Improve Sales Training—Flip It

I’ve recently come across multiple articles about flipping—an innovation occurring in our public schools that is getting a lot of buzz.

The idea is simple. Using technology (online videos, for example), students spend time at home getting up-to-speed on a given area of knowledge. Then in the classroom, the teacher spends time floating from table to table as the students work on exercises that apply the knowledge they studied before class.

The article took me back a number of years to my dissertation using Flander’s system of behavioral analysis for observing classroom instruction in public schools.  The major finding was this: 70 percent of the teachers spend 70 percent of the time talking. Given that population, there was some time available to flip.

To be sure, sales training does not have the corresponding percentages with regards to the time sales trainers spend lecturing. But whatever the percentage, it is higher than it needs to be.

Why flip sales training

Time and again, we hear senior VPs of sales say the same thing: “We would really like to do some sales training, but I just can’t see two-days out of the field for the training plus travel.  The opportunity costs are just too high. Perhaps we could do something at the national meeting, but it would need to be short, exciting, and upbeat.”

This comment takes different forms, but the essence is the same: I think training is great, but the time out of the field is a killer. Enter flipping. 

Any type of sales skills training has two components: a knowledge transfer component and an application component involving practice and feedback. The knowledge component doesn’t need to occur in the classroom.  By moving that portion of learning online, classroom time can be devoted to practice and feedback.  In practical terms, this means most two-day sales skills programs can be reduced to one classroom day.

How to flip sales training

Let’s take an example in which the objective is teaching classic call execution skills, such as asking questions, opening and closing, active listening, and objection handling.

A program configuration could include a self-paced e-learning module before the face-to-face class that provides an overview of best practices. This would be followed by a customized sales simulation that has participants apply information learned in the e-learning module to planning, executing, and reviewing a series of sales calls for developing business in a typical account.

Providing each participant a phone app chunked into the targeted skill sets and best practices could occur after class to help reinforce the training.  Plus frontline managers could have access to a customized software-based coaching package designed specifically for the targeted skill set.

Final note

With the changes that are occurring in sales, there will be an increasing need to make sales training more effective, more efficient, and more affordable. Leveraging e-learning and other educational technologies and reserving classroom time to that which can uniquely be done in the classroom is one answer worth serious exploration.