Sales Training Budget

sales team development plan

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How to Create A Sales Team Development Plan and Budget

Professional development opportunities are a major factor in the decision to change jobs. That’s according to numerous research papers, including our recent Sales Team Retention survey. So if you want to improve employee satisfaction and stave off attrition, then a sales team development plan must be a top priority. 

By giving your reps a roadmap to build their skills and advance their careers, you give them a compelling reason to stay in your organization. Read on for actionable tips to build the perfect development plan for your sales team. 

Why is sales team development critical?

Sales team development is more important than ever. Ambition found that 98% of sales reps would stay with a company forever if they were given ongoing development opportunities. 

What’s more, companies that invest in sales team development put themselves at a significant competitive advantage by retaining talent. Losing a salesperson costs an average of $115,000. 

Your sales team is only as good as the people on that team. By investing in their development, both as individuals and as a group, you can improve their ability to meet quotas and move the needle. 

How to build a sales team development plan

Sales development doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a lot of intentional strategy and effort and requires a commitment of resources from the organization. 

As such, it’s important to have a clear plan to get you from Point A to Point B. A cohesive development plan includes role definitions, resources, expectations, and timelines. Here are some steps you can take to develop your own. 

1. Establish a sales development budget

On average, 1–3% of the total annual budget should be earmarked for development. Small to medium businesses are spending more than $77,000 annually on outsourced sales training and development. Large companies spend more than five times as much. 

If you under or over-spend on sales development, that will create bigger problems down the road. Over-spending without generating results will cause you to lose buy-in among executive stakeholders. Under-spending is unlikely to generate positive results. 

By understanding your needs, you can set a realistic budget that suits your goals and needs and, more importantly, moves the needle in the right direction. 

Download our Sales Training Budget Guide to help you determine how much to budget for development.

2. Reallocate unused resources

There’s no point in spending money on tools and resources that no one uses. A great way to invest in development without increasing costs is to look for resources that you aren’t using. Rather than waste those dollars, use them to grow and improve your team. 

3. Identify high-impact opportunities 

Most companies have limited budgets. This is especially true in today’s economic climate. 

The key to an effective sales team development plan is knowing where to spend the most time and money. After all, you want your limited resources to go where they’ll have the greatest impact. 

This is where having high-quality managers makes all the difference. When you support your managers and empower them to make decisions around resource allocation, they can effectively support your sales reps at every stage of onboarding and production. 

Effective managers understand the best delivery methods for training and development. Live in-person and virtual training sessions are both great options for team training. For companies that are local, live training sessions are refreshing in today’s remote-heavy work environment. Getting reps face-to-face for in-person training is worth the cost of the return. For remote companies or spread-out teams, virtual sessions are a great alternative to in-person meetings. For best results avoid pre-recorded training videos. When participants are able to meet in person or join a live virtual session, they feel more engaged and collaborative, which promotes learning. 

4. Prioritize your tools and tech stack

Not all tools and technologies are created equal. For example, many sales teams have a digital resource library—a big expense content bank that no one uses. It’s important, then, to look at your current resources and decide which are actually empowering your team to do their jobs better.

Instead of thinking of technologies by their product class (e.g. “asset management platform”) think of them based on the problems they solve for your organization (e.g. storehouse of information to educate our reps). 

When you break out the mold, you may find other more creative solutions to the problem (e.g. interactive, live training sessions vs. pre-recorded talking-head videos). 

5. Make use of free resources

While it’s important to invest resources in sales development, there’s a wide range of free courses, webinars, and training available online. In an interactive group setting, these resources can be a valuable tool—and they don’t require additional buy-in from budget holders!

However, it’s not enough to simply throw these free resources at a rep without any context or structure. Prepare discussion questions and exercises to test skills during webinars and presentations. 

When reps take part in live discussions and practice the skills they’re learning, they’re more likely to retain and apply them when they hit the floor. 

6. Think outside the classroom 

Training and lecturing are two different things. Lecturing is telling someone how to do something, while training is actually showing them. 

