This article is part of a series: Agile Learning – The Guide for Sales Leaders. Previous piece in this series: Tip #1: Focus on Last Mile Knowledge
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.
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.
Want to spot the knowledge gaps within your organization?
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.
