When you invest in sales training programs or sales coaching initiatives for your company, what would you most like to achieve? Sure, your list of goals for enhancingsales skills 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 courses also should improve salespeople’s ability to develop more business with current customers without giving up margins. Great sales coaching should enable them to build ever-stronger relationships with current customers and grow revenue dramatically.
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 leaders know that. Their satisfaction with sales training—the value they place on any sales training course—ultimately comes from the return on investment that they achieve: the tangible ROI.
How to evaluate sales training?
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 sales training courses or delivery methods
- Ability to customize sales training offerings
- Strength of client satisfaction
That fourth criterion, client satisfaction, is based on the reactions of salespeople and sales managers to the sales training, but most importantly on the tangible results that companies see following the sales training program. The first three criteria determine the program’s success at building new sales skills, but sales skills are significant only to the extent that they help produce tangible results.
This year Action Selling ® again won a Top 20 award. We won based on all four criteria. My point, however, is that we could not have earned the award if our clients didn’t rave about what our sales training courses did for them. And what they were raving about, specifically, was that by building the right key sales skills that unlocked the untapped potential in their sales forces, we helped them make a lot of money.
I mean measurable money. Money they could count.
For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.