Most Sales Reps Are Lousy Teachers [Start Your Week]

Most Sales Reps Are Lousy Teachers

How do you learn? Do you learn by someone telling you how to do something, or from sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher, or do you learn best by DOING?

Ben Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. 

Everything you’ve learned, you probably learned by doing, that is, interacting with your environment so you can put the knowledge you’ve been given to work.

Studies have shown that students who went through active learning, that is, got physically involved in putting the subject matter to use, saw much higher test scores and improvement rates. Another study found that students who did not engage in hands-on learning were 1.5 times more likely to fail a course than students who did active learning.

Hands on learning involves physical activity. It involves being aware of your body positions and movements through your muscles and joints. It’s getting students physically involved in moving their whole body, not just their mind, so they can more easily process and learn new, and sometimes difficult information. This learning by doing style provides students with instant feedback so they know what they need to keep doing, what they need to improve, and what they need to stop doing altogether. Hands-on movements can be as small as taking notes, drawing a diagram, painting a picture, or much larger actions that are athletic related. The key is, you learn best by physically doing what you have been taught.

Too many sales reps are lousy teachers because they never get physical with themselves, or with customers. They try to teach customers by just telling them what they want them to do, but never ask them to actually do it. Therefore, customers never really learn what’s being taught...