Chapter 11
Getting the Most from Sales Training
In 1996, Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article titled “Ryder Sees the Logic of Logistics.”1 The story outlined the shift at Ryder from primarily renting, leasing, and selling trucks to primarily “planning transport for others.” Imagine the impact this change in strategy had on the Ryder sales force. One day the titles on their business cards are something akin to Truck Sales. The next it’s more like Global Supply Chain Management and Integrated Logistics Solutions Consultant.
In the 1990s, the shift to logistics in the shipping industry was a forceful trend. At that time we were working with a company facing the same kind of transition as Ryder. The charge was to transform a truck sales force into logistics consultants.
Take an old-school truck sales and leasing strategy, and boil it down. You get something like, “You wanna buy a truck? Oh, good. What kind of truck?” When the company’s whole strategy changed to logistics, everything needed to change. Describing the sales transformation necessary would take pages. Instead of doing that, we’ll just tell you the title of the training initiative: (Name of company) Insight Sales.
Before that time and since, consultants at RAIN Group have transformed sales forces across industries to raise their game and drive their own demand by selling ideas and inspiring buyers to think differently. In this chapter, we share seven keys to success we’ve learned over the years for what it takes to succeed with sales training—particularly when the stakes are high—with special attention paid to helping organizations succeed with training insight sellers. We’ve presented these seven keys in the negative—as seven reasons sales training fails—because people have told us it’s easier for them to say, “Yeah, that’s us” where the shoe fits and then take action to change it.
Failure of Sales Training
Here are two striking statistics:
- Companies spend $3.4 to $4.6 billion on sales training every year with outsourced sales training providers.2
- Between 85 percent and 90 percent of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days.3
That’s a lot of investment with little to show for it beyond short-term, short-lived gains.
And this is for sales training of every type. When companies are working to support an effort to build a team of insight sellers, because it’s no small challenge, the failures are even more pronounced. Fortunately, the reasons sales training fails are predictable and fixable for those so inclined. Here are the most common problems we see:
- Failure to align desired outcomes with learning needs
- Failure to build fluent sales knowledge as well as skills
- Failure to assess and develop attributes
- Failure to define, support, and drive action
- Failure to deliver training that engages
- Failure to make learning stick and transfer
- Failures of evaluation, accountability, and continuous improvement
We’ll cover each in turn.
1. Failure to Align Desired Outcomes with Learning Needs
Sales training has virtually no chance of producing lasting results if business leaders base their objectives and expectations of results on wishful thinking. They underestimate what it will take to implement training that will create desired behavioral change. They overestimate the impact of periodic and uncoordinated training events. As researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Louisiana State University put it, business objectives for sales training are all too often “platitudes rather than real plans for action.”4
Health Care or Entertainment?
While writing this book, Neil Rackham commented to us how sales training can be compared to two industries: health care and entertainment. We hadn’t thought of it quite like this, but we certainly see the same thing. When sales training is like health care, its purpose is to make something better. For health care–style sales training to succeed, you need the right understanding of the issues, the right treatment plan, and dedication from the health care provider and the patient to stick with the plan. When sales training is more like entertainment, it’s just an enjoyable diversion. It might make an impression—you might even remember months later how fun it was—but it doesn’t accomplish much beyond that.
We recently spoke with a business leader who was planning a half-day sales training program. His desired outcome was transforming a service and delivery team into a proactive sales force tasked with increasing sales to existing accounts by selling new offerings. How did they want to do it? Insight. They also communicated to us that success was critical. The future of the company literally hung in the balance.
We asked if there was any training delivery time available over and above the four hours? No, a half-day was it. We asked if it was possible to invest time and energy before the training through e-learning or after the training with learning reinforcement and coaching. No, just the half-day, and could we focus on really jazzing up the team?
The training needed to be health care but the approach was entertainment. We didn’t think it was going to work. The proportion of the input (i.e., the training initiative) needed to be rigorous enough to produce the desired output (i.e., account penetration with a team not used to selling, let alone inspiring buyers with new ideas, which is what they had to do). In this case, the business objective was clear, but the learning and change effort was nowhere near aligned to achieve it.
Assess the Learning Needs of Your Team
When it comes to learning needs of sellers, leaders need to figure out:
- Where the sales team is now regarding the skills, knowledge, and attributes needed to succeed (this is the starting point, or point A)
- Each individual’s improvement potential
- In which sales role each individual is most likely to succeed (and whether the person is a good fit for becoming an insight seller)
- What it looks like when they’ve succeeded (this is the new reality, or point B)
- What kind of effort and time it’s going to take to get from point A to B
When leaders don’t dig to find out what sellers need to produce the outcomes they seek, it makes for sales training initiatives that:
- Focus on content the team doesn’t need
- Leave out content the team does need
- Fail to deliver content at the right level of sophistication (e.g., too basic or too advanced—getting it just right is left to chance)
- Fail to build learning processes that are rigorous enough to actually develop needed skills and knowledge to the point they transfer to on-the-job behaviors
Before implementing any sales training program, the companies that succeed are serious about making sure the learning approach is rigorous enough to do its part in producing behavioral change and getting results.
