How to Master Data-Driven Sales Training

By Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications

Would it surprise you that 74% of the sellers applying for a specific sales position are unqualified?  Did you know that only 1 in 7 sellers are capable of being successful as a sales manager?  Would it shock you that 5 out of 6 sales managers would not be successful as an individual sales representative?  Although some of these statistics seem counter-intuitive, they are very real, and based on Big Data that’s been collected over the past 3 decades.

Think about it.  How many companies promote their best sellers to a sales manager role?  It happens all the time.  The thinking is that the person must know a lot about our products and customers to be this successful.  Surely, he or she can teach, coach and lead the others.  It’s that last assumption that causes the problem.  Remember the opening stats, only 1 in 7 sellers can be successful as in Sales Management.  It’s really a different skill set.

Unfortunately, we do this to ourselves all the time, and it’s the worst of both worlds.  We lose our best sellers, and then the person fails to grow their team’s skillset to the next level.  In many cases, the Sales Manager becomes the 11^th hour Super Seller that rushes in to close an important deal, because they never taught their team how to do it.  Unfortunately, that rescue might have caused 6 other deals to fall off the cliff, because the people never learned how to close their deals.

Let’s switch gears and begin to home in on the data issue.  Imagine if you will, having a doctor prescribe medication to you without performing a physical or even asking questions about your symptoms.  That’s kind of like buying a magic “cure-all” elixir from the back of a covered wagon in the Old Wild West.  With the sophisticated diagnostics available to physicians these days – lab tests, x-rays, ultrasound, MRI’s – as well as CDC data on contagious diseases to be on the lookout for in their patients, we are able to pinpoint a patient’s problem accurately, as well as prescribe a path to wellness by using more than guess work.

In our world of sales, we have this diagnostic capability today.  We can use Big Data to compare seller competencies against their peers across an industry, as well as analyze their skills from a variety of perspectives, such as their will to sell, their development capability, their leadership capability, as well as their organization or role fit.

So why not use this data as the starting point, and then map our training to fill whatever gaps we discover?

Seems elemental, but most sales training is recommended and delivered without knowing any of this data about their sellers.  How effective can that training be?  Even worse, we often hire new sellers without knowing any of these details about them.

Using a Kevin O’Leary line from Shark Tank: “Stop the insanity!”

Fortunately, mastering a data-driven approach to sales training is getting easier all the time.  The data we have available to us now has a very high predictive validity.  The assessments that we use predict sales success with a 96% accuracy rate and is based on research from over 1.7 million sellers in over 26,000 companies, across 200 industries spread across 115 countries. These assessments measures 21 sales competencies and 28 sales management competencies. On new hires, 92% of the recommended and hired candidates have reached the top half of their sales team within 12 months.

So, this is where we need to begin our sales training efforts.  We start with the data and we need to follow these 10 general steps:

1. Assess your complete sales team to identify the gaps, problems, challenges, and the reasons why your sales results are where they are. Once you know the baseline, you can set a realistic expectation for growth.  At this point you will know which team members are capable of improvement, how big their gap in that competency is, and the exact training and coaching they will need.
2. Define your sales process, as your training must introduce or relate to your formal sales process. All of the content must be delivered in the context of that sales process.
3. Map each competency you are measuring to a training or coaching remedy and path. These are not necessarily going to be linear and rigid paths, but instead flexible, multi-faceted learning paths as shown in the figure below.

   

4. Provide a multi-faceted set of delivery modalities that can be used by your sellers to fill their skill gaps.

   

5. Immediately focus on the lowest scored areas in the assessments, by mapping them to their prescriptive path, as shown in this individualized development path for a seller named Gregg Allman.

   

6. Aggregate skill needs across your sales enterprise to find common needs by various roles. This includes your sales management team. For your training to work and be effective, your sales managers must be trained and coached so that they can coach to the content in the context of your sales process.  It’s your sales managers that reinforce the training, change behaviors and make the new knowledge and skills stick.  That happens after the initial training and coaching interventions.
7. Group your people in terms of four quadrants, so that you can decide on any necessary shifts in roles or responsibilities. Here is an example of that categorization, and the red box is where you might need to identify specific remedies:

   

8. Before you begin the sales training, you want to make any necessary changes to your sales organization or roles. If that happens after the training begins, it will interfere with the changes you’re trying to implement with the training.
9. Determine your success metrics for this training and coaching. These should be at the individual, team and company levels.  You might find this publication useful: http://bakercommunications.com/dl/BCI-Key-Performance-Indicator-Guidebook-and-Addendum.pdf.
10. Select the Sales Transformation vendor to work with.

If you would like help to craft this solution for your specific company and sales team, we would be honored to work with you and your team.