StoryQuest Blog

Recently, a Fortune 500 company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their global sales force to a conference. They loaded everyone up with company messages, product information and sales tactics from their top performers. Their IT staff uploaded a library of PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and video of the event onto the company web portal. The problem? After 2 weeks they found that only the smallest percentage of their people spent any time reviewing it. For the others, it was as though that event never happened.

Ever happened to you?

After the conference, the company found that only 20% of their people retained and utilized what they’d learned and made improvements in their sales results. Despite the incredible investment to get everyone together, to bring in great speakers and trainers, and then to invest in the technology to make it all available afterwards, they saw very little return on their investment.

They’re not alone. A 2004 Miller Heiman Sales Effectiveness Study revealed that 54% of sales leaders recognize that they have inadequate processes for leveraging the potential of strong performers. So how do you extend the productivity of top performers to your midlevel sales people? Answer: It’s all in the message. Regardless of the technology, regardless of the sizzle, it’s still the steak that makes or breaks sales training. Content is still king.

Mobile tools are great, but content is still king

Web tools, sales enablement, mobile tools all are becoming part of the sales performance landscape but content is still the most important factor. While Podcasting and other mobile tools are making learning portable, convenient, and allow listeners to multi-task – it’s just not enough. The good news is that by leveraging some techniques from learning behavior models and sound, common sense, you can break through and see results.

Here are four tactics to greatly improve the learning and performance of your sales force:

1. When it comes to training, steer clear of marketing ease
The savviest consumers of your marketing are your own people. They are often cynical and suspicious of the refined messages from the marketing department and are more responsive to learning from their peers. You’re job? Get marketing to take a backseat to the less polished but more authentic tales from the top performers.

2. Improve the production quality to improve the retention
Podcasts don’t do more than showcase the problem: Crumby content is crumby content no matter where you get it. The only difference? With an iPod you can just turn it off. Your job? Edit out the ramblings, structure for impact and package for presentation or hire someone who will. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of everyone’s time to put poor quality information out there and expect it to be consumed.

3. Stories are still the most compelling learning devices
We’ve known if for centuries but need to be reminded once in a while; we learn best through storytelling. It captures our imagination, improves our retention and is a more enjoyable process. Listening to stories gives your team the opportunity to learn from others experiences and reflect on how someone else handled a particular situation. Your job? Get the top performers to share their successes, failures and tactics through authentic stories. Capture those stories so that they can be digested by a mobile, multitasking audience.

4. If you don’t make it important, they won’t
OK, you’ve done everything right, authentic content, great packaging…so now what? Well, if you expect that you’ll throw great content out to your people and “just see the sales numbers climb”, you’re kidding yourself. You’re job? Ensure that people are accountable for the consumption of the content by holding their feet to the fire. Measure, test, track and hound them, it’s the only sure-fire way. It may be painful in the short term, but the long term is the creation of a culture of learners.

Remember that pushing out information, no matter how, isn’t a guarantee that it will be consumed, retained or that behavior will change. You can improve your odds with better quality content and a dedicated cultural shift towards tracking and accountability. The ROI of your event can be greatly impacted if you remember to make the small changes that yield the biggest results.

Tim Keelan, president of StoryQuest, is an expert on learning enablement in the enterprise environment. Tim’s clients include Lucent, Keane, RSA, Miller Heiman and many more.

Tim can be reached at 888-263-6976. To learn more about how you can empower learning in your organization using cutting edge technology and advanced behavioral theory, visit us on the web at www.StoryQuest.us