

The Economic Impact of Sales Training: How Sales Skills Contribute to Organizational Growth
Consider how different the sales function is from nearly every other discipline a business requires to thrive and grow. Whether the company is a Japanese manufacturer, a Brazilian information company, an Indian professional services provider or a German Defense firm, each has functions such as Accounting, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Engineering, Executive Management, Production, HR, Legal, etc.
Not every company worldwide has or requires each of these disciplines, but notice that in these cases, the professionals working in these areas bring formal education, specific, measurable skills, training and, in some cases, professional certification. Many even require continuing education credits to maintain their professional license. Guess which function has no such formal credentialing?
Answer: Sales.
Questions to ask yourself: The Sales Function Gap
Hiring sales professionals is a process of guesswork, subjective evaluation and examining past sales success for many companies.
- Is it any wonder that sales leaders and senior executives worldwide consistently report frustration with their sales performance?
- Have you ever wondered why only the sales function is often mated with a function called “Sales Enablement”?
- Is there another department in any company with an “enabling” function?
The Importance of Comprehensive Sales Training
These questions set the context for a summary of why sales training can significantly accelerate business success and why there is such a gap between potential and actual performance for teams without formal sales training. When discussing achieving sales training’s full potential, let’s start with what does not qualify as sales training.
For many companies, sales training involves training sales teams on the products and/or services their company offers. While sellers need to understand the products or services they represent, this does not provide them with key skills, strategies, market intelligence, market stratification, etc., that enable success.
Likewise, in many companies, sales training involves introducing sellers to the technology stack they are expected to master. While many of these technologies can benefit efficiency, there is little evidence that a technology stack alone will provide an acceptable economic return.
In other areas, sellers receive training, and much of that training is necessary and can be an essential part of sales success. However, too often, the content and process for educating sellers on valid, proven sales best practices are missing.
Economic Benefits of Sales Training
No field is as crowded with companies claiming they can provide economic benefits but who consistently fall short of those promised outcomes as the industry of sales training providers. In the simplest of terms, providers who can fulfill their promises must be able to demonstrate:
- The content they provide is legitimate. Every company claims to have “research,” but only a handful of studies are based on determining actual statistically verified best practices.
- Their ability to tailor the content to the needs of the training audience. This means adapting to what the sales support personnel, sales managers, marketing personnel, and senior management must also master.
- They can provide a clear path to mastery, where the training experience is merely the start of a process rather than an event. Few companies seeking outside expertise recognize that this ability is far more critical than the content itself.
- They can provide a certification path beyond a simple checkmark that a participant has completed a course. Is there a certification process that ties training content to measurable improvement?
Anyone seeking outside help to improve sales performance should evaluate each of these subtleties and some complexity. If these things are in place, however, the overall impact of sales training provides a short-term economic benefit that any other initiative cannot equal. Let’s look at why this is the case.
The Critical Role of Task Clarity in Sales Effectiveness
There is no such thing as the perfect salesforce, nor a sales team that has no room for improvement. Every sales team has specific areas of challenge. It could be that sales call planning and execution skills are lacking, it could be that sales strategy skills are not capable of maximizing a company’s potential, or it could be that the sales team does not do an adequate job of adding opportunities to the top of the sales funnel. A myriad other issues could be at play. Regardless of the specific challenges, they all have a common characteristic. Sellers lack what we label “task clarity.”
What we mean by task clarity is the idea of a seller knowing:
- what specific tasks are most closely related to their success
- what cadence of these activities is required for maximizing success
- what level of mastery is necessary to maximize success.
In this case, “tasks” refer to the individual activities a seller can control and the activities their managers can inspect, evaluate, and coach. Identifying these “tasks” also guides the form and content of training that will produce the highest ROI.
Companies can remove the most significant barrier to revenue growth by focusing on task clarity, maximizing margin, renewals, etc. One of the most shocking findings from the data was the impact of task clarity on morale, reducing turnover, speed to productivity, sales manager effectiveness and a host of benefits essential to other parts of an organization.
Every company is different in many ways, so it would be impossible to give a blanket indication of the expected ROI/ROE from training. However, research has consistently proven that when done correctly, no other initiative can produce as high or as immediate a set of benefits as practical sales training.
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About the Author: Tom Snyder is the Founder & Managing Partner of Funnel Clarity, a sales consulting and training company that focuses primarily on the areas of sales strategy, sales skills, and sales process for sales leaders. Funnel Clarity

