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Four billion dollars. That's how much enterprises spend every year to train their sales professionals, according to ES Research Group, a sales training advisory firm in West Tisbury, Mass. And fully half of that goes to third-party training firms. The investment should be worth it, because a more effective sales force can translate into the kind of bottom-line results that would make any vice president giddy.

But more training, if it's the wrong training, can lead to nothing much. If you promise to increase effectiveness and revenue through training, you'd better make a good choice—and the odds are against you.

According to ES Research's 2006 Sales Training Vendor Guide, 90 percent of all sales training programs do yield an increase in sales productivity. The catch is that the increase only lasts 90 to 120 days. Fewer than 20 percent of companies manage to sustain that productivity gain for a year or more. Now, if you only make promises about the first quarter after training, you're good to go. But if you want more than just a blip, and you've decided that buying a vendor's program instead of developing your own is the way to go, then you've got some research to do.

"Some of the most well-known companies have called me in, crying that they've spent millions on sales training providers and nothing has worked," says Dave Stein, CEO and founder of ES Research. "They wind up with a solution to a problem they don't have, and no solution to the problem they do have."

How do you avoid that? We talked to several sales trainers who have been on both sides of the equation: They've had to sell, and they've trained others to sell. They gave us their best advice for how to be a savvy purchaser of sales training.

Where to Start

As with any purchasing decision, you have to start with a careful evaluation of whether to purchase at all. Is the effectiveness of your sales force really going to be improved by training, whether store-bought or home-grown?

Gill Wagner is the president of Honest Selling, a sales training firm in St. Louis. Wagner, whose bias would seem to be for all sales training, all the time, says that the world is full of vice presidents and training managers who were too quick to throw training at a problem that couldn't be solved that way. "For example, they look for a training program in telephone skills or cold calling, but the real problem is their salespeople's willingness to pick up the phone and dial," Wagner says. "It doesn't help to teach them skills for calls when the problem is that they're having a hard time making calls at all."

That's why, Wagner says, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you investigate the real reasons for your sales force's difficulties. Before you start talking to vendors, talk to your salespeople and your supervisors, to find out what their problems are. Wagner says he begins with an audit of his client's sales efforts.

"It's both critical and complex to do it, but you have to consider all possibilities and not just throw solutions at a problem," Wagner says. "What if your real problem is a hiring problem or a motivation problem or a people problem?"

In fact, Wagner says, for people who are comfortable with calling, it almost doesn't matter what sales training program you use—and the same is true for people who just aren't comfortable. "If you're hiring the wrong kind of people, you may end up putting tons of training into people who are never going to be successful," he says. In other words, make sure you know what's wrong before you try to fix it with a couple of days in the classroom.

For example, consider your product development division. This is an area that has a huge impact on whether your salespeople will be able to sell well. "We tend to look at the entire customer acquisition life cycle," says Stein. "Ideally, your products or your services are priced right and they work. But a dysfunctional product development division can lead to products that don't work and prices that are too high, and that's not a sales problem, even if it looks like one."

Taking the Plunge

Let's say that you do discover your training needs a fix and buying a vendor's services is the solution. There's one potential difficulty that can cause you to fail: It isn't the quality of the program, but rather how you evaluate it. In short, if you're not careful, you can be your own worst enemy.

Stein suggests that a lot of sales vice presidents or training managers, who have done their own selling in the past, fall into that right-brained, creative, gregarious category of the population. Their strengths are people strengths, rather than the kind of symbolic and analytic thinking characteristic of the left-brained, engineer/mathematician/accountant part of the population.

"I think for a lot of sales VPs, being creative and social and building relationships has worked for them in the past. It works well for them in selling situations, but then when they get into a buying situation, something process-oriented like requests for proposal (RFPs) and evaluating those RFPs, being creative and spontaneous doesn't work for them all that well," Stein says.

To protect yourself from an emotional or simply incomplete decision, Stein suggests starting with a clear definition of your requirements for whatever sales program you buy. What do you want your salespeople to be able to do after they've had more training? Do you want to increase annual sales by 12 percent for each participant? If you know your goals, you can convey that clearly to the vendors you're considering.

