The State of Sales
Training
How to Improve the Current
Sales Training Experience
with Observational
Learning at Scale
By CommercialTribe CEO Paul Ironside
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com The State of Sales Training
Observational Learning at Scale
“Education has been preparing our students for an economy that no longer
exists. Technology and globalization have transformed our society.”
Dr. Yong Zhao - Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education
1/3 of our Sales New Hires Won’t Meet Expectations This Year. Why Is That Acceptable?
It’s time to rethink how we train our reps.
Our Industrial Education System
By Paul Ironside, CommercialTribe CEO
I recently attended a conference and was spellbound by a keynote speaker, Dr. Yong Zhao. A native of China,
he left that country to get an advanced degree in the U.S. and has since become an international expert on
education. At the conference, he postulated a startling theory: We’re going about education all wrong.
With all the emphasis on Common Core and Leave No Child Behind here in the U.S., we have focused our efforts
on readiness for college and career. But in spite of heroic efforts, we keep hearing statistics that make us all
depressed: over 50% of recent college graduates in the US are unemployed or under-employed1. Our kids
consistently rank behind students in other parts of the world on tests in the key STEM curriculum (Science,
Technology, Engineering, Math). How behind? According to Teach for America, the United States ranks 25th in
math and 17th in science among developed nations2. Ouch.
1
The Atlantic Monthly, April 23, 2012 “53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed—How?” by Jordan Weissmann
2
Teach for America, 2013
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com Our Industrial Education System, cont.
But what Dr. Zhao said next made me sit up in my chair and take note, as I thought about the thousands of sales
execs I’ve had a hand in hiring or training over my career. He pointed out that teaching that STEM curricula—or
any curriculum for that matter—in the way we do today - lectures, books and tests - is actually preparing our
kids for an economy that no longer exists. Just like the industrial age transformed us from an agrarian
economy to a world where factories were king, we’re now going through a similar transformation as we move
into the age of entrepreneurialism and what I sometimes call ‘digital everything.’ The problem is that our
educational system - and the way we typically train our sales teams - is still stuck back in the industrial age.
Our kids, and our sales teams, aren’t poorly educated. But as Dr. Zhao calls it, they’re ‘mis-educated.’
“They were prepared to look for jobs, but not to create jobs. They were prepared to solve problems, but not to
identify problems or ask questions. They were prepared to follow instructions, but machines can follow
instructions more precisely and more important, with less cost3.”
The evidence? Can you name a great, innovative company coming out of the countries that are besting our kids
at the rote curricula? Alibaba you say? OK. It’s an Amazon knock-off. Huawei? It got its playbook from GE.
Samsung? It’s trying to copy Apple. That’s right. In spite of lagging behind in the core curriculum standards, we
have some of the most entrepreneurial and creative business people in the world today. Many of our best
leaders didn’t even finish college.
The individuals – and the reps –are not the problem. Instead, the way we go about teaching and learning is
fundamentally flawed.
3
http://zhaolearning.com/2014/07/02/college-ready-vs-out-of-basement-ready-shifting-the-education-paradigm/
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com Preparing Our Reps for The New Age of Selling
This data got our attention. We immediately began thinking of how we typically train our reps.
Here’s how most of us do it. See if you agree:
1. Bring reps together in a classroom or auditorium setting for a multi-day training on our new products or
solutions
2. Have multiple presenters (usually product or marketing types) talk about the latest ‘thing’
3. Certify or role play to test their knowledge
4. Send them forth to sell
Sound a lot like how we teach in school today? It did to us. It’s no wonder that typically one out of three new
reps fail.
But how did our best reps really learn? They learned from their mentors. They observed the best and imitated
them until they got it right.
That behavioral-based learning style has been proven to be the most effective in teaching new sales skills. But
our corporate training model today is woefully behind. Instead of “flipping” the classroom, giving reps a
curriculum that allows reps to take control of their own learning, we’re lecturing and testing.
And here’s the result: 58% of qualified deals land in no decision, because reps haven’t internalized the
behaviors they need to change the status quo4.
