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Top 10 Not So Common Reasons Why Sales Training Fails to Deliver Sustainable Change

Effective sales training (defined as delivering a positive return on investment) is desired by small business owners to upper sales management at Fortune 100 companies, but achieved by far fewer. There are many reasons for the inability to deliver a successful learning engagement (meaning sustainable change). These 10 reasons are some of the not so common and often overlooked ones.

#1 – The brain only absorbs what the butt will endure. This is my all time favorite obstacle. Just think about what happens when you are away from your primary role for more than two hours. Your mind begins to wonder:

• How many phone calls have your missed?
• How many emails are sitting in your in box?
• When will you have time to get that promised proposal or letter sent?

After about 2 hours, most people’s minds become cluttered with all of their to dos. Then there is the physical tiredness associated with sitting in one place for an extended period of time. Even if the sales training does have activities, the brain can only absorb so much. Possibly this helps to explain why after 16 days, people remember about 2%. If you do not believe this is true, travel back to those nights when you crammed for an examine. Your cognitive retention of new material at best was 50%.

#2 – Presumption What’s In It for Me (WIIFM) will lead to What’s In It for Us (WIIFU)

Just because you as sales management see the value in learning does not mean your salespersons will share those similar feelings. A good sales training program will start with What’s In It for Me as the professional and that will lead to What’s In It for Us. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Use some emotional buy in to ensure WIIFM

#3 – Failure to identify the predetermined results upon completion

When any dollars are invested to improve organizational capacity, the results from that investment need to be clearly identified and articulated for all involved. As a trained and experienced instructional designer (developer and evaluator of learning curriculum), this reason is far more common than one would think.

For example, sales management wants good customer relationships. Yet what good means is not clearly defined because it is qualitative and not quantitative. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Use Kirkpatrick’s third level of evaluation to help quantify the results.

#4 – Predetermined results are not monitored. Since the outcomes are not predetermined, then this usually leads to them not being monitored during and after the sales training. Again returning to Kirkpatrick’s evaluation, this would be the fourth level of evaluation. For some this is called impact on the organization.

#5 – Boring training, poor facilitation, no connection to well world experiences. Learning must be real. There should be activity between all participants. The role of facilitator is not to talk, but to create an engaged learning environment.

#6 – Complicated sales training programs that only enhance the pocket books of the sales training companies. The act of selling is not complicated. It is fairly simple. There is a buyer, a seller, a product or service and a need. Far too many firms who provided learning services complicate the sales process.

#7 – Not asking the sales people what they need to do their jobs better. Sometimes the easiest way to increase sales is to ask your people what do they need. In many cases, the problem is misalignment between marketing and selling skills. Very few sales training programs actually provide information about effective marketing even though marketing is part of the overall sales process.

#8 – Presuming everyone consistently sets and achieves their own goals. Beyond reason number one, this is probably the killer as to why return on investment is not achieved. Consistent goal planning, setting and achievement are not learned in the K-16 educational experience. What I have found in my performance improvement and organizational development practice is most people place more value in the common everyday written grocery list than they do for their own futures.

#9 – Lack self leadership skills within the sales training and development due to exclusive focus on technical skills. Honing specific sales skills is critical. Yet with so many businesses embracing relationship selling, then the self-leadership or people skills must be equally developed. For example, market research suggests approximately 50% of all leads are not acted upon even during difficult economic times. So the question is not do they (salespersons) know it (follow-up), but rather do they want to do it (make the call)? The want to do it is an attitude or a necessary people skill.

#10 – Salespersons do not know their own talents. With all the negative conditioning, most people focus their energies on fixing what is wrong instead of reinforcing what is right. Winning teams win because of the strengths or talents of their players. Yet from my experience, very few people can identify their talents and this creates a working harder not smarter culture.

Invest the time to review these 10 not so common reasons and make any course corrections to your current sales training initiatives. You may be genuinely surprised by the results of such actions.

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Sales Coach Leanne Hoagland Smith helps with sales coaching, leadership to sales management development. How well is your organization using the talent’s of your greatest asset – human capital within your sales training? Maybe now is the time to consider this performance appraisal approach?