How to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Training Program

How to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Training Program

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What is Sales Training?

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Sales training is a vital investment for every firm that wishes to increase its sales effectiveness and competitiveness. But how do you know if your sales training is effective and aligned with your business goals? How do you compare your sales training success with other organizations in your industry or market? We'll look at some of the best techniques and approaches for gauging the effectiveness of your sales training in this blog post.

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How to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Training Program

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• Be Certain to Understand Your Baseline: If at all feasible, get some data prior to starting training so that you can assess the performance of your sales staff before determining how successful a training program is. In addition to gathering data regarding the success of the sales team—such as the quantity of closed deals and revenue goals reached—you should also assess each representative's performance. You may gather information about their phone habits, for instance. Do they arrive at work promptly? Are they adhering to the call scripts? Even though this is anecdotal, having as much knowledge as possible at the outset is beneficial. 

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• Determine what constitutes success: At the beginning of your training program, define "success". After a full year of sales training, what outcome are you hoping to achieve? Is money the only thing on your mind? If so, attempt to set a target as a figure or a certain close rate. It is also advisable to have your leadership participate in establishing this aim, or at the very least approve it. The cause? Determining success after the fact can be challenging, particularly if your company is attempting to reduce spending. If you have already established a goal, you can demonstrate how near you were to achieving it. But as we'll see in a moment, success doesn't always translate into money.

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• Set Expectations For Your Training: Writing for ATD , Instructional Designer Diane Valenti suggests that companies measure Return On Expectations (ROE) rather than ROI. That means setting behavioural targets for your training program. Maybe you want your team to have better phone etiquette, nurture customer relationships or stick to your sales process well. Rather than trying to tie training to financial data, measuring ROE tells you whether your sales reps are actually doing what they were taught to do in training. If their behaviour has changed, she says, you can then measure whether the activities they are doing are getting sales results—and that is tied to financial gain.

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• See How Much of Your Representatives' Recall: One method of tracking the success of your training without depending on your bottom line is to measure the behaviour of your sales team. Another is tracking how well they remember the lessons you've taught them. It's usually reasonable to assume that after completing a course or training module, participants will forget some of the material, particularly if the material isn't immediately applied. By assessing your salespeople's comprehension and "forgetting curve," you can determine how much of your training they are actually grasping and, consequently, how well they are applying it.

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• Continue To Watch And Examine The Data: In the same way that selecting sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as closure rates and conversions is crucial before beginning any training program, you also need to pay close attention to the information that your learning management system, or LMS, is gathering about your students. You can monitor your sales team's training progress with an effective LMS dashboard. It will show you who is logging in, which courses they are taking, how well they are doing in their training, and who would benefit from an intervention. If your training program has a behavioral or financial goal, why is monitoring learning metrics so crucial? Because even while it's critical to determine whether you're realizing