From Artificial to Authentic: Bridging the Training Gap with AI

I think we're talking about this subject here, artificial intelligence. You know, we're, we're focused, right? And there's a race and artificial intelligence, it's the new gold rush of 2025 and beyond. I mean, everyone is racing to get to this magical place. Artificial intelligence, I looked it up and here's what I found when I looked it up in the dictionary. The definition lacking in natural or spontaneous quality, contrived, not genuine. Then I looked up the antonym, the opposite. And here's what I found. Genuine, natural, honest, sincere, true, heartfelt. Now, I say that because as we enter this race to artificial intelligence, let's not forget what we're racing away from. Authenticity. In a society where we send literally, I looked it up. ChatGPTed376 emails per day.

We are overloaded with information. Our sales reps are overloaded with information. Our customers are overloaded with information. Everyone has it. ChatGPT has a Gemini, has it. It's everywhere. Our goal as leaders, and I'm talking to a room full of leaders, isn't simply to give our reps more tools and more information. There's countless courses out there. Our job is to help them filter, assimilate, and apply that information to win deals on a consistent basis. We need to move beyond delivering information and motivation to transformation. So how do we do that? Well, what I'm going to talk about today is something that we created at Leviton Group years ago. We have 931 graduates and in a masterclass course we call the four pillars of an Effective Training and Coaching Program. But here's what's cool. Now we can train and coach and leverage AI. Let's just not forget the human connection. So what are those four pillars? That's what we're going to be looking at today. And we're even going to give you the ability to take an assessment so that you can find out what. What pillar you lead with. So let's go ahead and get started and look at them now. So the four pillars. The first pillar to make sure people actually learn what you're training is education. What's education? Those of you, and as I go through, I want you to think, what pillar do I lead with as a trainer or a coach? Or what pillar does my enablement team lead with? Because as I'm going to show you in a minute, sometimes our dominant pillar becomes a weakness. Our strength actually can become a weakness. So everyone has a dominant pillar. So the first pillar is education. Now, people that lead with education, I love you people. You're nerds. You love creating content assessments. You love talking about HR policies, sales methodologies, your tech stack. Awesome. The next pillar is entertainment. You know the trainers that lead with entertainment, lights, camera, action, they're telling stories, they're thinking of the emotional state of everybody in the room. Maybe they have music. And then the two most important pillars, facilitation. You see, trainers and enablement professionals that lead with facilitation realize this, that there's more knowledge in front of them than is in front of me. Okay, so what that. I think I said that wrong. That we are the. That there's more knowledge in the room. Okay. And so that we're really relying on everybody in the room. And then finally, these wonderful humans. Coaches. Coaches Understand that real learning only takes place when we work one on one with our people. We have to understand our reps inner worlds so that we can affect their outer worlds. And throughout. Today, I'm going to show you some great tools so that you can expedite your training and coaching through AI. Now, I want to stop and say this just for a moment. I came up with this system years ago and it's kind of an embarrassing story. When I first started my training company 28 years ago, one of our biggest clients called me. Well, probably bigger than the other two we had at the time. Her name was Maria. And she said, psst, Sheri, I'd like to hire you to train all of our trainers. Now, I was pretty excited because this was a pretty darn big company, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now. And then she said, but before we hire you to train all our trainers, I want you to take a course by Mike so that you can learn how to train. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, let me get this right. You want me to take a course by Mike to learn how to train? To train your trainers how to train? Why don't you just hire Mike? And that's when she said to me, well, Mike's boring. Well, I took Mike's course and it was really boring. But I had the biggest aha of my career as a trainer. See, I used to go home every night and tell my husband, honey, you should have seen me. I was magnificent. They loved me. When in fact I should have wanted the sellers to go home and tell their significant other, you should have seen me. I was magnificent. See, I was training the way I wanted to train rather than training the way humans learn. And I will tell you, in this time of AI and information overload, if we don't train the way people learn, they're going to forget everything we taught them. That's why now people aren't hitting quotas. Leaders are figuring out how come they're not understanding what I'm teaching them. We've got this new tech, we've got these new AI tools. Why aren't they retaining it?

