Measuring Effectiveness of Sales Performance Improvement.

"Fewer than 40 percent of all sales organisations we have interviewed have implemented a formal, empirical measurement program for sales performance improvement or sales training. However, more than 70 percent have said that it is a priority within the next year."

ES Research Group

Trouble is - how, in a very practical sense do you do it? To produce something effective is actually a very difficult thing to do.

Your solution to this problem must help you minimise your training spend and maximise the effectiveness of your training outcomes. It must work with all types of sales training methods and absolutely must not be a sales training tool.

To be effective, it must do three important things:

1. Help you to define empirically the sales capabilities needed to deliver your business plan in terms of:
• Selling skills required
• Metrics required; and
• Key performance targets
2. It must provide easy to use tools for assessing the current skill levels of your sales teams. By comparing your current capabilities with your future needs they can then provide you with an empirically based view of where any skill deficiencies lie and provides the general characteristics and metrics to guide the design of a sales performance improvement programme.
3. Having helped you to create the optimal training programme, they should then allow you to pre-emptively track the effectiveness of sales training against your agreed key performance targets.

Without these characteristics, you can fall in to the old trap of monitoring sales performance without improving it.

Lucidus have their own take on such a tool, which is called TrakSkill - Sales. To see how we approached the problem and to get a feel for the tool we developed to solve it, please have a look at the TrakSkill - Sales web page or the web-cast; it lasts around 9 minutes.