Sales Training: Why it Fades and How to Avoid Wasting Your Time

This month, our webinar is on sustainable sales training. We took a moment to catch up with the speaker, Michelle Teel of Vantage Point Performance, to discuss what experiences make her enthusiastic about this subject, what trainers can do to reinforce learning, and whose responsibility it really is to ensure learning sticks. Michelle has over 26 years of experience in the sales performance arena. During that time, even when she was working with some of the best and brightest clients, she noticed that companies would spend millions of dollars on training efforts only to have little or nothing to show for it. After noticing the pattern, she began looking into what the reasons could be.

Why Sales Training Fades

As it turns out, Michelle learned that one of the main reasons why sales training fades is due to a lack of reinforcement. Does this mean that sales trainers should focus even more on materials that sales teams can use after the initial session? Michelle had this to say:

"By reinforcement, we don't mean online training modules designed to reinforce the content. That has been tried again and again with little to no return. When we say reinforcement, we mean execution with the client in the field where the job occurs."

This means that in order for sales training to really stick, the training needs to be applied on-the-job in addition to the classroom we've echoed in our blog before). Michelle believes that a way that sales trainers can accomplish this is by spending some time gaining sales experience. To speak sales team language, Michelle says, sales trainers need to make sales calls, attend strategy sessions, and go after prospects. This will help them translate their training into something the sales team can relate to.

So Whose Responsibility is it to Ensure Learning Sticks?

The question of who's responsible for learning may not have an easy answer, but is it something that trainers should worry about? Here's what Michelle thinks.

"It is almost never the trainer's responsibility. Training is only a small portion of an overall change effort. The stickiness of the training will depend upon the alignment between the reinforcement and the sales person."

In other words, passing the buck to any one individual isn't going to work. If you want to cause a worthwhile change in sales behavior, that change has to be echoed throughout the whole team. That means that the sales management, the sales trainers, and the sales reps all have to work together and do their part to make sure that training doesn't end in more headaches and less solutions.

Michelle Teel's complimentary webinar, "Sustainable Sales Training: Oxymoron or Achievable Goal?" will be hosted on Tuesday November 30 at 1 PM EST. The presentation will explore the common traps and assumptions companies make when they enter into a sales performance improvement effort and examine why these assumptions lead to misdirected allocation of resources as well as dashed expectations. Register today!