Take new hires out of the classroom so they can see skills being put to use in real-life scenarios and how to put them into action themselves. 

7. Focus on moving the needle

Hiring and training salespeople is an investment. To get the best return on that investment, you can’t treat it as a one-and-done. Skill retention requires applied learning and repetition. 

Don’t waste your investment by neglecting follow-up sessions, coaching, and feedback. Good coaching builds on the skills learned in training and helps reps understand where they are and where they need to be. 

8. Leverage gamification

Gamifying information is an easy way to improve retention and increase problem-solving. New hires who are challenged to solve problems and demonstrate skills outside of the pressure of the sales floor feel safer trying new things. Contests, competitions, and similar tactics help reps use skills in dynamic ways.

Who needs a sales development plan?

You may be wondering: do you even need a sales development plan?

The answer is YES if you want to:

  • Meet quota consistently
  • Retain your team over the long haul
  • Improve morale 
  • Grow and scale your business

Regardless of size, every sales department needs certain skills and information to be successful. A comprehensive sales development plan lays the foundation for your team to build and adopt these skills. 

Reach out to learn more about our customizable virtual sales training programs and get the best out of people. 

Working on your sales team development plan and budget?

Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).



10 Actionable Tips for Creating Your Sales Team Development Plan + Budget [“Sales Shot” Workshop]

10 Actionable Tips for Creating Your Sales Team Development Plan + Budget

[“Sales Shot” Workshop]

HOW TO BUILD YOUR SALES TEAM DEVELOPMENT PLAN + BUDGET

Smart leaders know that ongoing training and development is the #1 way to keep employees happy and engaged. It’s also the top thing that Millennials and Gen Z seek when job hunting. With attrition at an all-time high and the talent pool shrinking, companies need to shift their focus to retention strategies.

Watch our 30-minute, tip-rich session to learn everything you need to know when creating your sales team development plan. We’re covering the mistakes to avoid, how to budget for sales training, tips on executing development with low bandwidth, and much more!

Bonus: You’ll also gain access to our Sales Training Budget Cheat Sheet!

Watch the video replay!

HOW TO BUILD YOUR SALES TEAM DEVELOPMENT PLAN + BUDGET

Smart leaders know that ongoing training and development is the #1 way to keep employees happy and engaged. It’s also the top thing that Millennials and Gen Z seek when job hunting. With attrition at an all-time high and the talent pool shrinking, companies need to shift their focus to retention strategies.

Watch our 30-minute, tip-rich session to learn everything you need to know when creating your sales team development plan. We’re covering the mistakes to avoid, how to budget for sales training, tips on executing development with low bandwidth, and much more!

Bonus: You’ll also gain access to our Sales Training Budget Cheat Sheet!

Watch the video replay!

sales training ROI

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How to Measure Sales Training ROI

Training geeks will tell you there are four traditional ways to measure sales training ROI and the impact it has on an organization. It’s called “The Kirkpatrick Model.” In my experience, this model only includes two measurements that sales leaders actually care about. I’d like to add a few alternate levels to consider.  

Level 1 is Learner Feedback. The smile sheet has more to do with liking the trainer or getting fed than the impact, and the quiz results are more about short-term memory than anyone’s understanding of how to actually apply skills.

Level 2 is Observation. What happens on the job? It’s observed behavior change, and it’s subjective. “Manager, did Bob use his new skills?” Manager: “Um, I haven’t been listening to Bob all day long, boss. I have 14 people and 200 emails to read…” You get the struggle.

Level 3 is Information Retention. New skills should be fresh in their minds and easy to execute the day after training, but what about 2 months later? 6 months? 1 year? Over time, people are known to fall back into bad habits. Truly valuable training provides easy-to-use (and memorable) skills that stick with the learner over time. 

Level 4 is ROI. Calculate sales training ROI by taking the results that went up and divide by the cost of the sales training. Naturally, there are flaws here, like, “When do we stop measuring?” “What about soft costs of missed revenue?” “What if results fall off?” and “Training wasn’t all we changed that quarter!”

