Hosts Dennis Collins and Leah Bumphrey discuss strategies for getting the most out of sales training events. They explain why most sales training is ineffective as a one-time event, and emphasize the importance of continuous learning and reinforcement. Topics covered include evaluating current training methods, implementing a culture of ongoing education, utilizing tools like roleplaying and virtual scenarios, measuring progress, and providing coaching support. Collins and Bumphrey stress the value of looking outside your own industry for new techniques, networking with other professionals, consulting experts, and experimenting with different approaches. They encourage business owners to track results, support their team's growth, and view unsuccessful attempts as learning opportunities rather than failures.

Hi, it's Dennis again.

Welcome to connect and convert insider strategies for small

business sales success.

Today's topic.

How to get the most from your sales training events.

Yes, that is a big concern.

I know.

But first, before we get started, I have some great news.

I would like to introduce someone to you today.

Her name is Leah Bumphrey.

Leah is a esteemed colleague.

She's a fellow Wizard of Ads partner.

She's a brilliant sales brain and inspiring writer.

And now Luckily for me, because I need all the help I can get my partner on

this podcast, there are a lot of things I could tell you about Leah that I like

about Leah, but I'm going to tell you what I value about Leah, her perspective.

We have a lot in common about how to practice sales, how to teach sales, how to

think about sales, but there's one area.

We have that's different.

We have different perspectives, and I think that's going to I know it's going

to be a value for me, and I think it's going to be a great value for you.

That's going to be both challenging.

Yes, and interesting.

So, Leah, please introduce yourself to our audience.

Absolutely.

So I didn't even have to interrupt you.

I have to say Dennis you made me blush a little bit.

I think you and I have.

Similar backgrounds.

We both worked in radio and love radio for a long time.

You are in the warmth of the southern states and here I am up in Canada.

A little bit different market, a smaller, a smaller city, but

local radio just rocks up here.

I'm a mom.

I like to call them my beautiful boys, but they're all much taller than me now.

So we'll call them the Bumfrey men.

And, uh, they.

Love all things creative, all of them in their own way.

Um, I'm also a big sister and I think the combination of being a mom and a big

sister and having a background in all things creative and training makes me just

love this opportunity to work with you.

So away we go.

I think we're going

to have fun.

I know we are.

And I thank you for, for taking the time and effort to be with us.

I really appreciate it.

Let's jump into today's topic.

There's a sad truth.

Most sales training dollars are wasted.

How do I know this?

Cause I did it.

I wasted them when I was spending training dollars, but the triple cost,

okay, wasted time, taking training, wasted dollars, wasted money doing

the training and the worst of all, there's no improvement in sales.

It doesn't get better.

Does it have to be that way?

Well, I don't think so.

I don't think it has to be that way.

So today, Lee and I want to discuss some methods to make

sales training more effective.

Back in the old days.

Yeah, I remember those old days.

I was part of them.

Sales training was a one and done, but research training.

And science has shown that this approach is just not effective in driving the

long term behavior change and improving sales performance and building skills.

Okay, so we used to do the seminars, the videos, the tape.

I had cassette tapes.

I had, uh, big, uh, VHS, uh, films, videos.

I had it all.

Workshops.

And the theory was, well, give me four

hours.

And that's it.

And, you know, it's fascinating to me because there is

good training out there, Dennis.

We've all participated in training that we walked away from feeling like,

okay, this, I can, I can run with this.

This is fantastic.

Wizard Academy comes to mind for me.

That's the first time I was down there a couple of decades ago, but it

started, that's back when Roy used to travel and we brought him up here to

Canada to meet with our sales teams, to meet with our, our prospects and

our current clients to talk about Business and how to make business grow.

And isn't that why any one of us wants to be doing training?

Uh, Roy doesn't do that anymore, but at wizard academy.

And when I went there, man, I was just inspired to keep going.

I've even had one of my sons go and he was so inspired.

He's gone a couple of times.

It's all about, what are you trying to get out of the training?

What what's possible and wizardacademy.

org.

I always.

Encourage my clients or people that I'm talking to from whatever walk of business.

They're in check out the courses.

There's some fantastic ones

Couldn't agree more.

I you made me think as you were speaking about the very first time I went to

wizard academy I had been a follower of roy williams, you know as you had

his books his speaking Yes, I met him a couple times in travels and I

was just enthralled and then I heard wizard academy Oh, that's connected.

Roy's the wizard of bad, so I guess that's connected to Roy.

