Ten Reasons Why Most Sales Training Doesn’t Work

As I share my top ten reasons why sales training doesn’t usually work iyt’s important to note that You may not like them and/or may not agree with them.

I’ve been training salespeople at companies for almost 40 years, and I can tell you from experience that it’s always these one or more of the following ten reasons:

1. Sales training doesn’t work when a company doesn’t agree to have their sales team evaluated up front. An up-front evaluation tells us who can be trained, how much upside they have, what it will take to get them there, and shares with the sales team what they need to learn from training in order to improve. When a company skips that crucial piece, even customized training seems like off the shelf or out of the box.
2. Sales training doesn’t work when the top executive engaged in securing the training has no compelling reason to do provide training. In other words, they’re not stating, “We’re not growing fast enough,” “Our revenue isn’t high enough,” “Our revenue is flat,” “We don’t have enough of the market,” “We’re losing too many deals to the competition,” “We’re not retaining enough clients,” or “We’re experiencing deals getting stuck in the pipeline.” Instead of one of those compelling reasons to provide training, they’re just checking off a box; “We need to do training.” Check. When that happens, it’s not a company initiative, it’s just something nice to have.
3. Most sales training doesn’t work when the salespeople don’t have a compelling reason to change. And if we’re doing sales training the right way, expecting a sales transformation, and expecting different results, we’ll need a different effort, and we’ll need different skills. Well, if the salespeople have no compelling reason to change, change fails to take place and the results don’t change.
4. Sales training doesn’t work when there is no accountability for change. Sales managers who don’t’ hold their salespeople accountable for doing the things that they’ve been taught to do through training won’t see any change.
5. Sales training doesn’t work when the company doesn’t have an appropriate sales process. Most companies lack most of the required sales process stages and milestones and usually don’t have a sales-specific scorecard. So, you can train salespeople all you want, but if the sales process isn’t built from best practices, isn’t repeatable and predictable, sales training is not going to work.
6. Sales training usually fails when the methodology is inconsistent with the sales process and/or the results that you’re trying to achieve. The methodology and the process must be aligned with each other and to the company’s strategy.
7. Sales training doesn’t work when the trainer is ineffective. The trainer doesn’t have the team engaged, the team isn’t bought in, they don’t find it enjoyable, and don’t want to attend the training. That never works!
8. Most sales training doesn’t work when sales training lacks a role play component. You need to role play what good sounds like, and that must demonstrate what’s being taught in the training.
9. Most sales training doesn’t work when it isn’t connected to and won’t work in the real world. In other words, the training isn’t being applied to the company, the sales team, the salesperson and what they face every day. It’s too generic.
10. Most sales training doesn’t work when the sales managers weren’t trained to coach to the content that the salespeople are being trained on.

If you fix those ten things, sales will increase considerably.

When you don’t fix those things, it will be \training for the sake of training, and a sales transformation is not in the cards.