When I advise sales training leaders, I help them solve it all with two little words:

“Contributed to”

Last quarter, new vendor training contributed to a 25% increase in meeting close rates and a 34% increase in show rates. Extrapolated over the period of a year and using our standard meeting to deal close rates, that means an additional 245 meetings and 66 closed deals or $3.1 million in revenue. That’s a 31x return on investment of the $100K training investment. (That’s also expressed 3,100% folks and it’s BIG. It’s also a real case study, BTW).

So, sales training ROI is a big deal. When calculating, the bottom line is nearly always revenue or profit, but there are little wins along the way. Look for bumps in any of the following (and celebrate!):

  • Talk time
  • Conversations over 2:00 minutes
  • Close percentage
  • Show rate
  • Pipeline velocity
  • Average deal size

Combine these as I did over a time period of a year and the numbers get big fast. Even a modest increase in a close percentage or deal size will bring double-digit ROI.

Now for the new stuff. In today’s climate, there are 5 more sales training ROI measurements I advise you to start tracking:

  1. Applicant increase
  2. Tenure
  3. Promotion rate
  4. Employee satisfaction (a KPI to tenure)
  5. Ramp time

Yes, nearly all of these are about helping show the link between the career development you offer the new generation of sellers and how many of them come to work for you and stay.

If you’re offering ongoing development, a training budget, a certification, or a partnership with a premier vendor, ADVERTISE THAT (you’ll attract the new generation of sellers!). Then start tracking the average number of applicants over the previous months, but don’t compare pre-COVID (that’s apples vs. bacteria).

Great development keeps people in companies longer. So count what percentage of promotions are now happening internally and whether your investments are moving the needle of employee satisfaction. 

There’s a direct correlation between employee engagement (and happiness) and their performance. If they’ve been with your company for 6 years and are consistently meeting or exceeding quota, chances are they’re happy in their role and less likely to leave. Have they missed quota a few times now, or are they not as engaged with their customers as they once were? Then it might be time for a 1:1 to see what is going on behind the scenes. 

Finally, my holy grail: ramp time. How long does it take a new hire to get to quota? This critical number not only impacts revenue right where it counts but also determines whether a rep stays or not. Here’s an insider tip:

People who feel successful at work will keep coming back to work.

No, not Earth-shattering, but it might be if you reverse engineer it. 20 years ago I revamped a new hire sales training program for a computer manufacturer. It was taking reps 9 months to hit their goal. Ouch. (Best practice is 3-6 months and it’s getting longer – we’re now approaching 9 months again according to Mindtickle’s latest research) Yes, we took out a bunch of filler courses and implemented my “Just in Time” training approach, but we also did something a little sneaky. We lowered the bar. The VP of Sales and I saw the mass exit happening at six months and we worked together to get reps PAID if they were on track by this point in time. The result? We cut the turnover in half.

Help people win, and they’ll stay and keep winning.

Long story long, employee development has an impact on more than just revenue. There’s a reason training investments are up over 30% as an industry over last year. And if you don’t already have your enablement team running regular reports on these new stats, I suggest you get started or you’ll be late to the party. It may feel like we’re in a war for talent, but I assure you this is only the battle. Use your training investments strategically to attract, keep, and promote your people because this precious resource will become only more scarce.

Want more information on how to measure sales training ROI?

Contact us today to request information on our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).



sales training budget

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How to Budget for Sales Training

Employee development is a critical part of attracting and retaining talent, but only a fraction of leaders include an annual development line-item in budgets. We wait until we have a budget surplus, a BHAG goal or change to surmount, or a massive hiring goal to outsource or hire training talent. 

It’s sort of like call coaching for our managers, right? Employee development isn’t a fire drill (Panic! They don’t know something!) and often gets put off even though we all know the importance.

So hats off, leader! You’re ahead of the game by searching for annual sales training budget amounts.

How much?

Average spend on annual training per FTE is 1-3% of the total annual budget or 2-5% of the salary budget. 