Now, I want to go through in a little more depth and take a picture of this slide. What's in each one of these pillars? And again, if you're an educator, these are the things that you're focused on. If you're an entertainer, you're thinking about the emotional state and start to think as I go through this. Which pillar do you lead with? Which pillar does your enablement team lead with? Facilitation. And by the way, we can use these four pillars in a hybrid environment if we have the right tools. Because once Covid happened, all of the sudden we were training across a screen. How do we build engagement when we're on a zoom call or a teams call? I'm going to show you a couple of quick tricks for that facilitation. People that lead with facilitation are doing zoom rooms. They're using tools like murals, spectrogram, all of these different tools in order to engage their audience. And then, of course, coaching. Now, think about what pillar you lead with. And please take a picture of this assessment, and it will tell you what pillar you lead with. So it's a QR code, and that will tell you your dominant pillar. Now, here's why this is so important. You can tell from my story. I led with entertainment. I love entertaining a room problem. Nobody learned anything. They didn't retain it. So what I learned early on is that if I'm going to build a transformational training program where people can actually apply tools and knowledge, I need to either team up with a facilitator or a coach or a. Or I need to be painfully aware of how to use all four pillars so that people can filter, assimilate, and apply to win big deals. Okay, now let's go ahead and start with the education pillar. And I'm going to ask you to do something really silly. Now, we do this in our live trainings, but I want you to do this at home. I'm sure you all have a piece of paper, and what I'm going to ask you to do is take out that piece of paper. Just go with me on this. Unless you're driving, don't do this. And I want you to draw a picture and I'm going to give you exactly 30 seconds to draw this picture. And I want you to draw a picture of either the Statue of Liberty or Snow White's castle with a picture of you in front of it. You're going to have exactly 30 seconds to complete this exercise. It's a little more engaging when we're in a live seminar, but you'll get the picture. No pun intended. Okay. On your mark, get set and draw.

You've got 20 seconds. Draw your masterful piece of art.

Clock is ticking.

Five seconds.

Beautiful. Now, if we were in a seminar, I would ask you to sign your beautiful piece of art and then I would ask Gerhardt or Mark to put it up in a neighbor, a close museum so that everybody can see this beautiful piece of art you have. But then what I would do is tell you to exchange your artwork with a friend and put a number on it that corresponds to the age that it looks like the artist is who drew that beautiful piece of art.

