Where Is the ROI in Your Sales Training?

When you invest in sales training for your company’s salespeople, what would you most like to achieve? Your list of goals might include better prospecting skills and an improved ability to secure new business. But what about the customers you’ve already got?

I suggest that great sales training also should improve salespeople’s ability to develop more business with current customers without giving up margins. It should enable them to build ever-stronger relationships with current customers and dramatically grow revenue.

What’s more, you should be able to measure the extent to which a sales training program enables your sales force to bring in those additional dollars. The best sales executives know that. Their satisfaction with sales training—the value they place on any sales-training initiative—ultimately comes from the return on investment that they achieve: the tangible ROI.

Client satisfaction with sales training comes from tangible ROI

Each year, Selling Power magazine issues awards to the Top 20 Sales Training Companies in the country. The evaluations are based on several criteria:

• Depth and breadth of training offered
• Innovative and new offerings (specific training courses or methodology) or delivery methods
• Ability to customize offerings
• Strength of client satisfaction

That fourth criterion, client satisfaction, is not just based on the reactions of salespeople and sales managers to the training, but more importantly on the tangible results that companies see following the training. The first three criteria are really just building blocks that help to produce the ROI results that lead to satisfaction.