That’s $50.00 per $1000 of salary.

$100K employee = $5000/year  | $50K employee = $2500/year

These are averages across all industries and employee types – forklift drivers, CEOs, high tech, landscaping, etc. If customer experience and loyalty are critical to you, go higher. If your industry is complex or your product is early in the life cycle, go higher. If you’re competing like mad for talent, go higher. 

Sales jobs average 20% higher – $60 per $1000 salary. 

How often?

The average organization provides about 4 hours of training per month or a total of 45.5 hours a year. That’s right, if you haven’t trained since new hire onboarding, you’re lagging well behind average. 

My company, Factor 8, provides sales training for virtual sellers and sales managers across all industries. There’s a complexity to the sale, a talent pool in high demand, and a real opportunity to differentiate with a better customer experience. Our per-employee prices for a full year of ongoing sales development fall in the mid to upper end of this range, so I can validate the research. 

Why?

Employee development and career advancement are 2 of the top 3 things millennials search for when accepting jobs. And 50% of reps think their company provides them with the training they actually need to be successful.

We spend 5-10x a salary to recruit and hire someone and then a minuscule fraction of that to help them be successful and stay. It reminds me of this: 

Hiring and keeping employees are two ends of the same boat everyone. I picture recruiting and training as our passengers here!

virtual sales challenges

Justification:

Here’s some great research to help you justify the spend:

Both HR Magazine and ATD site double the profit per employee that prioritizes training (priority = double the spend of not a priority). In fact, companies who invest a minimum of just $1500/employee will see 24% higher profits.

CSO Insights proved a 63% average improvement across teams where the manager was getting development (that’s average you guys…what would happen with an 85% increase on entire TEAMS?)

And great onboarding can cut a new hire’s time to quota in HALF. That could be 1-2 extra months of productivity on an already-shrinking rep lifespan. Worth it!

Again, I can validate these findings. Over twelve years of partnering with BDR, AE, AM, and Management teams across thousands of companies, we’ve seen lifts from 30-300%, with a huge percent of teams paying for the training before it’s even over with increased leads, pipeline, close rate, etc. 

If you need an ROI model to get the spend, I recommend showing a 15% lift over about 90 days post-training if you’re still doing event-based training. 

You can expect bigger spikes with face-to-face training, but longer-sustained skills with a long-term blended approach. Overall, if you can’t show at least a 5-10% lift, it probably isn’t worth the investment.

Not sure it will work? Do it anyway and measure the results. Remember this?

A recent Ambition study surveyed sales reps about training and 98% of them said they would stay with a company indefinitely if they got ongoing development.

IBM recently shared that employees who feel they cannot develop in the company and fulfill career goals are 12X more likely to leave.

Truth is, sales reps know less than they did 10 years ago and our customers expect more. If you haven’t added a development line item by now, you’re in trouble. If you haven’t increased it in the past five years, it’s time.

And, if it’s been more than a year since you provided training, increase your number.

 

Want more insight on how to budget for sales training?

Click here to watch our session on “How To Build Your Training & Development Plan” to learn what industry spend is for sales training, the critical skills you need for every sales role, how to partner with your sales training organization, and more!

Is sales training included in your budget?

Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps (and managers).



invest in sales training

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10 Signs Your Sales Team Needs Sales Training

Your budget is limited. Your needs are not. So when do you know it’s time to invest in sales training for your team? Here are some easy benchmarks and warning signs to help determine if your sales team needs sales training:

1. Your New Hire Training Doesn’t Include Sales Training. I know, you hired for sales talent. You shouldn’t need to train them. If I had a nickel every time I heard that… Trust me, they need training. Why? Their old company did it differently, the sales motion was slightly different, they love a different methodology, and maybe they were loyal sellers but not great ones. I’ve had 15-year sales veterans in my virtual sales skills classes and often their learning curve is the steepest. (Head here for more info on what good virtual sales training looks like)

virtual sales challenges

2. The Last 4 Classes Were Product Related. If you’re thinking: “I do training all the time!”, I invite you to check the content. Reps are used to getting product/service updates and company updates, but not skill refreshes. Sales skills should be taught in onboarding AND at least once a quarter ongoing. 