So, I gave it a shot.

It was in Buda, Texas at that time, not at the beautiful campus we have now.

And Michelle Miller was my first instructor, and she led us through

a course in marketing to women.

Transformational.

Transformational.

It changed the way I thought about marketing women and women were

important to my radio stations.

Every time.

I've been going now for two decades.

Can't stay away.

Every course is different.

It's not what you expect.

It's the unexpected.

It's but it's it's transformational.

It gets it gets you in here.

It touches you.

You've managed to go every year since that first time.

Hey, Dennis.

I haven't missed.

Yeah, I, I actually served proudly and was honored to serve on the

board of Wizard Academy for, for a period of time, but every time since

I first started, I've been there at least for one course every year.

I, it, it, it's a transformational moment, getting away from the

day to day and transforming.

So I highly recommend to all of our listeners, if you haven't had

the Wizard Academy experience.

It's time.

Go on.

I'm sorry.

Absolutely.

I even took my husband because he was wondering what the heck is this wizard

thing and don't let the name put you off.

It is a serious tool for serious business.

And you will walk away with some serious ideas that

you put into effect immediately.

Wizardacademy.

org Okay, let's jump into our topic.

What's the new approach to sales training?

Well, thankfully, sales training has evolved and become more effective.

Why?

Because we're now focusing on continuous learning and enforcement.

Imagine that.

Science is very, very clear on this.

We forget 90 percent of what we learn within seven days.

We actually create 50 percent of what we learn in 24 hours,

unless there's an intervention and intervention is continuous learning

reinforcement spaced repetition.

So instead of one time events, companies are now going through

training program that provide regular opportunities for salespeople to develop

skills and knowledge is great, but knowledge without action is useless.

The next Topic we want to talk about is, uh, so you're a small business owner.

How do you implement these sales training methods in small business?

Well, first step, I would ask you to evaluate what you're doing right now.

What are the strengths and weaknesses?

Encourage a culture of continuous learning.

I know when I was managing radio stations, we made it.

On a core value that we would continuous learners.

I supported a lot of that by my continuous training exposure to new

ideas, but that also is something that the individual has to to adopt.

And my folks loved it.

That will help to reinforce the learning.

It provides guidance.

Applying the.

It's no good to learn new skills.

It's only good if we apply them.

How about role playing and real words, real world, easy for me to say, simulate.

Scenarios.

Okay.

Uh, yeah, we've been doing that stuff for decades, but it's a new way of

doing scenarios, real world scenarios based on real customer issues.

For instance, reporting sales calls.

Uh, I work with a client where we do record sales calls.

Okay.

And those calls.

Are invaluable when it comes to training.

How about utilizing tools for virtual training and practice scenarios

again online courses webinars.

There's so much you can get online today.

Some of it for free.

Measure and track progress.

I would say the biggest fight that I have with.

Prospective clients and current clients, for gosh sake, track the results.

Sales are outcomes.

Revenue is an outcome.

The activities that lead up to sales, that lead up to revenue, are the

activities that we need to track.

Okay?

Some people call KPIs, whatever you want to call them.

Track your progress towards The revenue and those air activity goals.

Okay.

And most important.

Particularly if you're a sales leader or a gentleman.

Provide support.

Let people know that you support their growth.

Their journey.

That you support their learning.

You can do that by offering.

By offering coaching by offering.

Support by offering videos.

By joining online community.

Okay.

Where people can share experiences and each other.

Okay, the next step.

How do you find out what the new technique look like.

There are a couple steps.

First of all, examine your current training.

Okay.

To identify what's going well, what's not going well.

Secondly, keep yourself updated on the latest trends.

There are all kinds of forums available for your industry, for any industry.

Uh, there are conferences, there are workshops, there are webinars,

there are books, publication.

Any number of ways to stay informed about what's new.

And you know what Dennis, you said a very key thing.

Your industry and other industries.

There's too much information.

Roy talks about this.

When when you have a problem, look at another industry and see what

solution they had for an issue and how you can bring it over.

It's no different when it comes to training.

What is what are other doing and how can that.

Help you

I'm glad you mentioned that.

It reminds me of something.

Back in the dark ages before actually before the advent of computers and

one of the key problems a radio station have is managing its inventory

with the inventory, the number of spots ad spots available for sale.

Okay.

And that determines your revenue.

Obviously, what price you sell that and how.

