How Effective Is Your Sales Training Program? Check the Data
Congratulations! You launched your new sales training program!
You have personalized training, peer-to-peer learning, training reinforcement, and a sales content library filled with just-in-time learning that sellers can access when they need an immediate answer.
It was a huge project, and now you are done. Well, not quite. Now, you need to make sure the sales training program is working. How effective is it? Are your sales reps retaining what they learn and applying it in selling situations? And more importantly, what impact is your sales training program having on the business?
To get those answers, you must look at the data. What do the business analytics tell you?
With business analytics, you can uncover the leading indicators of performance—and employee competency is a critical performance lever to measure and analyze. Drawing correlations between specific learning and enablement activities, content, and business outcomes is critical to getting out ahead of sales performance problems before they impact business results.
With the right analytics tool, you can gather standardized data sets on different user activities from within your sales training platform. Such tools provide granular, actionable business intelligence data, giving business and data analysts the ability to perform a wider variety of custom analyses, explore large data sets to identify useful trends or insights, and marry sales training activity with external data sources to discover correlations with outside KPIs.
This data supports a rational, evidence-based approach to learning and enablement programs, and can help make a better business case for when, why, and how changes should be implemented.
The data also allows you to identify correlations more accurately between specific learning activities and content performance that impact your priority business KPIs. As a result, because learning data is a leading performance indicator, you’ll enhance your ability to identify current problems, forecast potential problems, and spot new opportunities.
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9 Sales Training and Sales Enablement Data Points to Measure
Certain sales training and sales enablement data points provide insight into how effective your training is and its impact on the business. Look for a sales enablement platform that provides these data types.
- Content activities: Receive details about who is creating, sharing, and viewing content items.
- Collection activities: Get insight about the creation and sharing of channels within your sales enablement platform, sales training courses, and flash drills.
- Task activities: See who is receiving and completing tasks (sales training courses, events, exercises, flash drills, quizzes, and SCORM standards and specifications).
- External sharing activities: Get details about who is sharing sales content to external individuals or to digital sales rooms.
- External viewing activities: Track the number of times a piece of externally shared content is viewed.
- Content tag inventory: See the properties of each content item.
- Content item tags: Get details about content items to tag relationships.
- Collection inventory: See the properties of each collection of sales content.
- Collection tags: Get details about collections to tag relationships.
6 Ways to Use Sales Training Data to Uncover Problems and Opportunities
Once you have those metrics, run them through a business intelligence tool to help you uncover sales problems and new opportunities. Here are six ways you can apply the data.
1. Assess the Business Impact of Sales Training
Quantify the impact of your sales enablement efforts by tracking sales reps’ participation in your sales training program and their assessment scores. Then compare them against key job performance metrics to inform your ongoing strategy.
2. Unify Learning and Development Data Across Your Entire Learning Stack
Track learning completion, engagement, and scoring in your sales training platform. Then combine that data with your corporate learning management system (LMS) or other learning systems to create a centralized record. Leverage analytics as part of a broader organizational talent and performance management strategy.
3. Correlate Selling Activity to Sales Outcomes
Combine sales training, sales enablement, and CRM data to identify the selling behaviors, sales content, and seller knowledge and skills that produce successful sales outcomes. For example, you could see how a content item was tagged when a sales rep shared it with a buyer to help you better understand the context of the activity at the time.
4. Identify Core Skills and KPIs that Drive Sales Performance
Correlate sellers’ skills with sales KPIs (win rates, pipeline generation, quota achievement, deal velocity) to benchmark top performers and underperformers. Doing so also helps you identify ideal seller skill characteristics.
5. A/B Testing and Benchmarking
Compare test and control groups to quantify lift in job performance following specific sales training initiatives.
6. Executive Reporting and Performance Visibility
Feed sales training and sales performance data into business intelligence tools to construct dashboards for executives and leaders. Having these dashboards allows them to monitor key employee metrics alongside other data sets.
Having a strong sales training program is important, but you must make sure it delivers the business results your company needs. A robust sales enablement platform will provide the data to help guide you.
Learn More:
Download The Complete Guide to Conversation Intelligence and learn how to use data to understand your sales reps’ performance and enable a winning team.