This is from an actual seminar that we did. And you can see most people get a number like 4 years old, maybe 3 years old, 12 years old. Every once in a while somebody will get a 30. Now, what in the world does this have to do with training your salespeople? Everything. You see, what happens is very often when we deliver information to our sellers, they're not retaining it. And as a result, their sales conversations look like this. The problem is if we're not delivering in a way that they can process it and use it, their conversations look like this. We have retention problems and we don't win deals. And that's why I want you, especially today, with attention spans so short, to look at your onboarding, look at your training curriculum and start asking yourself, how can I chunk it into smaller parts? Because what happens is if we try to give them an entire curriculum, as I said, they're going to forget it. We need to chunk it. My friend Susan Chunks. She's got seven kids, she lives here in Park City. She has to chunk. What she does is every single Sunday, she'll make a whole turkey, she'll make potato salad, kale. She's from California, and she'll put it in containers and nourish her children throughout the week. Now, as much as I like food, I am not going to sit down to a 40,000 calorie meal in a single sitting. But unfortunately, that's what we end up doing to our sellers. We're giving them too much information. I see this in my work all of the time. People will call Us up and say, Sherry, can you give us your course on prospecting, on discovery, on negotiation? Yeah, just do it in five days. No. So one of the things I want you to think about is micro learning. Can you take what you're doing and chunk it over time, particularly with your Gen Z salespeople, they're not going to retain it. They're used to TikTok videos, they're used to Instagram. So you want to think about maybe what you did in three to five days and start chunking it into smaller pieces. One of my favorite tools to do this with. This is a great AI tool. It's called Cast Magic. I don't get paid by them. I've got to tell you, it's an amazing tool. What you could do is you could take a one hour webinar, a 45 minute segment, run it through Cast Magic, and it will actually chunk it for you. It'll even come up with headlines. And then for those of you that want to do social media posts, you can even ask it turn this into a LinkedIn post, turn this into an Instagram post, or just feed information over time to your sales team. Okay? So there's some really great tools out there so that your people can actually retain the information. The other thing about people that lead with the education pillar, so after you take this assessment, you also understand the most important thing about learning, and that is this training is a process, not an event. We have to continually train our reps over time, and not just on our products and services and our tech, on your sales methodology, how to overcome objections, how to negotiate. This has to build and happen over time. Next, entertainment. Of course, I love entertainment. And when I say entertainment, I'm not talking about playing the ukulele or doing magic tricks, although I know a lot of trainers that do that and that's really cool. What I'm really talking about here is how to engage an audience, how to create wow experiences, and how to create emotional connection and make your people feel safe. And yes, even if you're doing hybrid or virtual training programs, I call it the three E's. We need to. Let me go back here. Yes, we need to engage. And when we talk about engagement, what we're talking about is we're talking about opening up the centers of the brain. How do we open up the learning centers of the brain? One of the things that I can tell you is if cameras are off, you got an 82% chance they're multitasking. They're like shampooing the dog or you know, paying their taxes or something. We want to be able, when we're using virtual events, we want to be able to use chat, to use zoom rooms. There's some great tools I'm going to show you. Spectrogram is one of my favorites. That's where you can use a tool and see how people feel about an issue on a continuum. So you might say, how do I like working from home? Because between 0 and 100, and they'll tell you. And again, this is very important virtually. And of course, engagement's very important live as well. The next one we want to think about here is emotional connection. Now, when I talk about emotional connection, people need to feel safe. You've all seen it happen where 20% of the people are raising their hand and no one else is engaged. So one of the things that we recommend and that we teach in our masterclasses is try in the first five to seven minutes, put people in a zoom room, do an icebreaker. They're not a waste of time. What you're doing is you're getting people familiar with everybody else in the room. You're making them feel emotionally safe. A lot of times people won't raise their hand, even a virtual hand, but they will talk to one, two or three other people. And then finally, what kind of experience are you creating? And when I talk about experience, what I'm really talking about here, And I'm going to go through here. Oh, let me go back a minute. Here's a QR code for some icebreakers that you can use. And again, this is getting engagement right from the get go. So go ahead and scan that because again, they're important. They're not just a waste of time. All right, so I'm going to move right along here and go back here to the E factor and talk a little bit about experience. So we all know this important adage, and that is this. The energy strategy and commitment you put into the training process will be duplicated by your reps in the sales process. Now, I want you to think about that a minute. How much energy are you putting into your training? And the better emotional experience that our reps have, the better experience they will give to your customers. We also know the stats. Our products are so similar today that what customers say. According to research, 58% of customers will change brands for a better customer experience. What kind of experience are you giving your reps? Here are some interactive platforms that you can use, and these are all giving them a fun experience. Think of entertainment as contests, games, and the like, but what I really want you to think about when you're thinking about that entertainment pillar is using the five senses. And yes, you can even use the five senses virtually. We do it all the time. So if you're doing an event, do you send cookies to the winner? Like, literally send them cookies? Do you send them something physical, a hard copy, something in advance? All of these five senses create an amazing experience. Are you telling stories to bring them in? I'll tell you a quick story. Years ago, there was an elevator operator in New York. He was working in a New York subway. True story. And his name was Bruce Renfro. Now you can imagine the boring job of an elevator operator in New York. Nobody talks to anybody. Well, one day Bruce Renfro got an idea. He thought, you know, I think I'm going to put my bucket list items, something I've always dreamed of, right on the walls of the elevator. So he put some beautiful china that he wanted for his kitchen. Well, the next day, one of the passengers came in and they asked him about it. And then he brought in a picture of a racehorse. Well, pretty soon all the passengers started bringing in their bucket list items. There was pictures of the Bahamas and yachts and all kinds of things. Well, a day later, Bruce got another idea. He loves jazz. So we brought in a CD player in those days and he started jamming to Miles Davis. So now he had the sense of sound. And then he got another idea. See, there's a lot of homeless people in New York. And he thought, what if I started bringing in canned goods and feeding the needy? Well, pretty soon all the passengers followed suit and they brought in canned goods. I can tell you and read about it in the New York Times. This elevator got so popular, people were coming from all over New York just to ride in Bruce Renfro's elevator, whether they were going that direction or not.

Now, I tell you this story because if Bruce Renfro can change the emotional state of passengers in an elevator in a 10 by 10 box, imagine all the creativity using all your technology that you can employ in your virtual and live trainings. Entertainment. Think about the entertainment pillar and the five senses. Next, let's take a quick look at facilitation. Facilitation means this. It means people don't believe it when we say it. They believe it when they say it. Too many trainers are unwilling to give up control to the rest of the room. Now, I used to have a guy work for me, let's call him Joe. Well, that was his name. So we'll call him Joe. And Joe called me one night, very ill, kind of like I am right now. I've got a bad cough. And he called me up, boss, I got a training tomorrow.

