The Accepted Lie: Why Everyone Forgets What You Teach Them.

You are riding your bike down the street. Your tires feel solid beneath you, allowing you to seamlessly move over any bumps in the road. You are carefree, gliding your way towards your goal.

Then life gets in the way. You’re too busy to do your chores and you forget to check the pressure on the tires. 

A few days later you go out again and your ride is unsteady, jolting you this way and that way as you hit even minor bumps. 

Your ride takes you longer than usual, so you’re even more pushed for time when you get home and once again, you can’t check the tires. 

The cycle continues (sorry, couldn’t resist), and a few rides later, you are incapable of moving forwards. 

This is exactly how knowledge deflates when we don’t revisit it. It leaks away through cracks we never see at a rate we don’t perceive, leaving us wondering why it’s so hard to build any momentum.

The Lie

If you work in sales, you’re familiar with this concept. A rep attends training or gets a coaching session, feels a boost of energy then limps back to their old habits. 

Why? 

Because it’s scientifically proven to be the outcome. This approach forms an ‘accepted lie’ we all tell ourselves. We believe we can sit in the chair, upload a file and suddenly know Kung Fu. It’s not how life works. 

This article is going to explain to you what’s going on in a hope to stop this accepted lie propagating any further. 

Memory

The fundamental principle here is 140 years old! Think about that for a second. Despite all of the growth and advancements in the last one and a half centuries, we have not been able to solve it. It’s the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, and it states that people lose more than half of what they learn within 24 hours if they don’t use it. It goes on to say they forget 90% of it entirely within 90 days. 

Now apply that to GTM. A rep may have 20 calls in a week and meet their manager (who’s also their coach…) once a week. If you have a call on Monday and talk about it on Friday, you’ve already essentially forgotten it. Then imagine you leave that session with your manager feeling confident you can handle it better next time… but it’s Friday. By the time Monday rolls around you’ve already forgotten over half of it, let alone the by the next time that same exact situation comes up on a call.

You’re left remembering you had a conversation about it, but without the memory or capability to actually improve. I’d argue that’s a worse state than you started with.

Then consider that most reps don’t have a weekly coaching session. In fact, recent research by my company, Replicate Labs, showed that 73% of reps either get zero coaching at all, or get it entirely at random. The problem compounds. 

Capacity

But before we release our non-existent Kung Fu on managers, let’s see if it’s even possible for them to plug this gap. 

Managers have a pretty tough gig, their job has 7,000 different responsibilities and 99% of them are pointed at what’s happening today, tomorrow, this week, month, and this quarter. Only 1% of their time is dedicated to looking beyond that. And guess what the 1% is? Coaching. 

Managers are essentially forced to either zero coaching, or coaching to the deal, not the individual. 

Let’s prove that the math doesn’t math. 

→ Managers have around 6 direct resorts

→ Each report may have 15 client calls a week

→ A coaching session with appropriate follow up to combat the curve might take 30m per call

→ That’s 15 x 6 x 0.5 = 45 hours per week. 

→ Then there’s all the corporate initiatives for GTM (new methodologies, frameworks, products, personas)

→ Then there’s the other 99% of their actual job

That’s also all assuming a degree of consistency and predictability… Yet if there’s one word I’ve found to best describe a line manager it’s ‘firefighter’. 

Context

Unfortunately for literally all of us, that’s not where this ends. This only speaks to the frequency needed, which has little to do with the efficacy of the time spent actually changing somebody’s behavior.

The 70/20/10 model tells us that 70% of how somebody learns is by actively doing the thing, 20% by talking about the 70% and 10% from formal instruction. That’s also assuming they’re paying attention in the first place (over 90% of us admit to multitasking during webinar-based training). 

What’s critical here is that 70% (and the 20% by proxy) is based on using it ‘in context’. So completing a quiz is actually in the 10% bucket, as is an exercise of recording yourself, asking your enablement team what to do or even roleplay with anybody that hasn’t done the same job as your buyer (i.e. lacks depth of understanding).

So even if you can somehow help your managers time travel, or break your CAC and general profitability with wild manager:rep ratios, you can’t close this context-gap. 

Also notice I haven’t gone into the 55% of managers who say they simply don’t know how to coach, also from our research.

The blame game

Round and round the merry-go-round spins, with leaders mandating training, enablement executing and telling managers to coach. Or reps demanding more support on their personal development, to get sparse and untimely feedback. Managers are blamed, despite always lacking the time and most lacking the skills. 

But we send our surveys, blame our ‘company culture’, and move on to the next damn session.

Acceptance is the first step

Once you’ve decided to stop accepting this lie – to stop mandating that managers spend 1 hour per week with their reps ‘making them better,’ to stop releasing training with vague instructions to ‘coach it to life,’ and to stop putting people on PIPs for not improving despite not giving them the support they need to succeed…

Once we’ve had a good cry and realized we’ve been wasting everybody’s time for decades, let’s think about what we can do about it.

Make Time: Your options are finite. You can hire more managers, change the managers JD, hire dedicated coaches, offload responsibility to other depts, hire external coaches, buy tech, and do less.

Understand Staff: Every profession has tire kickers (see what I did there?), but reps, managers and enablers get kicked in the face for not ‘making things stick’. You need to understand that reps are given too much with too little, managers are told to do more than is possible and enablement are not coaches which is the key to the whole puzzle. If you cannot solve for time, resources and context you simply must reduce the scope of what you want to change by the 99% of time you don’t have or you are setting everybody up to fail.  

Solve for Context: If you solve for time and resources but don’t solve for context, you’re only getting 10% of the benefit (re: the 70/20/10 model). Context is everything, in both environment, knowledge and application. Hire your best customers, shadow clients, consume every piece of media you can about them, replicate the same environment, use real calls and emails, buy tech, do everything you can to close this gap. 

If you only do one thing from this article (as we know you’ll likely forget most of it), have it be this… talk to each other and be honest. If we move on from the accepted lie and collectively agree to break out of this cycle of time-wasting and lost potential, we will find a path forward. 

Keep the bike moving forward.