The Sales Training ROI Gap

The ROI GapIn our prior installment, Time for Sales Training to Grow Up, we discussed how companies over the past decade have struggled to achieve and sustain sales performance improvement – this while spending billions of dollars annually on sales training and improvement initiatives. As a sales training organization, we felt compelled to identify why companies aren’t attaining a higher return on their educational investments in sales. Interviews with multiple customers and experts, as well as industry research provided a number of insights. We identified five key contributors to the ROI dilemma:

1. Too Much Too Soon – The Sales Training “Event” - It is virtually impossible for sales professionals to learn, retain, and apply more than a small percentage of what is typically offered in intensive, multi-day training events – unless there is a systematic reinforcement approach across an extended period of time.
2. Training Not Aligned Around a Proven Sales Process - Training efforts focus exclusively on skills and techniques.  If there is no process “backbone” to attach new practices to, the new methods are applied sporadically and soon fall into disuse.
3. Fragmented Training Approaches - Many initiatives apply a partial or fragmented training approach that fails to provide an engaging, planned learning experience - across time.
4. Gaps in Curriculum for Specific Roles and Competencies - Even when there are attempts to define skills gaps with some level of rigor, some of the most critical competencies are often omitted from training initiatives.
5. Sales Management is Overwhelmed - In the high pressure environment of, “make your numbers this quarter,” most sales managers simply don’t have time to address the overall coaching and mentoring needs of their direct reports.

The illustration below is based on actual learning research that reveals the erosion of newly learned methodology content because of the factors cited above. As a result, most sales training dollars do not realize the expected return on investment. Research indicates that without systematic, ongoing learning and reinforcement, approximately 50% of the learning content is not retained within five weeks, much less applied. Within 90 days, 84% of what was initially learned is lost.

The ROI GapBut a continual learning approach, if well designed, can overcome many of the shortcomings of conventional training methods. So what can your organization do to combat the ROI gap and maximize the “return on training?” Next well we’ll take a closer look at what sales training research tells us about “best-in-class” practices, and begin to formulate a strategy for 2011 – and beyond.