Your sales enablement strategy must ensure your sales team has everything they need to engage clients through the buying process. Your sellers must know how they can use the resources they have in order to maximize profits. This means sales training sessions must be as effective and impactful as possible, in order to equip sellers with what they need to know in a short period of time.
There are multiple ways of educating your salespeople during training sessions and easing the sales onboarding process to meet your goals effectively. Ultimately, it is best to base your instruction method on proven scientific methods.
Here are the 3 scientific methods you should leverage in order to effectively train your sales team:
1. Gamification
In gamification, you will use game-like elements to motivate your employees to take steps that boost your profits. By “gamifying” your sales content, you can easily engage learners in the current hyperconnected world where people have short attention spans. Luring them into a game-like world that combines content and competition allows them to overcome distractions.
The primary benefit of gamification is motivating your people to learn. A study in the Journal of Education for Business reported that 67% of learners were more motivated by gamified rather than conventional course delivery methods. Gamification works for employees that want to boost their skills individually as well as those who are competing against their peers. This makes gamification an ideal sales training strategy for diverse sales teams.
Below are the main steps involved in the creation of a gamification strategy for sales enablement training:
- Outline your objectives. Most sales teams opt for gamification for their sales enablement strategy to improve rep follow-ups. Even when you have no issues, establish goals for your gamification training strategy to succeed (keep in mind the behavioral changes that you’ll want to achieve as part of this sales training).
- Outline the crucial steps you will take to achieve your objectives.
- Establish relevant KPIs to track your progress.
- Proactively measure the performance of your sales reps, and communicate their performance with them. This is a learning experience after all; be sure to engage your sales reps in some sort of decision-making process that focuses on improving behaviors together.
2. Microlearning
Microlearning is learning in small portions achieved by breaking your lengthy sales training session into more easily digestible chunks. In microlearning, your training sessions will be short to reduce the cognitive load and ‘’burden’’ of learning associated with lengthy sessions. Microlearning also allows your sales team to learn at their own pace and somewhat control how they learn.
The average employee nowadays gets interrupted every three minutes. Therefore, lengthy training sessions are not an effective way of using your sales team’s time. Not only will they not pay attention, but they may miss valuable opportunities. There is no specified duration of a microlearning session, but respondents in an ATD study cited ten minutes on average as the ideal duration.
Below are tactics of maximizing the benefits of microlearning for your sales enablement strategy:
- Your microlearning content should be engaging enough to hold people’s attention. Include videos, infographics, and photos in your content since these are easier for people to process, thus holding their attention.
- Have a defined learning objective that will be tested after the lesson. It is best to have one learning goal for each activity and communicate this to your sales team beforehand.
3. Social Learning
Social learning is one buzzword you will come across often in sales enablement training. Most learning happens informally, meaning outside traditional training courses, according to the ‘Seven Principles of Learning’ by Peter Henschel. About 90% of employees cite social knowledge sharing as their preferred mode of study in a global survey.
Social learning includes theories of cognitive and behavioral learning. It is based on the concept that human beings learn by observing others and noting the context in which a behavior occurs. There are four main steps involved in social learning: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
Social learning can take the form of a new employee observing how a senior sales rep handles his/her tasks, followed by a discussion on how and why certain steps occur. To maximize the benefits of social learning, it is essential to focus on behavioral shifts among your staff so that people can only pick positive behaviors from others. Some benefits of social learning include:
- Increased self-confidence because of peer-to-peer collaboration.
- Increased flexibility in learning since it can happen anywhere at any time.
- The ability to crowdsource learning content.
An impactful sales enablement strategy will save the time salespeople take to draw in clients, reaching their goals quickly. It also keeps salespeople aligned to their tasks and maintains your brand’s profitability.
The above approaches to learning are not used only to impart knowledge at one single time. According to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, human beings will forget what they have learnt when it is not repeated or reviewed constantly. These scientific learning approaches must be long-term elements of your sales enablement strategy.