Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

5 Ways to Ensure your Sales Training Program Won’t Succeed

Third in a 3 part series on sales training theory

The first two articles in this series addressed business processes that must be in place before you consider sales training as a solution, and the value of Bloom's Taxonomy as a training foundation. Today's post addresses how the training itself can go wrong, even if everything else is in place. Everyone that funds a sales training program wants it to succeed. But many times it doesn't. The biggest failure point results from lack of ongoing reinforcement of the principles learned in the training class. But there are other failure points, too, and we've heard several of them that are the ones most often voiced among inside sales execs, managers, and reps. Here are 5 of the most common:

1) Lack of a plan to ensure ongoing reinforcement of the principles taught in the class
2) "Chunking" curriculum into blocks delivered over time
3) Not seeing and vetting the actual curriculum before it's delivered
4) Training delivered from remote locations
5) Inadequate budget to deliver a curriculum that meets stated training objectives

Whether you're going to buy training or develop and deliver it yourself, those are important pitfalls of which to be aware. Here's an explanation:

1) To avoid having your training forgotten or unused, have a reinforcement plan in place that will guarantee the principles will be applied after the training takes place. Most of the time, reps are pretty pumped up about the training once they finish the class. In the training business, that's called a "sugar shot." So they go back to their desks, try one or two things, forget a few others, and a few days or weeks down the road, not much has changed from their pre-training behavior. Our favorite way of reinforcement is to have inside sales managers coach their own reps on a regularly scheduled basis that remains in place year-round. This is interactive, and allows the manager to cross-pollinate best practices with the rest of the team. Less effective are "push" strategies, like updated email sales techniques, and "pull" strategies, which often consist of visits to sales training websites. Most reps never get around to reading sales training emails, text messages on phones, or visiting sales training websites. However you choose to do it, my opinion is that you're throwing away both money and time by not building in a reinforcement piece that works.

2) Beware of "chunking" sales curriculum into blocks delivered over a period of time. The process of "chunking" is the delivery of a curriculum over a period of days, weeks, or months. It doesn't work well for sales training, because all curriculum areas interact with each other, and reps tend to have questions that relate to inter-curricular activities. Receiving all curriculum in a continuous iterative session promotes the learning process called "rehearsal," which allows reps to move concepts from short-term to long-term memory, and it's a critical step in the process of how adults learn knowledge and adopt new behaviors. For example, when reps are trained on innovative ways to open calls, they'll ask about everything from follow-on questions, to closing, to effective questions, to organizational charts. When you chuck your curriculum, your trainer will invariably respond to some questions with "sorry, we can't cover that today, because it's covered in next week's module." When you do that, reps learn pretty quickly not to ask about anything that's not on today's "list." All reps think differently, but you want your training to be interactive. Reps tend to drive curriculum by thinking of how they could have applied the material in past sales situations, and "out of the box" questions engage the class, and they learn more effectively. Chunking takes away one of the most powerful teaching tools, which is about going right to a later module when the class wants to drive it there.

3) See the course materials before the class takes place, and discuss or change elements of the curriculum with which you disagree, are uncomfortable with, or don't quite understand. As a manager, there's nothing worse than sitting in a training class when your instructor delivers a method that you know won't work. Believe me, your senior reps will know it, too. By then, it's a little late to change the curriculum, and your trainer may use the piece you didn't like to build on a hierarchy of behaviors linked to that principle. Your trainer could also have a compelling reason behind the principle, but the place to hash it out should occur well before it's delivered in class. If you're a manager that disagrees with a principle in the class itself, the credibility of the curriculum and instructor will be damaged, and reps will begin tuning out. Always see and vet your curriculum in advance so it can be modified if necessary before the class takes place.

4) Remote sales training these days is often an invitation to hidden multi-tasking as the training is taking place.  Just about the worst thing that can happen in a sales training class is for your reps to be unengaged with the trainer and curriculum to the point to doing other things during the class. That would include checking emails and texting on portable devices, fast-forwarding through the course materials, and daydreaming. These all happen pretty frequently when training is delivered from remote locations. It's pretty common for management personnel in the room to be doing the same thing, too. Since the trainer can't physically walk around the room, he or she isn't optimized for ensuring that everyone is engaged.  When the trainer is physically in the same room, he or she can walk around the room, constantly pinging everyone on curriculum data points, and can ensure that those PDAs are put away so people take the training seriously. In most societies these days, people have been brought up to multi-task when they're watching television (and remote training is television). It's second nature, and a habit nearly impossible to break. The physical presence of a trainer is a different story, and there are different expectations and expected behaviors of the part of learners.

5) Be careful of making training decisions that are based primarily on budget issues. Every company wants to save money, and doesn't want to overpay for anything. But it's the job of your salespeople to bring revenue to your company, and you wouldn't be considering training if there weren't performance gaps that you perceive as being critical to your overall financial success. So seriously consider determining what your best training solution is, then tackle the budget issue to see if you can get it worked out. Remember that your salespeople work roughly 2,000 hours each year, and successful training and continual reinforcement will make that training successful every single hour of the year. So find the training solution that will work optimally for you, and make a case for getting the funding approved to do it. The old adage of "when you buy quality, you only cry once" really does apply here, and most companies that have achieved less-than-expected results from training have realized that going the cheap route caused them to have to regroup and train all over again because the expected sales results never occurred, and that the behaviors the company wanted to change never did.

So there are 5 common failure points that are part and parcel to the business of training. Sales execs and managers love to talk about training, what worked and what didn't, and what to do better next time. In my interviews with them in discussions about my inside sales training courses, at least one of the failure points listed above was given as a reason they felt their training budget had, to a large extent, been wasted in the classes delivered by their previous training providers. Whether doing training yourself or hiring an expert, keep this checklist handy, avoid the pitfalls, and have a great training session. And add avoiding these pitfalls to your Best Management playbook.