And I'm supposed to put together a product knowledge test and I'm probably going to be up all night. I'm really sick. But I promised the client that we were going to do a product knowledge test. And so I just wanted to let you know. Well, at that time, we were putting together this four Pillars course, and I said, you know, Joe, I have an idea. Why don't you get a good night's sleep and when you go into that training tomorrow, have all of the participants create the test questions. And of course, today you can do that on ChatGPT. He said, Are you sure, boss? I said, absolutely. Give it a try. Well, that night, the next night, Joe called me up. He couldn't believe it. Not only was his cough cleared up, but he said, boss, that was the best training I ever did because everyone was involved. Here's the point and one of the most important things I'm going to share with you today. You may have seen the ebb and house forgetting curve. Here's the deal. When we do a training, whether it's live or virtual, if we don't have interaction, your sales reps are going to forget 90% of everything we taught them within 30 days. So I want you to think about that for a minute. The other thing that's so great about facilitating as trainers is once we create great case studies and interactions, what ends up happening is we get a little time to ourselves. And of course, now we've got all the tools in the world to do that. Whether you're using gong, whether you're any. Any kind of call recording you're using, put it into any AI tool, use it as a case study, and have your sellers determine what the seller did right and what they could have done better, rather than just telling them. Because here's the statistic. People retain 10% of what they hear, basic adult learning theory, 50% of what they see in here, and 90% of what they say and do. I've also put this here for you. These are all the different types of interactivity that you can do. A lot of people think that interactivity is, oh, I'm just going to do a Q and A. No, there's all kinds of things that you can do in order to really pump up that interactivity. All right, let's move on to the coaching pillar now. One of my favorite Quotes about coaching is from a good friend of mine, Verl Workman. And he says it this way. He says training is telling you how and why to do something. Coaching is making sales reps accountable to do it. I want you to think about that for a minute. It's actually working with people one on one. Now here's another statistic. What percentage of coaches say they're awesome coaches?

Here's the number. 86%.

Guess what percentage of sellers say that their managers are awesome coaches? Yeah, that number goes down to 13%. So we've got to be able to coach our salespeople. The problem I see is too many leaders. They don't even have a rubric or any type of mechanism so that their sellers know what they're being coached on. So what you want to do is look at what you're coaching them on and break it down so they know what they're being graded on. Now, there's all kinds of great coaching platforms out there. One that we highly recommend is called Grow AI. It's amazing. I can put it in the notes and send it to Gerhardt, but it's actually a one on one coach that helps you through every single stage of the sales process. Process and then gives the notes to the manager. So as we're coming in on time here, I want to leave you with this.

If you think about these four pillars of an effective training and coaching process.

Education.

The education pillar is all about delivering content. It's all about creating content. And I don't know many of you that are here today, but I'm guessing that if you're at this incredible event, everyone here at this virtual event has something important to say. And I'm also guessing you're really good at saying it. But know this. Information is everywhere today. What's rare today isn't information. What's rare is human connection.

Education connects people to our content. Entertainment connects people to us. Facilitation connects people to each other. It's about building community live or virtually. But coaching done right connects people to themselves.

And when we leverage all four, we move from information to transformation. And when we do that, we'll not only earn more, will help our sales reps to be more. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark and Gerhardt.

Jerry, that was absolutely outstanding when we take information and move it to transformation. And maybe that explains why there's such a gap between how good coaches think they are and how good salespeople think they are. So many applications, so many things. Thank you so much for sharing. Gearhart what are your thoughts?

I love Jerry's love for language. The way you present your insights in.

Sound bites that are memorable. And what strikes me about you is.

The way you conduct yourself. You are a wonderful teacher, not just an entertainer, but also you're a good student of life. And I know a little bit about your personal story. So you had an extraordinary mother and grandmother and good role models that showed you how to be a master of transformation because your grandmother was in Auschwitz and.

Right.

Look at how your family has transformed. And. And your mom is still teaching.

She's a keynote speaker and she's 90 years old. That's true.

That's true, Gerhardt. That is Gerhardt. I'm gonna do something really special for you. And I mentioned that.

We are doing a four, a five part masterclass beginning Monday with a very large price tag on it. I'll tell you, it's a $5,000 masterclass. We limit the class to 25 people. We have a single ticket left. I am going to give one away to one of your participants today. So if they filled out this assessment, we are going to choose one lucky. You've got to be a trainer or you've got to be an enablement. And from my heart to yours, we are going to give one of your participants a ticket to that where we delve into each pillar for 90 minutes with an incredible community of sales leaders and enablement leaders. How does that sound?

I love it. It's a wonderful, generous gift and I'm sure that many people will want to take advantage of that because.

Everybody wants to learn from you.

Well, the great thing is they learn from each other. Honestly, I do believe that as trainers and enablement professionals, that the greatest joy isn't delivering content, it's learning from everyone else in the room. I've learned quite a bit from Mark Hunter. His prospecting techniques are amazing, but also the way he conducts himself. And of course you, Gerhard, are always leading the charge, bringing in phenomenal speakers. And you both are lifelong learners. So thank you so much.

Thank you. And hey, grab that QR code right now to get registered because Sherry's made an offer that is too good to turn down. Grab that QR code, get that assessment. Maybe you'll be that, that person. What a. What a wow. What an offer. Thank you, Sherry. Thank you so much. Thank you for helping to make sales 3.0 a special event.

Thank you for having.