How do you get information to stick? That is the $100,000 question regarding any investment in sales training. A company won’t shell out thousands of dollars for training each year if it doesn’t net 5 or 10x that in increased revenue. Or maybe it will. Either way, it’s not a sustainable situation.
In 2007, Chip and Dan Heath captured business leaders’ attention with their debut book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” The book uses a collection of case studies and principles to explain why some ideas or lessons have a lasting impact while others are quickly forgotten.
The Heath brothers surmised that sticky ideas share six traits: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories (or get told in a memorable way). The book, with its memorable orange cover and faux duct tape across the middle, remains a primer on how to present information effectively.
Here are three other reasons why your training isn’t sticking.
• The salespeople don’t have a compelling reason to improve. If you present the idea that you’re training is simply checking a box, it won’t stick, says sales trainer Dave Kurlan in a four-minute video “rant” on why sales training doesn’t work. “If we’re really doing sales training the right way – if we’re expecting a sales transformation – we need different effort. We need different skills.”
• There’s too much training and not enough – or any – coaching. Dumping information in multiple-day or even longer sessions is futile unless you support it with regular coaching, states Madhukar Govindaraju, the founder and CEO of Numly, an enterprise AI company. “Coaching is a continuous relationship where the coach acts as a constant reinforcer of skills by sharing their knowledge and experience to develop salespeople to become sales superstars,” he stated in an article for Forbes.
• There’s no diagnosis ahead of the training. Doctors don’t treat patients without a diagnosis. In education, testing at the beginning of a year sets the table for what students strengths are and where they need extra help. It’s no different with sales training. Pinpoint the skills that need to be improved – and realize they won’t be the same for every rep.
