Alcohol beverage sales organizations are always looking for ways to prove the ROI of their training budget. While many leaders intuitively understand that preparing their workforce to be fully functional is vital to the success of their organization, they still view it primarily as overhead.
In fairness, all training is not the same quality, so the results can vary, particularly if the lowest price is your only criterion. That puts pressure on the sales managers to show how the right training platform can be cost-effective while creating significant ROI.
An astounding 57% of sales reps do not meet their sales quotas. That doesn't stop companies from needing their salespeople to meet them. How then do BevAlc sales managers remedy the situation? Continually hiring with the hope that the next high-performer will improve the team's results isn't practical, nor is it cost-efficient. The answer is to give your sales teams the tools, techniques, and knowledge they need to help them succeed and do it in a way that conforms to their learning styles.
Online learning and development allow your teams to access new educational content or reinforce prior training when your reps are most receptive and engaged, regardless of their location. They can take advantage of downtime while staying responsive to client availability. Easily accessible online tools provide a more consultative, quantitative approach to sales solutions, giving the customer powerful visualizations of potential options. Let's examine the many ways online training helps your organization create ROI.
While training your salespeople is paramount to your bottom line, it doesn't come cheap. Traditional offsite training requires not only signing up and paying the attendance fees, but someone has to plan for travel and accommodation, as well. If you are lucky, there may be a live learning event close to your location, eliminating some travel costs. However, when you need industry-specific education, you may have to travel wherever it is occurring.
The potential ROI of learning and development is even more significant when you leverage the convenience of online, on-demand learning. Moving to a virtual training platform can result in anywhere from 30% to 70% savings when you consider that you recoup travel, meals, accommodations, and valuable time away from customers. It doesn't just save time and money, online learning contributes directly to profits. 42% of companies included in an Ambient Insight survey reported that online sales training increased revenue.
As humans, we have a quest for knowledge, but unfortunately, our brains aren't wired to absorb and retain new learning immediately. We need to hear, read, or experience it multiple times for it to stay with us. This phenomenon is called the Forgetting Curve. It shows that we lose more than half of new learning within the first hour and almost all of it within a week if we don't reinforce it.
The good news is that there is a way to combat this loss. Continuous learning allows employees to constantly reinforce the content both as they advance through the modules and on-demand as they refer back to relevant points. Companies that invest in creating a culture of continuous learning enjoy 50% higher net sales per person than those that don't. Combining the increase in sales with the cost savings over in-person training presents a compelling ROI.
There is a recurring theme in survey after survey: employees, particularly the younger workforce, expect their employer to provide learning and growth opportunities. An astounding 86% of surveyed millennials replied that they would stay in their current role if their company offered them training and development. Retention profoundly affects the company culture, not to mention the bottom line. The expense of recruiting, onboarding, and getting a new team member up to speed is very high and comes at the cost of the other sales reps carrying the load in the interim.
The importance that morale plays in the workplace can't be overstated. Team members with high morale are more engaged, optimistic, confident, and motivated. They tend to work more efficiently and seek innovative solutions to problems. This enthusiasm raises the bar for the entire team, leading to greater productivity, higher customer satisfaction, and increased sales.
The ROI of learning and development is not always apparent to those who hold the purse strings. Though it should be obvious, most sales managers find themselves defending their training budgets every time it comes up for review. When you present the evidence of what industry-specific online training can do for your organization, the ROI becomes apparent in the cost savings for travel, enhanced retention of learned content, increased employee retention, improved morale, and higher sales.