Stein says to think in terms of your customer and ask yourself what you know about the way they buy. Are there customer requirements that your sales force isn't meeting? What do they know and don't know about those requirements? In what areas are they strong or weak? An assessment of this nature will tell you more about what you need from training, and also give you criteria and methods for assessing the success of that training once it's complete.

It also puts you in a better position to create a cost/benefit analysis for whatever training program you're considering. "In this day of tight budgets and oversight, it's almost impossible to get a budget for anything as complex and expensive as training," Stein says. So for every dollar you want to spend on training, you'll be in a better position to ask for it or to justify it if you can say what kind of a return you expect. And you don't have to come up with that alone—enlist help from vendors. This is an opportunity for them to show you that they want to partner with you, not just sell to you.

"You can be really clear and tell them that you need to show a tangible ROI," says Greg Bennett, the founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "A lot of vendors won't want to have anything to do with that, and they'll talk in generalities, like 'new skill sets.' The good ones will work with you to create a snapshot of where you are now." That snapshot can translate into whatever variables you're able to track with your sales force.

"ROI is hard [to gauge] if you don't have any data that shows where you are," Bennett says. But once you know where you are, it's easier to determine your goals, and to evaluate the sales force's progress after 60 or 90 days, he says. In fact, you can even ask the trainer if he is willing to tie a chunk of his compensation to whether or not those goals are achieved. Unfortunately, Bennett says, "Most trainers won't be up for that."

What to Look for

When you start shopping and see that there are herds of vendors in the marketplace, you may feel overwhelmed. But by giving thought to some fundamentals, you can winnow out the weaker services and get to the vendors that are most likely to help you.

Honest Selling's Wagner suggests that any buyer should give some thought to his company's core philosophy and search for training that fits. In theory, he points out, if your company's philosophy is to take care of the customer first, it doesn't make sense to select a vendor that teaches salespeople to lie to prospects or "not to take 'no' for an answer."

Once you've eliminated some candidates on this basis, the ones that remain can be sifted again, this time by examining their content. More importantly, says ES Research's Stein, how will that content be tailored to fit your unique situation? This will probably eliminate a few more contenders, because not all vendors are willing to customize their program to fit your needs. Depending on your training requirements, a one-size-fits-all program might be just fine, but if your salespeople are conducting a complex buying process, it won't.

"Many sales training companies make the most money when they can bring people in and get their cash without modifying their program," Stein says. "So you have to find someone who will willingly adapt their curriculum."

Ask vendors about their program. When did they develop it? How did they develop it? Was it created in-house 20 years ago and never updated? Does the company have curriculum development staff who design the instruction, or do they hire outside designers to look over what they've already created?

The quality of a program can be seen in its design and methods, and that's especially important in the current business environment, where people's time is fractured and their attention has to be everywhere. Says Stein, "If the company you're looking at hasn't developed or updated their content and delivery mechanisms, and medium of training programs in the last five years, they're probably out of date."

When you find vendors that offer training that fits your problem and is up to date, you've solved the first half of the equation. The other half is making that content clear so that it sticks.

Bennett from Altitude Profit has a favorite analogy for training. "It's like cotton candy," he says. "You get a great sugar buzz, but it wears off quickly." Training has a way of inspiring but not sticking, and one reason is that a lot of training is long on content and short on execution.

When you find a vendor with content you like, look at that vendor's plan for teaching its execution. If there isn't a plan for how to help salespeople apply the material, then you're going to have to be the one to figure that out.

"A lot of trainers are more likely to give you their program and essentially say, 'Hope you can make sense of this,' " Bennett says. "But when you get back to the office, it's frustrating if you don't know how to apply it. So if a vendor's idea of follow-up or help with execution is, 'Buy more of my training,' they may not be the best choice."

"This is something that has to be led by the purchaser," Bennett says. "You have to push them. Don't just pay for what they give you. Tell them, 'I need an implementation plan with six follow-up exercises and some help in what to review regularly with the salespeople.' "

One great way to get right to the heart of whether or not a trainer is going to teach execution is to ask whether he is going to make his own practice calls while trainees observe. "If they're not willing to do that, that's really telling," Bennett says.

