Why Your Sales Team Isn't Retaining Product Training – and What to Do About It

Perhaps you’ve been building training for your sales teams for the past several months but notice sales reps are struggling to remember new product information.

Perhaps you’re seeing missed KPIs and wondering where your sales reps are going wrong.

Perhaps you’re noticing that product sales are dropping or staying stagnant despite pushing out training all the time.

If any of this sounds like your situation, you’re certainly not alone!

Training in any industry can be a tricky beast, but the fast-paced, ever-changing retail environment can make product training especially challenging.

Let’s take a look at why your sales teams might not be retaining product training at your company and what you can do about it. We’ll look at the following roadblocks:

• Choosing the wrong modality

• Inconsistent delivery of materials

• Lack of accountability or follow-up

• Difficult learning environment

• No accompanying sales & customer service training

Let’s dive in!

CHOOSING THE WRONG MODALITY

Let’s start with the training materials themselves, as they’re arguably one of the easiest things to fix.

One of the challenges with training any employee type is deciding how to build and deploy that training. This is what instructional designers like me think about all the time. It’s like a math problem: If I have x audience who needs to know y information and has z constraints, what kind of training should I build? Building the wrong kind of training for a situation is like trying to make 2+2=5 – simply put, it’s never going to work right and will break a lot of other equations downstream. And if you’re new to building training, this can start to look more like complex algebra than basic arithmetic.

That’s because there are so many different types of training – what we call modalities – and different use cases for them. For the sake of brevity, I’ll spare you most of the details here and simply say this: no matter how you slice it, product training needs accompanying reference materials.

Imagine learning about a new product in a meeting and being expected to recite everything important about it in front of a customer without any kind of follow-up. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, there’s a psychological reason for that! The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve states that people forget around 50% of new information they learn within an hour and around 70% within 24 hours – unless they have near immediate reinforcement or review, that is.

Let’s take a new pharmaceutical drug as an example. You can build a fantastic presentation, have an in-person session with all your sales reps, and let them ask lots of good questions. This is a fantastic way to introduce a new product. But if you don’t give them a sales sheet to go with it, they’re going to forget the majority of what they learned. So, they go to their next client meeting and remember that they just learned about a new drug but can’t remember anything about it. Thus, the sale is lost before the conversation has even begun.

THE FIX

Honestly, you can build product training in just about any modality: eLearnings, presentations, in-person sessions, etc. There are reasons to choose one modality over another, but that’s a topic for another article.

What’s more important is that you give them some way of following up. Pair an eLearning with a sales sheet. Give them a copy of a presentation to take with them after the meeting. Follow up any training with an activity sheet. Whatever it is, give them materials they can easily reference or that let them apply what they learned. This isn’t the only type of following up your sales reps should get – we’ll talk about other ways soon.

This concept starts to get into the idea of multi-modality training, or having more than one module per topic in order to best support your reps. If reading this is making you sweat because you realize you don’t have time to build all this extra training, you may want to consider outside help! Check out my article titled, In-House Trainer vs. Outsourced Instructional Designer - Which is Right for Your Business?, to figure out if outsourcing may be right for you.

INCONSISTENT DELIVERY OF MATERIALS

Let’s say you’ve built the best product presentations in the world, yet you still aren’t getting any traction.

One of the tougher parts of training is figuring out how to scale it once you have a lot of teams, especially when they’re spread out to other parts of the country or even internationally.

The problem is, unless you have a team of practiced facilitators (which many companies don’t), it’s hard to control how information is delivered to each team. For instance, let’s say your District Managers are delivering training that’s built by your corporate team. You have little control over whether the DMs are delivering the entire presentation or skipping slides, whether they’re stumbling through the presentation or delivering it confidently, whether they’re prioritizing messaging that corporate feels is important, or whether the presentation is even getting delivered at all. Sometimes, if corporate and the field are really misaligned, field leadership will simply ignore materials entirely.

You’ll know that inconsistency could be your problem if you have some areas of the business vastly underperforming compared to others.

THE FIX

The easiest fix is to create materials that help whoever is delivering the training pick it up and deliver it easily. There are a couple options here.

If you’re building a presentation, consider adding facilitator notes that list topics to cover, key points to enforce, questions to ask the group, and anything else that will make presenting easy. You can even script the presentation if needed.

If you're holding live training sessions, consider making a facilitator guide. This is similar to presentation notes but includes any instructions a person would need for delivering the training. If it’s created right, any person in the entire organization should be able to pick up a facilitator guide and deliver a session with few to no hiccups.

Another option is to forego structured in-person training sessions in lieu of something asynchronous like eLearnings and sales sheets. The benefit with something like an eLearning is that it gets delivered to each person the exact same way every single time no matter how much time passes or who’s taking the course. Sales sheets provide the reference (as discussed earlier), and managers or other leaders can do more impromptu follow-ups to further reinforce learnings – more on this below.

Check out my other blog article that explores this topic more deeply, The Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Training Delivery.

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY OR FOLLOW-UP

No matter how well designed training is, it might as well not exist if there’s no one at the company holding people accountable for completing it.

