Selling Power Magazine Article

Every year, companies in the U.S. spend a little over $2 billion with third-party sales training firms. Unfortunately, much of that money is wasted on programs that are obsolete, ineffective, or inappropriate and therefore never achieve a reasonable Return On Investment (ROI). The cause of failed sales training programs is almost always a flawed selection process, according to Dave Stein, CEO of ES Research Group, a firm that helps companies evaluate, select, implement, and measure sales performance improvement programs. “Many companies select the wrong vendors for the wrong reasons,” he explains. “If they’d spend more time on the selection process, they’d be more likely to have training that pays off.” Fortunately, there is a way to ensure that your company makes the right choice. Here is a nine-step process designed to help you choose a sales trainer.

Step #1 Reassess your customers’ buying habits.
When selecting a vendor, many sales managers start from the assumption that their team should continue to sell in a way that’s been successful in the past. However, today’s business environment changes so quickly that your customers’ buying habits may either have changed or be in the process of changing. If that’s the case, sales training that reinforces soon-to-be-obsolete sales tactics can actually result in a drop in future sales. Therefore, before hiring a sales trainer, you should always revisit current market conditions.


Step #2 Create a unique go-to-market strategy.
In a world where an increasing number of products and services are “commoditized,” the only way to build and maintain a customer base is to differentiate your company from the competition. Unless you have a completely unique product set, you’ll need to sell and deliver your products and services in a way that’s superior to what the customer can get from others. If you can define how to give your customers something unique in a unique way, you’ll have a much clearer idea of the kind of sales training that you’ll need to deliver on that value proposition.

Step #3
Make an objective assessment of
your firm’s capabilities.
Once you’ve decided how you’ll need to address your customers’ buying processes, you must then determine whether your organization is capable of actually executing that strategy. A truly objective assessment of your company’s sales capabilities might conclude, for example, that you’ve got the wrong sales tools or the wrong level of funding and that 80 percent of your sales reps are incapable of selling in the way your customers want to buy.

Step #4
Decide what needs to change to execute your go-to-market strategy.
Determine exactly what it will take to get your company from its current set of sales capabilities to the set that will be needed in the future. Your company may need a new sales process, different hiring practices, new skills development, different technology, a different organizational structure, and more. Based upon that objective assessment, write an RFP – five or six pages is sufficient – describing the type of training and assistance you’ll need from a sales training vendor to adapt your sales team to the requirements of the market.

Step #5
Create a short list of qualified vendors.
Go on the Websites of at least 15 sales training vendors and find at least five who (at least at the “brochure level”) appear to be able to deliver what you’ll need. As you go through this process, remember that, while most sales training firms do provide real value, no vendor can be all things to all companies. Some vendors, for example, specialize in sales processes peculiar to a particular industry. Other vendors may focus on face-to-face skills rather than telesales. Provide your RFP to the vendors on that short list and ask them to present how they would address the requirements in your RFP.

Step #6
Drill down during the vendor presentations.
As each vendor presents their response to the RFP, drill down for details in areas that are particularly important to your firm. Look for any discrepancies that reveal that the training firm might be glossing over their weaknesses. Find out exactly which firms were trained, exactly what the vendor did at those firms, and the approximate ROI that resulted from that training. While sales training firms like to tout that they’ve trained highly successful firms, most large companies hire a variety of sales trainers. They may have just trained a single group.

Step #7 Perform with due diligence.
Before you make a decision, check on the references that the vendors presented to you, paying particularly close attention to references that emerged during the drill- down. Don’t just be satisfied talking to the contacts that the vendors provided. Call around. Use the Internet to identify and contact individual sales reps inside the referenced companies. Get some un-biased opinions from multiple sources. Then send your own sales reps to monitor the vendor’s training program inside another firm. There’s no better way to assess real-world capabilities than by seeing the trainers in action.

Step #8 Select the most appropriate vendor.
Based on your due diligence, select the vendor that seems best able to provide you with the training and services you’ll need to implement your go-to-market strategy. Remember that today’s trainers can usually provide more than just instruction on simple sales techniques, like closing and negotiating. Ideally a sales training firm (or a combination of firms) should be able to help you with almost every aspect of the (continued on page 2)

transformation that will be required to adapt your team to the requirements of the marketplace. (See sidebar above.)

Step #9
Negotiate a contract that states
measurable results.
Every sales training program must have a set of measurable results. These should not be just a checklist of activities, but must include actual financial results that can be traced directly back to the training program. Without this kind of measurement scheme, there’s no way to determine whether the sales training actually produced an ROI. Note that if you’ve carefully followed these steps, coming up with a set of measurable results should be relatively easy.