Try Before You Sell: How to increase your sales team’s product fluency through experiential learning.

There's a version of product training that most people have sat through. A presenter, a deck, and a lot of information on features, benefits, and positioning. Done well, it's genuinely useful; people leave informed, but informed and fluent are different things, and for a sales team, fluency is what actually moves the needle.

The gap between knowing something and being able to use it with confidence in a live conversation is where a lot of training investment quietly disappears. Closing that gap requires more than good content delivered well; it requires people to do something with the knowledge while it's fresh.

The case for experiential learning

Psychologist David Kolb's work on how adults learn points to something most people recognise intuitively: experience cements understanding in a way that passive reception doesn't. His Experiential Learning Theory describes a cycle moving from concrete experience through reflection and conceptualisation to active experimentation. In practice, what this means for a training context is that when people apply knowledge, discuss it with colleagues, make decisions based on it, and see results, it sticks differently than when they receive it from a screen.

This isn't an argument against presentations or structured learning. Those formats work, and for many people, they work very well. It's an argument for what comes after. A well-designed experiential element doesn't replace traditional training; it reinforces it. The presentation gives people the framework. The experience gives them something to anchor it to.

For sales teams in particular, product knowledge needs to be the kind that shows up in conversation as genuine fluency rather than rehearsed phrasing. That level of confidence tends to come from handling ideas, not just hearing them.

What this looks like in practice

Did you know that in the UK, over 6 in 10 households now own an air fryer? To deepen the first-hand knowledge of the ‘air fryer revolution’ for the Unilever Global Leadership team, we created a Kitchen Challenge where teams worked together to create meals armed with recipe guides and Unilever's suite of new air-fryer-specific products. The task was structured enough to keep people focused on the products themselves, and open enough to require genuine collaboration, debate, and decision-making.

What made it work was the fact that the activity was built directly around the learning objective. The products weren't props; they were the point. People talked about what they were working with in their own words, and they formed their own opinions. By the time the session ended, the product knowledge from earlier in the day had somewhere to live: in a shared experience, a conversation, a meal they'd actually made.

Designing for retention, not just engagement

The risk with experiential formats is treating them as a reward for sitting through the real training, a fun thing at the end of the day that happens to involve the topic. When an experiential element is genuinely integrated with the learning objectives, the two reinforce each other. The formal session gives people the information; the experience gives them a reason to care about it and a context to return to when they need to recall it.

It's also worth noting that experiential formats tend to lower the stakes around not knowing something. In a presentation, uncertainty often stays private. In a collaborative activity, questions surface naturally because the task requires people to learn from each other as much as from the exercise itself.

The other thing they do is create shared reference points. A sales team that has worked through a challenge together has a common language and a common memory, which has a lasting impact beyond the training room.

Questions worth asking

If your sales team needs to understand a product suite at the level where it changes how they sell, the question to ask when planning the day isn't only what content needs to be covered. It's also: where in this programme do people get to do something with what they've just learned?

Then you’ll be able to create a program that blends traditional and experiential formats to work together, rather than against one another.