Harsh Monga’s 7 tips on disrupting the sales training landscape

Introduction 

Sales training is all about improving the seller’s overall sales readiness to drive seller behavioral change and maximize sales success. To understand the sales training landscape, we teamed up with Harsh Monga, a dynamic leadership and executive coach and the director and head of sales training at Dr. Reddy’s. 

Not everyone learns the same way, though they might be learning the same thing. I think most of the people who might be reading this, if they are in the training industry, would understand that different people have different learning styles.

Harsh Monga was featured in our podcast series – #Pitch Perfect and shared his tips on designing the perfect sales training program. 

1. Outcomes and not outputs 

‘Activity is not productivity’, says Harsh Monga. Sales training is not about how much effort we are putting in terms of training people, it is about how much impact we can create on team performance and the business. 

It is important to sit with all the stakeholders and decide on the training outcomes before rolling out the training program. This helps in understanding the effectiveness of training. 

2. 3E’s for Effective Training 

When it comes to learning, three things are very important – Education, Experience, and Exposure. Education comes from the formal sales training that we provide to sales reps. Exposure comes from interacting with other people, learning from peers, on-the-job coaching, and the guidance of their managers. Experience is working on the job, experiencing different scenarios with customers, and going through different projects and assignments. 

The rule is that people learn more from 70% of experience, a little less than 20% from exposure, and just about 10% from formal education. But all three are important in designing an optimal sales training program. 

3. Focus on creating robust Training Needs Identification 

To create a unique and personalized learning experience, it is important to make sure that training needs identification is a robust one. Baselining through competency assessments is very important to identify who needs what kind of inputs, and create cohorts of people with similar training needs. 

4. Measuring sales training program 

The effectiveness of sales training can be measured based on a lot of matrices. It is not always sales or revenue numbers. It can be based on employee attrition, productivity measures, CSAT, and net promoter scores. Therefore, the effectiveness of a sales training program needs to be decided and agreed upon while designing the sales training program. 

5. Artificial Intelligence use in sales 

Even though there will be a shift in terms of AI-enabled sales coaching, it will never completely replace the manager’s guidance and intervention. And, it will never replace the human part of sales coaching. Therefore, utilize AI in assisting managers and critical aspects of sales training. 

6. Game-based learning is Overrated 

There was a lot of hype on game-based learning, and organizations built such games where employees could learn, but it takes too much effort, money, time, and resources to pick up knowledge from these games, and the ROI is not very significant. 

Now, people have switched from game-based learning to leaderboards, and that has been working quite well for sales training. Leaderboards can be used to assess the sales reps’ performance and also, reward the reps with exciting prizes and points. Hence, improving their sales performance 

7. Video-based learning is still underrated 

According to Harsh Monga, video-based learning is still very underrated. He believes it is one of the best ways of training sales teams. For most people watching videos is the fastest way to learn and retain information but the videos have to be engaging and interactive.