While you’d like to think your sales team spends every second of their sales training hanging on your every word, research from Xerox shows that they might only be hanging on a percentage of your words. 13% to be exact. The company found that 87% of new skills are lost within a month of sales training.
Sure, this is a frustrating statistic and even more frustrating when you see it play out on your team. But your reps aren’t the ones to blame, it’s your process.
The human brain just wasn’t designed to remember large amounts of information all at once. Retention rates are even lower when the information is delivered verbally instead of visually, as many sales trainings are. It takes time and repetition to turn sales training into good habits that stick. If you want your team to remember even 50% of their training, you need to rethink your approach. Here are a few quick changes you can implement to make your training far more effective.
Morning Drills
At Salesloft, our sales teams have a morning standup each and every morning. However, we don’t use this time as other teams do. Instead of going around the circle and sharing our daily priorities, we use the time to grill each other on objection countering, sales plays, and various other aspects of our sales training.
For the Salesloft sales team, sales training isn’t something that happens once a quarter, once a month, or even once a week. Sales training happens first thing every single morning. It’s hard to forget something you hear and use every single day and sales teams that use morning drills in this way have training retention rates that soar past the average.
Live Call Coaching
The reason morning drills are so effective is because the sales team is actually putting our training into practice. Everyone learns better by doing and having feedback provided in the moment is a crucial aspect of training retention and improvement. That’s why, in addition to coaching from recorded calls, the best sales managers also provide live call coaching, while a sales rep is still in the conversation with a prospect.
The best sales engagement platforms have live call coaching functionality, like Salesloft’s Live Call Studio, that allows managers to listen in on live calls, provide covert feedback and advice that only the reps can hear, or even join the call themselves. This functionality provides sales reps yet another opportunity to have their training reinforced in real time.
Track Progress in Real-time
In business, few sayings ring more true than “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” This is particularly true of sales training. If you aren’t tracking and monitoring progress, there’s little wonder as to why only a fraction of your sales training is remembered. You need to provide reps with visibility into their progress so they can understand the value of training, see its impact on their actual numbers, and know when to reach out for help. It can also increase the ownership and engagement your team feels in the training progress, which often translates into better retention and better results.
Sales engagement platforms like Salesloft provide comprehensive performance dashboards that show your performance in easy to understand charts and graphs. These dashboards make it easy to understand success, efficiency, and effectiveness at a glance. With a better understanding of their performance, you’ll turn sales training from an abstract concept for your team to an activity that has a very real, concrete impact on their performance.
If you’ve been struggling with your sales training, you’re certainly not alone. HR Chally found that up to 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI. But don’t despair. The simple adjustments to your process listed above will have a dramatic impact on both retention and effectiveness, and have your sales team pushing their skills, drive, and results further than you ever thought possible.
Learn even more about measuring and improving your team’s success rates. Download your free copy of the guide today!