Getting your sales team properly trained impacts your bottom line
Henry Ford is credited with inventing the modern production line, but he didn’t believe in drudgery. The image most of us have of that kind of working environment is one in which staff do monotonous, brainless jobs all day long; yet Ford had a firm belief in investing in his staff.
He said:
“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay,”
He was right.
The figures speak for themselves
As pioneers of the digital learning space, with over thirty years’ experience, we have seen how often well-trained staff outperform those who are left to their own devices. We even have the figures to back it up.
We used our Learning Content skills to build product training courses for HotelPlan, one of Britain’s biggest retailers of skiing and walking holidays. The material we developed helped travel agents, who would be selling Hotelplan’s packages, understand the specifics of the holidays it offered, and highlighted where they differ from the competition. It also presented complex information, like skiing runs and equipment hire, in a simple and informative manner.
Almost immediately upon launch we found:
- Those selling skiing breaks have generated 9% more revenue than they had over the same timeframe last year.
- Those booking customers a trip to the Italian lakes have done even better, increasing revenue by 10%.
- While across the board, 21 agents who hadn’t made any bookings by this time last year have so far made one or more sales.
Combined, these increased sales more than cover the cost of the training itself, so any returns from this point forward are pure profit.
The true value of training
With examples like these – and plenty of others – it’s easy to understand why product and staff training shouldn’t really be thought of as an expense at all. It’s an investment in a company’s future. If you were spending your current payroll on equipment rather than people, you would make sure there was a budget to maintain it and upgrade it.
That’s exactly what training is for your people: maintenance for your most confident, productive staff, and an upgrade for those who need help.
