How much does your organization invest — in time, money, and resources — to try to turn people with potential into sales superstars?  What are your current costs for recruitment, selection and training?   How much time and energy do you and your senior salespeople spend molding and mentoring the would-be rainmakers of tomorrow? When you add it all up, you are probably investing millions. 

So here is the question that should be keeping you up at night: What is the return on that investment?

If you are like most Sales Managers, Directors and VPs, the honest answer is you simply don’t know.  You recruit people you hope will work out, you provide them with training, management and mentoring you hope will be effective, and you hope for results.  But hope is not a strategy for success. 

The greatest challenge every Senior Sales Executive faces is being able to intervene before it is too late.   Let’s face it.  By the time you have picked your team, trained them, and taken to the field, the game is all but decided.  The time to assess the efficacy of your selection, training, and development efforts is before the starting gun sounds — not when the final scores are tallied on the board.

• Measure the effectiveness of sales training and its impact on bottom-line business outcomes
• Develop high quality metrics for evaluating the success of trainees early in the training cycle — allowing you to sift the wheat from the chaff as early as possible
• Separate the impact of training from other drivers of performance, giving you the opportunity to truly know when performance is due to luck, territory, managers, or the economy
• Understand the extent to which each of your field managers contributes to, or detracts from, the knowledge, skills, and abilities cultivated in training
• Reduce turnover and increase satisfaction and organizational commitment by identifying the characteristics most conducive to success in your organization
• Develop leading indicators of sales success, giving you the opportunity to identify your potential sales superstars as early on as possible

• Develop quantifiable evidence for the impact of training on the bottom line
• Measure and project Return on Training Investments (ROTI)
• Identify early predictors of success to take action sooner — saving time and money
• Detect inevitable selection errors, identifying those folks who sell themselves into a job they are not really suited to, so you don’t throw good money after bad
• Determine which aspects of training are having the most beneficial impact on real-world performance and which are wasting people’s time
• Customize training to meet the needs of individual learners — capitalizing on their talents and addressing their individual needs

1. Clearly define bottom-line training goals that can be empirically linked to performance
2. Design training evaluation metrics that are predictive of long-term success
3. Deploy metrics and evaluate their impact at key points during and after training
4. Recommend revisions to the training process for maximum impact on performance
5. Reassess, revise, and document the quantifiable impact of training on performance

Can Knowing The Difference Make A Difference?

To see the differences that exist in your own organization and better understand the impact measurement can make, list the members of your current sales force in order from highest to lowest performer.  Once you have that list, divide it in half, then in half again.  What you will end up with are four distinct groups, or quartiles.  These are the Superstars, Rising Stars, Dwindling Stars, and Black Holes of your sales force.  Calculate the average annual sales per group, as we have with data from one of our actual clients below, and you can start to see the differences that exist in your own organization.

Now consider what it would mean if you could predict in advance which group a person was destined to occupy.  What would the impact be to the bottom line if you were able to close the gap between the highest and lowest performing groups by even a little bit?  What if you could weed out some of those Black Holes earlier on in the process?  And what if you could give your Superstars — the people who will benefit the most from training — the kind of attention they really need and deserve earlier on?  Here’s a simple rule of thumb for you to consider:  If your Superstars are currently out-producing your Black Holes by more than 50%, something is probably terribly amiss with your sales force.  And depending on the industry you’re in, you are probably losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, as a consequence.

• Christine B Hutchinson
  Metrus Group, Inc.
  (908) 231-1900x108
  E-mail us by clicking here

  Related: Free People Equity return on investment ROI calculator

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