I found some old sales training documents that I had been given by a friend who had attended a sales training programme in Stockholm – she works in the food industry and gave me these booklets and sheets maybe 10 years ago.

They have been across my hands twice and I am still not 100% sure what’s inside.

It made me think about those people who have sat in my training sessions over the years and whether they have ever referred to the handouts and follow-up emails…

Training in isolation achieves nothing over the long term.

It should be just the start of a process.

Not what sales leaders want to hear, right? Everyone wants the quick fix.

Think about something personal that you might seek to improve – playing guitar, driving, cooking or gardening?

If you want to get better around the garden, a few hours in the company of Diarmuid Gavin or Monty Don isn’t going to set you on a path to mastery.of the retrieval, practice, coaching and habit formation stages behind lasting sales training

It’s not just the hope that kills you.

Training, retrieval, practice, coaching and habit formation – 5 stages behind lasting sales training

High expectations can have the same effect.

Real performance change starts with training but followed by 4 additional stages.

Ask a sales manager if their team retains what they’re taught, and most will describe an initial burst of enthusiasm and the predictable folder of slides, handouts and notes – all useful but redundant at the same time.

On the very rare occasion that a sales person will review the notes from the workshop, the impact will be negligible.

Retrieval: why re-reading doesn’t work

The experts – Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke – go for ‘Retrieval’ over re-reading every time. Retrieval, or actively recalling information from memory, builds retention far better than rereading it, and the advantage grows the greater the gap since learning.

Applied to sales training, this means the fix for forgotten course content isn’t reading it again — it’s making the sales person retrieve it. Asking the sales rep to explain, unprompted, what they learnt in the workshop on ‘objection handling’ will work better than rereading the handout.

Practice: not all repetition counts

The next stage is ‘Practice’ – but a specific type of practice. Anders Ericsson (Florida State University) is recognised as the architect of “Deliberate Practice”. His 1993 paper with Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” (Psychological Review), is the founding study — famous for the violin research showing that elite performers were distinguished not by raw talent but by accumulated hours of effortful, structured practice.

This idea has also been picked up by writers like Matthew Syed and Malcolm Gladwell, but it’s Ericsson himself, in his 2016 book Peak, who defines it most precisely: practice that is effortful, specific, just beyond current ability, with clear goals and immediate feedback.

Ericsson distinguished between: Experience, Practice and Deliberate Practice

Those are very different things.

Someone can spend twenty years selling and never become exceptional because they simply repeat existing behaviours. Conversely, someone with five years’ experience who continually analyses, practises, receives feedback and refines their approach may outperform them.

Ericsson defined deliberate practice as having several characteristics:
– Clearly defined performance goals
– Immediate feedback
– Repetition
– Continuous refinement
– Increasing challenge
– Work just beyond current capability

Think about the role-playing, call recording, script testing, peer reviewing that you are or are not setting as a ‘training standard’ –  do you think that deliberate practice would help the performance of your field sales team?

Ericsson’s framework requires the engagement of a teacher or expert observer mainly because performers usually can’t diagnose their own blind spots.

Coaching: the blind spot problem

This is precisely the role “Coaching” plays in a blended programme –  the coach is what turns raw repetition into deliberate practice rather than just reinforcing existing habits, including the bad ones.

Habit formation: the real timeline

“Habit Formation” is associated with the magic number of 21 days, which apparently
is traced back to a 1960s plastic surgeon’s casual observation about patients adjusting to a new appearance and has nothing to do with how habits actually form.

The real research tells a considerably less tidy story.

Phillippa Lally and colleagues at UCL tracked 96 people building a new daily habit over twelve weeks, measuring how automatic the behaviour became. The median time was 66 days — three times the popular myth — with a range from 18 days for some participants to 254 for others.

Progress wasn’t linear either: it followed a curve that climbed quickly at first, then flattened, with gains getting smaller and slower the longer the habit ran.

For a sales leader, this is an important number.

A two-day training workshop is roughly 1/30^th of the actual timeline required for a new sales behaviour to become automatic under pressure.

Sales training for any reason other than genuine performance improvement will be cosmetic at best and if there is a sincere desire to improve then you need a blended training & coaching programme not a workshop. If you want to find out more on how to make sales training stick for your team, drop me a message: info@shift-control.co.uk 

Thanks for reading

#how to make sales training stick