I am prompted to write this post based on Benjamin Dehenny’s recent LinkedIn post on how people learn and how repetition of (in this case) selling skills is essential for retention, mastery and ultimately sales success.
None of us particularly like repetition. When we revisit a skill that we’ve already heard in sales training, we think “hey, I’ve heard that already” or “we covered that in the last training session”. Maybe we did, but repetition has a way of embedding knowledge and skills. Using them directly after learning them is even better and helps us retain them. According to my business partner Thomas Edwards, 75% of what you learn will be fuzzy after 6 days with only 25% remaining solid…and hopefully the right 25%!
Several of my sales training participants over the years have exhibited the above behaviours by “forgetting” to do their assigned homework, multi-tasking during the 10-minute review of the previous week’s topics or asking them to apply the knowledge learned (again!) to a different sales situation. Role plays are decidedly unpopular, though it is the best way possible to embed selling skills.
Research shows that knowledge retention after training drops off significantly without a review and/or usage of the skills covered. The chart below shows the drop-off in retention both with and without reinforcement.
Reviewing helps us remember! It also helps us apply selling skills to different sales situations…if you do the work! This was something I embraced when my former employer, Alpnet, provided our sales team with Customer Centric Selling (CCS) training. CCS training at the time consisted of the “9-boxes” of sales scenarios. I wasn’t crazy about memorizing those 9-boxes and creating different sales scenarios based on customer roles, but I’m forever glad I did. Fate gave me the opportunity to use them right after the training. I reviewed and reviewed the applicable sale scenario and used it in what turned out to be very productive meetings with a prospective client. I always knew where I was in the sales conversation, I asked good questions and was able to go back and cover steps I’d skipped. In the end, I won the biggest sale of my career…and many, many additional sales after that! I attribute this success to the repetition and review that helped CCS become an integral part of me.
I realize as a trainer that repetition and review can feel tedious, but it really is worth the effort. I will always endeavour to make the repetition as interesting as possible (and include more role plays), but it only works with commitment and participation from you! If I can learn it, apply it and exceed my sales objectives, you can do it too!
FluentSales