When it comes to training, the most effective techniques are not intuitive. Whether the material to be mastered is abstract, like learning a company’s products and their comparative features, or it’s tangible, like learning the manipulations involved in component assembly, instructors tend to keep training simple and orderly, focused on mastery of each topic or step before moving on to the next one. But studies of successful learning show that mastery and retention are strongest when practice is mixed up and certain difficulties are introduced during learning.
The way that Farmers Insurance trains its cadre of exclusive independent agents is an excellent example. The company recruits upward of 2,000 new agents annually. The recruits arrive at a training campus for a weeklong program focused in the four areas of sales, marketing systems, business planning, and advocacy of the brand. Over following days, the training regimen spirals upward through layers of increasing sophistication, interleaving the learning and practice of different but related topics so that each adds meaning to the other, broadening and deepening competency.
At the start, participants are given a pile of magazines, scissors, and marking pens with which to illustrate on poster board what being a successful Farmers agent would look like to them personally, five years down the road. For some, the poster shows fancy houses and cars. For others, kids are being sent to college and aging parents are being cared for. The point is simple: If your definition of success requires, say, $250,000 a year in revenues and 2,500 policies in force, we can help you work backward to set the metrics for where you need to be in four years, in three years, and even three months from now. The image on the poster shows where you’re headed, the metrics are your road map, and the skills that are learned over the coming days and months are the tools that will enable you to make the journey.
From here, the week is not so much about teaching from the top down—there are no PowerPoint lectures as such—but about learning from the bottom up, as in: “What knowledge and skills do I need in order to succeed?”
The learning unfolds through a series of exercises that cycle through the principal topics of sales, marketing systems, business planning, and advocacy of the company’s values and its brands—returning time and again to each, requiring that participants recall what they have learned earlier and apply it in a new, enlarged context.
For example, when participants first arrive, they’re assigned to a red, blue, or green group. The red group is instructed to go meet people in the room. The blue group is instructed to go learn three things about somebody in the room. The green group is instructed to ask another member of the class about his or her family, prior occupation, favorite forms of recreation, and what he or she enjoys most. When the class reconvenes, they share what they have learned about others, and it is quickly evident that the green group, which had a structure for talking to others, learned much more than did their peers.
When talking about sales later in the week, the question comes up, “What’s an effective way to learn about a prospective customer?” Somebody will recall the initial get-acquainted exercise that proved so fruitful: asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment. That icebreaker now morphs into a handy tool for getting to know a prospective client and it gets an acronym: FORE.
Throughout the week, the four principal training topics are repeatedly touched on, a point is made, and the exercises shift to related questions. In one session, participants brainstorm what kinds of marketing and development strategies might generate the flow of leads they need in order to meet sales targets. An effective sales and marketing system has a structure called 5-4-3-2-1. Five new business marketing initiatives every month, four cross-marketing and four retention programs in place, three appointments scheduled every day, two appointments kept (prospects often have to reschedule), one new customer sold on average two policies per sale. At 22 working days a month, that’s about 500 new policies in a year, making 2,500 over the five-year horizon of the agent’s vision.
Practice is a central learning strategy. For example, they practice how to respond to a sales lead. Trying to sell the company’s products is how they learn about selling, but it’s also how they learn about the products they’re selling—not by sitting in front of PowerPoint slides gazing at long lists of product features. You be the agent, I’ll be the customer. Then we’ll switch.
Interwoven with these exercises are others that help the new agents learn about the company’s history, what it stands for, and the value of its products in people’s lives, for instance, through stories of how it has helped people recover from catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina.
Given the emphasis on marketing and the limited resources new agents have to invest, how does an agent determine which strategies will pay? The question goes out: What’s a reasonable return to expect from a direct-mail campaign? The agents mull it over and hazard guesses. Usually, one or more of the agents will have had direct-mail marketing experience and offer the sobering answer: Returns are closer to 1 percent than the 50 percent many had guessed.
Once you turn up a lead, how do you discover needs he or she has that the company’s products can meet? They return to the handy acronym, FORE. Now, the habit of asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment becomes something even more potent than a tool for getting acquainted. It provides an opening into four of the most important realms of a prospect’s life where insurance and financial products can help that person protect his or her assets and achieve his or her financial goals. At each pivot from one subject back to another, understanding deepens, and new skills take form. In this way, through generation, spacing out practice, and interleaving of the essential core curriculum, with an eye always to the five-year vision and road map, new agents learn what they need to do, and how, in order to thrive as a part of the Farmers Insurance family.
The research that we and other cognitive scientists have conducted into what makes for successful learning, at any age, has shown that:
- When learning is effortful, it is stronger and better remembered. When learning is easy, it is quickly forgotten.
- Trying to get new knowledge out of the brain, for example, by quizzing or practicing a new skill, is far more effective for learning than trying to get new information into the brain, for example, by rereading or reviewing instruction.
- What scientists call generation—that is, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution—results in better learning once the solution is taught.
- Spacing out practice of new learning by letting time elapse between attempts makes the practice harder, and the increased effort results in better learning.
- Interleaving the practice of different but related skills or conceptual knowledge (switching between tasks) makes practice more difficult, but it results in better learning of all the practiced material and a broader capacity to apply the learning at a later time.
Excerpt from Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). For more information, visit http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674729018
Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist based in St. Paul; Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel are professors of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. They are the authors of “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.”
