“How To Shred Bumps in 5 Easy Moves”
“12 Ways To Add More Ride Time To Your Schedule”
“How to Get Back In-Shape in 8 Weeks” (aka 8 Weeks to Super Human You)

These titles clearly articulate the steps it takes to get you from point A to point B, or from a place of unfamiliarity to mastery. The messages are clear and concise. For the most part, the opposite is the norm with training events, regardless if they are web seminars (live or recorded), multi-day training sessions or quick-hit technical overviews. Typically, a high level agenda is communicated by the instructor or organizer outlining the high-level goals of the communication and not much else.

Audiences deserve more. Moreover, your audience deserves more. Their time is precious and the more detailed map you give them the more engaged they will be. This being the case, upgrade the agenda by adding time stamps to it. For instance, rather than plainly pointing out the sections of the presentation, communicate that in (1) hour they’ll be able to hand-idly complete ‘X’ task. In (2) hours they’ll be able to complete ‘X’ and ‘Y’ task and so the story goes.

This method benefits the audience, the content deliverer and content developer. Addressing the audience first, this method breaks the task of learning into smaller, predictable chunks of data that aren’t overwhelming. If maintaining your audience’s attention is important to you, this is one of the simplest and easiest tactics to implement. As it relates to the content deliverer and developer (because they aren’t always the same person) it puts them on the hook to be mindful of communicating intelligible, cohesive thoughts in a timely fashion. Tangents are a natural and powerful part of conversation however they also have the power to derail an otherwise well organized presentation. Knowing that by a certain the time the audience needs to be able to do ‘X’, helps in reining in sidebars that often have a mind of their own.

Time stamps…use them liberally, your audience will love them.

The departments responsible for supporting the channel, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy assembling the right content and smartly organizing it. Too bad the neat and orderly organization of content is almost a complete waste of time.

The typical sales enablement experience progresses like this, a sales person, or customer, enters a portal and is presented a menu of all the available educational material. Often there’s an RSS capability that enables them to receive an alert when content is added or changed. Largely, this mechanism of consuming content is cumbersome, time consuming and most importantly it lacks personal context.

Personal context is the key to providing a rich learning experience. Succinctly, it’s the presentation of supplemental educational content to an audience member based on their previous actions. This includes, but is not limited to, the frequency with which they’ve consumed content, the recency of this consumption, and the basic clickstream data of website visits. Taken as a whole, their digital actions form their digital body language.

The ability to analyze behavior and deliver pertinent content that corresponds with the audience’s implicit or explicit interests moves content delivery away from a pull-action model to a push-action delivery model.

The pull-action delivery model of learning is highly ineffective. It forces the audience—in this case the sales person—to be self-aware of what they don’t know. This is analogous to a shopping experience where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it. In this mode, you could be browsing for hours and from store to store. If you have the time, I suppose this might not be an issue, but who has that kind of time? We have an economy to support and deadlines to meet. Conversely, if you’re pressed for time, this ‘browsing process’ can be a nerve-wracking, highly inefficient experience that will probably end fruitlessly.

To apply this example to the behavior of sales professionals: if they are spending time browsing through your mountain of educational content, regardless of whether the content is readily available in easy to consume formats, or if it is neatly organization, they aren’t selling. To minimize their time spent toiling away in your content library, present to them content that is most relevant to their immediate needs. Be their personal shopper.

An effective personal shopper knows their customer’s purchase history and preferences, and is able to translate the subtle cues of what catches their customer’s eye into what they are most likely looking for. Effective personal shoppers thin-slice.

To truly enable sales people and technical people alike, it’s imperative to minimize their time spent searching for the right content and maximize their time spent consuming and applying it.

Coincidentally, many sales trainings resemble weather reports in that they are infused with too much product specific information. The inclusion of this type of information doesn’t prepare sales people for business-related real world conversations. Consequently, where sales training should lower the execution risk associated with the act of selling, it fails by actually raises it.

This begs the question, what should sales training look like? Moreover, what type of information should it include and how should it be delivered?

From the top, think like your customer. News Flash: Customers don’t care about you or your product. They care about two things:

• How does your product or service help them fulfill their job responsibilities?
• How does your product answer a specific business challenge?

That’s it, plain as day. If your training doesn’t prepare your sales people to answer those questions (at a minimum) it’s nothing more than an exercise in futility. The natural inclination when thinking about sales training is to increase product knowledge. Enhancing product knowledge is not a bad thing, however, you can’t lead with it. The art of selling begins with uncovering the opportunity. Translated, this means, what is the real issue the customer is having? Furthermore, do they even know what their core issue is? At a higher level, what are the typical issues organizations in that market are having?

The only way to make a salesperson feel comfortable having a probing conversation is to arm them with holistic market data points. These are often referred to as market dynamics and they include:

• Market size
• Market trends
• Competitive landscape
• Typical customer pains (per vertical)

The conversation surrounding these attributes has nothing to do with your product. Of course there is a time and place to communicate how your product fits into the landscape and but this isn’t the first step by any means. The first step is 100% about mapping product/service capabilities to business challenges.