Think of sales calls as “game day.” How often did you practice before then? 

3. There’s Been a Strategy Change. About half our clients come to us because it’s been a struggle to change behaviors now that ______ has changed. Sometimes it’s a go-to-market strategy, a client coverage, an addition of a product or service line. You get it. What seemed simple in the boardroom can prove crazy-making when trying to align 50 junior reps and their managers. Just remember, telling them in the meeting only opens the door. Most employees don’t have the capacity nor the inclination to then translate how this will change their approach, their conversations, their goals, etc. Tell, TRAIN, then coach.

4. You Just Listened to Sales Calls and Your Ears Are Bleeding. If you’ve recently implemented a conversational intelligence tool like Gong, Chorus or ExecVision, you probably thought it would be fun to listen to the customer voice. By the ninth call recording, I’m willing to bet you summoned your team leads and training liaison and had a serious talk about rep skills. Enter professional sales skills training.

5. You’re Losing Millennials. If the last 3 exits or thanks-no-thanks job rejections were millennials, check your training package. A recent article cited “opportunities for development and advancement” as the number one requirement for millennial job seekers. New hire product and systems training won’t cut it if you want to attract and keep today’s talent, especially with the current sales hiring crisis (re: “The Great Resignation”).

Are you considering alternate hiring pools and need to teach former teachers, retail workers, vets or tradespeople how to sell?

Assign this task to the professionals, your HR trainer is probably not equipped for that heavy overhaul. Alternatively, congratulations on your brilliant strategy. Great training programs will open multiple hiring pools to you that won’t be open to your competition, and I love finding behavioral traits in an existing hire rather than teaching the skills to someone new!

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6. It’s Playbook Time! If you’ve grown to the point where it’s time to capture best practices and “how a bill becomes a law” at your shop, I’m guessing you have more than 10 reps but under 50 and you’ve been selling between 1 and 3 years. It’s time to document! Before you do, grab some new best practices from a professional sales trainer. The perfect time is after draft one and before it’s finalized. Invariably, clients who just finished their playbook have gone back to update it with our skills and strategies. If you’re not sure which to do first, I do recommend starting the playbook so what’s already created can be standardized and uniformly improved with training.

7. Flat Growth. If you’ve used the same conversion ratios the last 2-3 times you’ve done headcount projections, it’s time for some training. In other words, rep staffing isn’t always a quantity equation, you should bank on quality improvements as well. Not sure? Ask yourself how many heads you could save in your budget with a 15% improvement in your top-line conversion metric (whatever that may be). We regularly clock 30-70% improvements allowing sales leaders to lower sales headcount! Shift that spending to your “want” list instead!

Now let’s check in on manager training. Most companies invest in new hire training, then ongoing rep training, and maybe finally manager development. Makes sense, there’s only one for every ten or twenty reps, right? Unfortunately, most reps we promote to manager fail in the first 24 months (50-70% according to the Corporate Executive Board), and they can take down great customers AND reps with them. Here are three signs to check:

8. Your Turnover Is Over 65% or Increasing. If you don’t have annualized employee turnover/exit rates on your dashboard, get them – and by manager. Your star sales managers are keeping their teams and promoting reps rather than suffering high attrition. This is a red flag that you have a struggling manager – perhaps one who hasn’t been taught how to lead people yet.

9. Low Employee Engagement Scores. Consider this a leading-indicator KPI of attrition. It is NOT a buyer’s market anymore and if you have a great rep they are actively being recruited out. New generations demand ongoing development opportunities, so be sure you have a line item in your budget every single year. If not, you simply won’t be able to compete for talent. 

