4 Reasons You Need to Invest in Sales Training
After giving a physics exam to a graduate class, professor Albert Einstein was asked if the exam was the same exam he gave last year.
“Word for word”, stated Einstein. The inquirer was concerned about cheating and pressed Einstein on how he could give the exact same exam two years in a row.
“Because”, Einstein said, “in the last year, the answers have changed!”
We are living in a very fast-paced, knowledge-based, and global economy, which is why we must always be learning in order to keep up.
Much like physics, sales best practices can shift dramatically over a few years; just look at what the advent of the computer and the Internet did to the industry! This is why it’s important to invest in sales training; but that’s not the only reason.
4 Reasons to Invest in Sales Training
1. Prioritize Your Team’s Development
In his best-selling book Good to Great, Jim Collins said “get the right people on the bus and get them in the right seats”.
There is a huge investment in getting the right people, but once you get them you have to continue to invest in their development or you will either lose the employee or the employee will lose his edge.
Dr Brad Smart, the author of the book Top Grading, studied more than fifty corporations and found out that it costs an average of fourteen times a person’s salary for a mis-hire in the $100,00 range and twenty-eight times the the salary in the $100,000 – $250,000 range!
2. Teach them What They Didn’t Learn in College
According to Howard Stevens, CEO of HR Chally, in his book Achieve Sales Excellence, 66% of recent college graduates enter the sales profession. However, less than .5% of our colleges and universities offer a sales curriculum to prepare these graduates for their profession.
Companies usually offer product training and some a sales process. Unfortunately, most of the sales processes emphasize self-improvement (i.e time management, etc.), ideals that are designed to simply drive productivity. Sales professionals still lack the persuasive techniques needed to influence; they are missing the “how” to do it.
3. Discipline Makes It Stick
The objective of formal sales training is accelerated learning. The specific desired learning objective should be how to establish trust, create urgency, and generate preference.
It is not enough just to teach them how to do it, the trainee needs to have the process demonstrated, and then they need to do it themselves – hands-on. Unfortunately, most sales training programs do not stick because of a lack of discipline.
After the training event, trainees need to enter an “on-the-job”, continuous debriefing. This debriefing is designed to accelerate the learning and provide real-time coaching to make sure they aren’t just getting their repetitions in, but that they continue to improve their persuasive techniques. We don’t want the salesperson with the reported 20 years of experience that really has one year of experience repeated 20 times.
4. The ROI is Worth It
Finally, really good sales training results in really good Return On Investment. According to ES Research, third party sales training results in 40-fold improvement in sales metrics. Additionally, Harvard Business Review reported that $1 invested in sales training was worth more than $40 spent on advertising.
Most business professionals (Accountants, Architects, Attorneys) not only are required to get a degree in their field and pass an exam, they must continually re-educate themselves in their chosen field.
Therefore, while the questions that sales organizations have are relatively unchanged, including “How do we grow profitably?”, the answers continue to change!