The State of Sales Training

Transcription

1 The State of Sales Training How to Improve the Current Sales Training Experience with Observational Learning at Scale By CommercialTribe CEO Paul Ironside

2 The State of Sales Training Observational Learning at Scale Education has been preparing our students for an economy that no longer exists. Technology and globalization have transformed our society. Dr. Yong Zhao - Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education 1/3 of our Sales New Hires Won t Meet Expectations This Year. Why Is That Acceptable? It s time to rethink how we train our reps. Our Industrial Education System By Paul Ironside, CommercialTribe CEO I recently attended a conference and was spellbound by a keynote speaker, Dr. Yong Zhao. A native of China, he left that country to get an advanced degree in the U.S. and has since become an international expert on education. At the conference, he postulated a startling theory: We re going about education all wrong. With all the emphasis on Common Core and Leave No Child Behind here in the U.S., we have focused our efforts on readiness for college and career. But in spite of heroic efforts, we keep hearing statistics that make us all depressed: over 50% of recent college graduates in the US are unemployed or under-employed 1. Our kids consistently rank behind students in other parts of the world on tests in the key STEM curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). How behind? According to Teach for America, the United States ranks 25 th in math and 17 th in science among developed nations 2. Ouch. 1 The Atlantic Monthly, April 23, % of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed How? by Jordan Weissmann 2 Teach for America, 2013

3 Our Industrial Education System, cont. But what Dr. Zhao said next made me sit up in my chair and take note, as I thought about the thousands of sales execs I ve had a hand in hiring or training over my career. He pointed out that teaching that STEM curricula or any curriculum for that matter in the way we do today - lectures, books and tests - is actually preparing our kids for an economy that no longer exists. Just like the industrial age transformed us from an agrarian economy to a world where factories were king, we re now going through a similar transformation as we move into the age of entrepreneurialism and what I sometimes call digital everything. The problem is that our educational system - and the way we typically train our sales teams - is still stuck back in the industrial age. Our kids, and our sales teams, aren t poorly educated. But as Dr. Zhao calls it, they re mis-educated. They were prepared to look for jobs, but not to create jobs. They were prepared to solve problems, but not to identify problems or ask questions. They were prepared to follow instructions, but machines can follow instructions more precisely and more important, with less cost 3. The evidence? Can you name a great, innovative company coming out of the countries that are besting our kids at the rote curricula? Alibaba you say? OK. It s an Amazon knock-off. Huawei? It got its playbook from GE. Samsung? It s trying to copy Apple. That s right. In spite of lagging behind in the core curriculum standards, we have some of the most entrepreneurial and creative business people in the world today. Many of our best leaders didn t even finish college. The individuals and the reps are not the problem. Instead, the way we go about teaching and learning is fundamentally flawed. 3

4 Preparing Our Reps for The New Age of Selling This data got our attention. We immediately began thinking of how we typically train our reps. Here s how most of us do it. See if you agree: 1. Bring reps together in a classroom or auditorium setting for a multi-day training on our new products or solutions 2. Have multiple presenters (usually product or marketing types) talk about the latest thing 3. Certify or role play to test their knowledge 4. Send them forth to sell Sound a lot like how we teach in school today? It did to us. It s no wonder that typically one out of three new reps fail. But how did our best reps really learn? They learned from their mentors. They observed the best and imitated them until they got it right. That behavioral-based learning style has been proven to be the most effective in teaching new sales skills. But our corporate training model today is woefully behind. Instead of flipping the classroom, giving reps a curriculum that allows reps to take control of their own learning, we re lecturing and testing. And here s the result: 58% of qualified deals land in no decision, because reps haven t internalized the behaviors they need to change the status quo4. 4 Sales Benchmark Index, CommercialTribe, info@commercialtribe.com

5 How We Learn Sales Behaviors Our understanding of the ways that we actually teach and learn stem from research in the 1960s, by Stanford social psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura. Dr. Bandura s contribution was to Social Learning Theory 5, a comprehensive analysis of behavioral change and how we learn new ideas 6. What Dr. Bandura did was have a group of children witness an adult interacting with an inflatable Bobo doll. The adult struck and verbally assaulted the doll, and was given a reward, a punishment, or no feedback. Afterward, the children were allowed into the room, and generally interacted with the doll based on the observation of the adult s reward or punishment. If they saw the adult punished for hitting the doll, for example, they would avoid imitating the same behavior. What happened? What Dr. Bandura observed is that the children learned how to interact with the doll through four key steps: 1. Observation 2. Imitation 3. Recognition 4. Repetition Watching the specific behavior, the children naturally observed the situation and the noted violence. When exposed to the doll, they imitated the behaviors, beating and yelling at the Bobo toy. Getting the right recognition, with models rewarded or punished for certain behaviors, the child s own actions were reinforced. Finally, the actions were repeated, a learned behavior. This matches perfectly with the way reps learn: observing their managers and top performers, adapting the behaviors that seem to lead to success, getting approval and recognition, and repeating until it becomes their own. But this isn t how we re teaching, and certainly not how we re doing it at scale. 5 Social Learning Theory, Dr. Albert Bandura, 6

6 Observational Learning At Scale So why are we still using the old approach to sales training? Solving the sales training dilemma takes two basic solutions: Make it easy for the best reps to share what they know o Make it convenient to capture recordings o Publish for all so it persists in perpetuity as a library of best practices o Create incentives for the team to produce great content Make it easy for reps to learn o Observe relevant content on-demand o Practice and self-assess until happy with the result o Submit for feedback, coaching, and recognition Observational Learning at Scale Make it easy for the best reps to share Observational Learning at Scale Make it easy for our training reps to practice

7 The CommercialTribe Solution What does this look like in practice? Top performers and managers design certification and onboarding courses that bring out best practices. Using video, a medium already proven to dramatically increase sales training stickiness, reps observe, record, and share, practicing until they get it right. A library of best practices and tribal knowledge makes it easy for reps to learn more or to onboard. With video alone, it s been shown that seeing and hearing messages increases audience retention by 3-6 times when compared to isolated audio or text/images alone. 7 At CommercialTribe, we took this challenge to heart. We created a social sales training solution that makes it easy for the best reps to contribute what they know and get recognized for it. And even more critical, we created a solution that enables reps to practice bite-size pieces of a training program. We call it a learnercentric approach. Observe Watch video-based selling scenarios from your organization s best reps and subject matter experts. See how the best present and communicate with the market. Practice Internalize by recording your own selling scenarios in a safe and confident online environment. Share Submit a selling scenario to managers and coaches for asynchronous review and feedback. The best scenarios are made public, creating a library of tribal knowledge - By Reps. For Reps. Refine Make adjustments when you receive scorecard-based coaching. Monitor the user dashboard for progress updates as you work toward mastery. Think it won t work? We ve found that reps using the system practice and record an average of almost 7 times before posting for review. That s seven times more often than they re practicing now, and seven chances to get better before they re in front of a customer. They re learning, and the results are clear: Xactly saw a 13% increase in their lead conversion rate using our social sales training solution. It s what we call observational learning at scale. It s sales training for the Digital Everything Age. For More Information, Please Contact: info@commercialtribe.com Phone: YouTube for the Enterprise, Brainshark