Four Reasons to Incorporate Video Into Your Sales Training

When your new recruiter or new sales rep walks through your door on day one you should have two objectives; make them feel welcome and part of the team, and ramp them up to quota attainment as quickly as possible. The shorter the ramp up the quicker they build confidence and start adding value to the business. 

Unfortunately too many new hires joining IT staffing organizations are being tossed into the deep end of the pool with no life jacket and no lifeguard. They either get too little direction or too much of the wrong or conflicting information. Best case scenario is new hires are lectured by department heads on company policies and procedures and other topics that only delay ramp up time.

Despite their best intentions, these instructor led classroom training sessions are always too long, packed with too much information and dare I say, boring. Yes, I said it, boring!  All of of this leads to new hires walking out dazed and confused and a sales training or sales onboarding program that actually delays time to quota attainment. 

Fortunately there is a better way to train new hires and consume sales training and sales onboarding content. Below I share with you four reasons to incorporate video into your sales training and sales onboarding.  

Video Drives Knowledge Retention 
A common challenge all organizations struggle with when it comes to sales training and sales onboarding is making the learner experience memorable and engaging.  Studies show that after just 4 days of training the average employee will have forgotten 60% of the material taught.  Even worse, after 7 days, they will have forgotten 90%!  However, video engages learners in a way that lectures and documents, even PowerPoint presentation can't. 

Studies show that incorporating video into your sales training and sales onboarding  improve people’s ability to remember concepts and details.  Forrester Research estimates one minute of online video equates to approximately 1.8 million written words. In short, video is a must for increasing knowledge retention in employees.

The main reason people learn and retain information more effectively with video is because the brain simply favors video over lecture and text.  An article from Psychology Today’s titled Video vs. Text: The Brain Perspective, written by Liraz Margalit, explains that the human brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than it does text.  Since our brains are designed to avoid cognitive stress, it is natural that humans prefer learning that is spoon-fed to us via video.  Margalit wrote, “when we watch a video, we become immersed in it and create an empathetic connection with the screen."  If you want your learners to fall in love with your content and remember your content and what was taught, it makes sense to deliver it via video because it is much easier for learners to become emotionally attached to something they watch in a video than something they read.

Video Training Reduces Costs
Not only does video improve learner retention and comprehension but it saves money spent on that training.  One of the big reasons I hired a PHD in instructional design and incorporated video into sales training was so pass the cost savings on to our customers.

IBM discovered that 40% of its classroom training costs were spent on travel and lodging. As a result, IBM moved half of its training programs to an online learning management system. Over the first two years of the program they saved $579 million!  Microsoft has experienced similar savings by replacing many of their live, instructor-led training sessions and smaller events with their own internal video portal. This move has reduced the training costs from approximately $320 per hour per participant down to just $17 per person.

I've had numerous clients share with me how video based training has saved them thousands of dollars in bar tabs alone.  Think about how much you spend every time you fly your team or new hires into corporate for training and how much you spend at happy hour? Now think about travel expenses and opportunity costs. It adds up real quick. Video eliminates all of that.

Video Drives Consistent Training Results, Ensures Consistent Messaging
Consider the following scenarios:

1. Imagine you train your new hires by asking them to shadow a top performer. Is it possible for your top performer to be shadowed by every new hire? What if your new hire is located in a different market than your top performer? What happens when that top performer is not available or leaves the company?
2. Assume you rely on your branch managers in the field to train and onboard your new hires.
3. Pretend your new hire sales training and sales onboarding is hosted by various people at your corporate office,

Now ask yourself this.  Under any of these scenarios, how can you ensure each new hire receives the same consistent messaging and is trained to adopt the same skills and behaviors? It is very, very difficult and that is the point. 

Incorporating video into your sales training and sales onboarding ensures all salespeople, regardless of location receive the same consistent training and the same consistent message. Delivering consistent training including a consistent message is the key to producing consistent results.

Video Enables You to Clone & Replicate Top Performing Sales Behaviors
Every sales team has a top performer as does every recruiting team.  And every salesperson and recruiter has their own unique "special power," that one unique skill they're really good at. For example, suppose "Dan" is your sales rep who is really good at getting appointments with new prospects and "Sarah" is another sales rep who is really good at handling objections. You say to yourself, "I wish everyone could set appointments like Dan and I wish my whole sales team was as good as Sarah at objection handling.  If I could only clone them."

With video you can clone and replicate top performing sales behaviors and share it with your entire team to learn from and replicate.  You can simply video record your top performers executing their "super power" and then push the video to the field via your Learning Management System for all to watch and learn from. Not only that, this is a quick and easy way to create engaging sales training content that incorporates social learning.