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In this issue: Book Review |
How Much Difference does Sales Training Make? Knowing that training is good for your company profits is little comfort if you can’t determine its contribution. Most sales and personal skills training is done to motivate people or to fix a glaring skills absence or simply because we believe in it. Difficulty in linking training to results makes it vulnerable to the knife when costs are under pressure. What If the impact of training on profit could be measured? Let’s reverse the measurement. We can calculate how much profit must increase to provide a return on training investment. Using a sales example, the cost of training equals fees plus the missed opportunity cost (sales that could be made while the training takes place). For a worked example, five days training requires a sales increase of only 5% to return 185% of the investment. Measuring training benefit is normally left to subjective views of managers and scant references, about courses attended, in annual appraisals. Even in large companies, with comprehensive appraisal systems, the link between performance and skills training is hard to establish. Inflexible appraisal schemes run the risk of being too general to be a valuable management tool. Appraisals should encourage desired behaviour and initiate action to improve unsatisfactory performance. Can training companies help make them work? Would appraisals be more effective if the objectives of any training formed an integral part.? What contributions can a training company make to the measurement of training benefit? Firstly, by helping to define individual training objectives. Sales people are high cost. Time taken to match or customise training to needs, pays dividends. Consultation, needs analysis questionnaires and surveys can be conducted as part of a comprehensive service. Secondly, providing records of skills taught and participant feed-back can augment a motivational appraisal system. Thirdly, follow-up consultation and analysis will allow training effectiveness to be linked with individual performance assessment. Fourthly, quantifying outcomes enables training programmes to be tuned and developed for better results. Who should do the work, you or your training partner? Clearly it should be shared with both parties taking responsibility for results. Get Physical The fitter you are, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more you sell. Finding time to exercise or even eat sensibly, while working in a fast paced environment, is harder than remembering to slow down for the radar cameras. Exercise takes out so much of your day. Going to the gym takes 90 minutes. You already see little enough of your family and feel guilty about exercising in their time. Is this you? Here are a few ideas that can help:
How much of what you eat is fresh? Food loses most of its vitamin content long before we eat it. Plants draw minerals from the ground providing us with the essentials. Scientists have identified over 60 minerals that are important for human health. Farmers replace minerals that help grow crops but pay no attention to the minerals we need. Does intensive farming deplete naturally occurring trace minerals? It seems likely. Should we supplement our diet with vitamins and minerals? Mounting evidence suggests that paying attention to these issues pays dividends both in the short and long term. Little things accumulate. The better you feel about your health, the more you will sell. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman If you read nothing else this year, read this book. In SalesSense training I talk of using our whole mind. This book will tell you how. If you need to know what makes one person successful and another not, this book answers the question. You may have a high IQ and wonder how lesser intellects power ahead or have a low IQ and want to know how others like you have made it to the top. This book has real answers. Scientists are drawing the other curtain, the one covering the old taboo, feelings. Cognitive ability may not change but what of emotional intelligence? The jury is still out but early results reveal the insularity of previous ideas about developing intelligence. Daniel Goleman has written a thoroughly researched classic and it is an easy read.
Articles by Clive Miller
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