Once you know the basic outlines of a vendor's content, there's another easy way to assess the vendor's commitment to it: Ask yourself if they themselves are good salespeople. "As they're going through their sales pitch to you, evaluate whether that salesperson is doing what their own program is supposedly going to teach your people," says Honest Selling's Wagner. "Training programs can sell well even if they don't work. If [the trainers] are not walking their own talk, [the program] probably doesn't work."

Finally, when you meet with the vendor, make sure you talk more than once with whomever will actually conduct the training. Ask for everything you want—you're the customer, after all, and you don't have to take what they give you. Ask in more detail about execution and follow-up, and make sure the trainer is planning activities that will let your people practice what the trainer will preach. And assess how successful you think this trainer can be with your salespeople. The trainer may be a very successful salesperson, but that doesn't mean he will have the coaching mentality that will let him convey useful knowledge and skills.

"You don't want someone who will say, 'I'm a great salesman, be just like me!' " Bennett says. "People tend to resent that. You need someone who has a coaching mentality, and is willing to say that they struggled, and who can help others with their struggles."

SIDEBAR: Don't Discount the Fundamentals

Every year, one National Football League team wins the Super Bowl. But the next summer, no matter which team won last season, all the teams hold a training camp.

"I have yet to see last year's Super Bowl winner skip training camp," says Bennett, founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "The best teams always return to the fundamentals, year after year."

When you are considering buying sales training, it's a good idea to consider new ideas and methodologies. But don't assume that your sales team doesn't need to brush up on the fundamentals—especially your high performers.

"As sellers get more and more experienced, they start taking shortcuts," Bennett says. "In my sessions, I always have people admitting that they skip steps. You need to return to the fundamentals at least once a year."

Gill Wagner agrees. As president of Honest Selling, a sales training firm based in St. Louis, he sees talented salespeople making mistakes in the sales funnel every day. He evaluates salespeople on how they manage their sales pipeline. "Let's say you have to close two sales a month," Wagner says. "A nice, generic average is that that the salesperson has to send out four contracts to get those two sales. To get those four, they have to go through the sales process with six prospects, and to get those six, they have to set a first-time appointment with eight possibilities."

Obviously, Wagner says, if that funnel breaks down—say, if the salesperson needs to send out four contracts, but is only going through the sales process with three prospects—the salesperson will never reach his goal. Yet Wagner says he sees situations like that all the time, even with top performers.

In fact, he has seen many top performers make the same kinds of mistakes, despite knowing the fundamentals, such as having two prospects in the sales process and 10 contracts out, instead of six prospects in the process and four contracts out. A return to the fundamentals reminds everyone of what they should be doing, and that can be more valuable than new tricks.

"Good salespeople study sales and marketing and prospecting their entire careers," Wagner says. "I'm a sales training guru, and I'm still learning." —H.D.

SIDEBAR: Picking Up the Phone

What if one of your salespeople knows all the latest tips and tricks, has the fundamentals down pat and a Rolodex full of potential customers but never picks up the phone? Call-reluctance is a common problem in sales. Even if your salespeople are succeeding, it's a mistake to assume that your people don't have suffer from phone phobia.

For people whose livelihood is earned by picking up the phone, it's embarrassing to admit that call reluctance is a factor, but Greg Bennett makes a point of including phone time in his training so that learners have an opportunity to confess their fear of calling. Bennett is the founding partner of Altitude Profit Counseling, a sales training firm in Denver. "There's a tendency to focus on soft skills in sales training, but none of those skills matters if the person is call-reluctant," he says.

The source of the struggle, according to The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance by George Dudley, is a fear of self-promotion. Salespeople who are afraid to promote themselves are lacking a vital skill found in succesful salespeople who can pick up the phone without hesitation.

"I think call reluctance is the basis of all sales problems," Bennett says. "If your sales training doesn't cover call reluctance, or if the trainer doesn't know what you're talking about when you ask if they cover call reluctance, then it's probably no good." –H.D.

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