Measuring Return on Expectations Key to Achieving Sales Training ROI

When it comes to sales and recruiter training, leaders prioritize return on investment (ROI).  They focus on metrics like sales win rates, time to first deal, conversion ratios, length of sales cycle and others. These are all valuable and tangible metrics that should be tracked. 

So why do so many leaders feel frustrated and left in the dark when trying to quantify the impact of their training programs?

What most leaders and training teams get wrong is they fail to track and measure return expectations or ROE.

Tracking and measuring ROE is about tracking and measuring whether or not your sales training programs are creating the desired transformation in skills, behaviors, messaging and sales motions. 

ROE focuses on tracking and measuring:

• Adoption & application of new sales tools
• Changes in selling behaviors
• Adoption & application of new sales motions
• Adoption and application of new talk tracks and frameworks
• Case study utilization

This is vitally important because you can’t achieve an ROI without first achieving your ROE goals. 

If your sellers or recruiters fail to:

• Sell the way they’ve been trained to sell/recruit
• Change their current behaviors
• Adopt and apply your news tools and motions

You will never see a return on your training investment.

The First Step in Designing Your Training Program

 When designing your sales or recruiter training program, the first step is for leaders to define:

• The behaviors they expect to see (across each stage of the sales process and your selling motions)
• The change(s) in messaging they expect to hear
• How behavioral change will be tracked back to performance in the field
• How skill and tool adoption will be tracked, measured and reinforced

In essence, you have to define “what good looks and sounds like” and then figure out how to track and measure that. 

To see a change in your results (ROI), you have to see a change in behavior.

You have to start this process well in advance of actually developing training content.

Detailed Needs Analysis

Observe your sales team. Listen to what they say and do. Watch call recordings to hear and understand the questions and objections they get and how they respond. 

Sit on sales meetings and collaborate with your sales leaders and frontline managers to understand where deals bog down in your sales funnel and why.  Identify the knowledge and skill gaps contributing to those bottlenecks, and the key behaviors that need to change

Use data from CRM to pinpoint areas for improvement.

Define Clear Behavioral Objectives

Translate your needs analysis into specific, measurable behavioral goals. For example:

"Reps will ask at least ten open-ended discovery questions in initial meetings."

"Reps will follow the objection resolution model when handling objections."

“Reps will introduce customer mutual action plan once deal is qualified”

Again, you have to define “what good looks and sounds like”  You are establishing the standard for how your organization goes to market and sells. 

Repeat this process for each stage of your sales process and your selling motions. Only then are you ready to start creating your training content.

To learn more about measuring return-on-expectations and achieving sales training ROI, download our eBook, The Definitive Guide to Tracking and Measuring Sales Training ROI