My business manager and I went to the hotel industry and airline industry

to figure out how to manage inventory.

They had a great way of doing it.

As you get closer to the flight taking off, the, the seats become less available

and the price goes up same in a hotel.

If I try to book a hotel in your city today, I'll bet you I'm going to pay

more if I have to have it today than I will if I have to have it in January.

So we create it by looking at other businesses.

We create it and.

System long before computers were out there long before we had the computer

support that worked quite well for us.

So that, that's a great point.

Look around.

Uh, how about networking?

I love networking, connecting, you know, there's a lot of science also

behind this, that the more we connect with people, the bigger our social

brain network, the healthy we will be, the more productive we, the.

That's what we will be.

It's I'll do a podcast on that one day.

It's quite interesting.

The more connections.

The reason why we always want to be able to say that I know a guy or if I'm if

I'm your neighbor, Dennis, and I'm having trouble with my with my plumbing, I'm

going to say, Dennis, do you know a guy?

Because I don't have a guy.

He trusts people.

Would you trust

me?

Absolutely.

You'd be in trouble.

I'm not asking you to come fix my plumbing.

Let

me,

that would not be a good thing.

I might end up, it might end up costing you a lot more

money to fix what I screwed up.

Hey, consider consulting with sales training experts

or hiring sales consultants.

Hey, that's what Leah and I do.

Okay.

I'm not blowing our horn, but yeah, I'm blowing our horn.

We would love to have a conversation with you.

No strings attached to just find out.

You know, do an assessment of what you're doing, what's working, what's not working.

And then last but not least, experiment, experiment.

You know, someone framed this for me once, and I've never forgotten this.

You know, we all get hung up.

Well, failure, what's failure?

Okay, well we tried something and it didn't work.

That's failure.

No.

That's an experiment.

If you were in chemistry class in high school and you were supposed to concoct

some kind of concoction and didn't work, that was called an experiment.

That wasn't called a failure, was it?

So why don't we look at those things that we do that don't work as an experiment?

Okay,

how is constantly evolving back when I started in sales?

I'm sure it's similar with yourself.

Dennis.

They were actually designated.

Most companies had designated training positions.

So this person was responsible for what's going on and how can we help?

That's not the case anymore.

There's a whole bunch of fiscal reasons why there's also a whole bunch of

of organizational reasons why, you know, here's doing their own training,

tapping the shoulder of senior or senior salespeople in order to do it.

The issue is it becomes very much just all in the family.

If you're not willing to go outside and look at, at what's new, what's

trending, what other people have to say and what other people have experienced.

Because Dennis, I tell you, there's people starting today that don't know

even that inventory can be an issue.

We've experienced it, you've sold it, you move forward.

I remember that's.

Man, that's almost 30 years ago, having a huge order.

I'm so excited.

It was right around Christmas.

I had this huge order and put it on the air.

No spots available.

Yeah.

Inventory management.

Yeah.

And, uh, it's something that we learned from the outside.

Uh, so in closing today, I, I'm going to harp a little bit more

on don't be afraid to try things.

And, you know, if you learn something from a so called

failure, you didn't lose, did you?

You didn't lose.

You learned something that didn't work.

If Thomas Edison would have stopped his, uh, his journey to invent the light bulb,

he failed reportedly thousands of times.

He was experimenting.

Well, I tried this and this didn't work.

Then what's next?

What's plan B?

Most business owners don't have the plan B.

Well, we tried that training and it didn't work.

So it's, training is no good.

No, that's not it.

That's not it at all.

I've heard people say, well, you know what?

I'm very clinical in my approach.

This is exactly how I do it.

This is what works.

It's very, very, very defined.

Okay, that'll work.

In some instances, but if you're not open.

To other possibilities other ways of doing it.

You are missing out.

You're missing out on how to inspire your team.

You're missing out on how to make yourself feel really great when you go home.

Because I absolutely believe at the end of a great training session, whether you're

at Wizard Academy, whether you're doing a Zoom training, you gotta be able to

come out of that with something that you go home and you tell your spouse or you

tell someone, guess what I learned today?

This is so cool.

That's that would be the mark of a great event.

What I can't tell.

So well, this has been greatly I'm glad you joined.

You totally added to this.

You're keeping me on course and I appreciate that you're giving a different

perspective, which I totally appreciate.

I hope our listeners got something about getting the

most from sales training events.

This is Dennis and Leah.

Signing off on this version of connect and convert.

We'll see you next time.