When you invest in sales training, you’re committing time and resources with the distinct possibility of failure. From misaligned goals to lackluster adoption, there are many reasons why sales training doesn’t achieve desired results. Proper planning is a must for sales training that works. That means doing your research and finding an effective training provider to partner with and guide you through the process. Fortunately, you can set up your organization for success when it comes to sales training. The 22 green flags in this checklist give you a rubric to analyze potential providers, ask good questions, and form the foundation of your decision making. Download it as a quick reference or refer to our more detailed rationale below.

How to Make Hybrid Sales Training Work

Erica Schultz
November 21, 2022

Want to take this article with you or share with a colleague? . With the rise of virtual training, hybrid workforces, and self-directed learning, what is the role of in-person training? Is in-person sales training dead? Yes and no. It’s true the global pandemic radically changed how sales organizations think about live events, including salesforce onboarding, education, and SKOs that were once the norm. The pandemic challenged sales teams to try new and creative solutions for training, most of them digital-first.

What Is Sales Training?

Mike Schultz
October 26, 2022

Sales Training Defined  Sales training is the process of improving seller skills, knowledge, and attributes to drive seller behavioral change and maximize sales success. To be most effective, sales training should be viewed, designed, and executed as a change management initiative.

14 Sales Training Techniques for Building Elite Sales Teams

Mary Flaherty
October 12, 2022

During a now-famous interview on the Pierre Berton Show in 1971, Bruce Lee shared a simple philosophy: “be like water.” As fitting as Lee’s advice is for sellers, “be like a sponge” works just as well. To stay ahead, sales teams must continuously absorb new information and develop skills. Ongoing training and coaching and sustained effort over time is crucial. Otherwise, sellers (and their managers) risk not reaching their potential. Fortunately, there are sales training techniques that even the most experienced teams will soak up.

30 Sales Training Ideas for Top-Performing Teams

Mary Flaherty
September 28, 2022

For sellers, routine can be a blessing and a curse. It’s true that doing the same things day in and day out provides structure. It requires discipline, too. But it can also turn into a comfort zone in which many sellers stagnate. This is what makes recurring sales training programs so valuable. Yet even after the most engaging, resonant sales training programs, sellers tend to revert back to what they’re accustomed to doing. Which puts a heavy onus on sales managers.

Sales Training Topics to Drive Results

Mary Flaherty
August 17, 2022

TL;DR? Download the PDF and save it for later. If you’re responsible for designing or implementing sales training for your organization, you know the effectiveness of training varies greatly. It might not be implemented properly, land well with participants, be relevant to sellers’ daily work, or it might be forgotten completely in the days and weeks following the training. Sales training fails more often than it succeeds. But, for those who get it right, the payoffs are substantial.

Unlocking Sales Training: Four Keys to Driving Behavioral Change

Haley Katsman
November 18, 2020

Most people who enter the discipline of sales training and enablement have an intrinsic motivator to help people. They are teachers, inspirers, coaches, and cheerleaders. But sometimes, even the most skilled trainers are faced with obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Training is inherently challenging. Research on The Forgetting Curve shows that within one week, people will have forgotten an average of 90% of the information presented. What's more, training is difficult to facilitate, reinforce, and measure. This reality contributes to more than 25% of salespeople reporting that their training has little or no effect.

Virtual Training Best Practices: How to Get and Keep Attention and Engagement

Andy Springer
July 1, 2020

Engagement Threshold (noun): The point at which attention is captured and maintained, and below which is lost. We teach the concept of the engagement threshold to sellers that need to hold buyers’ attention in virtual sales meetings. When we teach it to sellers, we need to gain and keep their attention. It’s never been easy, but in a virtual environment, it’s significantly more difficult.

Complimentary Guide: 9 Principles of Virtual Learning Success

Erica Schultz
April 29, 2020

Since the Coronavirus pandemic began, virtual training has become an imperative. But designing and delivering effective virtual training is more the exception than the norm. Virtual training failure is all too common. That’s because virtual training that works is still in its infancy, and most organizations struggle to convert what works for in-person training to a virtual environment.

On-Demand Webinar: 9 Key Principles of Virtual Learning Success

Erica Schultz
March 18, 2020

COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated changes in how business is done around the world. With employees working from home, travel bans, and new developments daily, virtual training has become an imperative. But many organizations have never done virtual training, and many L&D and sales enablement professionals are looking for new ideas and approaches. It’s easy for virtual training to fail, so how do you make it truly successful with so much riding on it?

Sales Training Reinforcement: How to Get it Right

Mike Schultz
March 11, 2020

Reinforcement has been a trend in the world of sales training for a while now. All the research data in sales training—and learning and development in general—supports the need for robust reinforcement. But it’s still not happening often enough. According to Aberdeen, fewer than half (44%) of companies formally follow-up initial sales training with reinforcement. At the same time, the companies that do reinforce training see 20% more sellers achieve sales quotas.

