Sales training: Is it worth your while? Part 3 of 4

The importance of follow-up

One key reason the Drinker Biddle program worked so well, according to Barrett, was that to assure success you must “follow up and follow up and follow up. You need a system to monitor results and assure consequences, and you must offer individual coaching. Otherwise, people will be doing the same old things the next Monday.”

Drinker Biddle’s follow-up was organized by client service teams which assigned tasks and deadlines, publicized them to the group, and sent regular email reminders. They also used a software program called Results Engine to provide automated reminders every Friday.

If all that didn’t work, lawyers were to expect a call from the managing partner. But that did not happen very often because when people started to slip, group pressure took over. Lawyers did not want to disappoint their colleagues by missing the deadlines.

Iris Jones at Akin Gump agrees on the importance of follow-up: “The most important factor in training success is to immediately develop a formalized implementation plan for each individual. It’s like learning a language -- if you don’t put it to use right away, it’s lost.”

Similar results have been observed by sales trainers in a variety of industries, since all trainers face similar challenges, rooted in human nature. Whether you are a personal exercise trainer, a nutritionist, a psychotherapist, a middle school teacher, a prison reformer, or a sales coach, it just isn’t easy to change long-term behavior patterns.

ISA is the largest association for training company executives (). At their 2005 sales and marketing conference in Washington, D.C., one of the keynote speakers was Tom Snyder, Vice President of Business Development at Huthwaite a Virginia company described on its web page as “the acknowledged thought leader in the sales performance improvement industry… best known as the creators of SPIN selling.”

Snyder’s keynote speech explained how difficult it is to train new behaviors, and why. He summarized several decades of research proving that when skills training is an isolated event, a maximum of 8% of participants should be expected to show long term effects. The other 92% or more will fall into two large groups: about half will try to change and fail, and the other half won’t even try. To effect change, every organization needs follow-up and management support.

That’s why Catherine MacDonagh, Director of Business Development at Day, Berry & Howard, says that “training is great, but it’s just the beginning. Change requires that the firm’s leaders must be committed to a sustained effort.” MacDonagh is in a good position to know, since she co-founded LSSO, the organization that held the RainDance Conference discussed in Part 1 of this series.

To emphasize her point, MacDonagh quoted the Roman philosopher Lucretius: “The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.” In many cases, this requires institutional change.

This four part series is an expanded version of an article that I wrote for the most recent issue of Law Firm Inc (Nov/Dec 2006, p. 30). To see the abridged version that appeared in print, go to the free resources section of our web page.