Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

The ineffectiveness of auditorium training: are we throwing our money away?

  

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(Special note: One of my good clients in San Jose is looking for a great Business Development right now. If that’s you, drop me a line, and I’ll put you in touch with her). 

Today’s post is about inside sales training theory, specifically about how people learn best, and how training is best reinforced. It comes on the heels of several conversations I’ve has in the past month or so, and I’ll illustrate the point below with a real example of what I’m talking about. I’m not a big fan of “auditorium training,” where large groups of reps gather in a big room or auditorium, listen to a speaker, see slides and take notes, maybe even have a breakout session or two. Several times this past year, I’ve turned down opportunities where I was asked to conduct a training session of 50 or more inside sales reps in auditorium fashion. In each case, I asked how the training was going to be reinforced, and management said it wasn’t sure, but the reps would have a course book, a checklist, online resources, etc. We discussed the value of side-by-side coaching on real calls, but management wouldn’t go in that direction. So I turned down the business, because the training wasn’t going to work. 

Far too many companies put big money into sales training programs without putting together an effective reinforcement program. I’ve written before on Bloom’s Taxonomy, and how concepts delivered initially have to be reinforced to guarantee their being applied, and for behavior to change. You can’t tell if the concepts are being applied unless you’re listening to a call made by a rep. And behavior won’t change effectively unless you’re sitting right next to a rep at his or her desk before, during, and after a call, so you can see workflow, take notes on the call, and debrief. And after the call, when you’ve heard something the rep missed, you can ask the rep to call the prospect right back. And now you can watch and hear in real-time that the concept is being applied. And if you're in close quarters, other reps can hear the dialogue and pick up tips, great for team communication and cross-pollination of best practices.

Here’s an example. I was coaching a very smart rep that had a very strong foreign accent. We rehearsed his call opening, and I found it difficult to understand what he was saying. I’ll bet his prospects did, too! So we worked on it a bit, and it discovered that if two consecutive words started with vowels, he ran them together in one long non-word, which made both words unintelligible. So I changed each second consecutive word beginning with a vowel to a word beginning in a consonant. It worked great, and we tried it on a call. The prospect clearly understood everything. So he applied it on other calls, and I know that, because I was right there. I’ve got dozens of examples of other coaching “wins,” that have nothing to do with accents, but this was just one situation, and it was recent. 

So what’s this all got to do with auditorium training? As trainers, we’re not merely in the content delivery business. We are --- or should be --- in the “people” business. We should be climbing into the cubes, workstations, and lives of our reps. They’re all individuals, and work differently, learn differently, communicate differently. In a small class, I can talk to them as individuals, ask them questions, role-play with them, get to know them. After the class, we can work one-on-one to apply the principles that we’ve all agreed on, but still need to be applied, most often for the first time. You can’t get that kind of interaction in an auditorium or in online training, where you can’t walk around the room and get some action going (I won’t even get into people looking at mobile phones, but it sure doesn’t happen in my classes.) 

Before I was a successful inside sales rep, I was a Special Education teacher, and believe me, you had to be creative in the classroom, and you always had to have the students’ attention. Daydreaming on the part of the students wasn’t an option, because when they did, they certainly weren’t focusing on the curriculum. And auditoriums are great places for daydreaming. 

So if you’re a sales exec or manager thinking about training your team, give some thought to how you will realistically and concretely determine if the training concepts you’ll be paying for are being applied. Things like post-training tests and checklists given to reps might guarantee they know the concepts, but they certainly don’t guarantee they’re being applied.