On-Demand Webinar: 20 Sales Tips in 20 Minutes for 2020

Erica Schultz
December 11, 2019

With 2020 less than a month away, it’s time to think about what sales success looks like for you in the new decade. Are changes in buyer behavior affecting your sales success? Are your accounts buying as much or as often as they could be? Are you losing big in negotiations?

Sales Training Best Practices: What World-Class Organizations Do

Dave Shaby
October 23, 2019

In most organizations, it’s easy to make the case that millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars in financial gain can be had through sales improvement. You can affect growth. You can affect competitiveness. You can affect stock price. These are common items on leadership top priority lists.

The Sales Training and Enablement Revolution

Mike Schultz
September 25, 2019

The cliché of clichés to open an article like this is to say change is afoot. So I won't open with "change is afoot." In the world of sales training and enablement, change is explosive. There's a revolution going on in training and sales enablement that organizations can no longer ignore.

[New Guide] The Complete Guide to Sales Training Success

Erica Schultz
September 11, 2019

Sales training is often approached with a car wash mentality: You're in, you're out, and you're ready to sell. But this isn't how real learning happens. This isn't how you help sellers raise the bar and change how they sell. It's time for an entirely new approach to sales education; an approach that overhauls the way sales training is conceived, designed, and executed over the long-term. An approach that drives real behavior change and results.

3 Ways to Make Your Sales Training System More Effective

Mike Schultz
January 16, 2019

The most popular and effective diets and workout routines—ones that lead to the most dramatic changes—have specific guidelines and rules for how to follow the system. No such system existed for sales—until now. And, it works.

Want the Best Sales Training? Focus on These 9 Outcomes

John Doerr
March 7, 2018

When you're considering sales training, it's important to know what results you want to drive. Before any initiative, you need to answer one simple question: What do we want to achieve? There are many possible targeted outcomes of sales training from growing revenue and improving margins to increasing the average size of sale and growing accounts. Make sure whatever sales training initiatives you choose match up with your desired outcomes. As you think about your own sales training efforts, consider these possible results and how to achieve them.

Making the Business Case for Sales Training: New Research on Supporting Top Performance

Mike Schultz
May 24, 2017

Executives are always on a mission to prove Kirkpatrick Level 4 measurement of training: Results. Specifically, they want to know to what degree targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training event and subsequent reinforcement. There is relatively little data on how sales training correlates to business performance and results. That is, until now.

5 Sales Training Ideas to Improve Results (and Sustain Them)

Mike Schultz
April 19, 2017

By now you know that teaching people how to sell and become Top Performers takes more than a one- or two-day event. It takes ongoing reinforcement. Sales training is a change initiative. Going through a single class in two days does not change the way sellers sell. Change happens over time, once sellers get back to work and start implementing newly learned skills.

What Sales Metrics Should You Track? – The Essential List [PDF]

Mike Schultz
June 11, 2015

"What gets measured gets managed." – Peter Drucker Only when you have a good sense of what's going on in your organization can you decide which buttons to push to make the greatest improvements. Even small efforts to track key sales metrics can quickly drive better results.

Sales Team Training that Produces Real Results

John Doerr
May 19, 2015

Your sales team isn't hitting quota. You have aggressive growth goals but keep falling short. You want more of your sales team to transition from average to top performers.

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of B2B Sales Training

Ago Cluytens
January 20, 2015

There's one question I wish I got asked more when working with leaders looking to invest in B2B sales training. That question is, "What will it really take to get the best results?" If you're a seller, you can probably relate to the experience of a well-meaning trainer giving examples from an industry that had nothing to do with yours. Or maybe they didn't have a credible track record to back up their claims. And when the training was over, it was back to business as usual the next morning.

How to Set Up the Best Sales Training

Bob Croston
January 29, 2014

I recently returned from an industry conference. The speakers were excellent and it was great to get away from my desk, connect with the attendees, and have the opportunity to step back and think big picture about what I need to be doing to drive success in my position. I returned with all sorts of notes, to-dos, and grand visions for change.

Why Does Sales Training Fail? It's Your Fault!

John Doerr
December 3, 2013

Sales training is a multibillion-dollar business. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated to be more than $5 billion (according to Dave Stein in Sales Training: The 120-Day Curse from ES Research Group). Yet, also according to Stein, between 85% and 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. If we do the math, that amounts to somewhere north of $4.25 billion of unproductive training.

7 Reasons Why Sales Training Fails

Mike Schultz
February 21, 2012

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:

How to Build Fluent Product Knowledge and Improve Sales Success

Mike Schultz
November 29, 2011

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

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