One of the things I talk about often with sales leaders who are eager to maximize their team\u2019s performance is the principle of reinforcement. All too often, we think of training for salespeople as a one-and-done initiative, as something we can check off a list once the “training” event is over and consider finished. Actually, the training we have invested in is next to worthless if it is not reinforced over time, incorporated as a personal priority, and made an ongoing topic for discussion within a personalized sales coaching plan. Reinforcement is thus one of the neglected secrets of effective sales leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To understand the vital importance of reinforcement to a sales team, it helps to distinguish between two concepts that are commonly confused: impact <\/em>and imprint. <\/em>As leaders, we commit to training events because we want to have an impact on our team. And you know what? Just about any type of boot camp training environment will <\/em>impact learning. So yes. The training event does have an impact. It does create knowledge. But is that impact enough all on its own?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our view at Sandler is that it\u2019s not enough. Here\u2019s why: That learning tends to dissipate over time. Between two weeks to twenty days after the event, most of what has been learned in a high-impact learning environment will be forgotten. Why? Because there hasn’t been an imprinting<\/em> process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The imprinting process is what happens when we as leaders find a way to help the team to reinforce what’s been learned, either through something we do or through self-directed reinforcement, so that the knowledge is internalized and owned. Imprinting translates knowledge into action, into predictable behaviors and predictable results. The impact just creates knowledge. It’s the imprinting that creates predictability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Examples of reinforcement events that imprint knowledge help and turn that knowledge into predictable outcomes include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Role plays.<\/em><\/strong> Many leaders don’t see this as reinforcement, but an effective role play session focusing on what has been covered in training really can help your team members put what they have learned into action in a powerful way. Even when they stumble a bit during the role play, it’s important to understand that that struggling is part of the imprinting process. They get to experiment with what they’ve learned in training, to take a couple of wrong turns and then correct for them, and to see for themselves, from direct experience, how the new skill might actually deliver results in their world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n