Before working with The Fortune Group, one of our clients took an interesting approach to sales training: they gave an instructional book on sales to their staff and had each of them present a chapter back to the group.
Shortly after implementing this approach, salespeople started to miss training sessions, saying that they were busy with customer sales meetings.
Fantastic, our client thought,
the training is working better and faster than we'd hoped!
But then the client analysed their sales results. And despite the upsurge in the number of customer meetings, the sales numbers weren't improving.
What was happening? Our client investigated and, in retrospect, the explanation was very simple: their salespeople
hated the training. Not only did it not provide any value, but it bored them to distraction… literally! So they skipped the sessions by providing what they figured was the only acceptable excuse – a customer sales meeting.
Business training is not a one-way download of content that's presented as conclusive. You cannot put adult learners in a group, force feed them and expect them to take it. Really effective training has to be a two-way street, one in which interactive dialogue is the norm and well facilitated. When it's done that way, content is no longer king; instead, it becomes the catalyst for 'focused' conversation. And that conversation continues, not just during the first training session, but for many more to come. Because unlike a book, fixed in time and space, you can't just open and close business training programs; they're an ongoing process, iterative in nature, in which you will continuously improve yourself and your team... provided you manage it that way.
So the client learnt the hard way. But once they did, they not only engaged their salespeople with compelling and ongoing learning, and had them eager to attend future sales training, but they did what they initially set out to do: they increased sales.