Employee training has become much more critical with the rise of digital transformation across departments and job roles in all industries. Having a continuous training and learning culture is a vital element that differentiates organisations and positively impacts employee retention and growth.
With work practices that have recently become the norm, employees are placing more emphasis on the value of their work environment by considering their organisation’s commitment to their personal and professional development and career growth. For this reason, providing consistent, effective training not only shortens onboarding or ramp time but directly improves employee retention.
However, it is not easy to create an efficient and successful employee training process. The process requires a long term commitment and investment, and it’s because many organisations struggle to prioritise this strategy that they are unable to deliver effective solutions to employee training challenges.
In the sales industry, the damage that an ineffective or generic learning process causes is substantially higher. Because in sales, continuous learning and transfer of experience make a radically positive difference for both the employee and the organisation.
In this article, we’ll talk about common employee learning challenges in sales and how you overcome them to boost your sales team’s learning potential.
Important Employee Learning Challenges & Solutions
Each salesperson has a unique character and learning style. Their expectations, motivations and goals will change depending on their life stage, personal challenges and outlook. Content and technique differences aren’t the only sources of training issues. To identify core challenges, it is necessary to focus on the nature and work culture of a sales team. Considering a number of factors, the following are some of the key challenges in training and development:Lack of Engagement
It is obvious that the roles, goals and backgrounds of salespeople are not the same. For this reason, it is very difficult to create a training programme that will attract the attention of all salespeople and keep them engaged. Lack of employee engagement arises when training is not motivating or doesn’t go deep enough to create behavioural change. Most of the time, a significant number of salespeople lose interest and mentally limit their learning experience because of a lack of engagement. Sales training needs to be enriched with role-based and personalised content with interactive training sessions to ensure engagement and to help learners understand the mindset and barriers that are holding them back. In addition, it is necessary to create a shared learning culture for the organisation. Each sales team member should feel safe to ask questions and learn from one another. Ensuring that salespeople clearly understand the objective of training and strengthening the process with feedback will also radically improve the quality and depth of learning.Difficulty In Scheduling
Creating a shared learning culture for all employees is great. However, it is almost impossible to create a common learning calendar for all employees. It is quite difficult to find gaps in employee calendars when creating a learning and development program, but the real challenge is to revise the plan based on unexpected, additional tasks. In order to overcome this problem, it is necessary to change the structure of training. If a learning system is created where employees can set their own suitable time slots and quickly make up for missed training, the problem of tight schedules will be easily resolved.Full-Day Sessions
Full-day sessions are great for team building, networking and introducing new ideas and concepts. However, they are not great for learning because employees are required to cram a lot of information at once and aren’t able to practise or reinforce it. The solution to this is rather than having full-day sessions, breaking up training over a series of weeks. introducing carefully selected concepts and setting tasks in between sessions that enable learners to practise and reinforce the learning so that it sticks.
Focusing On a Single Learning Style
We all have our own unique learning style or method. There are 4 distinct models – visual, auditory, read/write and kinaesthetic (by doing) – each learner will use elements of each model. However, it is not just the type of learning that makes the difference between learning habits. A dispersed workforce or the employees’ demographic group and background create a broad learning habit spectrum. When training is only delivered using a single learning style, it becomes inefficient for employees who learn better using other styles or combinations of styles. To overcome this challenge, it is necessary to create employee training with content that will appeal to salespeople of all ages and backgrounds. In addition, reinforcing training with visual, written, and auditory content as well as kinaesthetic practices contributes to the equal benefit of everyone in the learning process.Uncertainty of the Objectives and Scope of Training
When employee learning processes are meticulously prepared in line with a solid purpose, they make a great contribution to both employee productivity and company success. However, a training programme consisting of irrelevant, generic and targetless content does not support the learners’ development. In order for the learning content to be deemed valuable and supportive, it is absolutely necessary to determine the learning objectives that are customised according to the sales-specific job roles. This helps organisations create a complete content package that will successfully serve the path leading to these goals.Theoretical Training That Does Not Cover Real-Life Practices
In sales, where success depends on a large number of variables, theoretical knowledge may not exactly match with job practices. The self-confidence of employees may weaken when they experience that their learning outcomes can fail in practice. And when employees feel unassured, this vulnerability may trigger the fear of failure. This problem is fairly easy to overcome if the training materials for employee learning are reinforced with exercises that simulate real life. For this reason, training programmes should be validated by individuals with experience in the industry and knowledge of the sales processes.
