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Tom Peters States “Training Is the Number One Profitability Strategy for Your Company”

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Tom Peters’ 2018 book The Excellence Dividend  talks about how critical skills and capability development is for any department in your organization. In fact, he states that training is the number one profitability strategy for your company.

But spending money on training doesn’t mean adding to your existing headcount.

Peters, who has helped thousands of companies to become more effective and achieve more yield and throughput—recognizes that the return on investment is much greater when you increase yield and throughput of an existing employee. In other words, it’s much more valuable and cost-effective to increase one person’s results through training and skills development than to add a second person.

And you won’t be increasing expenses at the same linear rate as adding to your headcount would. For example, the cost per person for training might only be $8,000, which in the grand scheme of their salary, might only equal a 1% increase in cost per seller.

This concept around yield and throughput is also discussed in this CSO Insights Study by Tamark Schenk, which drives home the value of social selling training. Let me break down some key results from the study:

• Social selling has been empirically proven to increase the volume of sales opportunities and increase the sellers’ win rate. However, unfortunately, the study also shows that social selling adoption is actually on the decline.
• The better the adoption rate for social selling (it’s a debatable metric: are we talking about tool adoption, behavioral change?), the better the win rate for forecasted deals.
• A higher social selling adoption rate can increase win rate per seller by up to 50%. In other words, sellers who have truly adopted social selling into their DNA, and are social selling every day, are winning up to 50% more of their deals when compared to those who don’t use social selling.

Bottom line: Training should be a key part of your profitability strategy. According to the CSO insights study, your return on investment could be, up to 50% in the conversion of deals.

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