Guest post from Findcourses
In recent research released from the professional training search engine findcourses.com, it was revealed that e-learning in training is on the rise. But how can your organization take advantage of professional development and integrated innovative technologies to fight the Forgetting Curve?
In industries across the country, organizations are recognizing the need for investing in training their reps. Resources abound for learning and sales managers toting the best strategies for transforming reps of all seniority levels into revenue leaders. While having a wealth of resources at your fingertips can be useful, they tend to leave a few key questions lingering like:
What tools are most organizations using to train their sales reps, and how are those tools proving to be effective?
According to the 2019 L&D report from findcourses.com, e-learning is the leading, and fastest-growing tool for training professionals to deliver their learning and development (L&D) programing. The report found of all the possible training tools, a whopping 63% of companies surveyed are looking to e-learning to maintain their L&D function as they settle into the new decade.
Furthermore, client-facing functions like sales and customer service were revealed to be amongst the top training priorities for organizations across industries. However, the report also found that 26% of companies only offer their employees one to two weeks of training per year.
Providing sales and customer service training through e-learning is clearly a cross-industry focus. But considering that 87% of sales training is forgotten in just 30 days and that most companies have so little training time on offer, one more question remains to be answered:
What’s the remedy for fighting the Forgetting Curve in sales training?
We may have a lot of questions, but we have just as many answers!
Read on to discover how you can harness the power of e-learning and innovative training tools like conversation intelligence software to fight the Forgetting Curve, and transform your entire team into revenue leaders in one fell swoop.
First Things First: What is the Forgetting Curve?
You’ve already learned that 87% of sales training is forgotten within just 30 days. In the 2019 L&D report out of the UK, the majority of market challengers forecasted a 41% increase in their L&D budgets. Increased training is a positive thing, but it’s useless if it’s not delivered and implemented with strategies for improvement in mind.
87% is too steep. Just what kind of beast are you facing when making the oftentimes hefty investment in sales training?
That beast has a name, and it’s the Forgetting Curve.
In short, the conventional method for sales training is no longer effective. Blindly throwing information at your reps over the course of a training session – no matter the length – will not help them retain anything. If you’ve been surprised at stagnating performance metrics after training sessions, chances are this is the reason why.
Now that you can put a ‘face to the name’ so to speak as to why your training endeavors aren’t having their intended effect, what can you do about it?
Put your professional muscle behind fighting the Forgetting Curve by using strategies such as:
- achieving rep mastery through repetition of training materials outside the training environment,
- strategizing your training to be consistently scalable as your team grows and develops, and
- promoting and rewarding when your reps make tools learned in training into habit loops on the sales floor.
Furthermore, training tools like e-learning and conversation intelligence software are ways to put a bit of extra muscle behind those strategies, to guarantee that you’ll vanquish the Forgetting Curve beast for good.
The Benefits of E-Learning for Sales Training:
Connecting multiple studies on e-learning, trainingindustry.com has reported that the engaging and easily digestible nature of e-learning results in increased training retention rates by as much as 25 to 60%.
The same resource demonstrates that e-learning requires 40-60% less employee time than traditional classroom training, is more cost-effective, and that for every $1 you invest in e-learning you’ll get back $30 in productivity.
If you’re looking to increase your ROI on training costs and increase reps’ retention of training materials, e-learning is your silver bullet. Whether it’s investing in online training courses for your reps or taking advantage of integrated software offerings from external partners – there are countless e-learning solutions that you can tailor to your organization’s and your team’s specific needs.
Tools like conversation intelligence technology will help you focus your training efforts even further and make them more specific, applicable, and engaging for your reps.
A tool like ExecVision will help you integrate e-learning and call best practices from training, into reps’ daily calls on the floor. Regardless of your reps’ experience, they all need to go through the same type of training and have access to libraries of real calls to keep training cohesively scalable.
For example, if you’re conducting a training session on call quality, ExecVision can be used side-by-side with other e-learning training platforms to provide reps with real data and conversations applicable to their roles. The days of abstract PowerPoints and awkward roleplays are over.
Conversation intelligence in conjunction with other e-learning tools and metrics will help identify the high-performers and show low-performers the exact skills they need to be more effective on the floor.
Because who are we kidding? Most salespeople enjoy a bit of healthy competition.
The Takeaway
The Forgetting Curve is the arch-nemesis of training and sales managers alike. Taking the time to train or coach a rep and not see the information make any impact is not why you got into this business. Take the time to re-evaluate your current training strategy and find areas where you can integrate e-learning and conversation intelligence tools into your training function to maximize the impact of your efforts. Solutions and results are key characteristics of any salesperson worth their salt, and training with e-learning and conversation intelligence technology are straightforward ways to make both into a reality.