What’s New

HARMAN Luxury is a global powerhouse with a spectrum of brands catering to different aspects of the high-end audio market. Under imprints including Mark Levinson, ARCAM, JBL, JBL Synthesis, Revel, and Roon, HARMAN Luxury offers audio system components for home theater, Hi-Fi, and entertainment applications.

A frequent innovator, HARMAN Luxury invests in several high-profile new product launches per year. These aren’t simple releases: Many devices are backed by millions of dollars’ worth of R&D and patented technologies, and simply learning the new SKUs and specs isn’t enough.  HARMAN Luxury caters to discerning clientele with a high-touch sales process: In order to be successful, dealers must understand the “why” behind each brand and component.

In 2019, HARMAN made a profound commitment to dealer success: the company partnered with industry training specialists and immersive media design firm Cogent360 to build a living library of on-demand training. In the process, they rethought how they approached new product training, increased the global reach of their curriculum, and supported dealers with training available on day one of new product launches.

The Challenge: Training on a Global Scale

HARMAN has always understood the value of training. Every transaction starts with education: a customer learns about a brand, what it can offer, and the unique needs it can fill. For a luxury brand, like HARMAN’s premium audio lines, the emphasis on product training is especially important. For example, HARMAN’s partners need to be able to articulate the unique value proposition of the various speakers in the JBL Synthesis line and match the right product to the right customer. Salespeople must understand not just the product specifications, but how that product speaks to the customers’ lifestyles, aesthetics, and the story of their homes.

“One of HARMAN’s core values as a manufacturer is educating the industry, not only about our products, but about technologies used universally by all luxury audio brands,” says Dave Tovissi, Vice President and General Manager, Luxury Audio for HARMAN. “A knowledgeable dealer is the best possible ambassador for our brand and industry.”

HARMAN believes that the better it educates channel partners, the more fluently and confidently they will be able to educate their end-user clients in turn. In the past, they relied on intensive in-person trainings to educate dealers, supplemented by webinars to reach global partners.

Unfortunately, that model doesn’t scale. HARMAN is a global enterprise with customers around the world including the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Only a tiny fraction of this audience can attend live HARMAN training. And in fact, sales professionals’ ability to attend in-person training is declining, part of an ongoing trend that has only accelerated since the pandemic. HARMAN needed a new training model that would allow them to reach their global sales force and get them up to speed on new products quickly and effectively.

The Approach: HARMAN University

HARMAN partnered with Cogent360, a firm well-known for the development of custom training programs for industry manufacturers who had previously helped design in-person training for HARMAN’s flagship Manhattan experience center. Cogent360 pushed for a modern approach that would be a lot more than an online library of lectures and PDFs.

“Traditional training can be very information-dense” says Dave Chace, Founder and President of Cogent360. “All too often, industry training consists of a vendor loading up a truck full of technical features and specifications and dumping the contents on a learner’s head – who are then left to figure out how to assimilate this pile of information into a concise, compelling sales pitch to their customers. We worked with HARMAN to create a different model, informed by both cognitive science and shared decades of experience in the CE and CI industries.”

Cogent360 recommended that training modules be concise and populated with rich multimedia assets, including text, video, animations, and in some cases, 3D product and scene renderings. Complex topics are broken down into discrete, digestible lessons, no more than ten minutes each. Along with the tight time frame, the varied media approach—including narration by professional voice talent—helps ensure that learners don’t tune out. “We aim for ‘intrinsic motivation’—where the learner wants to explore and see what’s next out of sheer curiosity,” says Chace. “When you don’t know what’s coming next, and also get to interact with the content, it keeps you focused and engaged.”

Cogent360 built a custom Learning Management System (LMS) for HARMAN University, populated with a mix of sales enablement resources created in-house at HARMAN and custom-designed by Cogent360. Reinforcing HARMAN’s commitment to global sales growth, the training modules are available in multiple languages to support dealer success worldwide. Additionally, HARMAN University’s content is shareable so partners can host it on their own LMS. The partnership is ongoing; Cogent360 is charged with growing and maintaining this online body of knowledge, including developing new training modules for product launches.

For each module, HARMAN creates a product brief detailing the target audience and most significant details and talking points. Cogent360 uses this information to develop a compelling narrative that is woven throughout the training module. “Good training contains a strong element of storytelling,” says Chace.  “This enables salespeople to more easily remember the key takeaways and convey them effectively to customers.”

“We take a ‘floor backward’ approach to product training,” Chace continues. “We realize that salespeople typically have just a minute or two to capture the customer’s attention around a specific product, so we work backwards from there to develop content that helps them most easily communicate the key selling points in that short window of time. Conversely, most manufacturers. feed them a laundry list of facts and specs and leave it to the salesperson to boil it down to a concise 60-second pitch.”

These narratives and details are used to develop scripts, storyboards, and finally, a complete new training module. Often, the module will include an interactive product model that allows learners to drill down and study the technical and engineering aspects of the device. “Our sales force ranges from people very new to the industry to serious audiophiles who have been working in the field for decades,” says Kevin Kent, Senior Global Product Line Manager for HARMAN. “This interactive approach lets our dealers choose how deep they want to go, while still offering them access to all the engineering detail they could want.”

The Results: On-Demand Training, In-Demand Products

HARMAN has seen a clear relationship between training and product success, especially in emerging markets. “We’ve observed a strong correlation between training uptake and sales increases,” says Kent. “It’s sometimes startlingly clear: you’ll see an uptick on module completions for a particular product in a region, and increased orders will follow. That’s why we strongly encourage dealers to leverage HARMAN University: It immediately benefits them and leads to mutual success.”

The partnership between HARMAN and Cogent360 has also allowed HARMAN to push out new product training materials in close alignment with launches and announcements. A training module can take several weeks to develop, but by creating 3D assets from the product CAD files, Cogent360 is able to create videos, animations, interactive demos, and even lifestyle scenes weeks before product photography is possible.

“Cogent360’s ability to produce photorealistic scenes from CAD drawings enables a much less stressful timeline for the creation of launch materials,” says Kent. “We’re able to put these devices in context from day one, so dealers are ready to show how these products will fit into end-users’ lives.

HARMAN Luxury’s transition from reliance on traditional in-person trainings to launching the innovative, scalable HARMAN University epitomizes the product training approach required for a global dealer audience. By partnering with Cogent360, HARMAN has expanded its training accessibility and enhanced the quality and impact of its content.

The strategic shift to on-demand, immersive training content has proven pivotal. Through HARMAN University, HARMAN continues to set standards in product training, marrying technology with pedagogy to foster success across its expansive global network. HARMAN University sets a benchmark for others in the industry, demonstrating that the right training can make all the difference in the competitive world of luxury audio product sales.

For dealers looking to enhance their expertise and maximize their success with HARMAN products, visit HARMAN University and register to access these comprehensive training modules.