Does Selective Sales Force Training Work?

Link: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0022243718803096

U.S. corporations have an estimated annual expenditure of $15 billion in sales force training programs, which amounts to approximately $2,000 per sales person per year. Sales training is particularly relevant in the retail industry given how business is defined by customer relationships, where the role of professional selling has evolved from information provider to one of a relationship builder. Training interventions play an integral role for both short-term productivity goals as well as building a salesperson’s future value to the firm.

U.S. corporations have an estimated annual expenditure of $15 billion in sales force training programs, which amounts to approximately $2,000 per sales person per year. Sales training is particularly relevant in the retail industry given how business is defined by customer relationships, where the role of professional selling has evolved from information provider to one of a relationship builder. Training interventions play an integral role for both short-term productivity goals as well as building a salesperson’s future value to the firm.

On the flip-side, training salespeople is resource intensive. It reduces the in-store availability of those salespeople who receive training, and the opportunity cost of sending salespeople off the floor is often too high. To compound matters, most corporate-held sales training sessions are held as multi-day events at off-site venues, which makes it even more challenging for sales managers to send their whole crew to these events. Many retailers report that they end up sending only a subset of their sales force to training events, a strategy that we call “selective training.”

In this paper, authors investigate (1) whether any a priori factors, such as the composition of the sales force, can predict whether training a subset of the sales force will be effective—and, if so, (2) what configuration of salespeople should be trained so that the entire store benefits from their training.

With data collected from salespeople in more than 200 stores over two years, the authors track the degree to which salespeople applied a customer relationship-building strategy taught in the training, along with more than 30 store- and salesperson-level covariates, and perform different analyses to correct for selection issues.

The results of the study have the following managerial implications for Chief Sales Officers:

• Training a subset of the sales force can be a highly effective strategy. It is also important for managers to have some assurance that performance outcomes in stores that adopt a selective-training approach will be similar to those of stores that adopt a full-training approach.
• Selective training can save significant time and money for managers whose salespeople have similar performance levels. On the other hand, managers in stores with high-performance diversity should attempt to train the entire sales team rather than a subset of salespeople.
• If training the entire sales team is not possible, managers can systematically identify which group of salespeople should be trained so that the entire store benefits from their training. Specifically, managers should choose a group of salespeople who are diverse in tenure to enhance spillover.