Proving the ROI of sales training

Conducting and carrying out sales training is a common tactic used by a variety of businesses to improve bottom line performance. In addition to teaching members of staff new skills and expertise, it can also change an employee’s attitude and behaviour at work. What’s more, teaching and tuition may even fuel your workforce’s thirst for knowledge, thus improving personal development and increasing promotion opportunities.

However, what is the point of performing training courses or programmes if you do not measure how successful they have been? On top of that, you may never know whether your ROI was worth it in the end.

The majority of organisations will probably look at their end of quarter to sales to see whether the cost of training has been cancelled out by greater turnover and bigger profit margins. Unfortunately, this doesn’t provide an in-depth understanding of what employees benefitted from the most, which training techniques were more effective, how the business can improve on coaching in the future and whether the invested capital made a difference.

Therefore, it is in any company’s best interests to comprehensively measure the ROI of sales training, as it has a myriad of boons and benefits.

Objectives and intentions

In order to effectively and accurately measure the ROI of sales training, some objectives and intentions need to be established in the first place. It is fair to say the majority of organisations that rely on sales will simply want to improve new customer conversions, close more deals with existing clients or enhance overall performance. However, having clearly defined targets and goals remains crucial, as this is what a lot of your measuring will be based on.

First and foremost, you’ll need to conduct a bit of training need analysis to find out what kind of tuition your sales team requires. Do they simply need a boost in confidence or is a bigger skill set required to proficiently carry out their roles? From here, you can establish measurable and observable targets that can be assessed later on.

But perhaps most importantly, you’ll need to identify appropriate and suitable training methods or approaches. From one-the-job training to action learning, there are various different options available. However here at Wranx, we have found that gamification is an extremely effective technique. By taking influence from behavioural science, human psychology and motivational theory, this training tactic uses games and puzzles to engage and motivate employees to improve their learning. Achievements are ranked on a leaderboard to encourage competition between employees while individual progress is constantly monitored too, improving the chances of measuring ROI accurately.

Reaction and retention

At the end of the day, training is all about improving or changing the skill set and attitude of employees. Therefore, the most fundamental thing to measure is whether training has strengthened their knowledge, enhanced job responsibilities and helped them progress as people. Hence, you should evaluate your trainees’ reactions through questions and queries.

First of all, determine what kind of information you want to find out and think of ways you can quantify responses to fit in with your ROI requirements. Encourage honest comments and suggestions and measure employee reactions against acceptable standards. How did they rate the subject, teaching and facilitator? How would they have improved the training and most importantly, what did they learn?

It is incredibly straightforward to determine an employee’s reaction to training with Wranx’s Deep-Dive Reporting feature. This detailed analytics tool tells you how quickly training was completely, what employees learnt about and whether they are progressing or not. What’s more, value metrics also tell you how much time and money was saved using Wranx.

Behaviour and application

While it is important to find out whether employees actually enjoyed or benefitted from training on a personal level, sales is all about generating more revenue and returning a profit. For this reason, you’ll want to measure your workforce’s behaviour and see whether skills can be applied in a real-world scenario.

In the past, tests and examinations at the end of a training course usually sufficed, but this didn’t provide accurate retention information or translate to actual workplace situations. These days, it is more advantageous and appropriate for employees to practically demonstrate their learning along the way.

Take our accelerated learning solution for example. Here at Wranx, we have taken advantage of a scientific “brain hack,” which proves that people remember or learn items when they are studied a few times spaced over a prolonged period. On top of that, we constantly test individuals to make sure their learning is at a sufficient standard. Wranx Drills can detect and monitor changes in employee behaviour by asking questions about particular subjects. Once they are understood enough, trainees can move onto another topic and repeat the learning process.

Impact and results

After spending some time examining and analysing the newly acquired knowledge and improved behaviour of employees, assessing the impact training has had on bottom line results is a good idea. This will involve a lot of number crunching, but should ultimately provide an accurate insight on your ROI.

Is the business closing more deals and are these being completed faster? Are more existing clients being retained and are they happy? Are you generating more revenue and have profit margins improved? With all this information, you should be able to determine whether sales training and the amount you invested are positively correlated.

From employee behaviour to business results, several ways of measuring training are open to interpretation and it can be difficult to link a specific benefit directly to workforce learning. However, a lot will depend on the type of training itself and how this has been carried out. With Wranx, you can carefully manage, monitor and maintain every stage of the process, from setting objectives and establishing subjects to observing progress and measuring success. Our multi-device solution, which is conveniently hosted in the cloud, allows training to take place anywhere, accelerated learning improves long-term memory retention rates while deep-dive reporting provides detailed insight into employee behaviour.