Learning is the most important skill for salespeople to master in the second decade of the 21st Century. Unlike medicine or law, selling is a profession that is learned by doing. The more calls you make, the faster you learn, and the more you learn about what works and what needs to change. Already in this decade, we are seeing the effect of combinations of exponential technologies that are profoundly and permanently disrupting the marketplace. Salespeople must learn how to learn and apply new knowledge quickly to contribute value to buyer-seller interactions.
Salespeople who are not learning and broadening their knowledge base as a habit will quickly find themselves out of touch with buyers who don’t need a sales relationship and can find and acquire the information they need for themselves, with minimal help from salespeople.
The rise of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, asynchronous selling techniques, free trials and self-service have already displaced salespeople from transactional-selling roles.
There are lots of ways that salespeople can learn. In a long-established way, salespeople are inducted and begin to learn to sell through applying a product-centric pedagogy, typically laden with PowerPoint slides, conducted as an in-person new-hire sales training course. Online learning is typically product-oriented and when combined with classroom training does little to accelerate sales ramp. Ongoing learning is typically event-oriented at annual SKOs or QBRs. Selling skills are typically learned on the job by rookies - or the experienced new hire is expected to already possess them.
Traditional sales pedagogy attempts to convey explicit knowledge about products, markets, and buyers. But is the world of your customer static? As outlined above, the rate of change in the marketplace is increasing, as exponential technologies disrupt status-quo processes in almost every industry.
The Coronavirus crisis has spurred a wave of remote learning innovation in just 6-weeks, as thousands of companies canceled in-person kickoff and new-hire training events and threw every ounce of creativity they had at virtual events.
As some of these highly effective remote events have proven, to evolve sales learning we need to adopt new practices, and we need to experiment and use modern learning theory to prepare salespeople for successful careers in a changing world.
Here are a few of my thoughts about modern sales learning;
The tacit dimension of sales knowledge is hard to share. I have adapted the Wikipedia definition of Tacit Knowledge for our purposes.
“Tacit sales knowledge can be defined as selling skills, ideas, and experiences that salespeople have, but are not codified and may not necessarily be easily expressed. With tacit knowledge, salespeople are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Effective transfer of tacit sales knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction, and trust. This kind of knowledge can only be revealed through practice in a particular context and transmitted through social networks. To some extent, it is "captured" when the knowledge holder joins a network or a community of practice”
We can make a distinction between explicit learning (about something static, i.e. a product or a service) and the acquisition of tacit sales knowledge through coaching, peer-learning, and social learning in learning to become a sales professional.
Selling is a practice where we learn as we go and the faster we learn, the faster we grow in the profession. As sales enablement professionals, we need to teach less and enable salespeople to learn more through experiential learning workshops vs. training, coupled with modern eLearning courseware and engaging learning paradigms.
Learning must evolve to cater to experimenting, playing, sharing, creating, observing, and stealing what works and making it our own. Practice must become team-play through imaginative use of new technologies, social networks, social learning, storytelling, and intelligent gamification.
The future of sales learning is exciting, fast-moving and a journey of discovery through innovation, experimentation, and adaption. It is incumbent on the sales enablement community to drive this transformation in sales learning. Learning to learn to sell is not a one-off event, it is a mindset and lifelong practice for everyone wanting a career in sales.
This article adapts various ideas from John Seely Brown’s writings and videos on a new culture of learning and my prior article The Half-Life of Learned Skill is 5-Years.