How to Approach Evaluating Sales Training Programs

Every sales team requires a reliable sales training program to help improve skills and abilities. However, many companies don’t use the right programs or adequately evaluate their effectiveness. This prevents sales teams from reaching their full potential and limits their success. Evaluating sales training programs will give you a clear idea of how much they’re helping or hindering your teams. The key is knowing how to evaluate these programs and choose the right one for your business.

It’s also essential to understand the value of personalization in training programs. Today, around 91% of employees want training to be relevant and personalized based on their unique needs. Evaluating your sales training programs can help you determine if it’s offering that level of customization to help your sales teams succeed. With the help of the right resources, such as an AI-powered sales training platform, you can effectively evaluate your training programs to allow for real growth.

The Importance of Evaluating Sales Training Programs

Even if you already have a sales training program, you must be able to evaluate it to improve it continually. Evaluating sales training programs helps confirm whether the program is a worthwhile investment or a waste of budget and resources. Otherwise, you might invest in a program that isn’t working for your sales staff.

You’ll see a few core benefits when you properly evaluate your sales training program, such as:

Find Opportunities to Improve Your Program

Evaluating your sales training program will make it possible to find areas of improvement that can help you get the most from it. You might believe your sales training is getting the desired results, but an evaluation might reveal specific opportunities. Some aspects of training might be weaker than others and fail to yield results. Proper evaluation will ensure you identify these weaknesses to work on them.

Sometimes, you may find it’s worth revamping your sales program entirely. An evaluation could reveal that your program isn’t personalized or thorough enough, which could inspire you to develop and implement a more effective program.

Keep Your Employees On Board

If you can provide personalized training to employees and show that you value each sales team member, this will help boost retention. One survey found that employees of all types love higher learning, with 94% of respondents stating that they would stay longer with a company that invests in their continued training and education.

With a solid training program, employees will be more engaged with their work and feel like you care about their development. In turn, you’ll likely see more employees stay with you as they grow and develop their skills. 

On your end, this will reduce the costs of hiring and onboarding new employees. 

Increased Revenue

One of the ultimate benefits of evaluating sales training programs is a higher return on investment. As you measure performance and optimize your programs, employees will become more productive and efficient, eventually translating into positive ROI. 

Related: Keys for Building and Improving a Culture of Sales Training

How You Can Evaluate a Sales Training Program

It’s not enough to have a sales training program in place—you need to ensure it’s the right one for your sales team. You’ll be able to decide whether a program is worth the time and money with a complete evaluation. If you’re unsure how to evaluate sales training programs, the following are some steps you can take.

Get Feedback from Your Sales Team

You can also measure the effectiveness of a sales training program by listening to your employees. For example, you can conduct a survey that lets sales teams discuss strengths and weaknesses. You can ask what aspects of training they would like to see and which they feel are genuinely working. You can also ask employees about what specific skills they would like to develop. 

Additionally, you can ask sales teams about any areas of the training program that left them unengaged. What could make those areas more helpful and worth the employee’s time and attention? Maybe there are elements that employees feel are missing from the program.

All this input can be valuable in helping you continuously improve your training program or develop a new one.

Conduct Employee Performance Reviews

Working one-on-one with employees to evaluate performance can help evaluate your sales training program. Through employee performance reviews, you can look at each team member individually. You’ll get a better feel for their unique wants and needs as sales employees. Evaluating each person on the team will give you a complete picture of your sales training’s performance.

Based on your findings in performance reviews, you can make the necessary changes to your training program. For example, you may discover that a new employee struggles with an existing program that another staff has accustomed to. In this case, you may need to make your training more accommodating for recruits. Conversely, you may want to implement a new training program to help engage a long-term employee whose performance and engagement begin to wane. 

Look at Sales Volume

Many training programs work toward increasing sales volume. Consider this factor when evaluating your training program if this is your primary goal. You may find opportunities to increase volume if you do not see the numbers you want. As you optimize your training program, continue to measure results until you achieve the desired volume.

Gauge Productivity

Your sales training program may have the primary goal of maximizing productivity. For instance, your program could emphasize finding more viable prospects and acquiring leads. If these items take top priority, determine whether your employees are productive based on your targets. A slump in productivity may indicate that you need to optimize your program or switch to another.

Use the Right Tools

One of the best ways to succeed with a sales training program is to implement reliable tools. One such tool might be sales enablement software that uses AI to help measure performance and track training progress.

With the help of the right platform, you and your employees will remain communicative, and you can be sure that your training program is working. An intelligent solution would enable employees to access the platform from anywhere and whenever they need training. They can upload, record, or follow prompts for a call, at which point the system can provide 100% unbiased feedback. In the process, employees can measure their performance based on various measured behaviors, allowing them to see where they stand compared to peers and benchmarks. 

AI can also help with personalization. Specifically, it can generate a growth plan custom-tailored to each employee. Sales reps can spend around five to 10 minutes turning weaknesses into strengths per lesson. Eventually, they can re-record themselves during practice sessions to gauge improvement. One huge advantage is that sales managers don’t need to initiate the process or be there. Instead, all they need to do is track employees’ progress and oversee training. 

When you use technology like this, you’ll be able to supplement your efforts with solutions that optimize the efficacy of your evaluations.

Measure Revenue

The ultimate goal of your sales efforts will be to maximize sales. As such, you should look into your revenue to measure the profitability of your sales training program. This will involve measuring the combined quality of sales and income from those sales. 

The ideal training program will cover every aspect of the sales process to streamline it and optimize performance. If any area of your program fails to do so, you may see this reflected in your total revenue. You need a program that helps your sales reps identify the best opportunities and prospects, shorten the sales cycle, and successfully close. 

Before implementing a new or improved training program, look at your current sales figures. After integrating the new program or updating an existing one, keep an eye on those numbers. The program will need more work if you notice that they’re not improving. 

Related: Tips for More Effective Sales Training in 2022

Empower Your Sales Teams with an Effective Sales Training Program

A well-optimized sales training program will help your sales teams thrive in the long term. While you might integrate a new program and believe it’s capable of meeting your standards, you won’t be sure unless you evaluate it. Evaluating your sales training program will reveal how it’s genuinely performing. Based on this information, you can take the appropriate steps to rework your existing program or upgrade to a new one. 

To properly track the performance of your sales teams and training programs, it’s essential to use the latest sales enablement solution. Quantified can help with this by giving your teams access to a fully-equipped sales training platform. Our solution will provide actionable data to help measure your training programs’ performance and track individual sales reps’ progress. 

Request a demo today for more details about what Quantified can do for your sales teams.