Make It Stick: Eight Strategies to Make Your Business Development Training More Effective

For instance, legal solutions can cause disruption to business processes that requires internal stakeholders to weigh in on the decision. A major law suit may not require much consensus among the stakeholders — the company has to respond. But an acquisition or a change to a contract can require more review inside the company before the decision is made to hire a lawyer. Understanding the client decision experience and designing the business development training to accommodate the client's informational needs and decision points is particularly important in the legal industry and will make the training much more effective for the lawyers in each practice area.

Design a Supportive Experience for the Learner

Business development is a social skill. Social skills rarely become expert skills in isolation. Lawyers interface with numerous others throughout the learning process including practice group leaders, firm leadership, professional staff and administrative assistants. Those that can influence or support the lawyer's learning should get exposure to what the lawyer is learning, especially the program's learning objectives, methodologies and strategies. Language is the most important determinant of culture. The language that evolves in a business development training program often becomes a mental shortcut for otherwise complex concepts. Teaching the support personnel and leadership these concepts helps to expedite the learning, improve results and build a business development culture in the firm.

Incorporate Instructional Design into Your Training

Instructional design simplifies learning for the learners. Through careful planning, it identifies the critical skills and the easiest and most effective ways to teach learners the information and skills they need. As a result, the learning process is shortened, objectives are met more easily, and resources are optimized. Good instructional design improves the return on your training investment.

Too often, law firm business development training programs don't undergo a rigorous instructional design review process. That means that the training did not articulate clear learning objectives to guide development and instruction of the program. It can also mean that the specific skills required to accomplish the learning objectives have not been clearly identified and the proper instructional techniques such as exercises, quizzes and case studies have not been incorporated to ensure the skill is taught. Frequently we see training that has not been sequenced into logical learning paths where higher level skills are built upon lower level skills. An instructional design disciple also will require that the program clearly states how outcomes will be measured, an important component to build support and demonstrate results for the investment in training.

Provide Multiple Training Modalities to Appeal to Different Learning Styles

The vast majority of training in law firms is done in lecture-style workshops, typically created in house and done within an hour. It mirrors the training styles ingrained in law school. But successful programs incorporate training delivered through multiple mediums and accommodate different learning styles such as in podcasts, video or e-learning as well as lecture-style workshops. Multiple mediums enable people to take advantage of the training in a way that works best for their unique learning style and preferences. And putting the training online enables learners to access the information as much as they need it or even just when they need it.

Incorporating learning styles into your program's design extends the appeal of the program and its effectiveness. There are seven different learning styles, all of which should be incorporated into your training program. Most learners access several learning styles but tend to prefer one or two over the others. The learning style preference can change over time. If your learning style is:

• Visual (spatial), you prefer using pictures, images, videos and spatial understanding.
• Aural (auditory), you prefer using sound as in listening to a podcast.
• Verbal (linguistic), you prefer using words, both in speech and writing. Verbal learners learn best by reading.
• Physical (kinesthetic), you prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch to experience new information. Role playing, mock situations and other techniques can accommodate this learning style.
• Logical (mathematical), you prefer using logic, reasoning and systems-thinking to learn new information. You want information that is logically sequenced and factual.
• Social (interpersonal), you prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
• Solitary (intrapersonal), you prefer to work alone and use self-study.

Design Post-Training Reinforcement into Your Program.

Have you ever crammed for an exam only to forget most of what you learned 30 days later? That's because the brain holds information in short-term memory and does not automatically feed it to long-term memory. The brain has to be told to store that information in long term memory.

Reinforcement is how you transfer information from short term memory to long term memory. Training reinforcement happens when you provide strategic content as a training follow-up to help the brain recall and reuse information. Doing this several times helps to transfer that information to long-term memory. Without training reinforcement, the brain's natural cognitive processes flush that information away.

While there are several factors that go into the amount of forgetting that happens and the speed in which it happens, the body of research indicates that people forget approximately 50 percent of training within just one hour, and 70% after 24 hours. Within 30 days, that amount of forgetting increases to 90% unless something is done to help learners retain the most important information.

Reinforcement should focus on the most critical, block-building information and occur sequentially after the training. Most learning professionals advise reinforcement occurring immediately after the training, again in a few hours after, two weeks post training and again after four weeks. The repetition and engagement designed into a reinforcement program will multiply the retention of the information.

It's not difficult or complicated to add post training reinforcement to your training program, it's just not often done and certainly not done in a way that reinforces the most critical skills and knowledge in the training. Types of post-training reinforcement content can include:

• Quizzes with multiple choice and/or short answer questions;
• Surveys and polls;
• Short videos on similar topics;
• Case studies with questions and comments related to the material; and
• Emails and messages with facts, statistics, tips and techniques related to the materials.

We don't have data on what law firms do to reinforce their training. But we do have information on the non-law world. The statistics there don't paint a pretty picture. In companies with a sales force, less than half of all companies provided post-training reinforcement. But companies that did incorporate post-training reinforcement saw a 34% increase in the number of sales reps that achieved their sales quotas. According to Richardson, a leading sales training company, companies who use post-training reinforcement are able to increase the retention of the training content 87%.

Integrate and Align Coaching with Business Development Training

Coaching and training are not an either/ or proposition. You need both. And lots of it. But too often, one or the other is missing or not fully utilized. The biggest problem however is that the two are rarely integrated together. This results in two or more methodologies being taught often resulting in conflicting priorities and divergent strategies.

Business development methodologies taught through training should be reinforced in the coaching sessions. And coaching programs should be integrated with the business development training to ensure it reinforces what is being taught in the training.

The disconnect is especially problematic and more difficult to control when different outside resources are used for training and coaching. Sometimes multiple vendors are used. Too often, their methods have not been vetted against an approved program. This can lead to confusion, conflicting priorities and poor results.

A well-designed training program can improve the results of the training tenfold. And that translates directly into the revenues and profitability of the firm. Without it, you might as well forget about training because, well, it'll be forgotten anyway.

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Eric Dewey, MBA, provides marketing and practice development consulting, business development coaching and training, e-learning and course development, instructional design and LMS system management to law firms throughout the U.S. As the former chief marketing executive in four large law firms and a consultant to dozens more, he has successfully coached hundreds of lawyers to help them focus their practice, build competitive advantage and attract profitable clients.  © 2020 eLegal Training, LLC and Eric Dewey. All rights reserved.