Sales Training ROI: Ensuring Your Investment Pays Off

If you’re spending time, effort and your precious budget on a training initiative, but then you’re failing to measure its impact, how can you prove it was worth it?

For sales leaders, the ability to demonstrate ROI is second nature … so now it’s time to extend that to your sales enablement training. In this post, you’ll discover how to measure the impact of your sales enablement microlearning and why it’s so important.

Why measuring ROI matters

When you’re swept up in creating new microlearning content, it’s easy to forget to track your metrics against your all-important KPIs and learning objectives. But measuring the impact and ROI of your microlearning is important for two reasons:

• If you’re not quite hitting your targets, you have all the data you need at your fingertips to start to close knowledge gaps and optimize content for better results.
• If you’re achieving the goals you set out to, then shout about it! Create a stakeholder-friendly report to show how your sales enablement resources are having a direct impact on sales and performance to help secure buy-in for future initiatives.

In our experience, many learning teams don’t quite manage to measure the impact or calculate the ROI of their training programs. Often they believe that they lack the expertise within their team to interpret their data, or they don’t know how to present their findings in a way that resonates with senior leadership or stakeholders.  

That’s why we’re coming to the rescue with our two-step process to help you prove the ROI of your sales enablement solution!

Measuring the impact of microlearning-based sales enablement training

Naturally, the main purpose of your sales enablement training is to increase sales, but the specific intended outcome will depend on your overall business objectives.

Whatever your specific goals are, you will need to show a link between your sales enablement training and actual sales performance to prove the effectiveness of your microlearning.  

Pre- and post-learning assessments will play a vital role in proving the impact of your sales enablement training - you’re looking for an increase in learning activity and an increase in sales performance.

You will then need to back up this correlation with more data, such as time spent learning, improvements in assessment scores or pipeline improvement scores, strengthening the link between sales enablement training and real sales.

How to calculate sales training ROI

The good news is that it’s relatively straightforward to measure the ROI of your sales training. Put simply, this means assessing the financial benefits gained from the program versus the costs incurred.

Prior to implementing your sales enablement program, be sure to take baseline metrics so you can calculate the impact of your learning. Then determine when you want to take your first measurements to explore the impact of your program.

You will need to calculate two figures for your sales training ROI.  

First, the net financial benefits, comprising revenue impact (i.e. the impact your training has had on sales) and cost savings (such as reduced time to competency, reduced training costs or reduced sales cycles).  

Second, the total training costs, comprising things like the cost of learning technology, SME time, hosting costs and tool subscription fees.

Then, simply divide the net financial benefits by the total training costs and multiply this figure by 100 to discover the ROI (expressed as a percentage) of your program.

Here’s a good example:  

Six months after introducing your sales enablement program, you take measurements. Compared with your pre-training baseline, your sales team has increased its sales by $200,000. Switching from time-consuming, face-to-face sales workshops to mobile-enabled microlearning has saved $100,000. This means your net financial benefits are $300,000.  

In total, your sales training program cost $150,000, including the cost of your platforms, tools, third-party content and external mentors.

You then divide your net financial benefits - $300,000 - by your total training costs - $150,000, giving you 2. Multiply this by 100 and you get an ROI of 200%.

What this means is that for every $1 invested in your training program, you get a $2 return in financial benefits, across more efficient, effective training and increased sales. You can easily identify the increase in sales from your CRM or sales platform, or by comparing the impact on sales between salespeople who engaged with training and those who didn’t.

Another thing to consider is the intangible benefits of your program. This could include increased morale across the sales team, improved confidence, enhanced team collaboration, and reduced attrition. While these are difficult to quantify, this qualitative or anecdotal evidence can support your overall sales enablement training ROI.

Teams with customized sales enablement training can enjoy accelerated business results such as:

• 26% increase in sales revenue per rep (source)
• Almost 2x as many reps achieving quota (source)
• 15% increase in winning forecasted sales (source)
• 15% improvement in the sales of low-performing reps(source)
• 59% of organizations surpassing their targets (source)
• 8% organization-wide increase in revenue (source)

How to achieve impressive sales training ROI

OK, so you know how to measure the impact of your sales enablement training, but how do you get there in the first place?

Our brand-new 10-step guide reveals all. Whether you’re wondering where the gaps are in your current program, how to get started with gamification or how to master the art of microlearning assessments, this is a must-read guide for every sales leader looking to get more from their reps.

Get your copy here to create your most successful sales team yet.