Benchmarks Verify Progress in Learning

Multitasking. Mobile meetings. Doing more with less. Slimmer windows of opportunity. Today’s sales environment is faster, more demanding, and infinitely more challenging than ever before.

Sellers need 21st-century skills, but time is too precious a commodity to spend much of it in training classrooms. When sales organisations do invest in their people, they demand results and ways to measure progress.

Benchmarking Sales Training Effectiveness

At Richardson Sales Performance, we constructed our new blended-learning, cloud-based platform, Accelerate™, with numerous measurement benchmarks. These both track and motivate each learner’s performance while giving leaders desired insights into individual and team progress.

Sales organisations have long used the Richardson Sales Performance SkillGauge™ diagnostic tool to assess and validate skills. Now, we are taking a similar approach in Accelerate in the form of Baseline Check, which occurs at the launch of the training programme, and a Final Check several months after the programme’s conclusion.

• The Baseline Check is an assessment that benchmarks each seller’s starting point and prepares them to learn.
• The Final Check validates learning progress and shows exactly how far each learner has come.

Between these two points in time, as learners work through activities and exercises, Accelerate delivers formative quizzes that check progress and redirect effort. Through confidence scoring on each activity, learners self-identify where they feel strong and where things are a bit shaky. They can then go back and review concepts needing more attention.

Data Provides Actionable Insights

The ability of Accelerate technology to measure and inform turns data into actionable insight. Learners gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses; they see how well they are learning; they see where they need to apply more effort. Leaders gain visibility into what is, or is not, being learnt and by whom. They can see where learning and coaching interventions are needed. Leaders can tap the analytics for a snapshot of an individual’s performance or the overall view of their entire teams.

Each assessment check presents learners with scenarios of real-life sales challenges and requires them to make decisions. This behavioural-based approach clearly identifies skill gaps, allows for meaningful feedback to learners, and provides decision-making intelligence to leaders. Assessments are based on Richardson Sales Performance’s nearly four decades of experience in tracking best practises and working with world leaders across industries.

Best-in-class benchmarks set expectations and often raise them. In developing Accelerate, Richardson Sales Performance looked to new benchmarks to meet learner expectations. No longer would other training programmes be the comparator, because sellers don’t measure their training experiences against other training experiences. They take into consideration all the formal and informal learning experiences they’ve had, whether in person or online.

With Accelerate, we have set the bar higher. Our best-in-class benchmarks to meet — and exceed — learning experiences are derived from digital spaces, where people are spending more and more time. We now assess Richardson Sales Performance training in general, and Accelerate specifically, against a wider set of competitors, including training programmes, online universities, educational products, YouTube, Google, and massive open online courses known as MOOCs.

For sellers to acquire and hone 21st-century skills takes a 21st-century approach — and benchmarks that measure and motivate progress along the way.