Secrets of Sales Enablement & Training
The Role of Sales Enablement & Training
You’re a professional educator with qualifications in adult learning, instructional design, or change management. Or you’re a successful salesperson/manager responsible for bringing others to peak performance. Whatever your situation, you know being in charge of your company’s sales & management development is a privilege and a challenge.
Sales enablement and training departments come in two sizes:
1. 'Mission Control' - You’re adequately funded & resourced. The science of tuning the organization fascinates you. You perform deep training needs analysis, and subscribe to all the right magazines, conferences & analytics. You offer curricula for new hires through to experienced players, including on-the-job coaching. You’re measured on the ROI your training adds to the company’s balance sheet, and possess the capability to develop new solutions in-house or through a team of suppliers, including email automation for lead generation, CRM platforms, AI chatbots and online learning academies. Having set the bar high, your goals are ambitious: spot new trends, achieve efficiencies, and delight your internal customers.
2. 'Skunkworks' - You fight for internal budget and have limited resources. Managers tell you what training they want, and you tick these boxes by putting out tenders to find capable vendors at low prices. You save money by writing & delivering your own courses—a YouTube download here, a borrowed powerpoint there. You’re a ‘jack of all trades’ measured on the variety of classes run, volume of people trained, and the scores they give on evaluation sheets. But managing the volume and variety of training stretches you thin, your budget doesn’t go far enough to keep everyone happy, and upper management sometimes complains they can't see clear proof that the investment leads to actual sales revenue.
"Neuroscientists, vocational psychologists & researchers—from Ebbinghaus (1885) to Rackham (1979), and The Royal Society’s studies (2011)—prove that typical sales training doesn’t stay in the brain long enough to get applied in the field. As a result, the ROI from most sales effectiveness investments is appalling."
How We Help
If you’re in charge of 'Mission Control' (a large company's sales enablement department) or a 'Skunkworks' (a smaller-sized training team) you'll look for different levels of support from a sales effectiveness partner. SalesLabs scales to suit: from the simple provision of sales aides & workshops, to fully outsourcing your sales academies and coaching.
Our Principals have run training departments in start-ups, SMEs and global companies. In doing so, we’ve learned that not all sales training has the same impact. In fact, here are some statistics you need to know:
- 56% of ‘sage on a stage’ training is forgotten in 60 minutes.
- 87% of any training is lost within 30 days (unless reinforced with refreshers).
- Theory is best learned today by video & reading assignments.
- Skills can only be retained through practice, feedback & coaching.
Neuroscientists, vocational psychologists & researchers—from Ebbinghaus (1885) to Rackham (1979), and The Royal Society’s studies (2011)—prove that typical sales training doesn’t stay in the brain long enough to get applied in the field. As a result, the ROI from most sales effectiveness investments is appalling.
It’s not a question of the content in the training materials. It’s that the learning architecture (classrooms, trainers, slides, e-learning, videos, animations) is wrong for how adults learn and retain information.
Here’s a summary of two key points you need to understand as a professional sales enablement and training manager:
1. Neuroplasticity
The human brain functions on ‘use it or lose it’ rules. It’s a principle called neuroplasticity, and explains why the permanent muscle-memory you hope to create for sales & management skills in training workshops and e-learning is always so elusive.
Think of the training you or your suppliers have run in the past year. Whether the topic is sales induction or complex account management, did it focus on the ‘what’ more than the ‘how’? Did it put a lecturer in the room to teach & entertain the troops, and end up drowning them in slideware?
Unless skills training includes plenty of practice & reinforcement, the memory cells used to store that information get tagged by the brain as non-essential, and are written over with new data within a few hours.
This is why pre-learning, plenty of practice, and then spaced refreshers are so important for the retention of information and skills.
Most training ignores this. We decided to look into it further.
2. Alpha-Gamma
Working with neuroscientists we learned the brain is an electrical system with 5 power modes, measured in hertz. It powers up or down based on the stimulus it receives, and assigns more or less memory cells according to the hertz being used.
This voltage is labelled Delta (deep sleep), Theta (dreaming), Alpha (concentration & learning), Beta (awake & alert), and Gamma (fight or flight; super-focused).
New knowledge about products, sales processes or management techniques is best delivered when the brain is in the Alpha wavelength. Books, videos, eLearning & quizzes that require interaction work best.
New skills can only be created when the brain is in the Gamma state. Placing people in simulations to try new techniques, make mistakes, receive feedback, and try again until they succeed works best for this.
Sales & management training needs to be carefully designed to stimulate these Alpha + Gamma modes. When it does, the retention of knowledge & skills is 900% higher than the Beta or Theta states created by traditional instructor-led, online or blended learning.
SalesLabs took on the challenge to re-engineer our entire sales & management training portfolio around what we now call the The Alpha-Gamma Learning Standard (AGLS). Since doing so, client feedback has been off the charts as they’ve achieved record sales growth (minimum 72% / maximum 1126% CAGR in emerging markets, and minimum 47% / maximum 368% CAGR in mature markets).
Call to Action
Our sales & management learning model and skills improvement methods are tried and tested, academically validated and commercially proven. They represent an exciting 21st century advancement that achieves permanent uplift in skills, knowledge and overall competence for any role.
Our reputation has positioned us as the only sales training firm experienced and independent enough to be trusted by Edward Elgar Publishing to compile the new Encyclopedia of Sales and Sales Management, due for publication in 2025.
If you’re a serious practitioner of sales & management enablement and training, you’ll want to harness this. You can do so in several ways:
- SalesLabs can audit your current training delivery model, advise how to tune it, certify your training team on how to deliver new material using the Alpha-Gamma model, and track the ROI with you.
- SalesLabs can work with your existing training suppliers, help lift their training to the Alpha-Gamma model, then give you an implementation playbook to extract the most value from their offerings.
- SalesLabs can build you an integrated end-to-end curriculum based on analysis of your company’s needs, and either a) run it as an outsourced academy, b) deploy it through our seasoned consultants, or c) certify your own trainers for internal delivery.
Our approach is unique. It's evidence-based. It works. And we guarantee it.
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