Sales Training Blog - RAIN Group

Is your sales training falling short?

According to ES Research between 85% and 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. At the same time, companies are spending billions of dollars on sales training each year. That’s billions of dollars being wasted on limited sales performance impact and only short-term boosts in sales at best.

Training can be a disappointment right away when it just doesn’t go well, or it can be a disappointment months later when results don’t materialize. Regardless, sales training strikes out a lot. When it does, it’s usually because of common and predictable reasons. But if you can avoid these mistakes, you can set yourself up for a successful training initiative that leads to increased sales performance and long-term revenue growth. Here are 7 reasons why your sales training might be failing...

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How Was the Sales Training? 14 Comments to Avoid at All Costs

By Mike Schultz

successfailure What does sales training failure look like? Hear any of the following comments after asking, “How was the sales training?” and you’re closing in on it.

Failure is popular these days.

Seriously.

I’ve been reading (and recommend) The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. In The Lean Startup, Ries covers a number of concepts to help entrepreneurs and their new ventures to succeed. One such concept is ‘Validated Learning’.

Essentially, Validated Learning is a process by which you try a lot of things that you think make sense, measure the results, find that you made a lot of mistakes and hit on some successes, and keep on keeping on by avoiding the mistakes and testing new things.

I like it. For a business.

For sales training, not so much.

I’m a fan of failure when...

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Sales Training

RAIN Group Brings Home 6 Top Sales Awards

By Erica Stritch

The votes have been counted and the results of the 2011 Top Sales Awards are in. We are thrilled that RAIN Group brought home 6 awards in total including the gold in 4 categories:

Top Thought Leader: Mike Schultz and John Doerr
Top Sales Book: Rainmaking Conversations
Top Sales Resource Site: RainToday.com (taking home the gold for a second year in a row)

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Vote for the 2011 Top Sales Awards

By Erica Stritch

It's that time of year again when all of the "Best of 2011" blog posts, newsletters, and magazine articles are coming out – from the best new business books to the best restaurants in every city.

This year we are thrilled that RAIN Group and our online publication RainToday.com have been nominated for an unprecedented total of 7 Top Sales and Marketing Awards.

But the voting ends tomorrow!

With stiff competition in each category, we need all the voting help we can get. If you find that we're deserving and you would be willing to vote for us, we're up for:

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How to Build Fluent Product Knowledge and Improve Sales Success

By Mike Schultz

Build product knowledge to improve sales success.

Salespeople know what they sell, and they sell what they know. When it comes to salesperson knowledge, people know too little about their particular industry, their customers’ needs, and their company’s products and services to be able to sell the full suite of solutions. Without this knowledge they can’t:

Ask the right questions to uncover the complete set of customer needs
Match the right products and services to those needs
Position the value of their company as superior to other options available to the customer

Indeed, they can’t and don’t hold masterful sales conversations with customers.

The result: Lost sales and missed cross-selling opportunities.

Some of you may be saying to yourself, “Wait. We provide knowledge training. We even hold a retreat each year and classes focused on knowledge topics.”

Perhaps you’re the exception, but most often even if product knowledge training happens, it doesn’t get the job done. If there is some kind of test for knowledge gained, it’s usually only for accuracy.

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