2. Failure to Build Fluent Sales Knowledge as Well as Skills
Although insight sales skills are essential, they are only one side of a very important coin: capability. The other side of the coin is sales knowledge. As we covered in Chapter 8, insight sellers need to have expert sales knowledge across a variety of areas.
Some company leaders say to us, “Wait. We provide knowledge training. We even hold a retreat each year focused on updating knowledge across topics.” Unfortunately, this typically doesn’t get the job done. It’s often focused only on product or service offerings, which isn’t nearly sufficient. With a common death-by-PowerPoint delivery format, sellers don’t remember what they heard. Some companies do better than this, requiring sellers to study the content and pass tests for knowledge accuracy. Still, they find their sellers don’t weave what they learned into their sales conversations. For sellers to put knowledge to work, they don’t just need accuracy; they need fluency.
We define fluency as accuracy plus speed plus appropriate breadth and depth. When knowledge training stops at accuracy (if it even gets this far), companies miss a major revenue growth opportunity by not training to fluency.
Indeed, sellers at best-in-class companies are better at demonstrating product knowledge, understanding client business challenges, and mapping products and services to those challenges.6 In other words, they connect the dots by understanding need and crafting compelling solutions.
As we’ve argued throughout Insight Selling, sellers need to know more than just their offerings and how they solve needs. They need to know the buyer’s industry and their own. They need to know what happens after buyers buy and how to help them navigate the murky waters of difficult implementations. They need to know how they can maximize their impact on the buyer’s success. When sellers fumble around about these knowledge topics, they have neither the foundation nor the confidence to bring insight to the table.
Sales training will continue to fail until sales knowledge training:
- Takes its appropriate place alongside sales skills training
- Expands to cover the full suite of content
- Trains salespeople to fluency
To this last point, many say, “Fluency happens over time. You can’t expect someone to become an expert right away.” True, not right away. However, it can and should happen a lot faster than it does at most companies. It’s becoming more and more important to do so. As Jill Konrath writes in Agile Selling, “Getting better faster matters.”7 The implications for insight selling can’t be overstated. If buyers don’t trust a seller’s knowledge, they won’t take the seller’s advice. Good night, insight selling.
3. Failure to Assess and Develop Attributes
When I (John) worked for a large company, I knew a number of people who were top performers—really excellent results producers—who retired. There was a big problem, however—they never told anyone! For years, they just kept showing up to work, but they weren’t nearly the producers they used to be.
They had the capabilities to be top performers—they could sell—but they were no longer actually doing what it took to produce results. After years of overachievement, results dropped as their commitment waned. Where there used to be passion for work, passion for selling, performance orientation, money orientation, and perseverance, there was now complacency.
These are attributes, not skills. Attributes were the difference between past success and current mediocrity.
Assess Attributes along with Skills and Knowledge
Researchers publishing in refereed academic sales journals assert assessing competencies (we use the word attributes) is a must.8, 9 When sales leaders don’t assess their team’s attributes, sales training fails because:
- Sellers don’t have the drivers to succeed. People end up in sales training and may actually gain the requisite skills and knowledge to succeed, but they don’t have the drivers in place to achieve top performance, or sometimes, any performance at all.
- Sellers have detractors holding them back. Even those who have some drivers in place to succeed have detractor attributes that act like weights pulling them down.
If the drivers of success aren’t in place—meaning the person doesn’t have, for example, passion for work and for selling, performance orientation, sense of urgency, assertiveness, and so on—it’s quite possible the person shouldn’t even be in the training at all. Much as you might want your kids to go to medical school, if they fail biology and what they want to do is teach art history, medicine rarely works out.
If too many detractors are in place, the salesperson might have capability but can still fail.
Neglect real, incisive inquiry into each person’s attributes (described in Chapter 8), and sales training initiatives leave the gate with weights tying them down.
4. Failure to Define, Support, and Drive Action
According to Aberdeen Group, 85 percent of best-in-class companies use a formal sales methodology, preferably supplied by an external provider.
What’s more, these best-in-class companies are seeing dramatically better performance:
- Of their sales reps, 83 percent reached quota, versus 52 percent among industry average and 6 percent for laggard companies.
