Creating an effective and efficient training course

Some people have asked me, throughout my (long) career and often in interviews, how one should create an effective and efficient training course for a new product release / launch or indeed as part of the introduction of a new / revamped sales process or methodology. It needs to be effective, i.e. to bring the audience to a suitable level of understanding for their role. It also needs to be efficient, i.e. to bring them to that level with the smallest possible investment of time. It also needs to be organised to be even more efficient when they’re re-visiting the material. Ideally, your LMS will track both for you. These are useful metrics for demonstrating the impact of enablement on salesforce readiness.

Effective training

There’s nothing really new here, first establish why you are creating this new program. This should underline and be used to justify all of the future steps in the project. Next, you should establish where the median of your audience are with their understanding of the topic and plan where you need to get them to. These are your start and end-points. Current comprehension for many topics can, and should, be assessed with a knowledge or more practical check. Time spent on developing this checkpoint is extremely worthwhile for you as an enabler; if the assessment is done well, some of your audience will be able to justly qualify themselves out and avoid spending precious selling time running through a pointless course which will, in turn, burn through your valuable enablement capital with the salesforce. The training itself needs to be modularised, mobile and multi-styled. Modularised because of reduced attention spans of all of your audience and because it also serves for the just-in-time learning needs of all our pressurised audience. Mobile, because that’s where your audience are for much of their working life and we shouldn’t distance the learning from that familiar platform. Multi-styled because our audience will have learning preferences that we can’t ignore given our goals for this and every asset/course we create.

Efficient training

Getting salespeople and managers to invest time in training is not always easy. The sellers, or their managers are always understandably keener and under pressure, to invest seller time in revenue generating activities. Enablers must make the most of any time given over to training. Not only should the above steps be taken to increase effectiveness but also the time required to achieve the required competency should be minimised. This competency should have two levels. Level one is familiarity with the topic, enough familiarity to be competent in the basics. Level 2 is to know what they, the seller, still needs to know to be situationally competent and where to quickly grab that, in whatever form they absorb the best. Some of you are, I’m sure, asking why not bring them all to be completely situationally competent every time? In this fast-moving, fast changing world it is simply not realistic to expect all of our sellers to master and retain all of the topics that they need to to sell efficiently and effectively. Some of them will and that’s great but we need to cater for our whole audience in order to increase everybody’s chance to succeed in sales.