The Accountability Dilemma

I asked Kevin why his new rep, who had graduated from the training phase and had been on his team for almost two weeks, wasn’t following the sales process fully. The new rep failed in their compliance audits of both the phone call and the CRM input requirements.

Kevin said that the new rep told him that he was never taught those processes. That they weren’t covered in training by his trainer.

Of course, my next call was to Susan the training manager, to share this claim that her trainer wasn’t going through all the requirements. Her response was that they do indeed cover everything.

I asked her for evidence, proof that the trainer covered the exact topics in question, and her only statement was “it’s in the facilitator’s outline, so they should have covered it.”

Should have.

Now I was caught in the middle…like two kids fighting in the back seat of the car where each blames the other for hitting first. Who to believe? I didn’t want to doubt my training team but they couldn’t say for sure that the new rep had been taught the content fully.

The Solution: Building a Comprehensive Training Program

From this moment forward I have always built training programs in a way to cover the company. A comprehensive training program will include the content being taught AND a way to confirm what was covered and some level of retention. There must be a knowledge check. This would typically be in the form of a quiz/test. I recommend having small quizzes after each subsection, and larger tests after big sections and potentially a ‘final exam’ that they must pass to graduate.

It might sound like a lot, but it should become a best practice in your training program.

The quizzes can be short – 2 to 3 questions, depending on how much content you had the trainee go through.

Now keep in mind, I am not only thinking you are doing online, LMS type training. Hopefully you are doing live, facilitated lectures, maybe videos, audio, reading documents, role-playing, etc. A wide variety of modalities to help adult learners learn.

Just because you have a live lecture portion doesn’t mean you can’t do a quiz (reminder that that is all we experienced in school growing up – lecture, quiz, repeat).

There is power in constant quizzes and tests.

First – it lets your trainees know that you are expecting them to pay attention and learn a portion of what you are sharing with them. They aren’t going to retain everything during a training session, but you want to set the expectation that they will be tested and must achieve a certain score/percentage. This way they can’t just sit back, relax, maybe tune out, and think it doesn’t matter.

“My trainees would never do that; they are excited to learn.”

Maybe some of them are learners. But some of them are salespeople…which means they can’t wait for training to end – to stop listening to lectures about stuff, to stop having to watch video after video after video potentially made by someone who has no idea how to actually sell – so they can hit the floor and “do what they do best” – talk people into buying. Those are the most important ones to be held to the expectation of paying attention.

Overcoming the 'He Said, She Said' Scenario

The second reason for the power of knowledge checks is related to the opening story I dealt with and have seen so many organizations struggle with – how to overcome the he-said-she-said scenario where the trainee says they were never told to do something (or NOT to do/say something), and you have no way to prove they were taught.

That is where quizzes/tests come in. It moves away from trusting that your trainer will train on the topics the company needs them to cover, and ensures they follow what is required. You would now have a quiz the trainee took and their passing results that show ‘yes, we did teach you that, and at least at one point in time, you confirmed you knew it.’ Case closed.

Better than the ‘eye in the sky’ magical ceiling camera that parents tell their kids they have access to, this is actual proof that they taught the needed content.

And just know, the goal is not to make them feel bad or punish them for not remembering. It’s more about keeping them from leaning on that excuse. It is also a super valuable (and I cannot overstate how valuable) tool for sales managers to know and trust that new hires are being trained fully. There is nothing worse than inheriting a freshly graduated trainee who claims they have no idea how anything works because they weren’t taught any of it in training. When that happens, managers start to lose faith in training and build resentment at having to ‘re-train’ trainees, which shouldn’t be their job (and they don’t have the time to do, because they are busy with the rest of their team and a bunch of admin crap they have to deal with).

Conclusion: Implementing Effective Training Accountability

Bottom line:

• Build a full training syllabus.
• Put knowledge checks throughout.
• I also recommend a final exam with a pass/fail mode (where if they fail, they are let go, or have to restart training).

Footnote: Practical Tools for Knowledge Checks

If you don’t have an LMS – don’t worry. Make your quizzes in Google Forms (free) or SurveyMonkey (free) or any other free quiz/form app.