- A 15.4 percent average year-over-year increase in corporate revenue was seen versus the industry average 5.6 percent increase and a 1.5 percent decline among laggard companies.
- A 5.3 percent year-over-year increase in average sales deal size or contract value was seen versus the industry average 0.7 percent and a 2.6 percent decline among laggard companies.
The best-in-class companies are investing more in sales training—more than double that of the average and laggards11—and they’re clearly reaping the rewards.
Process and Methodology
Here are how process and methodology help.
- Process: a systematic series of actions, typically grouped in stages, aimed at producing a specific output
- Process is a guide to action. For sellers to bring insight to the table systematically, companies must build it into the process.
- Process helps sellers be efficient and get more done.
- Process prevents reinventing the wheel.
- Process allows for process improvement. If you can measure it, you can manage it. Find the people who are succeeding, and learn what they’re doing to succeed; then you can help other people do the same.
- Methodology: a system of strategies, principles, guidelines, tools, learning approaches, language, and evaluation methods for selling
- Methodology provides guidelines and tools for how to do specific things in the sales process, such as leading sales conversations, prospecting, delivering presentations, gaining commitment, goal setting, account management, and so on.
- Methodology creates a shared language that everyone in the company understands, uses, and follows.
- Methodology helps define what works in various areas of the process and provides a platform to share that across the sales force and company.
The companies that make insight selling work make it a part of the culture. Process and methodology are major parts of that.
From the process perspective, here is an example of how RAIN Selling has been tailored and overlaid into a major customer relationship management (CRM) system (Figure 11.1). When sellers have visual cues to remind them what they are supposed to do, real-time training and tools available, and tracking directly in their CRM, both the process and the method have a much better chance for adoption.
Figure 11.1 RAIN Selling Methodology Built into a Major CRM System
If you want sales training to succeed, don’t let it float in a vacuum without process and methodology.
Goals and Action Planning
Process and methodology are essentially guides for behavior. They help you know when to do certain things (process) and how to do them well (methodology). Sales training that gets this far, but doesn’t focus on goal setting and action planning, misses a huge opportunity to boost results.
When researching one of our other books, we spoke to Dr. Jim Harter, Gallup Consulting’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being. Gallup has asked over 12.5 million people, “Do I know what is expected of me at work?” Slightly more than half answered, “strongly agree.” In other words, slightly less than half are not so sure what’s expected of them at work.
Dr. Harter further told us, “Workplace performance suffers dramatically with those that answer below ‘strongly agree.’”
When sales training helps sellers build and track goals for themselves, it not only erases the problem of sellers knowing what’s expected of them but also maximizes motivation and commitment. With action plans, take care not to build them without first focusing on goal setting. Without clear, written goals, action plans aren’t meaningful to the individual. Without meaning, execution over the long term suffers.
When goals are in place, not only do they have the effect of maximizing action, but they can also increase the sellers’ attributes of passion for work and sales, their performance orientation, and their money orientation. Together these often increase motivation to succeed in sales.
Earlier in this chapter we discussed building capability. When sellers are capable, they can sell. Just after that we discussed attributes. When the right attributes are in place, they will sell and sell well. Add process and methodology and goals and action planning to the mix, and you add the catalyst to bring it alive: what to do to sell.
When process and methodology are in place, and sellers have goals and action plans, sales activities are more organized, more energetic, higher volume, more effective, and more efficient.
5. Failure to Deliver Training That Engages
Too often training can be boring and confusing. It can be unclear how to apply strategies and sellers are often left unconvinced they should bother trying. As noted earlier, ES Research estimates that between 85 percent and 90 percent of sales training initiatives have no lasting effect beyond 120 days. If a training event itself fails, there’s no positive effect at all. It’s more the opposite. Delivering a poorly designed and poorly received training event has greater negative effects beyond the obvious wasted time. Bad training discourages salespeople from participating in future programs and can have a negative impact on sales team morale.13
When training is boring, not applicable, not at the right level, and too focused on lecture versus practice, participants don’t engage.
No engagement = no learning = no behavior change.
For the training events themselves, companies have to get the content right and engage their teams with instructors they can respect. Trainers must also use appropriate adult learning devices, such as role-plays, case studies, simulations, exercises, videos, and other interactions. Otherwise, not only will training fail, but it’ll also be more difficult to get anyone back in the room for the next go-around.
6. Lack of Reinforcement—Failure to Make Learning Stick and Transfer
Months after a sales training initiative, salespeople too often say:
- I don’t remember what we covered in the sales training program.
- I don’t know enough to be able to use the tools and apply the advice.
- I didn’t get enough practice to feel confident enough to try it.
