Sales Training Sustainment

Through our 45+ years of sales training experience, we've found that attending a training session is usually not enough to significantly impact a seller's success. They need to retain the knowledge they have gained, practice applying it in real life, and receive evidence-based feedback and coaching to continuously improve.

In other words: learning is a process, not an event. That’s why Richardson works with clients to develop a robust sustainment strategy for our sales training programs.

Why is Sales Training Sustainment Important?

If you’re thinking about sustainment as protecting the status quo, then you’re thinking about it wrong. A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that employees who sustain and reinforce skills demonstrate a 16 percent increase in overall performance as reported by their managers. Moreover, this same group exhibited 125 percent less burnout than their peers.

What makes sustainment so powerful is that it serves as a basis for what the researchers behind the study identify as growth, or “thriving.”

They explain:

“We think of a thriving workforce as one in which employees are not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future — the company’s and their own… people who are developing their abilities are likely to believe in their potential for further growth.”

By focusing on sales training sustainment and skill reinforcement, you ensure your workforce stays strong – keeping your organization competitive in any economic setting.

Advantages of Sales Training Sustainment

Some advantages of committing to a strong sustainment and reinforcement strategy include:

• Skill Retention: Without sustainment efforts, the skills and knowledge acquired through training programs will degrade over time. Sustainment maximizes the ROI for sales training by helping sellers apply what they've learned for a longer duration and fostering desired behavior changes.
• More Engagement: Long-term results and innovation come from employees who are “dialed-in.” Ongoing training can boost job satisfaction and motivation among sales professionals, reducing turnover and improving team morale.
• Improved Alignment: Sustainment creates consistency across team members. As a result, managers can be certain that business outcomes are tied to learned skills. When teams are aligned around a core set of skills, they’re better able to work in cooperation and even help one another.
• Competitive Resiliency: Continuous professional growth helps sellers stay updated on industry trends and adjust their strategies accordingly. With a strong sustainment strategy, sales teams are better positioned to outperform competitors in the face of market changes.
• Better Customer Experiences: The most productive business relationships are long-term. Creating a long-term relationship means delivering a consistent customer experience. Sustained selling skills are the foundation of this approach.

Sustainment Planning Solutions

For any sales training program to have a lasting impact, it must be supported with a sustainment strategy that helps sellers retain learned skills through reinforcement, build proficiency by applying skills to daily work, measure performance over time, and continuously improve through targeted coaching and collaboration. Richardson offers a variety of robust solutions to ensure your training investment leads to real, lasting results.

Richardson Accelerate^TM Sales Performance Platform

The Accelerate Sales Performance Platform delivers a blended learning experience using assessments, videos, gamification, and bite-sized modules for skill building. This platform supports retention via an easy-to-use interface, allowing sellers to revisit lessons helping them execute best practices and new skills directly to real accounts in their pipeline.

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Spaced Repetition Technology

QuickCheck™ is Richardson’s training reinforcement tool that sustains learning via your team’s mobile devices. Each day your sales team is prompted to answer a multiple-choice question based on a selling scenario they’re likely to face in the real world. These gamified exercises can be customized to your organization's needs and have been shown to increase knowledge retention, engagement, and skill proficiency.

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Integrated CRM-enabled Workflow Tools

We support our clients’ training journey by offering tools that seamlessly integrate into your existing CRM workflow to help sellers apply the skills they’ve learned to real accounts in their pipeline. The Strength of Sale tool provides an assessment of opportunities to guide a seller's strategy, the Sales Call Planner uses visual prompts and coaching to help sellers prepare to meet every meeting’s unique objective, and the Prosperous Account Strategy tool supports all phases of the account planning process so you can win more business in strategic accounts.

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Sales Coach Training and Services

One of the most important elements to help sustain learning beyond training sessions is ongoing coaching. Richardson's Sprint Coaching^TM program and supporting topical training modules provide sales managers with a model for coaching behavior they can apply with their own teams to best ensure sales skills are sustained and performance continues to grow.

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Performance Measurement

To constantly improve, sales teams need to know how they’re doing. Richardson's analytics solution translates data from various sources to help managers evaluate training and sustainment efforts, reveal challenge areas, and identify coaching opportunities.

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Sales Academies

A sales academy builds personalized learning journeys spanning months (or even years) that align sales training content with the capabilities needed for specific sales roles. Richardson can create a sales academy tailored to your organization's specific requirements that foster a culture of continuous learning, motivating individuals to seek new knowledge and skills. We work with sales leaders through every step of the process, from building the foundation of the sales academy to coordinating the training and monitoring its success.

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