When you invest in sales training for your company’s salespeople, what would you most like to achieve? Your list of goals might include better prospecting skills and an improved ability to secure new business. But what about the customers you’ve already got?
I suggest that great sales training also should improve salespeople’s ability to develop more business with current customers without giving up margins. It should enable them to build ever-stronger relationships with current customers and dramatically grow revenue.
What’s more, you should be able to measure the extent to which a sales training program enables your sales force to bring in those additional dollars. The best sales executives know that. Their satisfaction with sales training—the value they place on any sales-training initiative—ultimately comes from the return on investment that they achieve: the tangible ROI.
Client satisfaction with sales training comes from tangible ROI.
Each year, Selling Power magazine issues awards to the Top 20 Sales Training Companies in the country. The evaluations are based on several criteria:
- Depth and breadth of training offered
- Innovative and new offerings (specific training courses or methodology) or delivery methods
- Ability to customize offerings
- Strength of client satisfaction
That fourth criterion, client satisfaction, is not just based on the reactions of salespeople and sales managers to the training, but more importantly on the tangible results that companies see following the training. The first three criteria are really just building blocks that help to produce the ROI results that lead to satisfaction.
This year Action Selling ® again won a Top 20 award. We won based on all four criteria. My point, however, is that we could not have earned the award if our clients didn’t rave about what we did for them. And what they were raving about, specifically, was that by unlocking the untapped potential in their sales forces, we helped them make a lot of money.
I mean tangible money. Money they could count.
Download the White Paper that describes several company’s experiences with Action Selling ® and their ROI gain. It’s Time to Redefine Selling: What the best-run companies are doing.
Action Selling ® in Action
How much business do salespeople leave on the table if they aren’t trained in Action Selling ®?
When Selling Power magazine surveyed Action Selling ® clients in connection with our recent Top 20 Sales Training Companies award, one client they heard from was giant Michigan-based food distributor and grocery-store-chain operator SpartanNash.
Sara Blasing, SpartanNash’s director of training and development, offered this testimonial from one salesperson who used his new Action Selling ® skills in dealings with a current client:
“I had the relationship with the customer for 23 years; my company had the relationship with them for 50 years. We knew price was going to be a touchy subject in a pending deal, so we focused on defining their needs for quality. When we presented our solution, price never became an issue. As a direct result of Action Selling ® training, we are up $680,000 in sales with this customer.”
This single example shows how much money a single salesperson can gain (or lose) with a single customer. Multiply that by the thousands of customers that SpartanNash serves. So how about your sales force?
For information about how to make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.
Download the White Paper that describes several company’s experience with Action Selling ® and their ROI gain. It’s Time to Redefine Selling: What the best-run companies are doing.