Building an effective and engaging training program for sales staff has always been a challenging task, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made this even more critical. As analysts have pointed out, increasing sales will be crucial to pandemic recovery. Unfortunately, in the age of remote working most firms can no longer rely on in-person collaborative learning to disseminate important skills throughout their sales teams.
Some of these challenges with remote learning - including fragmented training, a lack of engagement, and unclear return on investment - have been around for a decade already, but show no signs of diminishing. This has led to a situation in which companies spend millions of dollars a year on sales training without seeing any measurable improvements from these investments. In other words, the content and method of sales training is both poorly defined and expensive.
Enter performance learning, a strategy that aims to make sales training more effective by identifying the skills shared by top performers, and teaching them to new staff via methods that are contextual, vocational, and more effective than classroom-based learning.
In this article, we’ll take a look at performance learning, and show you how you can use it to improve your sales training.