Five Reasons Why Your Training Isn’t Working

How well is your training working? Do you know? What are your goals for training? To recruit? Or, do you have more specific goals for your training? Unfortunately, most brokers don’t have training goals. They just know they ”need training’.

Here are the major mistakes trainers make, and why their training isn’t getting results. I’ve also provided recommendations for you to make your training pay off.

 1. Talking and calling it training just won’t cut it when you have low production. Remember, people today have a 30-second attention span. You’d better use other delivery methods to teach, so they really learn. (Task force, case study, role play, action plan, for example).

 Broker recommendation: Becoming an effective trainer requires mastering several specific training skills. Take a Train the Trainer course. Or, to cut your learning and preparation time, purchase a training program with a facilitator guide to tell you the effective training method for what you’re teaching in that module.

 2. Using your old materials and old information just isn’t believable today. I see training programs cobbled together with five different trainers’ scripts. I hear information shared that hasn’t been current since hula hoops.

Broker recommendation: Update your training materials and training methods to deal with today’s practices and consumer demands.

3. Being a ‘nice’, supportive trainer just isn’t enough today. The market isn’t nice; the consumers aren’t easy; the challenges are much greater than ever before. You’d better get as tough with your students as the market and consumers demand.

 Broker recommendation: Don’t do any training without accountability built in. You need to see that the student takes action. Make the student do something to get into your class, do meaningful actions to stay in your class, and complete meaningful actions to get out of your class.

 4. Training as though the consumer is dumb. No wonder the agents don’t like most training. It’s boring. It’s not ‘real life’. It’s simplistic. It doesn’t teach them to work with the demanding consumers of today.

 Broker recommendation: Your training should teach your agents to think. It should provide the foundations for systems and processes. It should be built with basic skills leading to more complex skills, processes, and systems.

5. On demand video will not solve your production problems. Many large franchises are providing video on demand training. Brokers may be relieved that this is going to take training off their plates. I wish. Unfortunately, video training can provide very limited production results. Why? Because people don’t learn much by watching video. Yes, they learn a little. They observe someone else doing something; they get information. But, they don’t have to take action.

 Broker recommendation: Use video as a support to the kind of training that gets results. Results-based training is face-to-face, uses a skilled facilitator, has high accountability, high interaction, and includes action plans in the field.

I have a resource to help you. I’ve built a training program that covers those 5 bases above. It’s a high accountability, results-based training program: Advantage 2.0. Check out out.