Attention span is short and time is scarce. Make your product training count.
Why make it complicated when you can make it easy?
Especially when research shows that both knowledge retention and engagement go way up when you share bite-sized micro-learning instead of piling it on.
That’s why we argue that you should put some time and energy into creating perfectly portioned key knowledge instead of investing huge amounts of resources to make a complicated LMS.
After all, it’s all about getting the right information directly in front of the eyes and ears of the people who need it. They don’t need to know absolutely everything, but they need to know something. And you need to make sure they know. You know?
Also, the annual turnover number for retail is somewhere around 60%. That means that you should keep your training tight and frequent to keep up and stay top of mind where it counts the most.
Product training – a little goes a long way
As a brand, you have limited access to the retailers’ staff. Make the best of it!
If you are allotted a certain amount of minutes at a training clinic, alongside other brands, make sure your presentation is the best. And make sure the knowledge sticks.
How? By adding a quiz that the salespeople can answer later (throwing some prizes in there, to boost engagement). You don’t want to waste your own and everyone else’s time by adding a real-time quiz to your presentation. Just make sure they download the app (QR codes FTW!) and hit them up later.
A huge success factor is making the training available at the salespeople’s own convenience. This applies to clinics as well as your normal, everyday training.
Make your training interesting
Retailers love it when their sales staff are educated about the products they sell and motivated to sell them. At the same time, they are not always too keen on their staff using a lot of valuable hours to go learn something, instead of actually selling the products.
That’s why you should offer a training alternative that the salespeople can do on their own time. And you have to make it interesting enough for them to actually take two-three minutes on the bus commuting to work, on the couch at home, or on their lunch break to answer a quiz.
So: How do you make it interesting? There are a few ways to make it happen – and you should use all of them:
- Fun and light content (use humor, keep it easy)
- Gamification (points, badges, scoreboard)
- Personal connection (send out messages)
- Prizes!
Read more about how to succeed with bite-sized micro-learning in this blog article.