Development Dollars (Needlessly) Down the Drain

By Doug Hutton [image error]

Of all corporate functions, Sales consistently spends the most money on a per person basis for training and development. From technical product courses to negotiation or Challenger skills, sales rep development often goes unquestioned as critical to achieve sales outcomes, even after factoring rep time away from customers. Then how do sales leaders square that truism with clear data that training often has limited impact on performance and widespread dissatisfaction persists with current development offerings? SEC research shows that 84% of sales executives rate their sales training programs as being only “somewhat effective” or “not effective” – not a rosy picture for what is likely the largest line item after headcount.

Why are current sales training programs so ineffective?  A figure like 84% certainly has multiple culprits, but long-time CEB Sales Executive Council members likely recall the primary reason: sales reps forget 70% of the information they are taught within a week, and 87% within a month, without subsequent on-the-job coaching and reinforcement. We cannot reasonably expect that 13% of training curricula can truly move the needle when it comes to sales performance.  The next logical question becomes this – how can we prepare both sales reps and their managers for successful development experiences to boost the amount of retained knowledge?

The answer is surprisingly simple: individual applicability.  Research from CEB Learning & Development has found that training’s relevance to urgent individual skill gaps is one of the most impactful drivers of both a rep’s motivation to apply learnings, and (unsurprisingly) corresponding improvement in rep performance. The member imperative becomes this: putting a clear view of those urgent skill gaps in the hands of each rep before training, and providing sales managers with the tools to coach to those gaps afterwards.

As mentioned in an earlier post, CEB is excited to announce our newest service, CEB Challenger Selection & Assessment. Not only can this offering help organizations make more objective hiring decisions, the Challenger Assessment can determine the specific competencies correlated to high performance for particular roles and develop a deep understanding of current skill gaps. This will enable you to deploy targeted, applicable sales training to groups of reps with similar skill gaps.  Not only will this save you money by not allocating resources to ineffective training, it will also highlight to employees your intent to provide them with thoughtful, impactful development opportunities.

By assessing your sales reps across a wide variety of competencies, each rep will receive a tailored individual development report, complete with guidance on how to improve Challenger skills and their overall selling ability. Sales managers will then have a roadmap to help each rep close critical skill gaps, while sales leadership can allocate resources most appropriately for training and development.

For more information on this new offering and to begin adding more Challengers to your sales force, please click here to send us an e-mail; we will reply within 24 hours to schedule a subsequent conversation.

SEC Members, to learn more, visit the Challenger Selling topic center and review the Challenger Rep Starter Kit. In addition, look at the Talent Development topic center for best-in-class practices on training, coaching, and developing managers.