Why It's So Important to Find Time to Train in Sales

How We Find Time to Train at DCS

Our World

In a business at the heart of the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods sector, the pace of work can often seem to reflect those sped up time-lapse videos!  

For several of our business functions, such as manufacturing, warehousing, transport and customer service, the daily routine is marked by hourly targets and cut-off points.  Finance, Sales, and Commercial teams are guided by monthly routines and deadlines. While in the support functions of Marketing, Quality Control, IT, HR, Learning and Development we work in sync with our internal customers, aiming to provide support at exactly the right time.

This consciousness of time patterns shapes the training we design and deliver. And it reflects our strategic priorities of efficiency and growth.

Our Training

I’ve talked before about the 10:20:70 model of learning. For us, this is most clearly exemplified in the operations functions. Short bursts of formal training on each standard operating procedure are followed by time spent observing others who are good at what they do and then put into practice under the keen eye of a buddy.

Our sales and commercial training plans are aligned with planning cycles, key presentations, joint business plan preparation and are delivered at times when teams are focused on those goals.

Those learnings are further explored and developed into practical ways of operating in the team meetings which follow soon afterwards.

We have challenged the practice of back-to-back meetings to build in more reflection and preparation time and these gaps are allowing people the time to integrate key learnings into their real world.

With a strong focus on being customer-facing taking days away from the business for intensive training is the exception. Instead, we use highly practical bitesize sessions that range between 30 mins and 3 hours, each focusing on one element of performance. Not only does this avoid the training fatigue of long sessions – and the inefficient and old-fashioned notion that ‘even if I learn one thing today it will be worthwhile’ – it’s effective in delivering the learning that we want to see in practice.

And across the business, our newly launched online learning portal has been embraced by an even higher percentage of people than we had dared hope in its early days! Not only is this a fantastic endorsement of the initiative, but it is also giving us valuable information about the specific learning that people need – and when they need it.

The Impact

How do we know that we are delivering the right training at the right time?

In the last six months, our Operations Learning and Development Partner trialled a system of Observational Assessments with our co-pack team. The goal was to deliver training that significantly raised individuals' competence, reduced waste, and increased efficiency across the whole process. It was a shift from traditional knowledge tests to observation and ‘in the moment’ training.

The results were astounding: 84% reduction in learning time; zero loss in production hours; simultaneous development of the Observational Assessor and further specific gaps with a quantifiable measure of their impact identified.

Not surprisingly we are rolling out the approach across Operations. However, it has also prompted us to think about how we can transfer the methodology to all functions across the business.

As a Learning and Development team, we are very conscious that a huge amount of the learning will come from the teams themselves. Our role is to facilitate a culture of continuous improvement and cross-fertilisation of good practice, challenge with positive intent where we see opportunities for even better performance, and support teams in developing it. We do this best by working in sync.