The Counterintuitive Truth About Sales Training: Why Slow Learning Yields Better Results, Accordi…

In a recent LinkedIn post, Leslie Venetz challenges conventional approaches to sales training, advocating for a slower, more deliberate learning process to achieve genuine long-term impact. Venetz, who has extensive experience in sales enablement and leadership, shares her journey of developing sales training as a product, emphasizing the crucial role of feedback and a deep understanding of learning science.

Venetz recounts her decision to formalize her sales training expertise by returning to school, despite 15 years of practical experience. This commitment to further education, including a college course on fostering learner-centered conversations, was driven by a desire to ensure her training product genuinely served sellers and delivered desired outcomes. She explains her motivation:

“I had already been doing the work. I had been leading training and building sales teams from scratch for 15 years, sent to Macau, Mexico City, and Sydney to run global sales enablement. I knew how to train sellers. I didn’t want to rest on what I already knew. I wanted to make sure I was building a product that truly served sellers and delivered the training outcomes they deserved.”

The Dopamine Trap of Modern Information Consumption

A central theme in Venetz’s post is the negative impact of modern digital habits on deep learning. She argues that the constant influx of information, particularly through social media platforms like TikTok, has conditioned individuals to crave rapid information intake, which triggers dopamine and creates a false sense of learning.

As Leslie Venetz points out:

“We have been trained by social media to consume information in a way that feels like learning but isn’t. It’s trained us to crave a super high input of information which triggers dopamine. We scroll, we scan, we feel like we are learning. That’s your brain lying to you (and no, you’re not special, nobody can do deep learning from speed scrolling tiktok). You just flooded your brain with inputs you will never think through, never practice, and never actually use, but it FEELS like you’ve accomplished a lot.”

This phenomenon, according to Venetz, is a significant barrier to effective skill development in sales professionals.

Embracing Slower, Deeper Learning for Lasting Impact

Venetz contrasts this superficial information consumption with the nature of true learning. She asserts that genuine learning is an inherently slower process, requiring dedicated time for conversation, digestion, and repetition. This realization shaped her approach to designing her sales training workshops and keynotes.

Leslie Venetz emphasizes this point:

“The reality is that real learning is slower. It requires conversation, digestion, and repetition.”

Consequently, Venetz structures her training programs to focus on mastering one skill per month before introducing the next. Similarly, her keynotes concentrate on a few interconnected techniques or mindsets that collectively support a single core skill. This deliberate pacing, she explains, is often met with initial resistance from sellers accustomed to faster-paced information delivery.

The Evidence of Effective Training

Despite the initial pushback, Venetz has found that sellers who initially resist her methodology often become the most enthusiastic learners. These are the individuals who are genuinely seeking practical, usable skills to enhance their performance. The ultimate validation, she notes, comes from post-engagement feedback.

According to Leslie Venetz, the sellers who embrace her approach often report exceptional results:

“What I’ve found is that the sellers who push back at the start are the ones who are most eager to learn, really learn something they can use to improve. So they also tend to be the sellers who are most likely to send me a note after the engagement is done to tell me it’s the best sales training they’ve ever had and to share results.”

Venetz concludes by posing a question to her audience, encouraging reflection on how they manage the desire for instant gratification in learning and focus on deep practice instead.