This article is part of a series: Agile Learning – The Guide for Sales Leaders
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.
