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February 18, 2021

What to Expect as a Sales Training Buyer

By Ken Valla, President and Co-Founder, The Valla Group

The inherent problem is that the economic model of most sales training providers is at odds with your desire to truly improve sales performance. You need modern, innovative, quality, and research-based content, customized for your unique business situation. This content creation process takes money, time, knowledge, and experience in selling. It is easier and more profitable for most sales training providers to continue to promote their decades-old approach and innovate lucrative services.

A cartoon of a sales manager who is nervous about evaluating sales training solutions.

If you are someone who buys sales training, does this situation sound familiar?

The sales leadership of your company wants to implement a new sales methodology. You’re tasked with finding and sourcing a provider. This new methodology is supposed to transform your business, enabling your salespeople for future success in your evolving and fast-paced industry. This is a big part of your company’s growth strategy, it’s a big deal for you and your company, and you are driving it.

While evaluating current sales training providers, you notice most have been around for ages. Their latest offering has more to do with how they deliver training versus what the training actually teaches salespeople, and the content is basically the same as what they sold 10 years ago. But now they have a new reinforcement app (so maybe your leaders won’t notice the content is stagnant).

Their pricing models are also the same: Pay per person for the content or license it for a certain number of years, and all services and customization are extra. Also, if you don’t renew, you will lose access to the content and need to rip it out of your other trainings or systems it’s integrated into.

Already, you might feel like you’re in a bind.

You ask, “If we pay per person, will we have access to all the components of the offering to drive change and transform our company?” You hear, “Yes, we have consultants and can offer a great services package to drive your transformation.” This also comes at a cost.

“Can we embed this into our new hire process?” “Yes, if you pay us to T3 your facilitators and if you keep buying more participant guides per person.”

“How about reinforcement?” “Yes, that is what the new subscription-based app is for.”

Everything you touch, try to change, adopt, sustain, or measure is all available for a fee, and always requires the sales training vendor to either do the work or be heavily involved. Why shouldn’t you be able to have more control of your own sales training programs? Why should you have to pay for a company to do what you could do internally?

The Problem with Most Traditional Sales Methodologies

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s because this is how the industry has rolled for a long time.

The inherent problem is that the economic model of most sales training providers is at odds with your desire to truly improve sales performance. You need modern, innovative, quality, and research-based content, customized for your unique business situation. This content creation process takes money, time, knowledge, and experience in selling. It is easier and more profitable for most sales training providers to continue to promote their decades-old approach and innovate lucrative services.

This makes them service companies first and content companies second. They make their money selling services (people or technology platforms these days). The implication to you—the person tasked with finding the right partner to buy the right sales methodology for your teams—is that you are completely tethered to the provider. You have limited flexibility with their content so driving a transformation over time requires you to be joined at the hip with them and have deep pockets on a continuous basis. This also raises another challenge: How do you leverage the existing resources on your training and enablement team if the provider is doing all the work?

Expect Better

You shouldn’t have to be stuck in a bind. Successful adoption of a transformative sales methodology happens when your sellers can relate to the situations that a modern methodology addresses, when it is adapted to your unique business situations, and when you can leverage your own internal resources who know your business best.

And should you really have to pay for every little thing? Future sales training financial models will be most attractive when they enable you to use content. Unlimited. Untethered. Ongoing.

A sales leader celebrating that he has decided on the qualities he expects from his sales training solution

If you are a sales training person and you are looking to buy a new sales methodology that is tailored to your unique needs, you should expect:

  •  Content in a sales methodology to be modern, research-based, and flexible
  • The ability to leverage your own internal resources and put them to work with the new content and not at a charge on every move
  • Not being “nickel and dimed” for services
  • Flexibility in leveraging the content with the ability to develop derivative works
  • A perpetual license to the content so you can use it without the fear of what it takes to unwind from your business the day you stop paying for the content

An image of notebook paper with an explanation of the word what “perpetual” means in sales.

These aren’t big asks. This is what you should be requesting of your sales training partners, because they are required if you are going to be successful with that big initiative you have been asked to drive.

Headshot of Ken Valla

Today's post is by Ken Valla, President and Co-Founder of The Valla Group, a modern sales training organization. Follow The Valla Group's LinkedIn page for sales effectiveness insights.