Cameron Sandmire<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I first started my internship, we met on Zoom twice a week to learn new sales techniques. For the most part, I enjoyed these sales calls and got a lot out of them, but one stood out as particularly bad. The best way to break down why is to use \u201cKirpatrick’s Levels\u201d from our lectures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To preface, we had a guest speaker for the sales interns that week, and she said a couple of things that didn’t feel moral or right. We were selling products in the store, and she urged interns to tell customers that promotions were ending much sooner than they were to promote urgency, upsell to customers even if they don\u2019t need it, and make up stories about past customers who bought and loved the product. Level 1 of Kirpatrick\u2019s Levels is Reaction, and I can confidently say that nobody reacted positively to this advice; we were all pretty shocked. Level 2 is Learning, and I would say we learned nothing that we actually wanted to use. Level Three is Behavior. I don\u2019t want to speak for my fellow interns at the time, but I didn\u2019t make any changes to my sales behavior due to that meeting. If anything, it made me put an emphasis on fitting people into what is right for them. Level 4 is results, and no, it didn\u2019t have a positive or negative effect on our results. They stayed trending the way they were before, and everyone ended up joking about that meeting weeks later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An experience that I had that checked all these boxes was at a southern division retreat for the same company when I was a hired employee after the internship. That week, we were able to get our hands on the tools we were selling in the aisle. Each station ran us through how to use the tool with demos and ten minutes of information about the tool that we could use to sell it. This was the most tangible training we had so far and left me with real information that I could confidently use to boost my sales numbers. For months after, I was thinking about what I had learned from that experience, and it genuinely changed my sales behavior. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, the experience you have with training, even within the same company, can vastly change your ability, experience, and confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Lecture 2<\/p>\n\n\n\n