There are two alternatives in sales training programs. Online recorded programs are sales training programs which have been recorded, and may be played back over the World Wide Web. Online live programs are those programs which are delivered by such live webinar technologies as WebEx and GoToMeeting.com. The third, hybrid mode, is to intersperse online recorded training with several online recorded sessions where discussions, projects, or general working sessions are incorporated.
Trend advantages
First, time away from the field is minimized. Online recorded sessions can be viewed before and after working hours, on lunch breaks, and if audio only while driving. While it is desirable to gather field sales personnel together occasionally, it is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient to do this more than once or twice annually, even though product and strategy changes are often more frequent. There is also the problem of new hires and transfers which occur in between live meetings.
The second problem is knowledge retention. The effect of a sales training event is typically 30 to 90 days, as we have seen in numerous studies. After that, sales people have a tendency to revert to their former, familiar, less productive practices, as the new training excitement begins to wear off. This knowledge decay is almost universally present, but rarely noticed by sales managers or executives because the trend in the sales profession is to watch current performance rather than track historical productivity.
Change required
The move to online live and online recorded training is not as simple as it sounds. Certain principles of course/instructional design must be followed to maximize the benefits. We see sales training companies undertaking this task more readily than internal training departments for several reasons, not the least of which is that they can amortize the cost of electronic development over many clients. Only the largest of corporations can afford the technology to train inside personnel.
One of the first benefits of online training is that students can be quizzed, tested, and the training reinforced at almost no cost electronically, where such quizzing and testing are both expensive and time-consuming in classroom situations. Yet, these activities alone increase knowledge retention by almost 30%. However, when training online, we must remember that the attention span of a person sitting in front of the computer is not reinforced by peer or instructor pressure. Therefore, successful online learning engagements are broken into 10 to 20 minute modules interspersed with reading materials and quizzes.
As we said, it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is inevitable, but nothing moves rapidly in the world of sales training. If you want to be a leader, move to online/on demand training. Don't worry; we're well past the time where you would have to be a pioneer.
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