“I wish they’d told me how to deal with the most common complaint I hear from customers, but it never came up in training.”

“As soon we got back onto the selling floor, we saw that we hadn’t really learned any tools to do our jobs better.”

If you have ever gotten comments like those after investing time and money in training, you’ll be pleased to know that you can avoid them by allowing employees to play a bigger role in planning their own training.

Here are some simple questions that can dramatically improve both the results of your training and your ROI.

Question One: “What would you like to learn in training?”

This open-ended question is so simple that some companies forget to ask it. They seem to think they already know what employees need to learn, so why ask? Our advice is, go ahead and ask. The answers you get might not all be usable, but there will be some nuggets of high value, critically important topics that your training needs to cover. The people who are designing your training – whether your in-house training department or an outside training company – need to pay attention.

Question Two: “What is the biggest challenge that you face on the job?”

This question is not open-ended, but the answers it triggers can be extremely useful as you plan your training topics and curriculum. If there is a question that your phone reps hear every day but cannot answer, for example, shouldn’t that be covered in your training?

It’s a powerful question for another reason too, because it can uncover issues that training cannot completely solve. If your salespeople are losing sales because customers say that it takes too long to receive their orders or that product quality is not good, those are issues that need to be addressed outside the training stream.

Question Three: “What specific processes and steps do you perform as you do your job?”

This question, which lets trainees explain all the sub-steps of what they do, can uncover specific tasks and activities that your training can improve most powerfully. If you own an appliance store and you want to train your delivery and installation personnel to provide better service to customers, for example, you will be reminded that there is more to delivering a new stove than simply wheeling it into a customer’s house and hooking it up. Your delivery people need to find the delivery location, park the delivery truck, unpack the stove, discard packing materials, navigate delivery through different kinds of residences, answer customer questions, demonstrate how the appliane operates after it has been installed – and engage in a number of specific sub-steps.

If you review those steps and discuss them with your future trainees, you will discover that some of them have the potential to yield greater process improvements than others do. That’s another way of saying that you can leverage greater value by bringing more focus to your training.

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

If you’re not sure, maybe it is time for you to contact a Tortal Training consultant. CLICK HERE to start that conversation today.