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Five Reasons Why Sales Training Fails

By IsaiX | June 14, 2008

This article written by: Gil Cargill

During the course of my 28-year career as a consultant, I have been asked many times the question, “Why does sales training fail to produce permanent results?” The purpose of this white paper is to provide you with answers that will help you, as you go into 2006, to build a sales development program that will produce the results you desire… permanent, significant improvements in profit.

1. Failure to change beliefs: Virtually all sales training offered today focuses on changing the salesperson’s behaviors. This training encourages them to make more calls, to make better calls, to listen better, to close better, etc. Unfortunately, you cannot change an adult’s behavior until he/she changes their belief set.

If a salesperson believes he/she should not be successful, then no amount of skills training will help them become successful. I frequently encounter salespeople who believe that prospecting is beneath them or that it is something they did when they were a rookie but, now that they have a number of years of experience under their belt, they no longer need to do it.

Beliefs like these cannot be overcome with skills training. So, if your staffing system allows you to hire people who have inappropriate beliefs, there is no amount of sales training that will produce the results you desire.

2. The sales cycle: Assuming you have impacted the salesperson’s beliefs, very few sales cycles are short enough to allow a company to see any change in that salesperson’s behaviors within a reasonable timeframe.

If your sales cycle is just a few days long, you should see some change in your team’s behavior during sales cycles immediately following the training. However, if your sales cycle is longer (as most are), then the effect of the training will fade before you can realize a change in your team’s behavior.

Research shows that sales training typically has a half-life of approximately five weeks. If your sales cycle is ten weeks long, your team will retain (on average) only 25% of the knowledge, skills, tactics and strategies they learned. If your sales cycle is twenty weeks long, then your team will retain just 3% of the knowledge or skills transferred during the training session.

Please note: These statements assume that your company will not (as most companies don’t) reinforce the lessons taught during training. As a result, while management is looking for an increase in sales, your team (being comprised of normal human beings) is forgetting most of the information they learned.

The only way to remedy this is to ensure that your management team regularly reinforces the skills, tactics and strategies taught during the training session. Failure to reinforce training contributes significantly to the poor results that most training produces.

This, combined with the fact that most sales cycles extend beyond the timeframe in which you would have an opportunity to see any impact the training would have on your team’s behaviors, is the reason most training produces unsatisfactory results.

3. Your team’s motivation: A common mistake I have observed is that management assumes their sales force wants to improve. That is not necessarily true. Many salespeople are quite comfortable with the status quo. As a result, training that focuses on helping the team to sell better, to sell more effectively or to sell higher volumes will produce substandard results. This is a function of several factors.

First is your staffing system. If you hire people whom you like but who do not have the proper belief system and/or DNA to seek constant improvement, then they may view training as nothing more than an irritating interruption. To protect yourself against this, make sure that your staffing system brings highly motivated people who have demonstrated throughout their life the behaviors you desire.

Another common contributor to unsatisfactory results is management’s assumption that their compensation plan motivates the team to sell more. You cannot make other adults want to earn more money than they want to earn. Again, if your team is satisfied with their current income and production level, they will view training as an irritating interruption.

4. Misalignment with your sales process: Don’t, for a second, believe that “sales training is sales training is sales training”. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is analogous to saying that sports training is sports training is sports training, assuming that the skills taught to a basketball team will work for a football team or a golf team or a tennis team!

When you select a sales training program (especially if it is being brought in from the outside), make sure that the sales training and the trainer who will deliver the training understand your organization’s sales cycle, primary value propositions, as well as the buying modus of your customers.

If you bring a training program in that does not align with the reality of your sales environment, your team will reject the ideas from the outset and you will have no improvement and, candidly, will have wasted your money (the least of which would be the fee that you paid the trainer).

5. Lack of accountability: If you do not hold your people accountable for changing the processes they use to find, acquire and keep business, then no skills training can have a permanent impact on your organization. Research has shown that sales representatives reach a proficiency plateau (from a skills point of view) within three to five years of starting their sales career, regardless of how they learned to sell.

The real key to generating productivity improvement is to offer training to your people that focuses on managing the sales process in a more effective fashion. Even though this training is designed to target the real issue (it’s not your people, it’s the process), you must hold your team accountable for implementing the tactics and strategies taught during the session.

If accountability is not a core component of your training program, then save your money and your time. All the training will be is an entertaining event, which won’t produce the results you desire. Process change and accountability are the only two things I know of that guarantee permanent and measurable productivity improvements.

One word of caution: Accountability without consequences is an exercise in exerting a lot of energy with no effect. We humans don’t change our behaviors, unless we are aware of the consequences of not changing. Take a look at yourself. For example, why don’t you drive faster than the speed limit? After all, many of us view speeding as an exciting and fun activity.

Most of us obey the speeding laws because the consequences of breaking those laws are undesirable. We run the risk of either a ticket, a fine or, even worse, an accident and some injury to ourselves or others. This foreknowledge of the consequences of violating the law is what keeps most people from violating the laws and breaking the rules.

Now, let’s take a look at your sales organization. What accountability do you have within your organization? What are the consequences to your team if they fail to comply with your wishes with regard to changing their behaviors, tactics and activities? If there are no consequences, then you will never get the behavior change you desire.

I hope this article helps you understand why traditional sales improvement strategies fail. Although the title of this article is “Five Reasons Why Sales Training Fails”, I really could have called it “Five Reasons Why Sales Improvement Initiatives Fail”.

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