Does sales training work, without the use of subsequent reinforcement consolidated learning?

Keiran Scally posed the above mentioned question (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/sales/sales-techniques/MAR_SLS_STC/454116-23664146?browseIdx=10&sik=1246776242987&goback=%2Eama) on LinkedIn, to which the note mentioned below was my response. The reference made inline refer to all the posts made by others in the same post.
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Dear Keiran
I must commend... very very interesting question; and something that most people in the field of learning & development remain baffled when asked. Well, I will try to respond to that in brief (compared to the volumes that are available to learn from). LI provides for answers only upto 4000 characters, hence, I have divided my response into two parts, This is the first one. Your question is... Does sales training work, without the use of subsequent reinforcement consolidated learning? In the question I could not get the contextual meaning of 'consolidated'... pardon my ignorance. Having said that my response is to 'Does sales training work, without the use of subsequent reinforcement of learning?' The simple answer is NO. The basic question is 'why are we doing sales training?'. As Gerry mentioned, most sales people would take it as 'free lunch'. In my experience, while I do agree to that, I also believe that instructional designers could use simple tools supported by concepts like ARCS. John Keller synthesized existing research on psychological motivation and created the ARCS model (Keller, 1987). ARCS stands for Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. This model is not intended to stand apart as a separate system for instructional design, but can be incorporated within Gagne's events of instruction. (http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art3_5.htm). The next important thing to work on is the basic understanding of what can be done whilst in the classroom. It is very well explained in Bob Mager's 'What Every Manager Should Know About Training'. In his typical clear, jargon-free style, Bob Mager explains what training is, and what it's not. "Training" won't fix a problem unless the problem stems from a lack of skill or knowledge. Mager explains why you can't train your way out of badly designed jobs, or idiotic incentive systems, or a lack of resources. He also shows ways to deal with those barriers to accomplishment. He also talks about building 'self-efficacy', and that is what the trainer can surely do in the class. Self-efficacy refers to the judgments people make about their abilities to execute particular courses of action – about their ability to do specific things. For example, “I know I’m a good golfer;” “I know I can beat my sales record of last year;” “I know that my fencing skill is the best in town.” Self-efficacy isn’t about the actual skills people have; it’s about the judgments they make about the strength of those skills. People with low self-efficacy don’t believe they can do the things they actually can do. “Oh, well, I didn’t take the job offer because I didn’t think I was really good enough.”... and that is one of the main reasons for sales people not wanting to put the learnt knowledge into practice, which leads to learning-atrophy, and in some time becomes irrelevant, and that is what remains in the memory, 'the program was all knowledge, but nothing can be implemented'. This is one of the reasons. Don’t confuse self-efficacy with self-confidence, which is a much more generalized way of referring to one’s feelings, and often refers to the expected outcomes of one’s actions. That’s about the classroom piece.Now, after the classroom event, I would like to draw your attention to the component of learning-atrophy. How to handle it is something that could be worked out, and is relatively easy (!). The fight is moving the learner from Level II to III on Kirkpatrick's Model. People start forgetting unless the knowledge/skill is put into practice within a specified time frame. The time frames vary on a variety of factors, such as motivation, instruction quality, relevance, need, learner-maturity, methodology, overlearning percentage, difficulty of the learned material (e.g. how meaningful it is), its representation (see: mnemonic), and physiological factors such as stress and sleep etc. We should also keep in mind that the fastest drop in retention occurs immediately after learning (Peterson and Peterson, 1959). Drop in retention or the forgetting curve illustrates the decline of memory retention in time (x axis - time // y axis - memory). Studies indicate that time has an inversely exponential impact on 'forgetting'. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the exponential nature of forgetting (Über das Gedächtnis, later translated into English as Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology), and there has been a lot of work around it for a long time. So, what are the basics that we need to keep in mind, in case we want the memory to retain, so that it aids in application. While the following are measures of retention, the same could be used to build retention. The form of the retention curve depends in part on what measure is used. The three most frequently used measures are recall, relearning, and recognition

RECALL
In recall, the subject is asked to reproduce the original response in some form. In experimental work the subject often responds vocally or may even be asked to write his response in a blank. There is little prompting in recall testing. Often the student is simply instructed to remember as many items from a list as possible. As might be expected, a test of recall generally yields the lowest measure of retention.

RELEARNING
Relearning is sometimes called the savings method. Using this method, the subject first learns some material and, after various lengths of time, relearns that same material to the same criterion level. The number of trials to relearn the material is always fewer than the number required to learn it the first time. Relearning usually reveals more retention than recall because more stimulus conditions are present in both the original learning and the relearning.

RECOGNITION
Recognition is the type of retention measured by a multiple choice question. The learner is required to choose the correct alternative from among several. In an experimental situation, the subject would be required to point out the correct answer from among many. The above alongwith hand-holding (executive and/or functional coaching), as suggested by Judy Sundale does most of the job. Offcourse willingness to do it and motivation to do it (incentives, promotions, respect, remunerative, recognition hike etc) play an important role as well.

You could refer to the following for more on psychological research in learning and memory...
> Ebbinghaus and learning/retention curves
> Pavlov and conditioning
> Thorndike and the laws of learning
> Watson and behaviorism
> Hull and the reaction potential
> Tolman and latent learning
> Skinner and reinforcement

The 'brief' response was not really brief!

Chao!