The concept and practice of engaging people for business through games is not new. Marketing experts point to airline frequent flyer mile programs as an early form of gamification aimed at consumers. As for employees, pilots practicing and honing their skills using flight simulators is a good example of how training can be gamified.

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Richardson and Clients Take Gold, Silver, and Bronze; Recognized for Sales Excellence with Nine Stevie Awards

Richardson and its clients took Gold, Silver, and Bronze — a total of nine awards – at the Seventh Annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Winners of this international competition, which recognizes sales excellence in disciplines vital to business success, were announced Monday, February 25, at a gala ceremony at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.

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How Gamification of Sales Training Boosts Rep Engagement and Increases Ability to Recall - (Part 3 of 3) 

- Today’s BLOG is written by Richardson’s partner, Duncan Lennox, CEO of Qstream

In my previous two posts, I presented the problem of sales reps falling victim to The Forgetting Curve and the solution of using a tool such as Richardson’s QuickCheckTM as a means to help sales reps commit what they’ve learned in training to their long-term memory. Let’s take a closer look at how it works and some of the benefits of using the QuickCheckTM after training your reps.

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Attention Sales Leaders: 4 Predictions from Bersin Worth a Closer Look

As a business or sales leader, you know how important it is to manage talent in your organization. Bersin recently published a great piece called “Predictions for 2013” that should be of interest to you.

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Sustaining Change Management: A Deeper Dive into ADKAR

When we help a client invest in sales training, we know that they’re not merely interested in producing a successful event for their employees. They want the training to drive a greater change within the team, function, or organization. The training itself is merely the tip of the iceberg — the greater challenge is to influence a lasting change beyond the sales training.

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How to Make Sales Training More “Sticky” and Drive Sustainable Behavior Change

Is your sales training “sticky?” It should be, but for many companies, it is not.

Companies invest heavily in sales training to improve their people and processes. Business leaders want to affect a change through training that will impact their business through new skills, knowledge, and behaviors. Committing to training employees and sales reps is often a significant investment of time, money, and lost opportunity. So it should be no surprise that sales leaders want and expect to see a return on that investment.

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Nine Trends in Sales Force Effectiveness and Learning & Development for 2013

(Part 1 of 2)

What’s happening in the marketplace, and how can your company take advantage of it? Technology continues to evolve rapidly, and demographic shifts among your employees and clients are changing buying and selling behaviors and preferences. Many of these innovations impact the areas of sales force effectiveness  and learning and development (L&D).

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Getting the Message Right: The First Step in an Effective Change Management Process

Step 1: Refine the message

The first step in an effective change management process is for leadership to get the message right. And the way to do that is to try to connect what each person’s role in the change is, back up to the highest-level organization vision.

Many leaders have a tendency to speak in lofty terms and insider jargon while extolling their “big picture” vision — no matter who their audience is. True, they need to get their pitch down pat and reinforce their conviction through repeated telling of their story. But leaders should also realize that each audience is different, which includes having a unique perspective about what they’re hearing and its impact on them.

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After Sales Training: Question, Observe, and Reinforce

In the first two posts of this series, I talked about what sales managers should do before training programs to support strategic change and during those programs to ensure that sales reps derive the greatest benefit. Where should sales managers focus once the training is over and sales reps are back to work?

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In our business, we are well aware of the challenge that Learning and Development professionals face when working with sales or line-of-business leaders on growth initiatives. Sales training is often outside of the typical learning professional’s comfort zone because most have never lead sales teams or carried a bag — or haven’t done so recently. While they know that they shouldn’t be “order takers,” they end up in these situations because they don’t know to push back without ending up losing credibility or putting themselves in a political quagmire.

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