10. You’ll Be Scaling in the Next 18 Months. If you’ve proven your concept (product fit and funding or even the voracity of digital sales vs. field selling), you’ll be planning to add headcount. When doubling (or more) in size, the critical path is your management team. Sales management training helps provide a consistent rep experience (teams will juggle), a consistent sales process, a consistent definition of what is a good call, consistent performance evaluation, and consistent hiring. I think you’re getting the key word here. Consistency will allow for a smooth scale. Without it, you’re trying to replicate the Wild Wild West and you’ll experience a spike in rep (and manager) attrition 3-9 months after your hiring waves. 

Bonus: Before you scale is also the right time to upgrade your onboarding experience. You’ll need standard curriculum, testing, wave-based hiring, sand box systems, and professional sales curriculum. Do this before tripling the team’s volume in class! 

If you’ve found a few signs that your team needs sales training, I hope you’ll reach out and have a conversation. We’re happy to help you decide what skills would help most even if you don’t ultimately outsource to us. 

Ready to invest in sales training?

Contact us today to learn about our customizable virtual sales training programs
available for reps and managers.



How to Budget for Sales Training [Guide]

How to Budget for Sales Training

[Guide]

Your Guide to Calculating Your Sales Training Budget

If you’re assessing internal or external virtual sales training solutions, use our Sales Training Budget guide to help you determine the true cost of sales training and how to calculate the cost/budget for sales training.

With this guide, you’ll learn:

  • Why sales training is crucial to the success of your team
  • How reps and managers can ask their leaders for sales training
  • How much sales training should cost per employee

This is must-have information for ALL sales leaders, sales enablement, and sales operations to help you determine how much to budget for sales training.

Download Guide

Your Guide to Calculating Your Sales Training Budget

If you’re assessing internal or external virtual sales training solutions, use our Sales Training Budget guide to help you determine the true cost of sales training and how to calculate the cost/budget for sales training.

With this guide, you’ll learn:

  • Why sales training is crucial to the success of your team
  • How reps and managers can ask their leaders for sales training
  • How much sales training should cost per employee

This is must-have information for ALL sales leaders, sales enablement, and sales operations to help you determine how much to budget for sales training.

Download Guide

How to Build Your Training and Development Plan [Webinar Recording]

How to Build Your Training and Development Plan

[Webinar Recording]

BUILDING YOUR TEAM DEVELOPMENT PLAN?

Smart leaders know that providing new hire and ongoing training to their teams is the #1 way to keep them AND the number one thing millennials seek when job hunting (Forbes).

And with the constant changes in markets, sales motions, and customer budgets, rep and manager development is more critical than ever.

Don’t leave your team’s training to a potential time and budget surplus. It’s too important to meet your sales goals. Plan the budget you need to accelerate your teams, attract the best, and retain top talent.

Watch Factor 8 Founder, Lauren Bailey, share tips on…

  • What is an industry-standard spend
  • What are the critical skills needed for every role
  • How to partner with your training org (if you have one)
  • Smart spends vs. money wasters
  • Aligning your goals and growth plans with your enablement plan
  • Easy ways to incorporate continuous training throughout the year
  • Low-cost and no-cost alternatives
  • Tips on executing development with low bandwidth

Recommended for: Enablement & Training Leaders, & Sales Leaders

Watch the video replay!

BUILDING YOUR TEAM DEVELOPMENT PLAN?

Smart leaders know that providing new hire and ongoing training to their teams is the #1 way to keep them AND the number one thing millennials seek when job hunting (Forbes).

And with the constant changes in markets, sales motions, and customer budgets, rep and manager development is more critical than ever.

Don’t leave your team’s training to a potential time and budget surplus. It’s too important to meet your sales goals. Plan the budget you need to accelerate your teams, attract the best, and retain top talent.

Watch Factor 8 Founder, Lauren Bailey, share tips on…

  • What is an industry-standard spend
  • What are the critical skills needed for every role
  • How to partner with your training org (if you have one)
  • Smart spends vs. money wasters
  • Aligning your goals and growth plans with your enablement plan
  • Easy ways to incorporate continuous training throughout the year
  • Low-cost and no-cost alternatives
  • Tips on executing development with low bandwidth

Recommended for: Enablement & Training Leaders, & Sales Leaders

Watch the video replay!

