Odds are, you’ve heard of agile.
Maybe a software engineer talked to you about it. Your ears may have pricked up from the obscure-sounding buzzwords: Scrum. Kanban. Hippogriff. (The first 2 are real. The last is from Harry Potter).
But it would be a mistake to dismiss agile as mere tech jargon. For a sales leader managing quota-carrying reps, agile can give you a competitive edge.
Agile is a way of working that emphasizes flexibility. It ensures that your team has what you need to win, no matter what unexpected obstacles you encounter.
Companies across a broad range of industries use agile to outmaneuver their competitors and create cultures of continuous learning and improvement. Philips uses agile to bring medical technology to market 3x faster. VistaPrint reduced project lead times by 83% thanks to agile. And according to a BCG report, companies that used agile in the pharmaceutical industry delivered product launches 20% under budget and with 20% productivity improvements.
We’ve created this guide to demystify agile for the rest of us. We’ll answer 3 common questions:
“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else”
– Eric Ries
- What is agile, really?
- How can agile apply to training, especially in sales organizations?
- What small, easy steps can you take today to unlock the benefits of Agile Learning and give your team a competitive edge?
The Need for Speed (of Learning)
Agile arose in response to a simple truth: The future is uncertain. Customer needs evolve, new technologies emerge, and new competitors enter the arena. How can you be more flexible, so that you can quickly adapt to a dynamic environment?
Traditional development approaches follow meticulously defined step-by-step processes, often documented in granular detail. The problem with this approach is that it’s inflexible. By the time the product hits the market or the training reaches its intended audience, it’s already obsolete. The result? Only 21% of companies believe they’re training their salespeople in the skills they need.
In contrast to the traditional, linear development approach, agile development relies on many fast iterative cycles.
Here’s a piece of trivia that many engineers don’t know: The inspiration for agile came from the world of sports (in fact, even the term “Scrum” comes from rugby)!
Agile's Origin in Sports
In sports, every team shows up on game day with a strategy. But ultimately, it’s not their strategy that decides whether they win or lose. It’s their ability to adapt to their opponent. Mike Tyson said it best: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
The average football game lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes, but has just 11 minutes of action. Those 11 minutes are broken into 15-second plays (in agile terms, “sprints”). With every huddle, the team takes stock of where they are and what their opponent is doing. Then they decide what to do next. It’s a continuous, fast-paced approach to learning.
Winning sports teams are top-notch learning organizations. They reflect on their wins and losses and improve constantly – play after play, and game after game.
What if your team could learn just as quickly?
That’s the power of Agile Learning. It’s a training approach that values speed, flexibility, and collaboration. It takes a rapid, iterative approach to learning that helps teams respond to changes quickly. The result is training that keeps up with your business and drives performance in the field.
How to Make Your Training More Agile: 4 Top Tips
We’ve worked with top-performing sales and operational teams across a wide range of industries: from pharma to food & beverage, and from financial services to logistics and construction.
From this experience, we’ve found that there are small, easy steps that any sales leader can implement to make their training more agile. Small changes unlock dramatic results. Within 60 days, you’ll see faster learning cycles, increased teamwork and flexibility, and more frequent wins against the competition.
Below, we’ve collected our Top 4 Tips to make your training more agile.
Tip #1: Focus on Last Mile Knowledge
Imagine: There’s less than a minute left in the Final Four, and the game is tied. The coach calls the team’s last timeout. The team huddles together, energized and expectant. The coach pulls out his clipboard… and launches into a summary of the principles of zone defense.
Ridiculous, right? Now, imagine the sales equivalent of that situation. Your reps have 5 minutes before a key customer meeting. Your biggest competitor is coming after you. They’ve just launched a new product and lowered their prices.
If you could coach your reps in those final moments, what would help them win the deal? Platitudes about sales fundamentals? Of course not!
What if you could give your reps specific advice about how to outmaneuver your specific competitor and win the deal?
