Microlearning: 8 Ways It Helps In Sales Training

Any business that wants to expand and create new opportunities requires a skilled sales force. But how does a sales team build the ability to carry out such huge responsibilities? By practical sales training. 

Here, microlearning is an obvious choice of training for your fast-paced sales team because of the reasons that we will discuss further in this article.

Properly planned training helps you onboard your sales team and allows them to meet their targets quickly. A sales training LMS proves to be an extremely valuable tool when it involves giving training to your employees as it fosters micro-learning and ensures it’s easily accessible to all employees.

Every manager who executes sales training wants their team members to remember what they learned and implement it to increase sales and draw in more clients, which will benefit the company’s bottom line. 

However, due to the massive amount of information available, most salespeople find it difficult to recall and apply what they learned in training. Hence, sales instructors seek strategies to help learners retain and use new knowledge when needed.

What Exactly Is Microlearning?

Who doesn’t want to consume information in bite-sized chunks?

Microlearning, as its name implies, imparts knowledge in small, bite-sized chunks rather than large modules that may overwhelm the mind. It can be an animated video, an audio file, or a simple yet informative PowerPoint presentation. The main objective of a microlearning program is to educate learners about a particular task and assist them in meeting a specific goal. 

L&D can help speed the learning curve by giving highly effective sales training in a short amount of time. Microlearning provides fast, impactful learning that aligns with the schedules of even the busiest salespeople.

Here’s how sales leaders are using microlearning to train, enable, and foster high-producing, quote-exceeding sales reps:

Gamification Increases Engagement

Sales may become monotonous and uninteresting, and if employees are exposed to the same things on the job, sales training can seem tedious and unappealing. It makes learning impossible. Use gamification in your microlearning pieces to make training more motivating and engaging.

Points, badges, levels, timers, awards, power-ups, and leaderboards are all game components that make training exciting and fun while ensuring that learners receive and retain the information. Sales personnel are easily persuaded by gamification because they are used to meeting targets to receive incentives.

Focused Learning

One of the most difficult challenges for a sales representative is finding time to improve their product knowledge, selling skills, and customer interactions. Sales representatives prefer information that is brief and to the point. 

Microlearning offers bite-sized learning that focuses on a specific learning objective and can be concluded in 3-5 minutes. It is easily accessible to sales representatives in between sales calls. It allows them to spend less time on training and more time selling and applying their skills on the job.

Aids In Cross-Selling

Microlearning, which includes short, entertaining courses and videos, is the best way to drive cross-selling. Due to time limits, salespeople may resent the need to learn about things that are not their own.

Offering micromodules for the entire production line can change this situation. Salespeople will benefit from the courses’ short duration and freedom to learn at their own pace.

The key to accomplishing this is to keep the modules as brief as possible, focusing primarily on the most important components of each product’s operation.

A laptop salesperson, for example, may be uninterested in learning about printers and scanners even though their company offers them. So, they may be unable to adequately respond to their client’s printer-related questions.

Microlearning may be effective in this situation. By enrolling in micro modules that provide key information for every product in the company’s portfolio, every sales representative will understand every product in the product line. It will let them respond successfully to customers, and forward promising leads to the organization.

Rapid Onboarding Ensures A Shorter Ramp-up Time

New salespeople require information that will allow them to gain insights into the products and services they will be pitching to customers, and they do not have the time to spend in a training room or read long training manuals to obtain it. 

Microlearning enables fast and smooth onboarding by allowing associates to inject themselves into the training wherever it is most needed.

Quicker Updates 

Internal service and product updates are issued regularly. A short video or microlearning module can assist sales representatives in updating their information and presenting it to clients. Frequent updates may necessitate managers to update existing modules. 

A 3-5-minute learning nugget requires less time and money to update than a 1-hour online training session or eLearning course.

Media-Heavy

Individuals learn more effectively from audio-visual multimedia than from reading plain text. It is because the more senses are engaged, the better learners recall. Microlearning functions on this principle to provide you with the tools you need to perfect your training strategy.

Most microlearning modules use audio, video formats, and images to deliver complex concepts in an engaging, fun way. This media-based concept also keeps learners engaged and interested—audio-visual components aid sales teams in dealing with real-time issues practically and appropriately.

Everyone Benefits From Flexibility

Scheduling sales training around the taxing hours of the sales floor can be a considerable challenge, and perfect attendance is difficult to achieve. Because microlearning can be deployed on various platforms, including mobile phones, corporate learners can access training when it is convenient for them—wherever and whenever they want to.

Improves Memory Acuity

Here’s another reason microlearning is the pinnacle of information retention, particularly in a fast-paced industry like sales.

eLearning developers create microlearning modules that use neuroscientific principles to improve learners’ memory. They don’t overload the brain with difficult-to-process information. Instead, they provide learners with short, absorbable, bite-sized content to consider.

Microlearning resources are used to help employees revise and remember information. They assist learners by reading and listening to resources such as micro podcasts and flashcards. 

Microlearning resources also make mobile learning more effective. Sales professionals can quickly access these bite-sized modules.

Microlearning, for example, could be used to provide follow-up tasks to learners to keep their skills and knowledge up to date. These short courses cover learning that spans the learners’ years of employment, memory retrieval, and just-in-time learning.

Conclusion

This article discusses the elements that make microlearning the ideal strategy for increasing your sales team’s learning effectiveness. In a nutshell, this is effective learning delivered in a way the learners enjoy.

Once you implement this strategy, you will quickly see significant benefits in your organization.