Is Your Sales Training Failing Your Sales Team?

By the looks of my LinkedIn feed lately, there is a lot of training going on to close out the business year and get people trained up for the start of 2018!

Great!

It is awesome to see so many people and organizations investing in the ongoing development of their people.

Organizations are not made up of brands, buildings, or anything else except the people that bring all these other things to life.

As much as I am cheered by the amount of education and training going on, I'm also disheartened by how quickly the effects of the training last or how little impact the training has on the organizations and people investing time and money in these learning situations.

Which leads me to my question: "Why Aren't We Seeing More Impact From Our Training And Development?"

I've got some ideas and some ways that we can make these investments more effective:

No Outcomes Are Set:

In too many instances, sales training becomes a band-aid and an IBM for the underperforming sales team.

You know the IBM analogy, right?

No one was ever fired for hiring IBM.

Same goes for sales training!

No one was ever fired for bringing in some sales trainers to "motivate" and "up-skill" the team.

The problem with this mentality is that "motivation" is one of those fuzzy words that we throw around when we don't have any better ideas because the thing is, someone might get you hyped up for a moment or two, but most sustained motivation is internal...meaning you have to motivate yourself to take the actions necessary to succeed.

The other problem with this thinking is that most of the time any sort of "up-skilling" becomes a reinforcing of the things that may not be being done, but might not be the most effective use of your teams' time and energy.

As an example, investing too much time and energy on a training that focuses on the words you should never use in sales or something along those lines can feel good, but is it doing a lot of good?

To overcome this, the first thing you should be thinking about in any training setting is what you hope to achieve with your training.

I hate the fuzzy metrics like "motivation," or "helping."

If you are bringing in someone for training or educational purposes, why?

Why is it that you are bringing in the trainer?

Is it your sales teams aren't creating enough opportunities?

Are you getting meetings and calls, but not closing?

Is it something else?

Whatever it is, you need to begin the discussion about what you want your training to achieve by focusing on outcomes.

"We want to find some tools and ideas that will increase our ability to set appointments."

"Our closing rate is at about 5%, we would like to see that increase to 6% because each percentage increase is $X."

These are very specific and enable you and your partner to develop specific plans and educational opportunities around specific outcomes.

Not just cookie cutter programs that "motivate."

The training is a one-time event:

This is likely the biggest challenge to training and education success of any that I see.

What do I mean?

In most cases, the training or education happens and everyone is excited to take their new ideas back to the office to put them to work.

A day or two pass and the new ideas never really get implemented or followed up on.

Why?

Because in most instances no one is holding the new ideas and actions that the education should spur and encourage to account.

This usually means that the sales manager might want the training to help people use more of their prospecting tools to open sales opportunities.

For one day, the sales staff is gung-ho on the new ideas, using new call scripts, new email templates, social selling ideas, whatever and after a day or so, the old habits become too much to overcome and everyone goes back to doing what they have always done.

A few weeks down the road, no improvement has been seen and everyone assumes that the training was failed or that the salespeople are the problem.

The real problem is that after the learning occurs, no formal plan for follow through is created.

What does this mean for you?

It means that learning isn't enough. The real value comes in the follow through.

Instead of trying to shovel 10 or 20 ideas onto your team and having them pick and choose how to implement them, prioritize implementing them, you need to set down some time with each member of the team so that you can come up with an action plan for new ideas, how and when you are going to follow up, and what success looks like.

Your training becomes monotonous or worse:

While I believe that all motivation is personal, the person doing the training needs to be engaging, bring new ideas, and have something new to present.

Far too many educational opportunities I see are monotonous or worse.

What do I mean?

I mean that one of the reasons that the training and education becomes ineffective and not helpful to the improvement of anyone's performance is because in too many cases, the same ideas are presented over and over again...maybe with a different voice or a different angle, but it is the same ideas that have always been offered up with a new bow on them.

The thing is that there is a constant variety of new ideas that you should be searching out and figuring out how to inject into your organization, no matter what industry you are in.

Just changing the voice of the same bad idea isn't going to work very well.

Here's the big point of this:

If your sales or marketing teams aren't achieving the numbers you need them to, the answer may not be to double down or up-skill techniques and skills that aren't the most effective.

Instead of doing that, the best course of action might be to take a step back and ask yourself a new set of questions.

Let's say you need to open more sales conversations, your first reaction might be to bring someone in to motivate or to work on cold calling techniques.

But what would happen if you asked instead:

"Are we using marketing and sales together effectively to open sales opportunities?"

"What would happen if we added an additional form of touch to our call schedules?"

"Is there some way that we can take advantage of our content to help open opportunities?"

The key in any of your training, educational opportunities, or process improvements is to not just fall back into what you have always done but to spend some time rethinking the question to get a better answer.

As for whether or not your education program is as effective as it could be if you are expecting your trainers and partners to "motivate" or "up-skill" it's likely you aren't going to have as much success as you hoped.

If you, instead, look to any educational opportunities as a jumping off point for rethinking your strategy, creating new accountabilities, and introducing new ideas, the likelihood of success goes up tremendously.

What say you? Let me know in the comments.

BTW, I do a Sunday morning newsletter that focuses on value. Sign up for it and I will throw in my ebook with my 12 most popular blog posts ever each with a little new commentary or ideas to update them.