In those moments that matter, the right knowledge can make the difference between success and failure. And that knowledge is unique to your organization.
There’s a reason why 80% of licensed training content is never used. Most off-the-shelf material is too generic to help reps in that moment of need.
Your reps already know the basics – that’s why you hired them! But to close deals, your reps need to master how to sell your specific products, to your specific customers, against your specific competitors.
We call this team-specific operational knowledge Last Mile Learning. You can’t buy it off-the-shelf. It’s the critical operational knowledge unique to every team. And studies have shown that it’s 6x more valuable than licensed training content.
But there’s a challenge with Last Mile Knowledge. It’s hard to capture and scale across a distributed team, because it usually lives in your top performers’ heads. We’ve found that some of the best sales training gold shows up in chat threads and ‘tap-on-the-shoulder’ conversations. It’s improvised, informal, and impermanent.
That’s where a Last Mile Learning tool like Learn to Win can make a huge difference. With Learn to Win, it’s fast and easy to capture and share the team-specific knowledge that actually helps your reps win deals.
Tip #2: Focus on One Concept at a Time
Once you’ve identified the Last Mile Knowledge your team needs to master to do their jobs well, the next step is to decide where to focus your training energy.
First, a hard truth: You can’t cover everything. At least, not all at once.
We get the temptation. It’s expensive to take reps out of the field for training, so of course you want to make the most of that valuable time.
But it’s one of the most common training pitfalls. When you try to prioritize everything, you actually prioritize nothing. At best, you make a millimeter of progress in every direction and fall behind your more focused competitors. More often, reps get overwhelmed by the volume of new information and disengage… and training turns into an expensive nap.
Want to spot the knowledge gaps within your organization?
Agile is all about fast learning cycles, and the teams that learn the fastest focus on one important concept at a time. They prioritize ruthlessly, asking, “What’s the most important topic that we need our reps to master first?”
With that clarity, they zero in on the topic, build mastery, and then move on and decide what to focus on next. Every learning cycle unlocks incremental performance gains in the field.
How do you decide where to focus first? The key is to use data. Most firehose-style (or “spray and pray”) training sessions take place because managers don’t have a clear sense of what their reps understand and where they struggle.
Because of this, we recommend that before you even kick off training, you give your team a quick knowledge assessment. In fact, at Learn to Win, every training cycle starts with an assessment. Simple is best – you’ll be amazed by how much you’ll learn from just a 10-minute assessment.
The data will reveal the knowledge gaps on your team. No need to waste time covering the topics that everyone understands! Instead, zero in on the most widespread – or most problematic – knowledge gaps on your team.
As an example, check out the data below. Sales managers saw that 87% of reps answered Q9 incorrectly. They dug into the data and realized that most reps misunderstood a key product feature in an upcoming launch. Armed with this data, they quickly spun up a microlearning lesson to ensure consistent and accurate messaging in the field.
Tip #3: Make Training Cycles Fast
Agile learning is all about speed to value. Once you’ve spotted a knowledge gap, how quickly can you intervene?
This is where many organizations stumble. When your competitor launches a new product or changes their sales strategy, rapid response matters. You can’t afford to wait 6 months for fresh training materials.
In most companies, though, the Learning & Development (L&D) team is under-resourced and bandwidth-constrained. In fact, in the average U.S. company, there is only 1 L&D employee per 300 employees. The result? Long backlogs for new training. Your reps will be waiting a long time for support.
Imagine if it took 6 months for a football team to build training for a new play. You probably wouldn’t see them in the playoffs.
So how can you bypass this bottleneck and ensure your team learns faster than the competition? The key is to use simple software that doesn’t require any technical expertise to create an effective lesson.
You shouldn’t have to know how to code, or how to use specialized software. That way, you don’t have to bother L&D when it comes to your team’s Last Mile Learning. You (or someone on your team) can just take care of it yourself, quickly and easily.
