Why Active Learning Works for Sales Teams

Active learning is a form of teaching that seeks involvement and engagement from the learner that goes beyond listening. Richardson Sales Performance Accelerate™, a digital learning platform, leverages the power of active learning by getting sales professionals to interact with video content, questions, and gamification to learn and apply effective selling behaviors.
An analysis of 225 studies comparing traditional learning to active learning found that average exam scores were higher among the active-learning students.
The results “support active learning as the preferred, empirically validated teaching practice in regular classrooms.” With active learning, concepts become relevant because learners place them in the context of their real-world challenges.
See It, Try It, Check It, Apply It
Here, we look at how Richardson Sales Performance Accelerate's active-learning methodology works with our “See It,” “Try It,” “Check It,” “Apply It” approach.
- See It: To adopt better selling skills, sales professionals must first know what “good” looks like. For this reason, we leverage video content. Learners view different selling scenarios and the behaviors that advance the sale.
- Try It: Sales professionals must not only see what effective selling looks like; they must also put those observations into practice. Doing so means answering questions that ask the learner to try what they’ve learned in simulated selling scenarios. Exercises like these build the sales professional’s “locus of control.” This term refers to the degree to which a person believes they are the driver of outcomes they experience.
- Check It: Learners benefit from instant feedback with the “Check It” component of Accelerate. Timely feedback means that learners immediately grasp how the instructor’s comments connect to the learning objective. The effectiveness of feedback is clear from a meta-analysis revealing that feedback translated to “a 28 percentile point difference in average achievement.” Real-time feedback means that the instructor’s expertise becomes part of the learning experience rather than just an additive component occurring after the fact.
- Apply It: Accelerate encourages learners to apply what they’ve learned. Doing so bridges the divide between what is theoretical and what is practical. We ask learners to think about the ways in which the learned concepts connect to real-world selling scenarios. In this final step, participants provide a written answer to questions. We ask what new insights learners gained from the most recent module and how they intend to apply those skills to their next customer call or meeting.
Click here to download the full brief, Why Active Learning Works, to learn more about the impact an active learning approach drives engagement and results.

Brochure: Accelerate Sales Performance Platform
Learn more about Richardson Accelerate, the sales performance platform at the heart of our blended learning training solution.
DownloadGet industry insights and stay up to date, subscribe to our newsletter.
Joining our community gives you access to weekly thought leadership to help guide your planning for a training initiative, inform your sales strategy, and most importantly, improve your team's performance.