As
you tackle the process of introducing sustainable improvements across
your organization, this series of articles is designed to provide a
framework that you may wish to explore when looking to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales, service and support teams.
In
our first two articles, we looked at the benefits of first considering
your training goals and how human nature plays into evaluating how to
approach your learning initiative. With those perspectives in place,
this week we'll explore a question that clients often ask: 'How much
time can we afford for training?'
After all, time is
money and independent of how much we know that sales training is
important, we have a lot on our plates at any one time.
In
any learning initiative, successful and long-lasting impact is dependent
on the quality of the information, the skill of those guiding the
learning process, the openness of the learners and how effectively you
can blend it into the events that are going on at any particular time
within the organization.
The world of natural sciences
introduced us to a concept of 'a half-life', the amount of time it
takes for a quantity to diminish to half of its original size through
natural processes. That same concept is also just as applicable in a
learning environment – skills and knowledge will have a tendency of
eroding over time. The question is: How do you slow that erosion or
perhaps top it up along the way?
When clients ask what the
best learning methodology is for them, we begin by looking at a delivery
method that reduces or eliminates the 'half-life' of the learning in
the context of what else is going on around the initiative.
In
some cases, a concentrated day or two may be an approach that fits into today's requirements – recognizing that the half-life of such an
approach is potentially quite short. In others, you may be able to
carve out time each week over an extended period. Each approach fits in
different circumstances and both have to consider whether students have
to travel, instructors provide onsite services or a combination of
online and conferencing facilities would meet the overall goals.
The
amount of time you can afford for training will vary based on the goals
that you have for the initiative and the type of change that you wish
to see within your organization. But there is one inescapable fact: training is not 'an event'. It is a continual process that is
designed to change behaviour. And that can't be accomplished by reading
about what to do or someone telling you how to behave.
Effective
sales training must be a consistent, ongoing process that is delivered,
measured, praised, coached and repeated on a daily,
customer-by-customer basis.
The ideal recipe for significant
change and sustainable results is a framework that delivers quality
content in an environment that blends the learning initiative into a
strategic thrust endorsed by the whole organization.
And how much time does that take? In our estimation – every chance you get.
We invite you to visit algario.com to review all of the articles in our Investing in Sales Skills series. We'd be pleased to review the Algario PowerLearn™ Sales Development System with you and demonstrate how you can maximize your return on invested effort for your sales improvement initiatives.
