Caribbean Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CPI) recently released a revolutionary new cancer drug (Vincenzio), which has the potential to change the entire health landscape. With the need to promote the drug in new and existing markets, CPI had to increase its sales staff and train them on all aspects of the drug's efficacy. Because of industry regulations, the company (CPI) designed a blended learning programme, which included teaching sessions with instructors covering the information sales reps would need to know in order to be able to explain the drug to the company's customers (i.e., prescribing clinicians, pharmacists and other medical practitioners). The blended learning format adopted by CPI facilitated access (on the company's intranet), to more than 100 hours of videos, doctor interviews; and two thousand pages of text about the results of in-depth drug trials. This blended learning approach to the delivery of the training programme, also included a 3-day face to face intensive classroom training component.

The training programme was therefore regarded by CPI as comprehensive and included all the information which CPI sales representatives needed to know, in order to be successful. Notwithstanding this, unfortunately, three months after completing the training programme, many sales reps were not successful in marketing and selling the drug in their assigned territories, as they were unable to pharmacists'/doctors' questions adequately. This incompetence was reported to the company by customers, and after some investigation, CPI discovered that one of the problems with the programme was that the sales reps had to learn too much highly technical information (in a relatively short period of time), and their failure to do so resulted in their lack of successful engagement with customers.

You have been hired as a HRD consultant for CPI and have been asked to review CPI's sales rep training programme, and: - (i) propose five (5) changes which you would recommend to the current sales training programme; (ii) discuss why and how each of your recommendations would be beneficial to the company AND (iii) discuss why and how your five (5) recommendations would be useful to CPI's sales reps. Include two examples to illustrate your answer.