So, You give them $1000 per head for sales training and a month later the give you $130 back – What!?

Crazy as this seems, surveys and research show this is a common outcome.

There’s got to be a better way to ensure sales executives get a return from their sale training projects. We need to raise the bar in how we select Sales Training providers?

A poor investment?

What follows is my personal quest for improving the outcomes of such projects

Three reasons kept surfacing in conversations with sales managers:

1.      How Much People Forget.

No matter how well we train sales people and they say they get it, typically most value gained erodes inside 30 days (80%+ is typical)

2.      How hard people find it to change their natural behavior

They get frustrated easily, after seeing the value of change and experiencing progress during a training program, they slip back to their default behavior – their comfort zone.

3.      Even when trained well, coaching is too little and too-outcome focused. And again people revert to their default behavior pattern.

Our experience is not unusual.  All those trying to gain competitive advantage for their companies recognize these problems.

So, we discussed

Why aren’t things improving?

Getting the Best from your Sales Training: Methodological Agnosticism?

Designing Sales Training: Methodological Agnosticism

Sound weird, doesn’t it? Truth is . . .  being tied to one training methodology simply isn’t productive.

There’s no “perfect training methodology” – whether it be focused on selling, managing or coaching. Any training should  Advance Competence while Advancing Sales. Complex sales organizations need methodological purpose rather than one methodology piled on top of existing methodologies.

Additionally, people have been trained a lot in their lives. It seems obvious that we should also give them credit for the concepts, processes, and skills they have already learned. Adding methodologies (no matter how good they are) risks creating indifference. We know indifference does not change behaviors! Conversely, building commitment relies on giving your people and managers credit for what they already know, while at the same time changing behaviors that do not work.