All of these Tips come from our trainer course called Training For Trainers. This comprehensive, four-day course gives both new and veteran trainers the very best delivery skills for achieving learning in today's complex training environments. Although we have not included any information about this course on our web site, we have been training it since 1993 in the United States and other countries around the world. Please send us an e-mail or call us if you would like more information about Training For Trainers.

Tip No. 1: Allow enough time to train.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. Sales or management training that is ineffective due to being too brief is actually far worse than conducting no training at all. It will send the message that sales generation isn't that important. If it were, "Certainly the training would not have seemed so rushed and crammed into a ninety-minute window."

Tip No. 2: Role play assessments vs. practice time.
One of the best ways to evaluate skills-based courses is by conducting thorough and comprehensive role play activities for the participants. Initially you may hear some push-back about the idea, but there is no substitution for having participants demonstrate the skills while in class.

Many courses that we have seen offer "practice time." During this time participants are encouraged to get into groups and do some practice of the skills. Unfortunately, the groups often have little structure and the exercise becomes useless. For better results make your role play times more structured and require everyone to participate, even if you have to get the vice president's permission to do so.

Tip No. 3: Have professional-looking media.
If you have been asked to put together a presentation in one hour, most people would cut you some slack if your materials were not beautiful. They know that professional media, slides, flip charts or overheads, take time to create. In general, however, most trainers have the time, but put off creating the media until the very end. This is not a good idea. Include time in your project management plan for creating media. Each PowerPoint slide takes between 10-20 minutes to make them look great.

Flip charts can distinguish your training from all others, but each one takes about 15 minutes to make. We also don't recommend just taking the slides that you have created and turning them into a black-and-white participants guide by making copies of the slides. If you are training a course that will be around for a while we strongly recommend creating a real participants' guide that allows for various exercises and activities. When participants see professional-looking media they connect it to the trainer or the training team. They automatically become more patient and willing to learn during the training.

Tip No. 4: A variety of media is one of the secrets to great training.
Have you ever been to a training course that had beautiful PowerPoint slides and the right lighting and yet it still got a little boring? Besides making your media professional-looking, you should always have at least two types of prepared media while training. For one module you might have a few flip charts and some slides. For another you might use a few handouts and several overheads. For another you might use slides and a couple of diagrams on a white board. By mixing it up you keep everyone's attention.

Various studies indicate that a participant in a training class can pay attention for no longer than 8-10 minutes. Others say that you must take a break every ninety minutes at the most. By varying the media you greatly extend your times because each new medium used seems fresh and new, even if you used that same medium twenty minutes ago.

Tip No. 5: Make it look like a training room.
Some trainers use training rooms that substitute for storage rooms. Even though it may seem like there is no way to remove the clutter, it is important to do so. I you are training in a room that has boxes everywhere and twenty extra seats that are not holding people, the room will be visually taxing on your participants. That will make them tired and will certainly not encourage them to embrace the material. At the very least, the front of the training room (the area where you stand and the view behind you from a participant's perspective) should be free of all clutter and neat.

The media should be organized so that it makes sense to people looking at it. If the room is a little small, try to be creative by making more effective use of the media and getting out of the room for occasional activities that don't require being in the training room.

Tip No. 6: Top-priority training should be kicked off by senior management.
One of the best ways to get senior management to be involved in the training that you are delivering is to kick it off on the first morning. Courses like sales and sales management should be considered top priorities by senior management. They will likely welcome the opportunity to come in and say a few words. This will also verbally commit them to standing by the training in the future.

Tip No. 7: Get involvement early and keep everyone involved throughout the session.
The best way we know to make sure participants are learning is to make sure that they are paying attention. Since overloading on authority and control will only give you forced attention, not true focus, we recommend other methods. Asking questions, involving individuals in quick scenarios, having participants draw diagrams or demonstrate skills are all great ways to keep them involved and learning. The only other alternative is to conduct straight lectures, and this is never the best approach. Even for technical training, involvement - from beginning to end - will win the day.

Tip No. 8: Job Aids are great for long-term learning.
Include lots of job aids in your training. Job Aids are tools that participants take away with them and can keep with them as they perform their new skills. One example of a Job Aid is a laminated sheet that illustrates the steps of a particular sales skill. Even if these skills can be accessed through a help screen, there is no substitute for seeing it on your wall when you need it.

Tip No. 9: Make sure that your trainers are also subject matter experts.
This Tip is really two rules in one. Make sure your "subject matter experts" are proficient trainers and make certain that your trainers are experts in what they train. If an SME is going to be involved in training for any duration, it is critical to send that person to a thorough trainer-training course before putting him/her out in front of participants.

Often management makes the mistake of thinking that an SME is ready to train because he/she has worked one on one with people in an instructional role. That is very different and doesn't prepare the SME for the role of standup delivery. Additionally, if your trainers are not experts in the topic and you have little choice on who trains, require that the trainers get some field time. Trainers can learn a whole lot in two or three days of observing people at work and seeing the skills at work that they will be training.

Tip No. 10: Measure learning on at least two fronts.
First, it is important to point out that call centers are tracking havens. You can track the effectiveness of most skills because you have so many people that are being monitored. One of the greatest challenges to measuring the learning is finding the time to do this. We recommend three things that you can do that will not take that much time.

First, offer some sort of pre-course evaluation. This can be done in the form of a questionnaire.

Second, use proper instructional objectives in training so that people actually have to demonstrate what they have learned by the end of the module or the course itself. Make the learning evaluation as close to real-world as possible. If you are measuring sales skills, don't give a written quiz. Conduct a role play with success criteria. The better your instructional objectives - built in learning evaluations - the more learning that will take place.

Third, conduct post-course evaluations similar to the pre-course evaluations. By measuring one against the other it is easy to see the learning that has taken place. Finally, interview participants three-six months after completion of the course. Ask them about specific changes they have made in their performance and skill sets based on having participated in the course. There changes will be evidence of the learning that took place in the workshop.

Free Training Tips Main Menu

1. Tips for Call Center Selling.

2. Tips for Coaching and Managing Sales in the Call Center.

3. Tips for Changing your Service Center into a True Sales Center.

5. Tips for Dealing with Difficult Associates.