With traditional approaches to sales training, 90 percent of the focus is on a two- or three-day training course. Only about 5 percent of the focus is on activities to prepare salespeople for learning before the event. Likewise, only about 5 percent of the energy is focused on reinforcement and application activities following the learning event.
Research by Brinkerhoff, Saks & Belcourt, and Kraiger and many other experts in training evaluation indicate that this approach results in surprisingly low levels of learning transfer. The solution to this dilemma is not more learning, but more learning transfer.
Over the past five years, experts in Adult Learning at Wilson Learning have conducted research to isolate the specific actions sales organizations can take to improve learning transfer rates. Here is a summary of these results:
Actions that improve learner readiness
- Motivation to learn
- Intent to use
- Career goal alignment
- Self-efficacy (self-confidence)
Actions that improve learning transfer curriculum design
- Goal setting
- Practice and modeling
- Application review
- Actions that improve organizational alignment
- Manager support
- Peer support
- Job connection
- Learning culture
Technology to the rescue
Out of these 11 actions that improve learning transfer, the component with the strongest impact is manager support. Most agree that solid sales manager coaching is an important part of boosting sales performance. However, in the real world, sales managers face a barrage of administrative tasks, often manage their own accounts, and are so focused on helping their team win immediate opportunities that it is difficult, if not impossible, to get them to invest more time in coaching salespeople around the skills learned in sales training. The irony here is the fact that if they were more effective at coaching, reinforcing, and encouraging sales training skill application, managers would be laying
the foundation for greater salesperson independence, mastery of essential sales skills, higher win rates, higher margins and less dependence on the sales manager to swoop in and save the sale at the last minute.
In most organizations, sales managers pour over “trailing indicators” of sales performance metrics and give little to no attention to observing, coaching, modeling and recognizing the “leading indicators,” meaning the sales skills taught in sales training that are critical for success.
Since sales manager involvement is critical, yet hard to accomplish, our clients started asking us for technology solutions to make it easier for sales managers to be involved with sales training, reinforcement, coaching and application of the “leading indicators” of sales success. As a result, we developed an approach to extend learning to ensure reinforcement and application of skills and processes on the job. This is done in part by sending participants interactive links to videos, planners, job aid cards, and application assignments.
Sales managers simultaneously receive messages with interactive links to coaching tips to make it easy for them to coach their direct reports on the specific skills learned during sales training. They also have a dashboard to see their salespeoples’ review and use of the materials. By sending the right message to the right person at the right time, we can automate reinforcement and simplify coaching.
