The Evolution of Sales Training

An Optimistic Future
Look around, and you'll see where sales training is headed. Companies such as OutStart have developed tools that support on-demand learning and have extended the learning environment into a collaborative, community effort in which learners can ask questions, get answers and collaborate with peers and experts to truly enable the learning process. Those learners must be better-equipped than ever before to meet the demands from buyers for value articulation and business knowledge.

Companies that already provide strong sales methodologies and processes, including The TAS Group, Richardson, Wilson Learning, Sales Performance International (SPI), Performance Methods and Acclivus, are driving the use of sales performance measurement frameworks that deliver hard evidence of the business value of their training programs.

In addition, there are about three dozen U.S. universities that have courses of study in professional selling, turning out a little more than 4,100 graduates a year. Over the next 10 years, this number is likely to grow, with graduates of these programs funneling directly into the workforce as rookie -- but highly educated and trained -- salespeople. Because they are being schooled in process, as well as the basics, they will have an immediate and positive impact on the companies for which they eventually will work.

The Bottom Line
There have been many great developments, yet sales is still last in line for many companies. All the education, training and technology in the world will not improve how people sell if they, their management and those who educate and train continue to look at sales training as a series of unconnected, tactical events, the results of which are not measured, rather than a critical support component in the broad adoption of a formal, institutionalized sales methodology.