Want to Achieve Success? Take a Look at Your Sales Training ROI

Want to achieve success?

Well, we believe that it’s a mistake to conduct professional sales training if you don’t measure its success.

We live in a learning economy, where those with the most know-how and understanding generally outperform their peers.

However, it doesn’t matter how much you know or understand if you don’t put it into practice.

Achieve Success: A Glimpse at Sales Training ROI

If your goal is to achieve success, you’ve come to the right place. This article was designed to help you navigate the waters of sales training for optimum success.

And here’s what I mean by that.

Conducting sales training is easy. (Well, relatively easy). The team gets together, an internal or external person conducts sales training, and voila! Your team has now been trained.

The issue? Well, if you’re not assigning a ROI (return on investment) on your sales training initiatives, then something is missing. How can you possibly measure the success of sales training if you aren’t tracking metrics and indicators?

The good news? I’ll be sharing specific metrics and indicators to help you track your return on sales training investment and achieve success.

Tracking Return on Sales Training Investment

Before embarking on professional sales training, determine if the training is aligned with your corporate strategy. For example:

• Growing organically
• Selling new products
• Expanding in new territories
• Competing in new markets
• Improving marketing and branding initiatives

Once you’ve decided where the company is going, or where your division is going, then you can create a list of skill gaps. These are gaps between what you have now and what you will need. Use professional sales training to fill these gaps.

While doing this, determine who is trainable and who isn’t. Many people, even top performers, are resistant to change. Embark on a buy-in conversation before conducting professional sales training, especially if it’s going to be administered on a wide scale.

There are many ways to measure return on investment, besides dollars and cents. Choose which of these indicators you should track to measure the effect professional sales training has on sales performance.

In this article, I will share the first two out of ten in my list of ROSTI metrics (return on sales training investment). Want all ten metrics all packaged up and ready to go? Click here to download our How to Track Return on Sales Training Investment eBook.

01: Measure Culture

If you’re very perceptive, you know intuitively if your culture is working or not. However, trusting your gut isn’t enough. Think about other things you can spot to determine if you have the right culture.

• Do your people have “lightness” in their stride?
• Are they relating better to each other?
• Are they being more creative?
• Do they have strong commitment to the company’s success?
• Do they talk up the company to outsiders?

These are questions that help you to examine the health of your culture and whether or not a robust professional sales training program has made a significant impact on it.

Notice if there is increased confidence during and after delivery of professional sales training.

• How do salespeople interact with their customers?
• How do they apply their knowledge about who you are?

If you see improved sales, you’ll see improved confidence.

With more confidence comes more creativity. People become innovative. They get ahead of their customers and focus more on educating them vs. selling to them. You’ll notice this change in conversation style when you go on joint sales calls.

A sure indicator of an effective culture is a steady stream of constructive feedback.

The more your team communicates with you and with each other, the more they take pride in what they do.

People who move up the performance curve want to raise the bar on themselves and on their teammates. By making the team strong, they make themselves strong.

02: Build a Forecast

Professional sales training should be delivered to help your sales team hit its targets. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that the forecasts are accurate, completed by everyone, and finalized on time.

Many salespeople struggle to construct an accurate forecast. This is one area that professional sales training can address. Conducting sessions on how to put the forecast together is a good use of time. Your sales leadership team should be trained on accurate forecasting.

Strategic account volume, revenue mixes by company type, pipeline status, transaction size, and type of salesperson all factor into generating your forecast.

Salesperson Type

Before determining revenue by salesperson, we classify salespeople by A+, A, B, and C. The A+ salesperson typically brings in a higher percentage than the rest of the team. The A salesperson slightly less, and so on.

Here is an example:

50% Total revenue production from A+ salesperson(s)

25% Total revenue production from A salesperson(s)

15% Total revenue production from B salesperson(s)

10% Total revenue production from C salesperson(s)

Take this into account so you can generate a realistic, balanced, and accurate forecast.

Want more metrics to help you track return on sales training investment? Click the image below to download your copy of the ROSTI eBook.