Sales training consumes time and costs money. If training does not produce meaningful, long-term performance gains in a sales force, then it’s hard to see why any company would bother with it. Yet if “long-term performance gains” are the measure of success, then research supports my contention that about 90 percent of all sales training fails.
Obviously, it would be helpful to know in advance whether a particular sales training program you are considering is likely to provide a good return on your investment. So, here’s the question: What are the key differences between the 90 percent of sales training that fails and the 10 percent that succeeds? Here are the three major reasons why so many training programs fail:
- They have the wrong content. That is, they simply teach the wrong things.
- The training is rejected by salespeople. The trainees never “buy into” the premise that the program has useful things to teach.
- The training doesn’t “transfer” from the class to the job. Even if the trainees learn how to do something differently, they don’t go back and do it in the field, where it would count.