How do you determine if your sales training programme is really effective?

When thinking of increasing sales in your business, the first option that should come to mind is to improve the capability of your Sales Team. That’s right, we’re talking about investing in a Sales Training Program.

The fact of the matter is that developing and training your team is the key to gaining that competitive edge you need to increase sales. And not only do you need to find the best training program that’s the best fit for your business, but you also need to make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck.

What gets measured, gets done

So the principle of “what gets measured, gets done” is 100% applicable here. Therefore, you need to be able to measure and compare results before and after the training has been completed to determine its effectiveness.

You’ll need to identify your current Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The most common ones are your Conversion Rates, Items per sale (IPS), Average Sale and your Sales Targets. These are all driven by a change in behaviour. Great, now you know where you’re standing.

Let’s assume that after 6 months of completing the training programme, there’s been an increase of 6% in your conversion rates and associated sales.

How do you determine that there is a direct correlation between your Sales Training Programme and the increase in your Conversion Rates?

What we know from experience across many sectors is:

1. High-quality content, combined with a great user experience (the ability to integrate the training with their day-to-day roles) and outstanding support (to launch it and embed it effectively) are key elements of an effective training programme.
2. On target coaching and feedback, are key drivers of an effective change in behaviour that lead to increased conversion rates.

It’s the latter one that is usually the most overlooked and it’s usually due to not having an effective reporting tool or the inability to integrate it with existing systems that make these metrics hard to measure. When thinking of investing in a Retail Sales Training Programme, think of what type of reporting will help you measure the outcomes that matter and get a change in your KPIs. Here are some examples:

These reports usually provide the detail for each team or team member and give you visibility of who is actively engaged and participating in the training.

It’s important that you can easily identify at what stage of the program each team member is at, so no one falls behind. Having that visibility can then spark a conversation around how you can best support their learning if they are not keeping up.

Assessing competence is a crucial part of any training program. These reports should show the quality of the answers provided and/or provide in-depth results of the assessed content.

So if we now go back and answer our previous question with what we know: how do you determine that there is a direct correlation between the Sales Training Programme and the increase in your conversion rates?

If we have the right reporting in place indicating high completion rates and high engagement rates during the duration of the programme, we can conclude that the Sales Training Programme had a direct impact on increasing the conversion rates. You can further confirm this by analysing the quality of the answers provided by the trainees in their activities and the coach’s responses. When the coach is on target and a trainee’s skills are enhanced, they’ll convert more sales.

To sum up

When you think of investing in a Sales Training Programme, you must ensure you have the right tools and systems in place. They should provide the required visibility to determine the effectiveness of the Sales Training Programme, which will ultimately set your team up for success.