Learn to Win is training software that’s easy for anyone to use. Want proof? Our first power users were football coaches… not known to be the most tech savvy group! Learn to Win’s simple interface means that you can build and share a great lesson with your team in minutes.
It’s faster than PowerPoint for you, and a lot more engaging for your learners.
Tip #4: Make Learning Easy
Magic happens when your reps can learn in the flow of work.
Just as huddles take place throughout the game, you want agile learning to be a continuous process. But too often, training disrupts the flow of work. Reps have to stop what they’re doing, tunnel into the VPN, log in to the eLearning portal, sift through modules until they find the right one…
Still with us?
You can’t blame your reps for finding creative ways to avoid this kind of training (our favorite is the trusty ‘Stapler on the Spacebar’ strategy). Agile learning works because it meets reps where they are.
See how easy it is for anyone to create a lesson in Learn to Win!
That means designing training for the device reps always have with them (usually their mobile phone). Many training platforms claim to be compatible with mobile, but those claims are often flimsy. There’s a big difference between a Computer-Based Training (CBT) shoehorned onto a small screen and an experience designed expressly for mobile. A mobile-first design serves your learners in the time and place of need – just like a team huddle.
Your average employee only has 20 minutes to devote to learning each week. The most effective training works within those time constraints and delivers learning in bite-sized bursts.
That’s one reason why microlearning is an essential component of an agile learning strategy. The other reason? Our attention spans are shorter than ever. According to Microsoft, the average human attention span is even shorter than the average attention span of a goldfish: Just 8 seconds.
Since you’re in a constant battle for your employees’ attention, your training has to be both bite-sized and engaging. The best approach is to make the learning hands-on and interactive.
Studies have shown that most people don’t learn from just watching a video (or worse, reading a memo). Imagine if, minutes before your scheduled surgery, your surgeon whispered, “Relax, I watched a video on how to do this procedure.”
We learn by doing. Therefore, make your training as interactive as possible. The best microlearning platforms incorporate knowledge checks, gamification, and even video roleplay elements.
Learn to Win is a mobile first-product built for the generation that grew up on Instagram. Unlike your company LMS that delivers training about as effectively as a health care app delivers surgery, Learn to Win was built for on-the-fly learning
With Learn to Win, it’s easy for your team to train in the flow of work. Learners can engage for a few minutes at a time, on the device that’s always with them. And since we designed the platform to maximize engagement and interactivity, your team will retain what they learn and quickly put it into practice.
When you remove the friction associated with training, you speed up your team’s learning cycles and help them get better faster than the competition.
Want to spot the knowledge gaps within your organization?
Get Better, Faster with Learn to Win
Agile Learning unlocks a powerful advantage for your sales team. And Learn to Win makes it simple for any team to make their training more agile.
Run circles around your competitors with training that is focused, fast, and flexible.
The best part? It’s dead simple to get started with Learn to Win.
It doesn’t require you to make massive changes. You don’t have to uproot your LMS. You can start small and see immediate results. After all, that’s the core principle of Agile Learning!
Real Results in Just 60 Days (Here’s how)
- Zero in on a Specific Operational Issue. We’ll start by deciding where to focus together. Where do you suspect that knowledge gaps might be hurting your team’s performance?
- Start with a Micro Assessment. We’ll build a quick assessment on Learn to Win (10 questions max), which we’ll push out to your team’s mobile devices. The data will highlight your team’s most critical knowledge gaps. You’ll know exactly where to focus your training.
- Build Targeted Remediation Training. Based on the data, we’ll build microlearning lessons on Learn to Win that focus on the most important gap you identified. No need to waste time training on material your reps already know!
- Observe Improved Performance. Confirm your reps have mastered the concepts that previously stumped them. Based on the fresh data from Learn to Win, ask yourself, “What’s the next biggest gap?” You’ve already kicked off your next learning cycle!
