Sales Enablement
Ongoing sales training: the weekly ritual that lifts the whole team
Gaultier Beauchesne
CSO & Co-founder @Eagr
🎧 From the Eagr to sell podcast episode with Lyes Boukeroui. Watch on YouTube.
Key takeaways
Without reinforcement, a rep forgets 84 to 90% of a training within 90 days. One-off training is money down the drain.
The format that works is short, frequent, and hands-on: weekly sessions built on role-play.
Every session ends with a specific commitment, sent to the manager who owns the follow-up.
The useful cadence: 3 to 5 hours of coaching per rep per month. Past that, returns drop.
Teams with a real coaching process see up to 15% more quota attainment and 20% less turnover.
Plenty of reps have never been through real training.
In some companies a salesperson spends a ten-year career with a single training day behind them. And when training does exist, it's usually an annual seminar that's mostly gone three months later.
The teams that outperform run something else: an ongoing training ritual.
Here's how to build one, based on the model Lyes Boukeroui ran at Uptoo, and what the research says about what actually moves a team forward.
What ongoing sales training is
Ongoing sales training is a regular ritual that holds and raises the level of the whole team, well past onboarding.
What matters is regularity and concreteness. One hour a week of role-play beats one annual day of theory.
The key word is "ongoing." A one-off training evaporates. A ritual sticks.
Why one-off training does almost nothing
The brain forgets fast, and selling is no exception.
Based on the work on Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, without reinforcement:
you lose 50 to 70% of a piece of information within 24 hours;
and 84 to 90% of a training within 90 days (Ardent Learning).
Put it in money terms: a $15,000 seminar the team has fully forgotten by next quarter is $15,000 gone.
The only antidote is spaced repetition. Coming back to the same skills, at regular intervals, in practice.
Companies that reinforce their training keep the benefits about 120 days longer than those that stop on day one.
That's the whole point of the weekly ritual. It turns a spike of knowledge that fades into a curve that climbs.
The right format: short, frequent, hands-on
The most effective format is weekly and built on practice.
At Uptoo, sessions ran every week on the 1pm-2pm slot. Each rep joined about twice a month.
Here's how a typical session runs:
Hosting : An internal expert (closing, discovery) runs the session
Role-play : One rep plays the buyer, with 3 or 4 prepared profiles
The hot seat : Another rep takes the exercise under realistic conditions
Feedback : Two peers split it: one gives strengths, the other the gaps
Having internal experts host does two things:
the training stays close to the field;
in-house excellence spreads, instead of living in the heads of three top performers.
How to run a session, step by step
A good session fits into five parts, over one hour:
Framing (5 min). The host names the skill of the day and the success criterion. One skill per session, not ten.
Demo (10 min). A top performer runs the exercise live. The team sees what "done well" looks like.
Hot seats (30 min). Two or three reps take turns, facing a peer playing a prepared buyer.
Cross feedback (10 min). One peer gives two strengths, another gives two gaps. Specifics, never "that was good."
Commitment (5 min). Each participant writes down the action they'll apply this week.
The secret to good role-play is the prep of the characters.
A generic buyer is useless. Give the person playing the buyer a clear brief:
their context and industry;
their main objection;
their budget and buying power;
how they dodge (the rushed one, the silent one, the skeptic).
The more realistic the buyer, the more the practice transfers to real calls.
The cadence that works: 3 to 5 hours a month
Regularity beats volume.
Data from CSO Insights (now Korn Ferry) puts the sweet spot around 3 to 5 hours of coaching per rep per month.
Below that, the effect is weak.
Above it, returns drop fast (Korn Ferry).
So the goal isn't to pile it all into one day a year. It's to hold a rhythm.
And it pays. Organizations with a solid coaching process show:
up to 15% more quota attainment;
higher win rates;
nearly 20% less voluntary turnover.
A ritual of two one-hour sessions per month per rep puts you right in the sweet spot.
The secret ingredient: a tracked commitment
The closing commitment saves the training from being forgotten.
At the end of each session, every rep commits to applying one specific behavior within 30 to 60 days. That commitment goes to the manager, who's made responsible for following up.
Without that mechanism, a session is a nice moment. Nothing moves.
With it, you get a behavior change you can measure. The written commitment, reviewed by the manager at the next 1:1, is what makes your team actually apply what it learns.
The mistakes that kill ongoing training
Four traps come up again and again:
Too much theory. An hour of slides changes no behavior. Role-play does.
No follow-up. A session with no tracked commitment hands the next day back to the forgetting curve.
Always the same topics. Replaying "discovery" every month with no data bores your best reps and misses the real gaps.
An absent manager. If enablement trains but the manager doesn't follow up, the transfer never happens. The manager is the relay, not a spectator.
How to launch the ritual on your team
To get going in the first month:
Block a short, recurring weekly slot. One hour is enough.
Have your internal experts host, topic by topic (prospecting, discovery, closing, negotiation).
Write real buyer briefs for the role-plays.
End every session with a written commitment, sent to the manager.
Pick topics from the team's real data, not from a hunch.
That last point changes everything.
To target the right topics, start from where your reps actually drop the ball in the sales cycle. Eagr spots it from their calls, so you skip training everyone on something already mastered while the real gap stays open. See how Eagr works.
FAQ
How often should you train a sales team? A short weekly ritual beats a big annual block. Aim for about two sessions per month per rep, which is 3 to 5 monthly hours of coaching.
Why do my reps forget what we teach them? The forgetting curve: without reinforcement, 84 to 90% of a training disappears within 90 days. Only spaced repetition, in practice, makes it stick.
Which training format is most effective? Role-play. A peer plays a prepared buyer, another takes the exercise, two colleagues give strengths and gaps. Theory on its own doesn't change behavior.
How do you make training stick? End every session with a precise behavior to apply within 30 to 60 days, sent to the manager who reviews it at the next 1:1.
Who should host the sessions? The internal experts for each topic. It grounds the training in the field and spreads in-house excellence.
How long before you see results? A few weeks on behaviors, if you hold the rhythm. Quota and win-rate gains show up over one or two quarters.
Sources
This article comes from an episode of the Eagr to sell podcast with Lyes Boukeroui. Watch the full episode on YouTube.
