to the head office in California, taking three work days for meetings plus 2 days for traveling, the NSM hosted through Myagi by Rallyware required no travel or accommodation, no disruption to communication with key accounts or warehouse activities, and only a small portion of the time it usually took to get through all the presentations. Coupled with the long-term effects of improved knowledge retention and the ability for staff to consult content in Myagi by Rallyware rather than interrupting colleagues with repetitive questions, the savings in terms of time and efficiency are significant. “As a company, I think we will be doing a lot more of this kind of thing, because it’s far more cost-effective to do it this way,” says Patrick VanHorn.

Considering travel costs, accommodation, food and beverages, Giant saved approximately $55,000 USD in expenses and at least 1200 paid working hours on the summer 2020 NSM by switching to Myagi by Rallyware.

What’s next?

Following the success of the digital NSM, Giant USA used this experience to host their Model Year Launch event through Myagi by Rallyware. Jolie Hershey and the team “felt that both worked well and were very successful given the strange circumstances we are all in.” As an external dealer-facing meeting, some changes had to be made from the NSM format: videos and questions were not required to progress through lessons, and rather than having a defined window of time to access content, dealers were given free access to the dedicated channel for a week so they could consume the information on their own schedule.

According to Hershey, “Bike retailers have been extraordinarily busy during the pandemic and we wanted to make the experience of getting this launch information easy and positive. We had great engagement with this content and brought a lot of new accounts onto the platform because of it.” The model year launch is typically an immersive 3-day event with limited attendance, but this year Giant USA were able to invite all their dealers to interact with the content on Myagi by Rallyware. “When held live, these model year launch events are very expensive and laborious to produce—the experience of holding the event virtually has given us a lot of ideas about how to adapt going forward. We believe that both NSMs and Model Year launches in the future will be a combination of content based on the platform and live events.”