Sales Training Doesn't work!

It’s true. You’ve experienced enough to know that’s true. You’ve probably been inflicted with a day or two-day training years ago and you might remember one or two useful nuggets. Or you’ve put your team on sales training in the vain hope something might be different this time and they come back full of great ideas and it all falls away in no time under the pressure of hitting targets or dealing with demanding clients.

So, what’s the answer? There are three parties to any training program. Trainer, trainees and, we cannot forget, you as the trainees’ manager.

The first party, the trainer, needs to break that huge block of new ideas into sensible, digestible chunks. That means, even if there is a two-day introductory boot camp, the training doesn’t really start until the reinforcement program. Up until then, it’s just that, an introduction, it’s not really training. It can’t be. Nobody is going to have such a huge revelation that life changes forever in a two-day march through sales training.

The second party, the trainee, must want to change. If they are determined to stick to old ways, there’s nothing much anybody can do about it. I would argue that if you have decided you want your team to do things in a certain way and your reports refuse to do so, then you should seriously consider letting them go. If you are paying them to do something, then they should do it. After all, you do that with your external suppliers.

The third party is the tricky one. You. If you don’t hold your report to the new ways of doing things, then they won’t do them. Moreover, if you don’t know what it is that they are supposed to be doing, then you can’t hold them to it. So you have got to have done the training to some degree yourself, preferably before your reports have. And then you have to ensure they are doing the training. Not just the two-day introduction, the actual behaviour- changing training. Are they doing their homework? Are they practicing their new skills? Are they doing role plays with you to show how they have improved?

The real problem when we hear “Sales Training doesn’t work” is not that the training isn’t good but that the sponsoring company has no way of telling what the effect is. How can you know whether those deals would have come through or not without the training? What metrics are you going to use to measure whether the training is working or not?
Assuming the training might just work, what can the organisation do to make sure the investment in both time and money is well spent? There are several things you can do to make sure of your return, whatever training you take.

We at Sandler help you use the right combination of:

• “Hotlist” items
• Using the new terms or language in all you do
• Using sales tools, like pre-call planners
• Mapping methodology to the real-world sales process
• Reviews
• Online reinforcement
• Collecting success stories
• Learning Pods
• Roleplays
• Test your team
• Getting your trainer to help win the big deals
• Manager training
• Certification
• Cookbooks
• Playbook

If you were to use some of these, say four at least, that training, it will work!
To learn more about how we can support you make the training work, contact us now: glynn@sandler.com 07866 518848