4
Sales Benchmark Index, 2014
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com How We Learn Sales Behaviors
Our understanding of the ways that we actually teach and learn stem from research in the 1960s, by Stanford
social psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura. Dr. Bandura’s contribution was to Social Learning Theory5, a
comprehensive analysis of behavioral change and how we learn new ideas6.
What Dr. Bandura did was have a group of children witness an adult
interacting with an inflatable Bobo doll. The adult struck and verbally
assaulted the doll, and was given a reward, a punishment, or no
feedback. Afterward, the children were allowed into the room, and
generally interacted with the doll based on the observation of the
adult’s reward or punishment. If they saw the adult punished for
hitting the doll, for example, they would avoid imitating the same
behavior.
What happened? What Dr. Bandura observed is that the children learned how to interact with the doll through
four key steps:
1. 2. 3. 4. Observation
Imitation
Recognition
Repetition
Watching the specific behavior, the children naturally observed the situation and the noted violence. When
exposed to the doll, they imitated the behaviors, beating and yelling at the Bobo toy. Getting the right
recognition, with models rewarded or punished for certain behaviors, the child’s own actions were reinforced.
Finally, the actions were repeated, a learned behavior.
This matches perfectly with the way reps learn: observing their managers and top performers, adapting the
behaviors that seem to lead to success, getting approval and recognition, and repeating until it becomes their
own.
But this isn’t how we’re teaching, and certainly not how we’re doing it at scale.
5
6
Social Learning Theory, Dr. Albert Bandura, http://www.esludwig.com/uploads/2/6/1/0/26105457/bandura_sociallearningtheory.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_theory
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com Observational Learning At Scale
So why are we still using the old approach to sales training?
Solving the sales training dilemma takes two basic solutions:
• Make it easy for the best reps to share what they know
o Make it convenient to capture recordings
o Publish for all so it persists in perpetuity as a library of best practices
o Create incentives for the team to produce great content
• Make it easy for reps to learn
o Observe relevant content on-demand
o Practice and self-assess until happy with the result
o Submit for feedback, coaching, and recognition
Observational Learning at Scale
Make it easy for the best reps to share
Observational Learning at Scale
Make it easy for our training reps to practice
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com The CommercialTribe Solution
What does this look like in practice?
Top performers and managers design certification and onboarding courses that bring out best practices. Using
video, a medium already proven to dramatically increase sales training “stickiness,” reps observe, record, and
share, practicing until they get it right. A library of best practices and tribal knowledge makes it easy for reps to
learn more or to onboard. With video alone, “it’s been shown that seeing and hearing messages increases
audience retention by 3-6 times when compared to isolated audio or text/images alone.”7
At CommercialTribe, we took this challenge to heart. We created a social sales training solution that makes it
easy for the best reps to contribute what they know—and get recognized for it. And even more critical, we
created a solution that enables reps to practice bite-size pieces of a training program. We call it a learnercentric approach.
Observe Watch video-based selling scenarios from your
organization’s best reps and subject matter experts.
See how the best present and communicate with the
market. Practice Internalize by recording your own selling scenarios in
a safe and confident online environment.
Share Submit a selling scenario to managers and coaches
for asynchronous review and feedback. The best
scenarios are made public, creating a library of tribal
knowledge - By Reps. For Reps. Refine Make adjustments when you receive scorecard-based
coaching. Monitor the user dashboard for progress
updates as you work toward mastery. Think it won’t work? We’ve found that reps using the system practice and record an average of almost 7 times
before posting for review. That’s seven times more often than they’re practicing now, and seven chances to get
better before they’re in front of a customer. They’re learning, and the results are clear: Xactly saw a 13%
increase in their lead conversion rate using our social sales training solution.
It’s what we call observational learning at scale. It’s sales training for the Digital Everything Age.
For More Information, Please Contact:
info@commercialtribe.com
www.commercialtribe.com
Phone: 720-639-3040
7
YouTube for the Enterprise, Brainshark
© 2016 CommercialTribe, www.commercialtribe.com info@commercialtribe.com