Planning to Invest in Sales Training? Learn How Can You Identify the Right Partner

Posted by C Rajasekaran on December 4th, 2022

Everyone agrees that a company especially in B2B sector needs a high-performing sales team to successfully achieve their revenue targets.

To make sure your sales team is performing to its full potential, conducting frequent sales training sessions is a must to activity.
Over time, I realized that this can be a subject that can make a big impact to the Customer’s Sales KPIs or it can just become a “tick in the box” activity for the customer.

If you want to get maximum ROI for your investment in sales training practice, you need to make sure you partner with the right organization.

This article is to help you identify a few filters to help you decide the right partner for your sales training practice.

1. Are You Treating Symptoms or Causes?

Let me explain this with an example of a chemist and a doctor.

Whenever you get sick with any of these - headache, fever or cold. What’s the first thing you’d do?

You’ll go to a chemist and get a tablet or medicine to treat the above disease.

The reason you went to the chemist is because you already know the causes of your sickness (headache, fever or cold in this case). So you just go to a chemist and take the medicine. You don’t need anyone to diagnose your problem.

But if you got sick with malaria or jaundice kind of disease, then you cannot go to a chemist and get the medicines.

You’ll need a doctor to diagnose the symptoms of your illness and then prescribe you the right medicines

So, if you are clear about your requirement and also about the solution i.e you know the content of the module, and just need a vendor to fulfill it.

That means you need a chemist kind of sales training company.

However, when you have symptoms, but are not sure about the causes and want to treat the causes, then you would need a specialist doctor kind of Sales Training Company

These specialist partners would go deeper in their discovery, know/share industry best practices and suggest an intervention that would stick ( post workshop) and not just remain as a “one more session” for your organization.

2. Is the Trainers From a Sales Background?

There is a difference between both a normal trainer and a specialized sales trainer.

A trainer need not be from B2B Sales background and can still do a good job when he/she comes and delivers the content.

However, participants find more receptivity when they know that the trainer empathizes with participants’ sales/customer world and have background of sales/sales management experience. In this case you need trainers with a proper sales background

3. Ask Your Sales Training Company About Their Thoughts to Retain the Learning.

Most of the sales training don’t stick: You need a few things to ensure training stick and you find value to your investment in Sales Interventions.

1. Sales intervention should have both- “Process + Skill”. Only focusing on one does not work to imbibe this as learning across. The learning will fizzle out in a few days and your “Best Talent” will become better and “the rest of the team” will go back to its original state.
2. Involvement of Sales managers and sales leader – Manages/leaders can make or break any sales organization. Their buying to “Sales Interventions” is important to ensure cadence is maintained after the sales training programs. We would recommend using the new learning for at least 5 times post-workshop. This is where few things will fail but eventually, things would get ingrained in day to day working of the sales team.
3. Reinforcement – This is the most important part without which the ball gets dropped. Ensure your training partner remains engaged with participants for at least 2-3 months post-workshop.
4. As a leader, review the new learning post 3 months. If convinced that its working, try to integrate the new learning/tools to your sales CRM. It will help institutionalize it as a common language across the sales organization.

Ensure your partner company guides you with the above best practices and helps you avoid the pitfalls.

Your time, money, and resources are important to ensure the training doesn’t become a meet & greet tick in the box activity for your sales team.

4. Specialists Vs Generalists Partners

Unless you have a past view about the quality of generalists, it's always advisable to go with specialist companies who remain focused on “B2B Sales” instead of generic training companies.

Over time, you would realize that generalist training companies do the training whereas specialist B2B Sales focused companies positively impact your sales KPIs and the life of your sales colleagues.

There are other standard criteria that your L&D/procurement team uses to shortlist the right company. We have excluded them and added the above four points as they normally get missed out and, in our experience, these are the key ones that would make a difference to your Sales KPIs.