Training execution is arguably more important than the training materials themselves. If you have okay training that’s being pushed consistently throughout the company, that’s better than no one even seeing the best designed training. Of course materials should always be clear, concise, and high-quality – I’m not saying you should sacrifice one for the other! It’s very possible to have both, and you should strive for that. But even though it pains me to say it, if you have to choose between accountability or good training, execution trumps quality.

So, the question to ask yourself is, are your people being held accountable to completing their training? (Check out more on this topic on my published eLearning Industry article, Training Completion Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Content Problem.) Are they performing any follow-ups or activities? Are they attending meetings that cover new products? Do they have somewhere they can go to ask questions? Do they have materials that help them reference what they learned?

THE FIX

This is an unfortunately tough one to fix. If it’s broken, it usually means someone isn’t doing their job – and I write that knowing it’s a delicate thing to say. This could be on the operations side of things or within field leadership or even corporate leadership. Training and development needs to be valued by the company before execution gets better. Messaging that training matters should come from the top – the CEO, COO, etc. This should then be reinforced by field leadership like Regional Directors and District Managers. Trickling down even further, team managers should regularly talk with their teams about what was recently learned and should enforce training being on time.

Essentially, without leadership guiding training completion, training completion is likely not to happen except for high performers at the company who seek out ways to do better. But for those underperforming – which you probably struggle with, else you wouldn’t be here reading this article – they won’t do training unless there are consequences otherwise.

DIFFICULT LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

If your sales reps are in an office with you, this is more than likely not your issue. Meetings are easy to conduct and keep focused, and learners have access to whatever technology and connection they need.

But I know from experience across more than one company that training to reps in the field can be tough to execute. Sometimes, learners are on a call with patchy reception and no screen in front of them to view materials. Sometimes, learners are on a computer but have difficult internet access or can’t hear the call well. Sometimes, learners are in a store environment helping customers at the same time as taking training and are constantly sidetracked.

No matter what the issue, learning while distracted or overburdened leads to no learning at all. Imagine attending any one of your college classes while trying to have an important phone conversation at the same time. You’re only going to pay attention to one of those things, and learning – something that people often deem as optional and that usually has no follow-up or accountability – is what typically gets pushed to the side.

THE FIX

This is another difficult one to fix. The first thing you have to do is identify the constraint. If the problem is technical like internet access or lack of laptops, you may be out of luck here unless the company has the budget to fix it.

If the issue is distractions, on the other hand, there are more reasonable ways to fix this. The best thing you can do is give learners a quiet learning environment free of distractions. Allow learners to go to a back room to complete training. Give them one-on-one time with their managers to discuss topics or do roleplays. Ask company leadership to set expectations about being fully focused during a meeting and follow up to make sure this is actually applied in practice.

Whatever the issue here, a difficult learning environment will destroy any chance of learning no matter how good training is.

NO ACCOMPANYING SALES & CUSTOMER SERVICE TRAINING

If you’re focusing only on product training, you’re probably only looking at half the equation. Of course sales reps need to understand what they’re selling – I’m not at all saying product knowledge isn’t important. It simply isn’t the whole picture.

Remember that sales reps need more than just product knowledge. Selling skills sit at the core of their role. If they don’t have a solid sales strategy to follow, no amount of product knowledge will be enough.

Likewise with customer service training: If they don’t know how to conduct themselves appropriately in front of customers, if they don’t know how to treat customers in a friendly and empathetic manner, they can push products all day long and get no results – instead, pushing customers right out the door.

The bottom line is, product knowledge, sales skills, and customer service training go hand in hand. You can’t have successful sales reps if any one of these are missing.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you have a sales rep who knows everything there is to know about a new internet router. They can spout off information without hardly trying. But when they get an objection from the customer, they shut down because it feels personal. Objection handling is a selling skill, which this sales rep has never been trained on. So rather than handling the objection confidently and securing the sale, the rep shuts down and fails to sell the router.

THE FIX

First, create or purchase sales and customer service training.

If you’re handling creation of product training on your own and starting to get underwater, this could be another good opportunity to tap a studio on the shoulder for some help!

Second, concepts learned in sales and customer service training should be regularly reinforced in product training. For instance, a new product training could be concluded with selling scenarios using what they learned in previous sales training. Talking with customers appropriately could be regularly reinforced, especially in the context of the new product. Any delicate issues that accompany the new product could be discussed in the context of showing empathy and showing how to have a positive customer interaction. And you can include examples of objections for that specific product and how to overcome them.

No matter how you do it, product knowledge, sales training, and customer service skills should always be intertwined.

SO, WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE FROM THIS?

At the end of the day, a lot of companies are struggling to keep up with training demands. Having to handle product, sales, and customer service training alone is a massive undertaking. This doesn’t include providing any kind of soft skills or leadership development, operational training, safety training, and HR or legally required trainings.

But don’t panic! Whatever your situation, it’s likely fixable with the right tools – and the right help! Reach out to Phoenix Learning Solutions for help on your upcoming training builds.