Why Corporate Sales Training Fails to Achieve Desired Results? 

Why do you train salespeople and sales managers? 

Some companies want to educate them and improve their skills. Some feel obligated to provide training while others provide training hoping to improve results. Some do it to help improve morale and feel good about making it available. These are all very noble concepts, but they usually achieve disappointing outcomes. 

The primary reason to train your salespeople should be to change your salespeople. Until THEY change, their beliefs, behaviors, strategies and tactics won’t change either. And that’s the root of the sales training problem. 

Many companies use their internal resources (trainers, HR people, sales managers, star salespeople) to provide training. They buy “train the trainer programs”, have companies develop curriculums for them, and then their internal people deliver the training. When they measure results by education (lessons learned), obligation (we did what was right), morale (it motivated everyone) and good feelings (thank you for providing this excellent program), these programs achieve their goal. But if you truly want to change your salespeople’s behaviors, thereby changing what they actually do each day, programs like these usually fail. 

In order to change salespeople, trainers must be able to do far more than follow a leader’s guide, teach the curriculum, and demonstrate the strategies and tactics through role plays. Sales trainers must have a number of competencies beyond sales and training. There are underlying reasons why salespeople do what they do, why they only do what’s comfortable, and take the path of least resistance. And they tend to not do what we need them to do and trainers must first see to understand why. 

How? Those insights come from Objective Management Group’s sales force evaluations. What are some of those weaknesses and to what extent do salespeople have them? 

Need their Prospects to Like Them – 48% 

They Don’t Buy in a Way that Supports Selling – 65% 

They Become Emotional in Difficult Selling Scenarios- 52% 

They are Uncomfortable Talking About Money – 53% 

Self-Limiting Beliefs – 84% 

Don’t Recover from Rejection – 72% 

Too Trusting – 60% 

Call Reluctance – 21% 

Ineffective Sales Process – 92%  

Effective trainers must be able to use that knowledge to understand how the beliefs and sales specific weaknesses prevent salespeople from effectively and consistently doing what they should. They must also be able to dig deep to help the salespeople understand that their lack of success and inability to execute a strategy has more to do with those hidden weaknesses than it does from not having the right strategy or tactic. Ultimately, the trainer must help salespeople overcome those weaknesses. 

A single training program, or even four over the course of a year, will fail. It has been well-documented in the psychological literature that repetition and rehearsal can improve learning (e.g. Miller, 1956; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Craik & Tulving, 1975). Furthermore, evidence from Kurlan & Associates suggests that salespeople must be taught new skills at least twice per month for at least eight months. The individual’s identified weaknesses require as much attention as the strategies and tactics and even then, if sales management has not been trained to provide effective coaching and hold salespeople accountable to making those changes, the training still won’t work! 

So why does so much training not achieve the desired result? The wrong people are delivering it, there isn’t enough reinforcement, the message hasn’t been delivered with enough frequency in enough ways for everyone to get it, there isn’t enough attention paid to the weaknesses, and management isn’t prepared to support it. 

One sales expert asked if we had data on what percentage of salespeople should be considered for a different role. In this case, a different role doesn’t mean a different sales role, it means that they are so ineffective and have such a limited upside, they shouldn’t be in sales – period. When we discuss salespeople that should be either redeployed or relieved of duty, we should also discuss the statistic for salespeople that aren’t trainable. In this case, trainable has no relation to competence, it refers only to whether they have the incentive to change and improve as salespeople.

Twice as many salespeople should be redeployed than there are strong salespeople. And there are twice as many untrainable salespeople as there are salespeople that should be redeployed. 

The statistics show that: 

22% are not trainable

10% should be redeployed

6% are elite 

If you have a sales team, you already know if you have one of the 6%. But do you know which of your salespeople can become elite? And do you know which ones fall into the redeploy and can train categories? They may not be who you think they are because you may not be measuring effectiveness using the correct metrics. But that’s a story for another newsletter.