11 Ways to Make Sales Training Stick

6. ALLOW FOR COLLABORATION

Still, “the goal of sales managers is not to create more sales followers, but to create more leaders,” Dickie says. We don’t want sales reps to have to follow around coaches, but rather to learn to do things on their own.

Dickie notes that managers should be involved in training reps, but to a degree that doesn’t interfere with their progress, checking in with them one-on-one only to assess pressing areas but allowing them to flourish in their areas of strength.

One of the top ways salespeople learn is interacting with peers. It’s important they’re given a chance to learn from one another in person. Some technology vendors are contributing in this area; Allego, for instance, provides a “just-in-time” sales learning platform that aims to connect peers and get them to share best practices with each other via video sharing. It also enables management to review and identify the best materials.

According to Mark Magnacca, president and cofounder of Allego, many of the company’s clients have begun to incentivize sales reps to share videos containing best practices that can be accessed. “If you have 500 sales reps, inevitably you’re going to come across one that is lightning in a bottle,” Magnacca says. “That becomes a model of what good looks like.” He notes that his practice has proved especially useful in the pharmaceutical industry, in which quickly delivering and sharing across organizations consistent messages about medications is important.

7. INCORPORATE BEHAVIORS INTO DAILY WORKFLOWS

To get people in the habit of carrying out desired behaviors, those behaviors should be incorporated as seamlessly as possible into day-to-day routines and embedded into the technologies reps depend on.

“Salespeople are busy—if they have to go to six places on the company intranet,” for instance, they’re not going to follow a new system, Grodnitzky says.

Toman encourages companies to find tools that can be incorporated into the current suite of technologies, so they “swim with the tide of workflow.”

“It’s one thing to learn something,” Dickie says. “It’s another thing to make it part of your daily experience. If you can do that, that’s how you’ll change behavior.”

Demonstrated behavior must become second nature to salespeople, Dickie notes. For instance, every time reps are ready to make a call, they should be prepared to fill out a call planning sheet and share it with their manager. The manager can then think of other ideas the reps can cover during their calls. Every time reps begin new opportunities, they should get in the habit of filling out a relationship map that details the major players at the company, as well as any other pertinent information that can further the sale.

Solution vendors have been working to incorporate learning exercises into sales workflows. Qstream, for instance, enables companies to send reps sales-training challenges in manageable chunks to their mobile devices every few days. Reps can see how they compete against their peers. Managers can leverage the tool to access tips and connect with their reps.

Using Qstream’s services in pilot programs in the United States, Canada, and Europe, for instance, LinkedIn was able to boost its sales teams’ engagement rates to 98 percent, with a 23 percent gain in proficiency rate (i.e., mastery of the information they need to help them sell better). The company recently announced that it would roll out the solution internationally to help educate salespeople on a personal level, at scale.

8. ALLOW LEEWAY AND ROOM FOR FAILURE

As Dickie points out, “Any time you’re introducing sales training, you’re also replacing sales training.” So you have to get people to buy in to doing things a new way by reinforcement, and give them time to acclimate.

In many cases, reps need to feel comfortable failing at newly introduced behaviors before they can progress, Toman says. In fact, it might be worth it to work on a failing (or lost) account, to see if it can be moved to the next level in a pipeline.

As Toman says, any movement on a deal is a sign that something in the training and behaviors is working. If you can show salespeople that new sales methods have been able to advance stagnant deals to later stages, it will likely instill confidence in the training programs.

Related Articles

LevelEleven Adds Metrics-Driven Tools to its Sales Activity Management

The new tools aim to help sales organizations develop strategies around key performance indicators.

Xactly Sharpens its Sales Performance Management Tool Set

The enhancements enable managers to coach their sales reps in alignment with company goals, and adjust compensation plans according to industry best practices.