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, uses the power of active learning by getting sales professionals to interact with video content, questions, and gamification to learn and apply effective selling behaviours.

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 practise in regular classrooms.” With active learning, concepts become relevant because learners place them in the context of their real-world challenges.

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 use video content. Learners view different selling scenarios and the behaviours that advance the sale.
• Try It: Sales professionals must not only see what effective selling looks like; they must also put those observations into practise. Doing so means answering questions that ask the learner to try what they’ve learnt 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 learnt. Doing so bridges the divide between what is theoretical and what is practical. We ask learners to think about the ways in which the learnt 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.

Learning is most effective when it requires participation from the student. Just as effective selling requires strong dialogue skills, effective learning requires interaction between the instructor and the learner.

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.