Table of Contents
You run training for your customer-facing agents to prepare them to deliver excellent customer experience, but is it working? Two days after the sales training program ends, how much have your employees remembered?
Research has shown that 50% of new information is forgotten within just one hour of learning it. That rises to 70% over the next 24 hours, and 90% after a week. It’s not enough just to teach your agents; you need to train them, in ways that reinforce the information and skills and drive long-term retention.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how people retain (or forget) important information, and share four best practices for reinforcing training in ways that drive memory and skills retention.
Employees in customer-facing roles have a lot to learn and remember. You need them not just to learn the details of your product or service, but to completely master the value proposition. They should be able to communicate information effectively in their own words, without simply parroting a list of facts.
That means that agents involved in sales, post-sales support, or any kind of customer service interactions have to memorize a lot of product/service information, learn your business messaging, and gain techniques like building relationships, showing empathy, and active listening.
It’s not surprising that they struggle to master it all.
Executive buyers don’t want to talk to sales reps. According to Forrester Research, over 75% of buyers think sales reps are not knowledgeable about the business, do not understand where they can help and have no relevant examples or case studies.
First, let’s review how memory retention works. When someone first learns new information, the brain needs to encode it, store it, and organize it for retrieval at the right moment.
The best way to encode new information is through connecting it to a sensory experience or to something that already has meaning. That’s why someone who is learning a new language might put sticky notes on every item in their home, with the name of that item in the other language.
Once information is stored in the brain, you need to retrieve it. Your long-term memory can hold a massive amount of information, but you have to be able to recall it when needed. The best ways to improve retrieval are through repetition and by associating new information with existing knowledge.
The more links your brain makes between new knowledge and other concepts or experiences, the better and faster you’ll retrieve it. Active learning, where someone rehearses new information out loud or practices skills, is an excellent way to create more mental connections and improve retrieval.
There are many reasons why your agents or salespeople may struggle to retain new information and skills. If they failed to thoroughly process the information initially, they might not effectively encode it into their long-term memory. This is most likely to happen if it was presented without much meaning or significance, making it less memorable.
When people have weak and/or only a few connections to the new information, they’ll forget more quickly. This happens when someone doesn’t revisit or rehearse the new knowledge or skill, like when a student is taught something once in class and doesn’t ever use it, or an employee watches someone complete a sales call but never does one themselves.
Of course, issues like stress, fatigue, and distractions can also limit someone’s ability to encode and store new information. When employees are tired or feel annoyed or pressured, they won’t be able to learn and retain knowledge and skills effectively.
You might not be able to make sure that your team has a good night’s sleep and are free from stress, but there are tactics you can use to improve their memory retention. These four steps help reinforce training and strengthen memory links to new skills and knowledge, resulting in higher-performing agents, increased sales, and improved customer satisfaction.
It’s a good idea to ask your agents open-ended questions during training. These are questions that can’t be answered with just one word. When agents have to answer an open-ended question, they need to think beyond yes-or-no answers, requiring them to articulate their thoughts, explain concepts in their own words, and apply what they’ve learned to different scenarios.
Open-ended questions encourage active engagement, critical thinking, and deeper understanding of the material. It enables them to make connections between the training content and real-world situations, which helps embed training concepts more deeply and make the knowledge more easily retrieved during actual customer interactions.
When you require agents to record a video pitch – also known fondly as “stand and deliver” – it allows them to practice, review, and refine their message in a realistic way. In the process, they have to actively engage with the material, which helps them to internalize the training content. It enhances their ability to deliver an effective pitch in real sales situations, and strengthens their overall retention of the training material.
A recorded pitch also enables agents to observe their own body language, tone, and overall delivery, so they can address areas for improvement that they might not otherwise notice. The feedback they receive from training personnel further reinforces their learning, as long as your managers can respond quickly and their feedback is trusted by agents.
By repeatedly recording and refining their pitch, agents can build confidence, improve their call center communication skills, and ensure their message is clear and compelling. However, it does demand self-discipline from the agents. If they don’t have another person to interact with, their performance might sound forced, and a poor reflection of the real world.
