When it comes to sales training, not all results are created equal. In fact, only 17 percent of companies say they have an effective training program.
Is your sales training program one of the few achieving the right results?
The role of sales training teams includes partnering with the sales organization to recommend and prioritize relevant results, including:
- Objective results (backed by empirical data) and subjective results (backed by stories and experiences)
- Progress results, where a milestone has been reached on the path to the overall outcome, and destination results, where the outcome has been reached
- Results at the individual sales professional level, results at the team level, and results at the strategic or leadership levels of the organization
Below are six impacts to consider as you build your next sales training program.
1. Strategic Outcomes—How well does your sales training content and overall program approach align to the strategic outcomes of your organization? This involves understanding the most important outcomes to executive leadership in the next 12 months. For example, if it’s a strategic imperative to improve sales growth in the automotive sector with a specific product, your sales training program might focus on identifying the right prospects in that sector.
2. Sales Culture and Engagement—Sales culture is your organization’s unique combination of factors that help create sustainable, meaningful, and profitable growth. The strategy, people, processes, and technologies you employ are its pillars. Sales training programs should affect each of these pillars in a way that creates the right culture. When sales culture is intentionally created and curated, you create long term success—and a company that elite sales professionals want to join.
3. Mindset for Sales—When sales training programs cultivate a sales mindset in addition to tactical sales skills, they develop the consultative sales professional. In addition, a sales mindset is critical at all sales leadership levels. When sales management and senior leadership don’t practice this mindset and approach sales with optimism, negativity permeates the sales team and ultimately results in stalled sales growth.
4. Opportunity and Territory Progress—Too often, sales training doesn’t properly track real and measurable progress with opportunities, territories, or industry verticals. While sales training isn’t the only answer to measurable progress, it needs to demonstrate that it’s a significant player in overall success. When it comes to tactical implementation, using opportunity data and having teams track their progress via your customer relationship management tool (CRM) are opportunities for you to demonstrate short-term and long-term progress.
5. Structural Improvements—How does your sales training approach actively support and integrate with structures like sales process, CRM, and key sales metrics? This integration connects sales training to your organization’s sales structures. When sales training clearly aligns with your organization’s top three sales development metrics, you’re in a better position to demonstrate tangible return on investment (ROI) contributions.
6. Contribution of Sales Training to the Organization—The movement of employees out of organizations with the Great Resignation has taught us the value of having people development at the strategic level. Training leaders and sales enablement leaders who build bridges between the people development function and its contribution to the organization will be the clear winners. Developing your executive communication skills and business acumen—along with your vision for the contributions of the sales training function across the organization—will ensure your seat at the table.
Designing the right sales training program is no small task. But tracking these six sales training impacts will allow you to focus training on areas that will produce measurable results.
