FAQ: How much time do we need to make the most out of sales training?

To get the maximum benefit out of sales training, it is important to dedicate sufficient time to the process. It can be easy to overlook the importance of training when you are running a busy practice, and tempting to squeeze it into a short timeframe, but to obtain the highest possible ROI, it is vital to plan for adequate sales training time.

Who is involved with sales training?

Three types of people from your organisation will be involved with training: leaders, managers and participants.

We work with leaders first to identify the rationale, scope and goals for training. They will typically need to invest at least 2 hours of time working with us during the initial meeting and planning stages, although they may not attend the actual training itself.

We work with managers to plan schedules, arrange facilities, approve learning objectives, disseminate evaluations, encourage participants to follow the process and attend training, and follow up calls. Typically, managers will need to spend about 2 days of their time for every 1 day during the training cycle.

We also encourage managers to attend the training sessions for the reasons detailed in the article, Do I, as the manager, need to attend training?

Participants are the members of your team who actually attend the training. Training sessions are usually either 1 day (for telephone training) or 2 days (for personal sales training).

How much time do I have to spend before and after the actual sales training?

We don’t require participants to do any preparation before training, but we have found that participants who practice the principles taught in training for at least 1 day for every 1 training day, produce the best results.

We would encourage managers and other supervisory staff to help organise team workload so that every member of the team who has attended training is able to practice their new skills for sufficient time, without interruptions from other work.

It can be difficult to balance training time with work time for your entire team but we can help you to organise the training schedule and decide who should attend training in order to achieve your best possible return on investment. The potential lost sales from staff attending training rather than interacting with customers are worked into our ROI calculation so that you can clearly see the result of your investment.