Design Sales Training for Retention and Learning Transfer: The Spaced Effect

By Mark Roberts

Companies spend over $70 billion per year on training and are not seeing the return on their investments when 90% of what trainees learn is forgotten within days and new behavior does not occur. The science of learning has a lot to offer organizations on how adults learn and what are best practices in learning and driving behavior change for modern salespeople today. In this post we share the impact spaced learning has on retention and why your training program must have a spaced design element to insure retention. 

Remember that all-day sales seminar you spent months designing and developing? You included the necessary skills your salesforce needed to become great sellers, you incorporated games, a workbook, you even gave them free pens and polo shirts with the company logo! The trainer spent the entire day teaching them selling skills. Then, two months later, you launched a skills assessment only to find 90% of your salesforce were not using the skills they learned. As you read through the results, you thought “we trained them, why are they not using their new skills?”

Trainers and instructional designers know this scenario all too well. You spend months making sure you designed the perfect one-day seminar, only to find out very few people retained the information, and even less were able to apply it. Now what? Do you repeat the entire seminar, or is it time to think about designing your content differently? Your ultimate goal, as a learning professional, is to enable learner retention which leads to the transfer of learning. Incorporating the Spaced Effect in your design can help you accomplish that goal. Many studies have showed when using the Spaced Effect, “students were not just memorizing solutions, they were instead applying their learning to solve new problems.” (Kang)

We need to ask ourselves: what is the goal, the outcome we desire, our company expects from this training …to Forget or Retain?

We have all likely heard of the Learning Curve, but do you know there is also a Forgetting Curve? “In 1880-1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a study that ultimately lead to the Forgetting Curve” (Murre and Dros), which tells us that “we forget things over time unless we revisit them” (Fionnuala).

      The Forgetting Curve (McNamee) 

To overcome the Forgetting Curve, Ebbinghaus theorized that spacing out learning events leads to positive effects on retention and transfer of learning. In The Art and Science of TrainingElaine Biech explains, “when practice opportunities are distributed over time, learning is better. Learning requires several exposures to material for true understanding. It also takes different kinds of exposures, not just a repetition of input.” 

I don’t know about you, but I have very few learners who attend a class and start using their new skills immediately. It could be months after training when the learner needs to utilize this new skill, and by then they may have forgotten what they learned.

Instructional designers know training design should enable learners to acquire new knowledge and apply it at the time of need: a new skill, a new system, a new process. Learning transfer ensures learners have “the ability to utilize what was learned to answer new questions or solve new problems” (Kang). Learners today want, need and expect just in time learning.

The Spaced Effect, at its’ core, is a way to introduce a new skill, and then continue to re-introduce that skill to the learner over time. “Real learning is not memorization. Most of what we learn is lost in hours. To retain what has been taught, participants must chew on it” (Biech, 33-34). It is not enough to just repeat the same information, using the same methods as when you initially introduced the content.  

Putting it into Practice

There are many ways to achieve a spaced approach in your design. Take, for example, the salesforce we discussed in the beginning. We wanted to train them on sales skills in a one-day seminar. Sure, we were able to introduce the skills in that seminar, but the learning should not stop at the classroom door. 

First, we could include pre-work prior to the instructor-led event, such as an article to introduce the topics and videos to watch. When they come to the seminar, we present the topic again, but in a different way and with more substance. I particularly like this model and use a flipped classroom design when trainees arrive for instructor led training.

Another approach would be to incorporate learning events after the initial training. Let’s say in our sales seminar, we spend time training negotiation skills, however the learner may not need to negotiate with a customer for months later. As follow up to the seminar, we could develop a series of short videos on how to use key negotiation skills, then push out one video every week after the seminar with flash drills sent to the mobile devices. The short videos are reminders of what they learned, but in a different context maybe using a short story or an illustration for example. We could also push out content such as job aids, assessments, short video or flash drills to re-introduce the topics over time.

A great way to accomplish transfer of learning, after the initial instruction, is to have them complete an activity using the skills they learned. “Without opportunities to discuss, ask questions, do, and perhaps even teach someone else, real learning will not occur” (Biech, 33-34). Have them work through scenarios, role plays, create a presentation for others, or even engage in a discussion about how they will apply their new skills. Have their mangers work with them on the job applying and coaching the skills.

Our all-day seminar now has a pre-work introduction study, follow-up videos, and application exercises to keep the learners engaged in the topic for months after the seminar. Which means when it is time to use their negotiation skills, they can recall and apply what they learned to answer questions and solve real problems. When videos are available and deployed to their mobile devices, they can be watched multiple times and used as refreshers right before the big meeting with the customer where they must negotiate for example.

If our goal as learning professionals is to enable our learners to retain and apply what they have learned, then spacing out the learning, using a variety of training methods to help ensure learning transfer takes place, is critical to our role. Remember, plan for spaced learning events in your initial design. This can be done through pre-work and after the initial instruction. Make sure you are asking your learners to apply their new skills and recall previous content. Allow the learners time to absorb content before re-introducing it and be sure you are not repeating the exact same instruction over and over. Mix it up and your learners will walk away with skills they can actually use outside of training and drive the training ROI your executive team is expecting.

How about your team…

How do you train your salespeople?

Do you do one and done instructor led training? 

Do you have a blend of instructor led and online?

Are you designing your training incorporating video, articles, and flash drills to their mobile devices spaced over time?

The science of learning demonstrates the need for learning to be spaced to drive maximum retention and ultimately new behaviors that will drive the ROI from training our organizations expect.

If you want to learn more or discuss this topic give me a shout at [email protected]