As a marketer, you create stunning marketing campaigns to be proud of. However, then you have to rely on staff in other departments – sales, fulfilment, call-centres and customer relations – to take your message to market. If your colleagues don’t understand what you’re getting at – or worse, can’t be bothered – then your cutting-edge campaign simply won’t have the impact it should, or will fail altogether.
Training can ensure that the people you work with have the skills, knowledge and information they need to get your message across. Not only that, it can impart an enthusiasm for the subject which makes the rest easier. Ian Luxford, learning services director at Grass Roots Group, says, “Once people know and understand the purpose behind what they’re being asked to do, they become much more motivated to acquire the skills necessary to do it.” The focus of training has changed over the last few years from ‘What do I want to teach?’ to ‘How can I make people want to learn?’
Today, learners are no longer passive recipients of information, but take an active and interactive part in acquiring knowledge and skills. Few doubt that the end results are much more positive.
Such a departure from traditional training methods sets new challenges for trainers. If learners ‘own’ their learning, then trainers can no longer decide in isolation how something is to be learnt. The new learning methods need far greater teamwork between teacher and learner. The process might be more challenging, is probably more interesting and is certainly more effective.
It’s important not to assume that everyone in the marketing department knows how to deliver each marketing message. Any training should start with the marketers to ensure that internal marketing is properly managed and that staff know how to put across the message to their colleagues. Once the marketers know what to do, how to do it and why it needs doing, training can be expanded to ensure that colleagues responsible for other functions not only understand the message, but are able to communicate it enthusiastically.
Andy Preston, director at training consultancy Outstanding Results, explains, “A fundamental flaw in many in-house teams is the lack of synergy between the departments responsible for delivering the brand to the target audience, and will inevitably result in a poorly-performing campaign.
“Colleagues may need training in many different aspects of marketing and its campaigns, including what marketers are doing, why timing is important, why particular businesses have been targeted, how the new product or service works and even how to deal with the press. The following advice should be considered when managing work-based training.
“Hear and you forget; see and you remember; do and you understand.” Confucius understood the best way to learn is by investigation and interaction. Skills training is usually more effective in smaller groups, but not necessarily so. Training in large groups can be valuable, as long as people are co-operating in something that needs a large group to succeed. Giving field sales personnel the exercise of designing a marketing campaign for example, might provide them with a much greater understanding of the marketing function. It may also provide marketers with an insight into why and how colleagues misunderstand their role.
When imparting knowledge, as opposed to skills, it’s often best to encourage learners to work independently. E-learning and book assignments are useful for this as they allow individuals to work at their own pace. There are a number of tools and packages available that enable in-house trainers to tailor e-learning courses to their own and their learners’ needs. Experienced trainers know that frequent small tasks built into a coherent whole is a more effective method of learning than an intensive couple of days with little follow up. One recently-launched service, Skill-Pill Mobile Learning, sends bite-sized briefings to mobile devices, helping learners to utilise time on the move.
Flexibility is essential to effective training programmes and Video Arts’ new digital library allows registered subscribers to log onto a secure website, browse through the titles available, select the most appropriate chapters of each and then video stream the content. The resulting tailored programme can then be streamed online or from a preloaded video hard drive.
Most of us learn without noticing that we’re doing so, often by asking our colleagues. Experienced mentors are an invaluable and often underused training resource. Organisers of more formal training courses should tap into people who are already using the product or service by encouraging them to talk about it. Listening to someone enthuse about their experience is much more inspirational than listening to a speaker explaining how good something is. Video, either streamed online or delivered by DVD, makes demonstrating real people in real situations easy, even for national or international audiences.
Going through a training package off site may not necessarily be the best way to learn. Integration is important. Using the workplace as a learning environment means that learners can immediately see the application of what they’re being taught and can assess possible problems. If training must be taken out of the workplace, then providing learners with materials, which they can use when they return to their workstations helps them integrate their new learning with their old duties. Using such materials also helps discourage the lethargy sometimes inherent in implementing a change.
A trainer standing in front of a group of people and talking to them is the traditional way of teaching and is still widely used. It’s cheap, it saves time, both for lecturer and learner, and they can get back to their job quickly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. Professor Joad, an eminent Oxford scholar of the last century, commented that lectures were the means by which information was transferred from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without going through the brain of either.
There are a few trainers who by dint of personality and performance can give superb presentations, but they are scarce. Most people can’t speak as well as they think they can – look at most politicians – and their audience is used to a much higher level of sophisticated presentation – look at your own marketing campaigns. Lectures work best when a good speaker needs to get a relatively simple message across to a large number of people quickly. They are also useful for creating a pause between more active training sessions.
The broader the workforce, the easier it is to dilute or lose the message – and the more difficult it is to prove that any improvement is due to training. Luxford at Grass Roots says, “To check the efficacy of the training there should be an unbroken line between the training and the feedback from the audience, whether learners, customers or both.”
To assess the success of training marketers should:
- Decide what the outcome of the learning should be.
- Do the training themselves.
- Get feedback from learners during the training and afterwards to check the message has been understood.
- Identify whether learners have changed their attitude/behaviour as a result of their new knowledge.
- Identify what the knock-on effect is, i.e. what customers think.
- Spending on training is never going to equal a fixed percentage increase in profit. Effectiveness can, however, be measured from a qualitative point of view.
Who’s responsible?
Most large organisations have a member of staff responsible for training, usually someone within HR. This person will know a lot about the training process, but rather less about marketing needs. Although marketing training should be delivered by the marketing function, co-operation between the training expert and the department usually produces the best results. Trade bodies often take responsibility for training their own specialists and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) promotes good practice in learning, training and professional development.
Training is already becoming more flexible. The use of e-learning will increase as people become more comfortable with the technique. Changing attitudes rather than imparting skills and knowledge will be a growing area and employees will become more involved with their training. “The best training experiences are those which don’t feel like training,” emphasises Luxford at Grass Roots. Successful training not only makes a real difference to the effectiveness with which your colleagues do their job, but also to the ease with which you do yours.”
