Jayme Torres isn’t a schoolteacher. But it’s easy to feel like one when you present six-hour lectures every day, sometimes for weeks on end. You see, Jayme works as a product trainer for sales reps at Pamlab, a naturalized pharmaceutical company based in Louisiana.

She teaches volumes of detailed, data-heavy medical information to new sales team members, including 50 inside team members who work the phones and over 200 outside team members who meet with doctors daily. They study each product for six hours each plus two hours of clinical review. It’s an intense fact dumping on topics like human anatomy and physiology, conditions, symptoms, the effects of medicinal foods, and the case studies and data that back up their products’ success. The classes have to move quickly, and there is very little downtime in a day.

Jayme though is constantly innovating, bringing a little life and laughter to her trainings. “I try to break up the monotony and make it fun. I’m also looking for ways to increase engagement.”

One of the tools Jayme uses to liven up her marathon PowerPoint sessions is Poll Everywhere. Sometime near the beginning of a product lecture, or after a break, Torres runs a poll. Often it’s a question that tests the limits of the new sales reps’ background knowledge, or gauges their level of understanding of the topic at hand. Other times she uses polling as an icebreaker, to encourage new team members to get to know one another and interact.

“We’re always amazed, watching the responses come in, and seeing the bars grow,” Jayme reports. “It breaks up the monotony.” Other Poll Everywhere benefits Jayme notes are:

• Quickly demonstrating what experience and knowledge new employees are bringing to the table.
• Providing a lively, interactive opener for new topics.
• Giving an exact indication of how engaged her audience is, from poll to poll.
• Adding a social element that makes combined team update meetings feel a little more like a party.

Pamlab’s most popular poll to date is the one Jayme created with the help of seven team leaders. Each leader gathered one interesting fact about each person on his or her team. Then Jayme randomized the facts and created a massive Bingo game for the staff to play at the beginning of the meeting. Everyone milled around the room, trying to match each fact with a name and a face. It delivered a lot of laughs, and was the perfect way to break the ice among the inside sales reps. Even though these hard working reps all sat together in the same room, they focused so intently on their life-changing work, they rarely had time to talk and get to know each other.

Jayme reserved the most intriguing facts of the game for the poll. She put seven facts about seven mystery team members on screen, and let the whole room vote on who was who. The results were hilarious, and got the whole sales force pumped and primed for the session. Jayme recalls, “We were particularly impressed by these two gems:

1. “When I was in driver’s ed class in high school, I had to sit on a pillow to create height for myself. It was my teacher’s idea. As of now, my seat is pillow-free.”
2. “I was detained during a drug smuggling raid on a cruise ship arriving from Mexico when I was 18, due to drugs being found on the bottom of the ship.”

Jayme Torres, you win the official Poll Everywhere “Not-Boring Boring Lecture Award.” Hats off to hard-working product trainers everywhere!

If you have a poll that you think is as awesome as Jayme’s, let us know! We love to find out how Poll Everywhere is changing the face of your meetings, classes, and training sessions for the better.