The Single Biggest Secret to Effective Training

There are many challenges associated with designing and running world-class sales training. By far, the biggest issue members voice to us is getting that training to stick over time.

To help our members’ efforts, the CEB Sales Leadership Council team explored a number of new and creative approaches to sales rep upskilling that promise to drive long term behavior change. One particular practice came from our partners at ADP. They found that one of the single biggest incremental opportunities for improving the “stickiness” of training isn’t actually the training at all!  Instead, central to ADP’s approach is a basic, but very important principle — the battle for training stickiness is won or lost long before the training ever begins…

The global head of sales enablement at ADP told us the first thing you need to do is build curiosity.  In fact, the team thinks about this the exact same way as launching a new product, service or solution.

Here’s the equation they use:

f(x) Demand for Training = Curiosity (initial interest and emotional connection) + Scarcity (limited access to knowledge supply)

Looking at this equation, initial training demand is a crucial first step on the road to training stickiness.  It’s seen at ADP to be a direct result of curiosity on the one hand and scarcity on the other. 

Curiosity is all about building an emotional connection to the behaviors you’re training towards.  It’s about painting a picture of how the world is changing, and how rep behavior will need to evolve to keep up with it.

And there should be some real urgency here – reps should want what you’re providing as a result of you telling a compelling story.  A story not just about what’s in it for them if they succeed, but also what’s likely to happen if they aren’t successful.

So, the build-up to training matters.

The team at ADP think about building up to training in four steps:

Internal “Hype” Campaign – This is where the senior leadership team individually video-tapes personalized messages to the sales force, priming the pump for the large-scale sales transformation that the company has just launched.  They also mocked up a magazine article from the fictitious “Fortunes” magazine about an ADP rep from the future who had just been named Sales Rep of the Year based on the amazing commercial results brought in as a result of the ADP training launched two years ago.  Senior leadership had a lot of fun creating a “market” for the new target sales behaviors.
Pre-Training – The team also ran a pre-training informational campaign to orient sales reps to what the new approach is all about, and why it matters so much.  This is all about giving reps a “taste of training” — not in terms of the exercises they’ll do, or the skills they’ll learn — but the obstacles they’ll overcome and the outcomes they’ll achieve.
Exclusive Training - ADP builds some real momentum and excitement for training in the first two steps above.  However, instead of immediately capitalizing on those early wins by funneling everyone as quickly as possible through the actual training, they stoke the fires even further by limiting access. As you might imagine, the individuals who first go through the training become real ambassadors, and they go back to their peers and share stories of what they learned and how they’ve developed, ultimately bringing demand to a real peak.
General Rollout - Now, they open the training to a sales force primed and excited to get involved!

If you’re interested in learning about the specifics behind this best practice, you can dive into this work further by listening to a teleconference replay. Also, review the full study, Boosting Sales Training Stickiness and visit the Sales Training topic center for more resources and best practices.