Every sales leader has sat in a budget meeting trying to justify sales training without hard numbers.
While 61% of organizations believe their learning programs are effective, only 33% formally assess the financial outcomes or return on investment (ROI). (Source: D2L, Redefining the ROI of Corporate Learning, 2023.) The long-term durability of the sales training industry, despite this challenge, is a testament to its perceived value, yet many still question whether this investment truly improves sales outcomes.
It does. The pattern now emerging from Sandler customer results is clear: the problem isn’t that sales training doesn’t deliver a return; it’s that, until now, there has never been a way to make that return both measurable and actionable. Some leaders justify value by using customer testimonials or individual examples of how their methodology made a difference in a specific deal. Others try to tie their pricing to results. Yet, to date, no one has provided sales organizations with the tools needed to translate their investment into sustainable growth.
What prevents companies from unlocking sustainable growth from their sales training investment?
Sales leaders have never been given access to the insights needed to turn skill adoption into results.
This explains why frontline managers, who are directly accountable for outcomes, prioritize working with sellers on deals over coaching them on skills. To leverage coaching as a growth driver, sales training companies must remove three blockers:
- Not evaluating skill execution: Skills won’t impact growth until companies can validate that sellers are actually executing the skills behaviorally. It doesn’t matter whether the seller can explain the concepts theoretically, as evidenced by casual discussions and survey-based assessments. That only proves conceptual understanding. Leaders must measure real skill execution in conversations where the seller demonstrates the ability to apply skills in real-world scenarios.
- Lack of “in the flow of work” skill mastery measurement: Sales training delivers a set of “best practices” skills that improve a seller’s chances of winning a deal. Practice helps, but it won’t improve results if sellers don’t use them at a high level under the pressure of live sales calls, where the deal hinges on their ability to effectively execute the skills they have been taught. Once leaders can verify that a seller is indeed using the skill in live selling situations, they must gauge how well that skill is being executed.
- Can’t validate the impact of skill adoption on revenue results: While it’s valuable to have the ability to assess individual sales calls, one-off coaching moments will not, on their own, turn a sales training investment into a driver of long-term sustainable growth. The only way to do this is to deploy an insights engine that not only captures how well a seller executes each critical skill in a methodology over time, in real conversations, but also validates, via hard metrics, how leveraging these skills leads to measurable, repeatable revenue growth.
Coaching the skills sellers learn during sales training will not become a growth driver until sales leaders can draw a straight line from seller adoption to revenue results.
What if you could finally see exactly which reps are using skills they learned from sales training to drive revenue at the individual seller level?
To do this, sales training needs to be managed at the same level as more tangible processes such as deal management, where managers engage sellers on deal strategy and work with them to progress opportunities through the sales process and into revenue. This is now possible with Sandler’s Sales Performance Ecosystem.
Sandler integrated generative AI tools such as AI roleplay simulations and conversational intelligence analytics can now evaluate conversations to confirm seller skill adoption and establish a clear connection between the skills learned during sales training and revenue outcomes. This means ROI can now be made visible, not theoretical, allowing sales teams to move beyond simply justifying their investment to leveraging it to dramatically improve seller results.
The lifetime value of a seller who consistently executes learned skills at a high level on all deals, for years, is the true potential of any investment to optimize sales methodology. This is only possible when the skills learned are evaluated and directly linked to the improved revenue outcomes for each seller who adopts them. Click here to learn more about how Sandler’s Sales Performance Ecosystem is delivering this critical outcome for its customers.