Marketers wake up every morning convinced nobody cares about what they’re selling. Most learning and development (L&D) pros assume the opposite, that attention comes with the job title, or at least with the mandatory completion requirement.

That gap explains a lot.

Mandatory Doesn’t Mean Engaged

Think about the last compliance course you clicked through. You showed up. You moved the slider. You passed the quiz. And three days later, you remembered almost nothing.

The training counted as “done.” Nobody asked whether it worked.

Marketers don’t get that grace period. If they lose your attention, they lose the sale, and they know it in real time. That pressure changes how they think. It should change how we think, too.

Relevance Is Rocket Fuel

The fastest path to attention is relevance. Not “here’s a module on communication skills.” Real relevance. The kind that makes someone think this was made for me.

That means knowing your audience before you build a single slide. What does their day actually look like? What problems grind them down? What language do they use when they talk about their work?

The more your content connects to their world — their challenges, their context, their actual stakes — the less you have to fight for their attention. It shows up on its own.

This isn’t a design trick. It’s a research habit. Marketers are obsessive about their audiences. The best L&D pros should be, too.

Stop Thinking in Courses. Start Thinking in Campaigns.

A campaign isn’t one big push. It’s a series of smaller ones delivered over time, across different channels, building on each other. An email. A short video. A nudge before the weekend. None of it feels heavy. All of it adds up.

Training can work exactly the same way.

In Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro, we make the case for moving away from the “one-and-done course” toward something more like a multi-touch learning journey. Shorter, more frequent, designed to stick. Less event. More experience.

There’s a reason you remember a jingle from 1994 but forgot last Tuesday’s all-hands. Repetition plus spacing equals retention. Marketers figured that out without ever reading a learning theory textbook. They just called it a drip campaign.

You Have to Get Through the Gate First

Here’s what neuroscience and marketing agree on: the brain filters ruthlessly.

Before any new information gets processed, it has to pass a gatekeeper — the fast, automatic part of your thinking that decides in milliseconds whether something is worth its time. If the answer is no, the gate closes. Quietly. Completely.

Most training never gets through.

Marketers obsess over this. They sweat headlines, hooks, and the first three seconds of video. They know that if they don’t grab you immediately, nothing that follows matters.

The same logic applies to your course intro, your email subject line, your module title, your facilitator’s opening question. 

You have to earn the right to be heard before you say anything worth hearing.

Design for the gatekeeper first. Everything else is downstream.

A Mindset, Not a Budget Line

None of this requires new software, a platform upgrade, or a bigger headcount. These are thinking habits.

Here’s the shift: stop asking “did they complete it?” and start asking “did I earn their attention in the first place?”

That one question changes what you build, how you open it, and whether it actually works. Marketing has been answering it for decades.

Now it’s our turn.

To hear the full conversation with Mike Taylor listen to the How to Make a Leader podcast. You can connect with Mike here. And check out his book and his newsletter.