Coaching as a Service: Double Your Conversion Rates Tomorrow!

Most sales training fails. I’m not talking like “it’s poor.” It’s more like a seriously epic fail.

Case in point – research shows:

• Up to 80% of your sales skills are lost within a week if not used
• Up to 85% of sales training fails to ever deliver a positive ROI

And then the Wall Street Journal cites this amazing research:

“U.S. firms spent about $156 billion on employee learning in 2011, the most recent data available, according to the American Society for Training and Development. But with little practical follow-up or meaningful assessments, some 90% of new skills are lost within a year.”

Scary!

Say your company just spent $40,000 sending underperforming sales team members to cutting-edge training.

That’s a good step – but you’re not likely to realize any return from it.

Why Does Most Sales Training Fail?

Let’s start with the most obvious one:

1. You don’t have Processes in Place to Make it Stick

No one goes home after your amazing sales training and rehashes it multiple times so they stay at peak performance all year long. You need to develop a strategy for reinforcing the new sales behaviors you just learned.

Ask your sales team what they want – financial incentives, verbal praise, awards – and give it to them.

2. No Ongoing Accountability

It sounds almost insane to mention in the context of business, but many companies don’t analyze their results. Get a system in place for doing that – like right now.

3. Sales Training Builds Skills, Not Knowledge

So your training gets your team all pumped up because they know new killer sales techniques. But how well do they know what this training can’t teach?

They need to have in-depth knowledge of your products and services and how they meet your customer’s needs.

4. The Content Isn’t Actually That Good…

It’s harsh, but true! You get some pretty worksheets, new techniques, and big buzz words. But you don’t get any meaningful value from many of these new trainings.

It’s the same old junk – recycled and dressed up to make your sales trainer a hefty profit!

What Actually Works?

Now if you think about it, this approach really should work.

At ConnectAndSell, we do real-time coaching as close to the actual sales calls as possible. This increases our conversation-to-meeting conversions by 2-3 times on average.

What we do is analyze the rep’s performance prior to meeting. Since it’s logistically only possible to meet about 1 hour per week with each rep, doing this analysis before meeting and then discussing the sales call makes the meeting amazingly productive.

The initial promise of this blog post was that you would learn how to double your conversion rates tomorrow – and we’ve delivered very nicely on that.

Enjoy the results!