How to measure the success of sales training

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How to Measure the Success of Sales Training

Sales for Life Admin
Sales for Life Admin

You have a fantastic product and a sales team eager to sell it. Maybe you are getting a regular stream of leads, and everything seems to be going well. However, it is natural to wonder if things can be better even when things are already going well as a business owner.

It can be difficult to assess your sales team’s efforts and effectiveness. You want to make sure they’re constantly doing everything they can to generate new sales for your company through lead generation and prospecting. However, you are aware that the modern B2B selling process takes time and, at times, luck.

So, how can you get rid of some of the ill-defined measures that have traditionally been used to measure sales effectiveness and replace them with valid, accurate key performance indicators? What metrics do you need to keep track of to get a clear picture of your sales team’s progress?

Elements to Consider When Monitoring Performance Post-Training

Elements to Consider When Monitoring Performance Post-Training

To acquire a comprehensive view of their sales team’s performance, every sales manager should track these essential elements.

Activity

Simply said, activity is a metric that tracks the daily actions that your sellers engage in to produce more leads and boost conversions. The manner you track activity will be determined by how your sales team typically tackles lead creation, but your KPIs might look like this:

  • Quantity of potential accounts in the seller’s pipeline
  • Daily outgoing or cold calls made
  • Emails sent out as part of an outreach campaign
  • Amount of scheduled demos
  • Number of booked meetings

Because all of these measures are simply quantifiable, sales managers can see what each seller’s daily output of effort looks like.

Sellers have little control over how many people respond to their email communications or how many cold calls are returned, but they have complete control over how many they make. As a result, assessing output is a better approach to gauge effort than using a response rate.

Quality

The quality of a sales team’s pipeline is the following KPI to consider when evaluating their performance. This will give you a good picture of how well your seller is prospecting and how well they understand your ideal consumer.

Quality can be quantified using KPIs such as:

  • Rates for return calls
  • Open rates for emails
  • Setting up a warm sales appointment
  • Trial demos given vis-a-vis sign-ups
  • How far leads get into a seller’s funnel

These KPIs are also simple to track, and they should be able to inform you which of your sellers have nailed their prospecting and outreach strategies and which need some improvement.

Tracking these KPIs is also an excellent opportunity for your sellers to share best practices with the rest of the team. Let’s imagine you see that every email sent out by one seller receives a 60% or higher open rate. Maybe they can discuss the kind of subject lines they’re using with the entire team and the methods they’re using to expand their email list.

Conversion

The result of all of the above processes is measured by conversion. Usually, conversion is determined by factors such as:

  • Conversion value on average
  • Ratios of a quote to close
  • Methods of contact sales
  • Customer retention
  • Time to close

While most sales managers use the list above to track their sales teams’ progress, you can’t just rely on conversion KPIs to determine success. You won’t get a complete picture of performance unless you combine conversions with the other two types of KPIs mentioned above.

One of your sellers, for example, may have a low conversion value. However, based on these KPIs, you can see that they are closing more sales than the rest of the team. This could signal that they are particularly adept in lower-tier, speedier sales.

Alternatively, say one of your sellers isn’t completing many transactions, but you observe that most of their leads are moving quite deep down the funnel. Perhaps their low close rate is due to terrible timing, poor luck, pricing, or other factors beyond their control.

Conclusion

The indicators mentioned above will disclose whether or not your training initiatives are producing the desired effect on the business. Understanding your data will assist you in optimizing your sales and marketing budget and generate excellent outcomes, regardless of the size of your company.

We propose that you evaluate these indicators regularly to observe how they’ve changed over time. This will assist you in determining what is most important to work on.

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