These video pitch recordings ensure that the trainee can deliver the company’s pitch smoothly.
Role play conversations with an AI-powered partner provide a dynamic, interactive environment where agents can practice their skills in real-time. You can update the customer service training simulations or add new ones whenever you like, making them more versatile and closer to real life situations. It’s much faster to add a new simulation than to prepare a human partner for a new type of conversation.
AI role-plays allow your team members to rehearse customer interactions that mimic a wide range of scenarios they might encounter in the field. Continuous practice reinforces memory traces and encourages agents to internalize key techniques, making them more effective and agile in real customer conversations.
AI role play platforms can also provide personalized feedback and track progress, helping salespeople and call center agents identify areas of weakness. The hands-on approach helps them apply their training in context, adapt to different customer personalities, and refine their responses based on immediate feedback from the AI.
AI practice conversations, recorded video pitches, and open-ended questions all take place in a managed training environment. Anyone who has ever played a sport or performed live music knows that there is a huge difference between practice and the real thing. By incorporating real world experiences into the training process, you gain a whole other dimension. In other words, give sales and service employees the opportunity to submit recordings of actual customer conversations that they’ve conducted live, in the real world, for analysis, either by their manager or by AI.
Of course, using AI for this saves a significant amount of managers’ time, letting them dive deeper into just the calls or segments of calls where they can add the most value. An AI training platform can provide detailed, objective insights about an agent’s actual performance, covering factors like tone of voice, pacing, keyword usage, and customer sentiment. Precise feedback on areas like communication style, effectiveness in addressing objections, and adherence to best practices helps agents understand not only what they said, but how they said it and how it was received by the customer.
By analyzing real calls, you can confirm that all the preparatory training is being put to use in the field.
Whatever training solution you use, you should make sure that it covers all these four best practices for memory retention.
Second Nature’s AI-powered training platform is an all-in-one solution for memory retention techniques. In case you were wondering (and I know you were!), Second Nature covers all four of these best practices, ensuring that your trainees retain what they’ve learned and practiced using the platform.The AI role play conversations are always available, incorporating open-ended questions and encouraging agents to practice new skills and review new information more often. It delivers timely, customized feedback for recorded video pitches, analyzes recordings of live customer calls, and provides AI-led practice conversations, to help agents improve their skills and reinforce learning.
Contact us to learn more about how Second Nature can help your customer-facing teams improve their retention of training material.
Effective sales training should involve active learning like role-playing, plenty of practice opportunities, and ongoing, timely feedback. It should focus on building confidence, adapting to different buyer personas, and using data to refine techniques, ensuring that salespeople can consistently close deals and build strong client relationships.
AI improves sales training retention by personalizing learning experiences, providing interactive simulations, and delivering real-time feedback. It adapts to individual learning styles and reinforces key concepts through spaced repetition and active learning, making training more engaging and improving memory retention.
Yes, it’s an excellent idea to use AI to assess how sales reps are applying their training. AI can evaluate recorded real calls to analyze how well the rep is communicating, their objection handling, active listening, and whether they are applying other best practices. A good AI analysis should deliver clear reports and dashboards that give you timely insights into the effectiveness of your sales skills training.
Active learning boosts sales training retention by engaging participants through hands-on activities like role-playing, problem-solving, and discussions. An interactive approach helps reinforce concepts, improves critical thinking, and makes the learning experience more memorable and applicable to real-world sales scenarios.
See Second Nature for yourself
Generative AI Unveiled: Using GenAI for L&D
How to Use AI to Improve Enterprise Sales
About the Author
More relevant content
One of the challenges of sales enablement teams is to communicate a consistent message to the whole company’s sales representatives and help them internalize...
When I talk about “sales training” what does that make you think of? Maybe you imagine a sales employee role playing with their manager,...
Your salespeople are the ones directly responsible for generating revenue for your business, but a large measure of their success depends on the training...