Stop Wasting Your Money on Sales Training!

According to Trainingindustry.com, the total corporate and government training dollars spent in the US in recent years is somewhere between $140 to $170 billion dollars annually, with outsourced sales training comprising about $2.2 billion annually. There are a lot of zeros in a billion. And while much improvement has been made in training sales professionals, you can imagine that a whole lot of those zeros have also been flushed down the drain. And you would be right. According to Sales Performance International, sales training participants completely forget an astounding 84 percent of what they are taught within just five weeks. 84 PERCENT! FIVE WEEKS! That adds up to roughly $1.8 billion in wasted sales training every year. However, the results at Asher Strategies are markedly different. “Companies who have had their salespeople trained by Asher Strategies have experienced an average of:

• 17% increase in sales from acquisition of new customers
• 45% reduction in sales cycle time
• 22% increase in sales of high-margin, add-on business to current customers”

  Here is why I think others might be seeing such lousy results: Training the wrong people in the first place All of Asher’s clients know the importance we place on sales aptitude assessments as part of the selection process. We beat the drum about this all day, because we know that even the best sales training program will be absolutely wasted if used on a person who does not possess the natural traits for sales. It is hard science, and we have thousands of cases to back this up. Roughly 1/3 of all salespeople lack natural aptitude, this adds up to a staggering amount of wasted money. The solution is simple: test for aptitude for specific sales roles before wasting a single minute training anybody. Not reinforcing through sales coaching Our sales training seminars and workshops stress the applicability of the material being taught. These are real world techniques, and therefore we make training as realistic as possible by incorporating role playing exercises. We also recommend that sales managers continue to role play at weekly sales meetings once they return home. This produces great results, and I feel it sets us apart from other courses which just fill attendees with endless amounts of data. To drive revenue to the maximum degree possible, adding individualized sales coaching to the mix really delivers a rocket boost to performance. Sales coaching not only reminds salespeople and executives of the material they have studied, but it also provides a level of external accountability and pressure to perform. In one study cited by the American Management Association, 59% of those polled indicated a preference for an external coach when compared with just 12% who preferred an internal coach. Some of the reasons given include:

• External coaches are more confidential and unbiased
• They bring a fresh perspective
• They possess more specialized expertise

Added to those factors is that rather than just demand quotas be met, good sales coaches constantly reinforce the basics and insist a formal sales process be followed — which always leads to better results than “winging it.” Asher Strategies can tailor a coaching plan for your company to maximize your training dollars in conjunction with any of our programs. Drop us a line and we’d be glad to explain more.