How to ensure your frontline team learns daily
Ensuring your frontline sales team learn on a daily basis is no easy task. Unlike B2B sales teams who do most of their selling virtually, your team are working on the frontline, serving customers and delivering exceptional service whilst trying to close those all-important deals.
It’s no wonder that trying to get your B2C frontline sales team to learn on a daily basis seems out of the question.
The trouble is that if your sales staff aren’t learning on a daily basis then the chances of them forgetting crucial information is highly likely. Just look at Hermann Ebbinghaus’s world-famous forgetting curve.
His study found that after just one hour people will forget 50% of the information which was given to them, within 24 hours they will have forgotten 70% and after a month a whopping 90% of what was learnt will have been forgotten.
Why should you care?
Our brains basically live by the motto ‘use it or lose it’ because if you don’t regularly return to information or put it into practice, your brain dumps it to make room for information that you do use on a daily basis.
Ever wondered why you can’t remember the correct process to close those sales deals at work but you remember every word to those annoying songs on the radio?
It’s because they are repeated to you on a daily basis whereas you’ve probably only read your sales processes a handful of times.
If you want your sales training to drive better behaviours that lead to more conversions than your training needs to stick inside your sales rep’s brains. To make your learning information ‘sticky’ it needs to be reinforced on a daily basis and if you want your business to succeed this is vital.
It has been reported that high-performing sales organisations are twice as likely to provide ongoing training as low-performing ones.
So how do you ensure your B2C frontline sales team learns on a daily basis? Discover our top tips below.
Utilise your sales onboarding process
A sales onboarding process shouldn’t just be used to speed up time to competency (although this is very important) it should also be used to set the tone for what you expect from your team when they start and what your best practices are.
Setting the tone
Share stories on how your best performers rose to the top by ensuring they did a small amount of sales training every day.
Make it apparent that you expect your sales team to train themselves every day if they are serious about succeeding within your company.
Make it clear how new employees can learn every day and the best training modules to get started with.
Stating what your best practices are
If your sales staff don’t know exactly what is expected of them, it will be hard for them to stay motivated with their training. If you make them aware that you require them to follow your sales process with each transaction then your new employees will be more driven to ensure they know your sales process inside out.
How to encompass these into your sales onboarding process
Obviously, you can use email to include all of the points mentioned above, but if you’re like most companies your B2C sales team won’t have access to a company email.
Use a digital sales onboarding platform such as Engage which works on any mobile tablet or desktop device.
You can use the platform to guide your sales staff on what they need to watch and learn during their first days at work. Videos and podcasts can be used to excite and engage staff. Digital checklists, alerts and clickable banners can be used to guide staff on what they need to get done. Articles, news and acknowledgements ensure your new starters are reading all the information they should be and microlearning playlists make it easy for them to start short learning courses so they can hit the ground running.
Make your learning accessible on their mobile device
You’ve got to be honest with yourself here, if your training materials are tucked away in a folder or only accessible on a desktop computer then the chances of your sales team using them on a daily basis are pretty slim.
In fact, 64% of employees find accessing workplace learning form a mobile device essential or very useful and mobile eLearners typically study for 40 minutes longer than those using a desktop or tablet device.
Use microlearning
If your sales training consists of face to face presentations, 1 hour-long courses or reading lengthy documents then you’re never going to get your staff to learn on a daily basis.
Microlearning is about giving your sales team short bursts of learning content that take no longer than 10 minutes to complete.
The idea is that because they are so short, your staff are more likely to revisit them which going back to the forgetting curve means that they are much more likely to actually remember what they are learning if they do it on a daily basis.
Send them alerts and notifications
There’s a reason why your favourite social media platform constantly pings alerts at you, it’s to get you to visit their app on a daily basis and it works incredibly well. Did you know 56% of respondents in a social media study said they log onto social networks more than 10 times per day?
Now we’re not telling you to hound your sales reps with alerts so much so that they forget to concentrate on their work. Just a timely reminder in the morning or late afternoon will help prompt them to carry out a quick bit of training and if you do it consistently, they should start to form a habit of doing it on a daily basis.
What should I use to send my notifications?
You can use emails, text messages or WhatsApp messages if that’s all you have available.
We would recommend using an employee app that allows you to send targeted notifications by role or location and also send them to an unlimited amount of employees at a time.
The notifications will show up on their phone even when it’s locked and they can link to whatever piece of training material you want within the platform.
Notifications are all tracked so you’ll be able to view your reach and engagement rates.
Monitor their learning and progression and make them accountable
We don’t mean this in the sense of ‘Big Brother’ - watching their every move and forcing them to learn, but in a way where you both chat about which learning would be most beneficial for them and they agree to carry out that learning on a daily basis.
Discuss that you will check in to see how they are doing and you will have a proper catch up about their progression in a few weeks or months time.
If they know you can see how much learning they have done, they will be much more likely to complete it. In fact, if you commit to someone about completing something you are 65% more likely to do it.
Most mobile LMS’s have extensive reporting features which make it easy to see who’s learning what and who needs more support in certain areas.
Set clear goals in your sales observations
To ensure your frontline B2C sales team follows your sales process it’s crucial that you carry out sales observations and sales observations are a great way to incorporate learning goals.
What do we mean by this?
As you go through your process checks you will see which areas your staff are struggling in and you can assign relevant learning tasks as you go.
For example, let’s say you notice that your employee struggles to answer questions confidently about your new product line.
Your clear goal could be:
Learn something new about our products every day for a month
Complete a 2-5 minute microlearning playlist about our products every day.
Because these tasks sound small and digestible and you have clearly stated what you expect of the sales rep they will be much more likely to complete them before their next sales observation.
Analyse employee learning and how it links to sales
If your sales training is any good, it should eventually lead to more sales conversions. Take a look at your learning statistics and see if the people who are doing the most learning (preferable on a daily basis) are making the most sales.
If this is the case, it’s definitely something you should be shouting about. Create a short video detailing your findings, get your top learners to do a mini-presentation, create a quick news post or simply shout about it in your morning catch-ups.
However you decide to share it, make sure you do it in a way that’s motivational and use it as a way to explain why it’s important to learn every single day.
Need a digital tool that makes it easy to ensure your frontline sales team learn on a daily basis?
Engage’s mobile-first knowledge platform increases your sales through better product knowledge, consistent customer service and finding real-time upselling opportunities.
Powerful features trigger your team to learn on a daily basis and short microlearning playlists make it easy for them to jump in and out of learning when they have time. Make your learning fit around your employees and watch performance levels surge as a result.
