Every year, businesses spend thousands of dollars, as well as hundreds of hours, on sales training programs, from in-house sessions, to consultants to outside seminars. While the information might be valuable, sellers will inevitably forget it if they are not able to internalize and apply it in their day-to-day activities.

In order for training programs to be truly effective, they must be customized, practiced, and reinforced. By focusing on what really matters and providing hands-on practice that aligns with key steps of the sales process, sales managers can ensure that the new techniques will be applied, making sales training well worth the investment.

One size doesn't fit all: the importance of relevance

Sales training can be time consuming and expensive. As a result, many sales managers are tempted to take a “one-and-done” approach such as simply hosting an annual sales kickoff meeting. But the reality is that in order for sales training to be effective it needs to be tailored to the different needs of the unique roles on your team.

For example, a sales rep that has experience selling multiple products into several verticals has very different needs than a sales rep that has been focused on selling a single solution within a singular market. Not to mention the variances between inside and outside sales reps or enterprise versus small to medium markets in B2B sales.

The good news is that today’s technology makes this problem a little easier to solve. For example, some cloud-based tools allow sales trainers and managers to quickly create and assign short, interactive training modules for different roles, making it easy for the rep to find just the information they need at the time they need it. Some solutions even integrate with CRMs and marketing automation systems to bring in marketing intelligence about the prospect and recommend relevant content to support the sellers’ specific conversations.

Determine the right training solution for the company

While technology has led to huge advancements in sales training, it is not always sufficient on its own. Often it is more appropriately used in conjunction with live or virtual instructor-led training. In order to determine the right approach for your sales training program, it is a good idea to interview or poll a representative sample of participants and sales managers to find out what's worked in the past and what's working today. Take into account the corporate culture, attitudes and values.

Keep in mind that sales training is a type of sale in and of itself. You have to show the sellers how it’s worthwhile or what's in it for them. Once you can get them onboard with the training it will help to drive change from within.

Work with the way brains actually learn

People have short attention spans (approximately 7-10 minutes), and they're getting shorter. Therefore, it’s a good idea to keep the bulk of your training short and engaging. Kick off your training with a fun, relevant exercise to get audience energy up and engage them right out of the gate. If you’re giving a longer presentation, make a point to reengage the audience every 5 to 10 minutes. In addition, make sure the information is applicable.

Use as many different senses as possible to really drive the message home. When someone hears a piece of information, they only remember 10 percent of it three days later, but add a picture and retention skyrockets to 65 percent. So, incorporate video, audio, and tactile exercises into your training programs to maximize memory retention.

Also, find out what the top performers in the company are doing and use them as a model. Share their methods and stories to anchor theory into practice. Case studies like this can further ground training in concrete reality.

Make knowledge stick after the training

Most importantly, management needs to adopt the practices themselves in order for the rest of the team to take it seriously. Assuming that is the case for your organization, then the next step is to create exercises to apply knowledge post-training, ideally in real-life situations. For example, using knowledge checks immediately after a training session gives learners a chance to apply the information and help reinforce what’s been learned.

In addition, using periodic reinforcement and incorporating multimedia such as audio or video helps reps to retain what they’ve learned and apply it on the job. Research shows that breaking things down into short, easy to digest snippets and applying the spacing effect like this, or spacing learning events at expanding intervals, such as 2-, 30-, and 60-day points, enhances long-term memory.

Technology can really help in this process to boost retention by providing just-in-time delivery of relevant content. Sales enablement platforms can empower you to automatically make information available to the sales team on every device and OS in the moment it matters to help cement knowledge in long-term memory. For example, you can tailor your CRM to include guides, videos, and other resources to support and reinforce new training.

Bottom line: apply these strategies to foster long-term retention.

1. Split information up into short segments and dole it out at frequent spaced intervals.

2. Deliver multiple repetitions to help cement what was learned and enable recall.

3. Test knowledge and provide immediate feedback on mistakes. Then make sure learners get it right before moving on.

4. Use real stories, either internal or customer examples, to convey facts. Providing context to the information in this way helps people retain it.

Fine tune and adjust training to reinforce what is working and address what is not

Sales training should be an agile process. Gather feedback as you go. Track participation and how well people are doing on knowledge checks to see if lessons need to be adjusted to be more relevant or engaging. Using the right technology, you can even see what materials are driving sales indicators.

Sales reps often don’t want to take the time to stop and learn how to sell—they'd rather be out selling. But sometimes it is essential. In those times, it is important to make sure that the material is relevant to the audience, interactive and engaging. In order to avoid the inevitable brain drain, break it into small chunks and disperse it over time.

Then build in opportunities for on-the-job reinforcement to help them apply what they’ve learned so they will remember it. Also, don’t forget to gather feedback and scrutinize the usage analytics on the programs you produce so you can tweak them and improve them as you go.