Training is important but must be reinforced and sustained to make a lasting impact. We’ve heard it all before, but we don’t always invest the necessary time and effort into sustainment to really make a difference.
However, according to a recent report by Aberdeen Research, “It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Reinforcing Sales Training”, organizations that take the right measures to sales training reinforce and sustain impact significantly outperform their peers.
According to Aberdeen;
“The ever-changing landscape of the business-to-business sales profession necessitates a fresh look at crucial training and development activities … More than ever, companies expecting scalable and repeatable sales success stories are embedding their educational efforts into long-term, flexible, tech-say methodologies designed for multi-year results.”
The report offers some interesting observations and statistics. I’ve highlighted a few of these points below.
- The most effective B2B sales firms are 22% more likely (more than one in five) than all other sales firms to reinforce training at least once each quarter.
- Companies that carry out post-training reinforcement see 20% more salespeople achieve sales quotas.
Aberdeen raised more interesting and significant points to consider and actions to take — “takeaways” — from their survey and analysis of the results.
- Effective firms provide at least some sales training to nonsales staff. When the two groups understand each other, both benefit — as does the company.
- The need to focus training on better sales conversations between sales representatives and their clients. Train your staff to understand the needs of clients and to directly address these needs.
- Learn from the experience of others. Go even further. Collect the experience of others. Establish a central database of best practices — what works and what does not work — and under what circumstances methods work.
Continuous professional development, throughout a working career, is the best way, probably the only way, to enable people to remain effective employees. A well-thought-out sales training reinforcement plan drives effective employee development. The more effective companies know this and act on this knowledge.
