Hi! We are a smallish company with a salesforce of about 50, and I am a one-person training department. We do quarterly 2-day sales skills training programs (developed and delivered in house), and I am looking for ways to supplement and reinforce that training on a regular, ongoing basis. Ideally, this would be a monthly commitment of no more than 2 - 4 hours, and because we are a relatively flat organization, it needs to be something that is not too resource intensive. Most of the salesforce is in one office, though we do have a handful across the country. Our acting VP of Sales is on the opposite coast.

Any creative (I'd even take not creative!) ideas on how to do this? Open to any and all suggestions...

Thanks!

Hi Lynne,

Is there any way you can use some of your existing sales force to extend your capabilities? Meaning, identify internal coaches from respected members of the sales force who can provide feedback and coaching to others.

If there is already some sort of hierarchy within the force then the managers should already be responsible for this role. If it isn't part of their job description...it might be time to plug it in.

At any rate, the transfer of the skills from classroom to marketplace requires repeated practice and reinforcement. That "train-to-ingrain" philosophy relies heavily on developing coaches as well as employees.

I am not sure what kind of information needs reinforcement. Take this with a grain of salt as I am not a sales trainer

How about getting the team together on twitter and keeping track of each others' successes and failures? They'd be able to see that those who performed as noted in the training would do better (hopefully!!).

I might have different or more complete ideas if I know the sorts of things they learned in the training and whether or not they were "competitive" (that is, do they compete with each other for customers?).

The following could be done in a monthly email, newsletter or blurb on your company's internal homepage:

Every month feature a brief overview on a company sales rep who has applied the techniques learned in training and experienced success.
Provide interesting case study or training statistics on the sales techniques taught in class...

Follow up both with a 3-5 point summary of the techniques.

You could also hold lunch and learns every month that takes a deeper look into specific sales techniques. Or use the time to discuss what has worked and what has not... Those out of office can call in.

We have a push software tool, called Q, that allows non-technical subject matter experts to rapidly build reinforcement "objects" and launch them to sales people on a daily or weekly schedule. Q tracks user participation, user feedback, retention and identifies areas of misalignment. Q also prescribes additional reinforcement to individuals based on gaps.

This blends reinforcement into daily workflow without negatively impacting sales activity in that a typical "intervention" takes no more than 5 minutes per day. By leveraging the top half of the human attention span frequently, it creates top of mind awareness that leads to more people applying learning more quickly.

I have seen customers take a week to develop enough of these objects to deliver a quarter's worth of reinforcement.

Can be deployed in a day - so no heavy lifting involved. Let me know if you are interested.