- I tried something and it didn’t work—not sure if I did it wrong.
- I’m sure the powers that be don’t remember that this was a priority anyway.
Most sales training focuses on a two- or three-day event where sellers learn and practice new skills. The problem with event-only training is that the effects of the event fade. Even if positive effects are seen initially, four months later results and behaviors go right back to where they started before the training.
Reinforce Training for Lasting Impact
Adult learning is an ongoing process. Only through repetition and practice will your sales team internalize the training and put it to use consistently. Let’s assume a sales training event is well received. After the event, you can either build on its effectiveness or let it fade (Figure 11.2).
Figure 11.2 Learning Effectiveness: During and after Instructor-Led Training
As Aberdeen Group found in one of its studies, “Best-in-class companies outpace laggards by nearly a two-times factor in providing post-training reinforcement of the best practices commonly learned in classroom-style instructor-led sales education sessions. These firms have learned that long-term success depends on underscoring the best practices in sales training deployments.”14
And the reinforcement makes a difference in results (Figure 11.3).
Figure 11.3 Impact of Reinforcement in 835 Organizations That Recently Employed Sales Training
The concept that learning needs to be reinforced won’t be much of a news flash for most readers. Still, strong posttraining reinforcement is the exception in sales training. For those companies that apply reinforcement that works, it makes a tremendous difference in training effectiveness and sales results.
7. Failures of Evaluation, Accountability, and Continuous Improvement
These won’t be the most exciting topics to many readers, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
Most companies implement sales training to increase revenue. Selling (like anything else) is a process with a series of identifiable and measurable inputs and outputs. If you can improve process efficiency (getting more things done) and effectiveness (getting things done with greater success), you can improve the eventual output, in this case, revenue.
Yet only 9 percent of organizations evaluate behavioral change, and only 7 percent evaluate organizational results stemming from training initiatives.15
Evaluating Sales Has Its Advantages
Those companies that do evaluate sales performance systematically have a number of advantages:
- They can measure the effect of sales training and performance improvement initiatives.
- They can improve sales strategies and rollout successes across the team.
- They can remove ineffective sales strategies and training components in favor of those working better.
- They can shorten learning curves and get new salespeople producing faster than before.
- They can improve continuously.
The evaluation process itself also has a positive effect on sales results. Customer renewal rates, deal size, team achievement of quota, and salesperson achievement of quota are all positively affected by performance management processes.16
Without effective training and sales performance evaluation processes, sales training can fail simply because companies have no idea if it has succeeded. Moreover, without an evaluation process, it’s nearly impossible to hold salespeople accountable for changing and improving behavior or for taking actions and achieving results.
No evaluation = no accountability.
Implemented in the right way, sales performance evaluation analytics can be the source of significant competitive advantage. In fact, 67 percent more best-in-class companies have sales analytics than laggards.17
As Thomas H. Davenport wrote in “Competing on Analytics,” “Organizations are competing on analytics not just because they can—business today is awash in data crunchers—but also because they should. At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes.”18
Employ analytics and you’ll be able to join an elite club: companies that actually succeed with continuous improvement. When everything comes together (Figure 11.4), you’ll have salespeople who:
Figure 11.4 What Happens When Capability, Attributes, Action, and Evaluation Work Together
- Can do
- Will do
- Know what to do
- Get it done and keep getting better
Many sales training dollars go to waste because leaders don’t pay proper attention to what needs to happen to make sales training work. When leaders turn these seven failures into successes, insight selling truly comes alive.
Chapter Summary
Overview
Although sales training fails for many organizations, the best-performing companies have successfully adopted and implemented sales training that boosts their results compared with those of average and underperforming companies. Fortunately, the seven common reasons sales training fails are predictable (and fixable).
Key Takeaways
| The Problem | The Fix |
|---|---|
| Failure to align desired outcomes with learning needs | Assess the learning needs of your team:
|
| Failure to build fluent sales knowledge as well as skills | Fluency = accuracy + speed + appropriate breadth and depth Sellers must be able to speak fluently about:
|
| Failure to assess and develop attributes | Assess attributes along with skills and knowledge:
|
| Failure to define, support, and drive action | Implement a process and methodology:
|
| Failure to deliver training that engages | No engagement = no learning = no behavior change. Get the content right. Engage teams with instructors they can respect. Use appropriate adult learning devices, such as role-plays, case studies, simulations, exercises, videos, and other interactions. |
| Failure to make learning stick and transfer | Reinforce training for lasting impact:
|
| Failures of evaluation, accountability, and continuous improvement | No evaluation = no accountability. Employ analytics to succeed with continuous improvement. Results in salespeople who:
|