No matter what your organic growth strategy is, having well-trained talent to support that strategy is a key ingredient.
Recently, I read a Harvard Article, How We Made our Sales Training More Effective by Making it Harder by Jeff Winters, it made me chuckle. So many companies view training as simply a box they need to check. It looks good if I give my team some training, or I’m expected to give them training, etc. Consequently, companies typically chose training that is easy for everyone involved.
What do I mean by easy?
Well you know, let’s not ruffle any feathers, we don’t want any push back from the sales team. Let’s make sure they enjoy it, so let’s have a good speaker. Let’s not take too much time because it’s really about checking a box or bonding. Let’s not have the managers support it and ensure we are living it and using it in the field.
Let’s not bother would be a better answer.
So back to the article, How We Made our Sales Training More Effective by Making it Harder. I love it.
The essence of it was that they made practice harder than the sale itself. They allowed them to fail in the role-play scenarios and find a way to get unstuck. They also applied the principle of overlearning which is about repeating a task until it takes less effort to do it when in front of a client.
I chuckled as there are some similarities between what this company did to improve the effectiveness of sales training and what we do with Momentium. We share Momentium isn’t for companies who want to check a box. It is for companies who want a permanent behaviour change and lasting results. Momentium is about the science of learning and deliberate practice supported by an expert coach. Momentium requires you to focus and learn, it is hard, and because of that, it is effective.
By the way, the company in the Harvard article, Sapper Consulting, measured a 70% reduction in customer churn in just two months.
Tom Peters may have said it best in his interview on How Better Training Can Help Companies Face the ‘Tech Tide.’ Peters addressed a question on how important people are going to be for businesses as AI and technology are expected to run businesses; his response was:
“My bias is people are 10 times more important because the way they (companies) will stay in business is to intimately differentiate their product or service…… People will be far more important than ever, if they are well-trained, well-led and if they are engaged in what they’re doing.”
So, what are you doing? Are your people ready to “intimately differentiate your product or service”? What’s your training like? Are you checking a box or making lasting change?