How to Sell to the CFO (to Unstick Deals) [Cheat Sheet]

How to Sell to the CFO (to Unstick Deals)

[Cheat Sheet]

Deals getting stuck at the one-yard line? You’re not alone.

Whether we’re in a recession or facing challenging economic circumstances, there are plenty of times when companies conserve and freeze their budgets. So, how do you get your deals through? How can you ensure you’re equipped to sell to the C-Suite and new personalities like the CFO?
 
We’re here to help!
 
Download our cheat sheet for:
  • Tips for sales leaders on products, financial tools, and aligning solutions to help unstick deals
  • Tips for sales reps to help them align their pitches and get deals targeted to CFOs
  • Tips for sales managers on new skills and coaching tactics for reps now selling to execs
  • Advice directly from CFOs on how sellers and companies can get their deals approved
 
With this cheat sheet, you’ll be well on your way to unsticking deals and moving them past the finish line!

Download your cheat sheet below!



Deals getting stuck at the one-yard line? You’re not alone.

Whether we’re in a recession or facing challenging economic circumstances, there are plenty of times when companies conserve and freeze their budgets. So, how do you get your deals through? How can you ensure you’re equipped to sell to the C-Suite and new personalities like the CFO?
 
We’re here to help!
 
Download our cheat sheet for:
  • Tips for sales leaders on products, financial tools, and aligning solutions to help unstick deals
  • Tips for sales reps to help them align their pitches and get deals targeted to CFOs
  • Tips for sales managers on new skills and coaching tactics for reps now selling to execs
  • Advice directly from CFOs on how sellers and companies can get their deals approved
 
With this cheat sheet, you’ll be well on your way to unsticking deals and moving them past the finish line!

Download your cheat sheet below!



Get the budget you need to keep your team

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Get the Budget You Need to Keep Your Team

Congratulations! The decision to develop your sales reps and managers is a sound one. If you don’t already have battle wounds from our industry’s war for talent, the fight may be coming your direction as our hiring pool shrinks and the demand for digital sellers grows (at a rate of 10-14x traditional sales). 

For most of us this means that our talent is harder to find, harder to keep, and coming to us with less and less experience. In other words, we can’t always count on “buying” the talent — especially at the top of the sales funnel — instead we have to prepare our companies to “build” it.

“We can’t count on buying talent, we must learn to build it.”

According to The Bridge Group, the average tenure of a BDR/SDR role in technology is under 15 months and shrinking. And although best practice is being at quota by month 2, the average is closer to month four to six.  So we’re left with a year or less of productive sales talent and a lot of open reqs. 

So how do we get them up to speed faster and staying longer?  Glad you asked: You train them.

Forbes reported last year the #1 thing Millennials search for from an employer is development opportunity.

Sadly, only about half of Reps rate their companies as providing them with the training to be successful (American Association of Inside Sales 2019).  That means half the folks working for you right now may be looking elsewhere as your read this.

AA-ISP also taught us that only half of us Inside Sales Leaders actually get the budget we need to provide ongoing development for our teams.    

If our industry continues to think of training as something we do when there’s a budget surplus, we simply won’t have the tools and talent we need to attract, ramp, and retain our reps for the foreseeable future.  We’ll literally lose the war for talent.

Here’s how to fix it:

  1. Demand a per-employee training line item in your annual budget.  Ten years ago we convinced the CFO we needed one for recruiting. Five years ago it was tools.  Now it’s got to be training.
  2. Sneak it from a spiff, travel, or tools budget.  Hey, there are learning tools and training is a reward, right?  Sneak it this year and budget for it next year.
  3. Build an ROI case study.  Grab results from your favorite vendor case studies and do the model for your team.  Show seats filled faster, reps ramping sooner, and employees staying longer. Not to mention lifts in conversion, average deal size, and pipeline velocity.  We’ve seen companies increase conversions by 300%. The average is closer to 75%. But try building an ROI model of even half that and plan to over-perform.  
  4. Not comfortable modeling your floor?  Cite industry ROI statistics. Training Magazine re[prt that great sales onboarding can cut time to quota by half.  CSO Insights tells us that management development improves their teams’ percent to quota by up to 107% (with a 63% average improvement).  Where would your floor be if reps hit quota twice as fast or your floor increased quota attainment by 63%?
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What do I budget?

