Effectively selling depends on continuous skills reinforcement. Why?

Because, the human brain is wired to forget. Research on the “forgetting curve” suggests we forget 50% of new information in a day and 90% within a week.

And, the amount of “new information” sales teams need to master has increased dramatically as we move to an environment where 75% of buyers expect hyper-personalization.

Our sales conversations have to speak to each buyer’s goals, roles, and industry vertical.

So, how do you help your team get better at mastering all this new information? Science tells us it’s all about spaced repetition, which is a fancy way of saying frequent training and practice.

In a spaced repetition model, a new concept is introduced; then there is a first repetition one day later, a second repetition 7 days later, a third 16 days later, and fourth 35 days later.

It sounds like a lot, right?  

So, here is where sales playbooks come in. Playbooks offer an agreed-on set of best practices for managing each phase of our buyer conversations. 

Sales plays are not scripts but instead frameworks that guide the conversation back to buyer value. Think of it as the ‘yes and’ of modern sales.

Here is the really good news. Once you have shared playbooks, all of your buyer and customer conversations become content for spaced repetition of skills.

Think about it. 

Playbooks make it possible to use your deals and account work to act as a living and breathing curriculum.

It makes it possible for peers to work on the same skills using the same language. Your “curriculum” for structured manager to rep or peer to peer learning now include:

• Recorded discovery, demo, or stakeholder calls
• Sales documents that are shared externally with a buyer, including follow-up emails, a solutioning deck, or some type of mutual close plan
• Full call role plays and micro role plays on specific types of buyer engagement
• Self-recorded videos to practice talk tracks, discovery questions, and success stories

Peer-to-peer learning from deal and account work is the “gold standard” for spaced repetition of skills. Shared playbooks make it possible.