Sales training can be incredibly beneficial for an ambitious business. However, it’s still an expense and it’s important to ensure that anything you invest in training is money well spent.
The best way to assess the value of sales training is to calculate the return on investment (ROI) it offers. A practical and useful metric, this information will allow you to better understand the value of targeted training and help you see where this training is having the biggest impact.
Define Your Objectives
Before you send your team on sales training or sign up for a course yourself, you need to define exactly what you want to achieve from the training. For a sales team, these objectives could include:
- Increasing sales revenue
- Improving conversion rates
- Reducing sales cycle times
- Enhancing customer retention
Once you’ve defined your objectives you need to identify the metrics that are relevant to them. For example, if your goal is to increase sales revenue, start tracking the sales or revenue generated by each salesperson before training. You can then compare these figures once training is complete to see how your investment has paid off.
Collect Pre-Training Data
As we’ve already seen, collecting pre-training data is an essential part of calculating ROI. Try to get as much information on the performance of your salespeople as possible. The more data you have, the easier it will be to calculate your ROI once the training is complete.
Collect Post-Training Data
When your team returns from sales training, give them a few weeks, or even a few months, to put their newfound skills into action. You can then start collecting data that corresponds with the information you put together before training gets underway.
This should give you a rough idea of whether or not the performance of your sales team has improved. It will also indicate which members of the team have benefited most from sales training.
Calculate ROI
Now you have your pre- and post-training numbers, you can calculate your ROI. The most common way to do this is to subtract the initial cost of the investment from its final value. You then divide this number by the cost of the investment and multiply the result by 100.
For example:
- If the final value was found to be £600,000.
- And the initial cost was £100,000.
The ROI would be: [(600,000 – 100,000) ÷ 100,000] × 100 = 500%.
Other Benefits
Though ROI is of course important when it comes to running a business and ensuring the books balance, this isn’t the only benefit your company will see from good quality sales training.
Other improvements, like better communication skills, enhanced collaboration and higher levels of employee engagement, can be harder to qualify. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re any less important for the future of your business.
You can learn more about the benefits of sales training, and find out what we can do for your business, by getting in touch with an expert member of our team today.
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