Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016 - (Page 10)
SALES TRAINING:
IS IT WORTH IT ?
By Jim Dickie
"Money," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses." Sales leaders can't stop to smell the roses, though
- they're too busy balancing priorities to make limited budgets cover a wide range of purposes and needs.
Sales performance improvement is always
a top priority. A pattern we see repeated
year after year, in companies of all shapes
and sizes, is that salespeople or sales teams
who didn't make their quotas last year are
still given higher quotas this year. And that
gives rise to both a lot of soul searching
and an entire performance improvement
industry: How does an individual, a team, a
sales organization, get better at selling?
Many of the questions that we hear from
clients boil down to this: How do we get
the biggest bang for our buck? What are the
investments most likely to pay off in terms of
finding more opportunities, winning more
deals, and retaining existing customers?
Sales training, especially skills training, is an
issue of particular concern.
FIGURE 1
Our sales performance optimization
studies have examined the multiple types
of educational programs companies may
offer their sales teams, including training
on product or services, the customer's
marketplace, CRM system utilization, and
sales skills. Let's concentrate for a moment
on "sales skills" and exactly what that means.
During a sales cycle, there are many specific
skills salespeople need to use to transform
a prospect into a customer. These include
prospecting, call planning, relationship
building, needs analysis and prioritization,
objection handling, purchase justification,
consensus building, and negotiations.
A popular saying among researchers in
many fields is W. Edward Demming's remark,
In one study, we included a question that
asked participants to rate the quality
of their company's sales skills training
program. We found that 10.7 percent of
the programs "exceeded expectations,"
42.5 percent "met expectations," and 43.5
percent "needed improvement."
What the data clearly showed is that effective
sales training has a higher cost attached.
Companies with sales skills training programs
that exceeded expectations averaged
PERCENTAGE OF REPS MAKING QUOTA
69.4%
SALES SKILLS
EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS
10
"Without data you're just another person
with an opinion." It seems intuitive, even
obvious, that skills training will improve
skills, and better skills will result in better
performance. That's a logical proposition,
but it's still just an opinion until the data is
collected and analyzed.
64.8%
SALES SKILLS
MEETS EXPECTATIONS
60.5%
SALES SKILLS
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016
Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016
Perspectives on Sales Training
Table of Contents
Infographic
Four Ways to Increase the Impact of Sales Coaching
Sales Training: Is It Worth It?
Trust Is Dead. Long Live Trust!
The Salesperson's Most Valuable Portfolio: Aligning with What Matters Most to Your Customer
Great Selling Today: Navigating Change
Big Data-Driven Sales Training
Designing an Effective Sales Training Program
Putting the Cart Before the Horse?
Helping Sales and Marketing March Together
Modern Sales Management
What Sets High-Performing Teams Apart
Four Keys to Rapid Behavior Change
Do Your Salespeople Know Where They're Struggling
Banish the Other Four Lettered F-Word
The Secret of Sales Enablement
What's Online
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Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016
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