Better Knowledge Retention Using Multimodal Learning for Sales
Want your team to remember and utilize more of what they learn from sales training? Supplement your written materials with video. Engaging multiple senses in the act of learning improves knowledge retention. This is called multimodal learning.
Research shows using images combined with sound improves retention because the brain stores working memory in separate places for each. So it’s a lot easier to run out of processing power if you’re loading up on all images or all sound. However, when you combine the two, your brain splits the difference and absorbs more information. That’s why video, which combines image and sound, is so powerful. It engages multiple senses to burn the message into the viewer’s brain.
The human mind evolved with a major preference for visual information; we process it 60,000 times faster than text (yes, that’s four zeros). Video conveys messages more powerfully than text alone, and most people prefer watching a video about something than reading about it. That’s why video comprises 73% of all internet traffic in the world today. So why don’t sales training and enablement pros use it more?
Without the right tools, video is unwieldy. Try attaching a 5-minute video to your next email and see how high you can count before it’s finished uploading. Or try constantly creating and distributing new video content every time a change happens with your products, organization or market using your LMS (and no army). The problem actually has nothing to do with video itself: it’s that our tools weren’t powerful enough to handle it without giving us headaches.
Without a sales learning solution designed for day-to-day video sharing among real sales teams in the field, organizations find themselves hard-pressed to get any meaningful use out of this powerful medium. Solutions like Allego make video creation and sharing so easy that even busy reps can do it. Now it’s easy to capture and circulate organizational knowledge by giving team members the ability to quickly record and share videos of how they’re positioning certain products, addressing key competitive points, or handling tricky objections — all from their laptops or mobile devices, and all under tightly controlled user permissions dictating who gets to see what and when.
Making video a bigger part of your sales learning programs reaps outsized rewards because multimodal learning is how the brain wants to absorb information. And now that tools like Allego make it easy, there’s no excuse not to.