Best practice line item per rep is about $1500 and $2500 per manager.  If you haven’t trained in a while, have lack-luster onboarding, or a big hill to climb with a strategy shift or goal increase, double it.  The average spend across all industries is just under $1000 per person, with IT industries and sales professions trending at or above best-practice spends.

A few more stats to feather your pitch:

  • On average, the Fortune 100 ‘Best Companies to Work For’  list provide 73 hours of training for full-time employees, compared to 38 hours delivered as standard practice by others.
  • The top organizations also had 65% less staff turnover than other organizations in the same sector – partly due to their employee development programs.
  • Sales Architects tells us that 85% of best in class companies use a professional sales curriculum and/or trainer. These companies see reps hit quota faster. 
  • Aberdeen and The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals tell us that a lack of development is a top reason for reps leaving companies. 

All preaching and pitching aside, the absolute differentiator for companies in the next five years will be our ability to develop and retain our current teams + our ability to recruit from diverse hiring pools. Now is the time to create an annual development line item in the budget.   it’s up to leaders like us to fix the development gap with the generations we are hiring, or the scraping sound you hear today as we recruit from the bottom of the barrel will sound a lot more like a puncture as we blow out the barrel itself. 

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how much does sales training cost

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How To Get Budget for Inside Sales Training

If your Inside Sales team is relatively new, chances are you don’t have a defined training budget at your disposal (am I getting warm?). I’d also venture a guess that your somewhat green team could definitely use some inside sales training. (Still warm?) Which means that either:

  1. You’re individually training each of them yourself (ouch!)
  2. You’re sending them to some form of field or other training that doesn’t seem to actually fit
  3. You’re pulling out your hair and ready for some help! (ooh! Now she’s hot! Ha ha)

We’re here to help!

STEP ONE: DETERMINE NEEDS

The average company spends around $1000 / rep / year on training. Companies that score in the “best practices” range for sales spend closer to $2K. This goes right next to your incentives and recruiting budget my friends. Every year. In the meantime, ask for the equivalent of $1750 / Rep. You have some gaps to fill. This should buy you a few days of training per rep.

STEP TWO: FIGHT FOR BUDGET

Enter the Big-Bad–Doesn’t-Want-to­-Spend-Money-On-Your-Silly-Little-Team-Boss:

“Why would I spend money on training! I heard that by the time you back to your job, you’ve lost 90% of what you’ve learned in training and 3 months later the rest is gone too. And by the way, these Reps will be gone in six months anyway, right?” (Whoa Boss Man!)

Don’t panic…we’re gonna get through this. Ready for your side of the negotiation?

You (Superstar Inside Sales Leader): Sure, sometimes that is true (with bad training) but did YOU know that:

  • A recent survey found that 40% of employees who receive poor training leave their positions within the first year (and site “lack of training” as a reason for leaving!)

So providing good sales training will reduce attrition!

  • A second study found that companies with training programs that “exceeded expectations” achieved 94.8% of quota – ten points above companies with mediocre programs (and X points above you today with no training???) – So providing good sales training will raise our performance to quota!
  • Best in class sales training improves individual performance by an average of 20% – So if we raise even 10%, we should recoup ____ $$ and pay for training in X months!
  • 85% of companies rated best in class in Sales use an outside professional sales trainer / curriculum – So we probably should buy this not build it. I’ll do the legwork…

STEP THREE: FIND YOURSELF A VENDOR

So, what does good inside sales training look like? How can you prevent the “fall out”? Check out my recent video for quick tips to get the most from that training budget you fought so hard to get!

Hope this helps you Super Star Inside Sales Leaders out there!
Cheers!