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January 31, 2019

Allego Flash Drills Build Sales Reps’ Memory Muscle

Muscle memory is key to building physical skills—whether you’re playing golf or the piano. By repeatedly practicing a golf swing or piece of music, the necessary movements become automatic and almost effortless.

A lesser-known, but even more important phenomenon for salespeople and other knowledge workers, is memory muscle. This is the ability to quickly recall information relevant to your job by internalizing that information.

Like muscle memory, you don’t have to be a prodigy to acquire a powerful memory muscle. Instead, sales reps simply need repeated exposure to the relevant concepts and facts.

‘Weight Training for the Mind’

Without regular “weight training for the mind,” reps will forget much of what they learn very quickly–up to 80% of it within a month. This is the infamous “forgetting curve.” But with complex relationships to manage, deals to close and quotas to hit, sales professionals can’t spend all their time studying. So how can you ensure that they internalize critical knowledge without turning them into full-time students?

Spaced repetition is the solution. It overcomes the “forgetting curve” because it moves new knowledge into long-term memory by flagging it as being worthy of remembering.

The brain constantly gets hit with new information–far too much to keep–so it looks for signals about what’s important and what’s not. One way the brain figures out which information is most important is to register how often it’s presented. So if your brain encounters the same piece of information a bunch of times, it says “Hmm, maybe I ought to pay attention to this.”

What’s actually happening is that every time you review a given fact or concept, you’re strengthening the information pathways (synapses) in your brain for future recall.

Flash Drills Automates Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition’s popularity among sales organizations has grown because modern sales learning tools make it easy. For example, Allego Flash Drills automate spaced repetition techniques by sending push notifications to reps’ mobile devices for a couple minutes a day to challenge them with flashcards covering key training facts.

As reps demonstrate mastery of material by submitting the right answers, Flash Drills shuffles the deck so they see that material less often. That way, reps never waste time reviewing things they’ve already mastered.

Filling in Knowledge Gaps

Flash Drills can also be used to fill in specific knowledge gaps – information that (for whatever reason) wasn’t conveyed through classroom sessions, role-playing exercises, etc. Using Flash Drills, you can push out this missing information to individuals or entire teams.

And by reviewing Allego assessments of reps’ performance on the Flash Drills, you can see which questions users are getting consistently wrong. You can then turn the “challenging” questions into exercises or even an entire course – one designed to fill in the gaps you just identified.

Spaced repetition gives salespeople a way to master the knowledge they need to win more deals. Having internalized key facts, they can persuasively respond to questions or challenges without struggling to recall the right words.

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