Sharing Best Practices is Key for Modern Learning

Success in sales is all about research, learning, and iteration. There’s so much information on the internet that you can get lost in it, but the specific expertise at your own company can be mined and refined — “crowdsourced” if you will — and then shared with the rest of the team as best practices to follow.  Modern learning leverages the wealth of knowledge lying dormant in your organization.

The Value of Modern Learning

Imagine a couple scenarios; you find yourself in a random conversation, perhaps at the holiday party with your head of products, and they explain something about your solution that blows your mind. Or, say, you wind up overhearing one of your top sales reps on a call and they position something a certain way which you turn around and use every time after that.  The value of moments like this in undeniable. So why do we leave them up to chance?

Modern learning lets you bottle up that experience and make it available for the rest of your team in the form of bite size videos they can access whenever they need.  Modern learning is about increasing efficiency, and distilling the one or two nuggets of real value from the tedious content within a training session. You might go through a whole training course and only find two bits of information you can use. There’s too much content.   It’s too hard for sales reps to access, too long for them to absorb and utilize, and creating them is too manual and tedious for sales training and enablement pros to ever keep up with the rapid pace of change today.

Where to start?

People don’t think in nuggets.  They think in stories. So get your best reps to record a three minute win story detailing a recent close and make it available to others.  Where did the lead come from? What did they do to prepare for the first call? What obstacles did they overcome? Don’t ask hypothetical questions, but focus on situations. For example: “What would you do if you came up against this scenario with competitor XYZ in the mix …?” That’s hypothetical, but if you ask “Tell me about the last time you came up against this scenario with competitor XYZ in the mix,” then you get reality.

If there’s one positive thing the Internet’s taught us about people, it’s that we’re generous when it comes to sharing our stories and experiences.  Especially once we know the feeling of getting saved by somebody else’s. We’ll share our hard-won knowledge and give away our tips and tricks because the incentive is built in.  But it’s got to be easy like sending a text or sharing on social.

Get your reps to submit a video of themselves presenting a key competitive talk track or objection response.  Send out an example of what ‘good’ looks like and have them send theirs back. Ask a trusted SME to record a video the next time they need to communicate to the field.  Then mine the videos for the best two or three and set them aside as a best practice. This eases the burden of content creation and helps sales training and enablement pros connect the field with trusted peers and home office experts they’re dying to hear from anyway.

Sharing best practices is key for modern learning.  Modern learning solutions break down information barriers and breathe new life into training content, while easing the content creation burden on sales enablement and training professionals.  

For more on how solutions like Allego power modern learning,  read SiriusDecisions’ report on sales learning and coaching technology