An effective sales training programme can transform your business and help you overcome obstacles that get in the way of customer retention and growth. But implementing a plan that works can be challenging; it’s easy to throw away money on training that doesn’t work.

One of the best ways to improve your training is to track your return on investment (ROI) and keep employees in the loop on their development. Here’s how to do exactly that.

Identify skills gaps

One of the biggest challenges a business owner can face is to identify the skills gaps that their employees have. This is why the most successful sales training programmes are those which can do this for you. The needs and learning styles of your sales employees will be found through a skills evaluation form, a competency evaluation or interview, through self-evaluation or by simply observing their skill set as they work.

Set goals

There’s little point in investing in a training programme if you don’t know what you want to achieve, so set realistic, measurable goals that you can use both before and after training. These objectives or goals should be incredibly specific; for example, Employee A should increase their sales figures by ten percent over the next six months. Unless your goals are timely and achievable, you won’t be able to evaluate the results and determine your return on investment, and your employees won’t be as motivated to make their training and development programme a success.

Customise your training

A generic training programme will, most likely, offer some benefits to your business, but a customised plan that’s tailored to your employees and their skill gaps will be most effective. Tailored training that’s delivered in-house, like the solutions offered here at Frosch Learning, will allow your sales team to walk away with relevant knowledge and skills that they can put to use in their own everyday sales activities.

Reinforce the training

The hard work of a training programme doesn’t stop when you leave the training room – you need to ensure that the knowledge and techniques discussed are reinforced as part of your everyday working practices so that employees improve. Because managers often have very little time, following up and reinforcing training is often overlooked or done very quickly, but a slow and steady approach is often the most effective.

Make sure that your sales team consistently reinforces the techniques and knowledge that they have learned as part of their work by coaching, tracking and ongoing training. By doing so, you’ll make individual team members accountable for their development, which will not only increase engagement and motivation but allow you to manage the entire team at once and still get on with your everyday duties away from managing employee training.

Frosch Learning’s sales training programmes were designed to help you get more out of your sales team. Find out more or get in touch with a member of the team.