Making Sales Training Technology Actionable

Over the past decade, we have seen a growing gap between the developmental needs of sales organizations and the learning solutions available in the market.

The pace of work has never been faster, selling organizations have never been more diverse and distributed, and the expectation for revenue growth has never been higher — and yet, learning solutions have not kept pace. Actionable sales training technology is a solution to bridging that gap.

Sales Training Technology Keeps Sellers Selling

Skill development has always been a critical aspect of sales organizations, but in today’s complex sales environments, revenue pressures are relentless and don’t go away while sellers sit through training. In a recent interview with ATD Research, Charlotte McKenzie, Executive Director of the Urban Agile Learner Institute, underscored the power of technology to address specific concerns for salespeople. For example, because money walks out the door when salespeople are not in the field, mobile learning programs can minimize time-out-of-market by reducing the time they spend in the classroom. Sellers learn key concepts and selling models before class, giving them more time to focus on clients.

“Courses designed using microlearning strategies can produce an effective learning experience during what salespeople call their ‘dead time. For example, while traveling to customer sites, during lunch breaks, commuting to and from work, waiting in the lobby for customer appointments, and so on. These features of mobile learning allow salespeople to access their learning modules when it suits them, which is the key to getting them to utilize it.”-- Charlotte McKenzie, Director of the Urban Agile Learner Institute

Inspiring Learning

Oftentimes, technology is blamed for breakneck change that’s hard to keep up with. But at Richardson Sales Performance, we believe in using technology to inspire learning. Our Accelerate platform, for instance, is designed to address current challenges facing sales organizations while adapting with users to help them take on emerging challenges. Flexible and built to fit selling teams no matter who they are, where they are, or what they need to know, Accelerate leverages a user’s preferred devices to deliver microbursts of content that help drive consistency and engagement.

Driving Results

One great advantage of technology is the ability to capture data and transform it into actionable insights. Through assessments, formative quizzes, and learner confidence scoring, we designed Accelerate to deliver analytics that provide visibility into the business and inform learning. Accelerate uses built-in touchpoints to provide the data that sales organizations need to show how far learners have come and where they need more focus. Because sellers interact with the platform before setting foot in a classroom, they enter the learning program with an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and maintain a good understanding of their performance. The platform knows each learner’s goals and progressively adapts the daily work effort needed to keep them on track. An added layer of game mechanics keeps them motivated and highlights progress against self-imposed benchmarks, as well as peer-to-peer.

Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning

As learning solutions take advantage of technology to evolve and keep pace with learner expectations, it’s important to remember that sales training is not an event; rather, much like technology, it’s a process and it needs to be able to live on beyond the classroom. Higher-order learning that sticks now requires a combination of traditional classroom scenarios and the digestible, personalized content that makes them relevant and actionable in the real world.