The Four Most Important Factors in a Successful Training Experience
1. You must enable trainee buy-in.
Psychiatrists have been telling us for years (er...or they’ve been telling a good friend of ours...yeah...a friend...) that a patient has to want help before help can be provided. Fair enough. The same axiom holds true in the training world. You must provide your trainees with the right training framework. And what is the right training framework? Easy: they must want to be trained.
If it’s going to help them increase sales, convince them of how wonderful this will be. If it’s going to increase their capacity to earn more commission, tell them. Work with your outsourced trainer before the actual training event and promote these benefits.
Remember, please: negative expectations from trainees will pollute even the most well-designed training, just as the world’s best psychiatrist can’t help our ''friend'' overcome his fear of circus clowns.
2. You must know what the problem is and what the solution will be.
This one sounds too simple to be true. But you’d be amazed to see how often this factor is overlooked. Do you know what needs to be fixed? Is it deal closing or relationship building? Do you want to improve ROI? Motivate? Cut down on process redundancy? Align communication from different units, functions — heck, even cubicles and floors? If you don’t know what’s wrong, you won’t know how to solve it.
Or worse (and yes, there is a worse here), you might actually create problems by trying to solve the wrong thing. Scary, yes, but it happens. If you’re trying to solve a team-building problem by promoting individual accomplishment in your training, then you’re actually making things worse. And on top of that, you’re paying for it! AHHHHH!
3. Measure and monitor your sales metrics.
All of the training in our solar system is regrettably not going to improve your sales metrics if you don’t know what those metrics are, what they should be, and whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. You want to measure before and after the training to gauge effectiveness.
4. Who’ll own post-training?
One of the greatest advancements in the language of business is that people are now told that they own certain tasks. So who in your company will own the essential task of post-training?
What?
Post-training. You may have successfully taken care of number one, number two, and number three above, but what happens a week, a month, or a year after the training ends? Who will ensure that its legacy lives beyond the actual training experience? Memories fade, and enthusiasm wanes. You must elect someone capable of this ownership task and empower her or him to do what is necessary to ensure that post-training gains are achieved over the long term.
Training Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Please remember: as a decision-maker and training change agent, the problems that we’re solving here aren’t your fault. The perception of training has changed dramatically in the last decade, and it’s something that more and more people — especially skilled/knowledge workers — are disliking or even resenting.
Yet what hasn’t changed, and what will never change regardless of how dramatic things get, is that training is an essential part of a successful enterprise. The strategy is therefore not to fly the white flag of human resource surrender but to approach training with total success in mind. Implementing the four steps noted above will firmly put you on the right track and head you in the right long-term direction.
About the Author
Adrian Miller is a speaker, a consultant, and president of Adrian Miller Sales Training. Her firm works nationwide, providing highly customized sales training solutions and business development consulting to companies across a wide diversity of industries. Adrian works with companies that range in size from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 firms, and her high-energy programs are well known to be practical, informative, results driven, and fun. Widely read in business publications, Adrian is also the author of The Blatant Truth: 50 Ways to Sales Success, and she is currently at work on her next book. She can be reached at 516-767-9288 or amiller@adrianmiller.com.
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