Winners Versus Losers – What Does Research Tell Us?

In our prior installment, The Sales Training ROI Gap, we discussed some of the potential reasons that sales training fails to deliver the expected ROI. In the past year, we commissioned independent research (through Aberdeen Group) to help us better understand several important things:

1. How well are our (SPI’s) customers attaining improved outcomes?
2. What do top performing companies do differently than laggards?
3. What can these lessons contribute to a better strategy for sales training?

What sets apart the winners in sales performance?While the results for our customers were very positive, we won’t spend time here on that topic (we’ll have a full release later in January). Of more general interest is what we learned about top performing companies – companies that have significantly higher quota attainment and revenue attainment. The “best-in-class” companies outpace laggards in a number of areas, including:

• They have a defined process to objectively assess specific skill or competency gaps (they want to know the truth)
• They provide significantly more formal post-training reinforcement of best practices (they don’t leave this to chance)
• The provide a dynamic library of learning and reinforcement assets for marketing and sales teams (they provide extensive access to the right learning assets)
• They provide internal social collaboration tools and a central repository of best practices (they provide scalable ways to communicate and perform “self-coaching)
• They continue to provide instructor led training and complement that training with virtual and on-demand learning (they still need us humans to teach, but they repeat (and repeat) in multiple forms)

So your reaction is probably a resounding DUH! These ideas may seem incredibly obvious as methods to improve sales training effectiveness, but top performing companies seem to apply them much better and more consistently than their peers. If what you need to do is so obvious, why is that the case? From our observations, there is something more subtle at play here. Just listing out things to do to improve training results is helpful, but it doesn’t really provide an integrated strategy that can be put into consistent execution. Have you ever noticed that some professional sports franchises always seem to be in contention year after year, and others never can seem to create consistent results? They have the same access to talent, the same financial constraints, and strikingly similar organizational structure – but year after year some seem destined for another losing season.  

From our observations over nearly two decades, the top performing companies understand one thing really well - “programmatic” thinking. They just get it. In other words, they understand the difference between a collection of Ferrari parts and an assembled Chevrolet. Their sales and training organizations understand the difference between checklist compliant training events (and technologies) and on-going professional development that relates to business outcomes. The top companies have both the requisite parts and a coherent integration of the parts into a model for on-going improvement. They’ve organized the right intellectual property around a planned sequence of on-going learning and reinforcement - a continual learning program.

But programmatic thinking and execution can be difficult in sales, because sales organization can be very volatile and prone to change (the average tenure of a CSO is about 22 months). It can be very difficult to “wire” together a comprehensive, programmatic approach to continual learning and performance improvement. We think more companies can join the “best-in-class” attainment levels. Next week we will explore a fundamentally new approach to sales training – for 2011 and beyond.