The Business Case for Sales Technology Training

In recent client research interviews, fueled largely by growing interest in released and planned innovations based in artificial intelligence, many sales organizations report plans to invest in additional sales enablement technology. On the surface, this could be viewed as a positive trend, as sales teams today are facing mounting challenges with cultivating new opportunities, closing those deals, and then expanding penetration of those accounts over time.

But let me present a reality check that spending more on sales enablement technology does not always translate into sales performance optimization.

The reason for that assertion surfaced during some additional analysis of Sales Mastery’s 2023 Sales Performance Scorecard (SPS) study data. An initial review of the data showed that, on average, sales teams that were given access to more sales technology tended to outperform sales teams with less or no technology access.

But that is not the complete story. As part of the 75-plus performance metrics we gathered from the 435 B2B firms participating in the survey, we looked at the types of training that firms were providing their sales teams. This included training on how to effectively leverage sales enablement technology.

Drilling into this aspect of sales performance support, we found that 38 percent of the firms surveyed rated their technology training as “unacceptable or needing improvement,” 39 percent gave that training an “acceptable” rating, and 23 percent gave it a grade of “above average or excellent.”

This prompted a follow-on question: Does the quantity/quality of sales technology training matter, and if so, how?

To start to answer this question, we stepped back and looked at the main objective of investing in sales technology: to help salespeople sell more. With this in mind, we segmented the study data based on the ratings companies gave their tech stack training and then looked at the average outcome of their forecast deals, a comparison of which is seen in the following table:

Looking at the noticeable differences in win rates, sales organizations may want to take a lesson from their colleagues in IT. Technologist are aware of the need for adequately training AI models in order to generate valid/consistent results. The differences in win rates clearly point to the need to adequately train the sales professionals who will use these new tools. We need to remember that in its current state, AI is still a tool. Over time it may evolve into something totally different, but today we need to apply human judgment to the insights AI generates if we are going to optimize performance in any aspect of business.

So, for example, if you are planning to implement sales enablement tools to better segment the accounts salespeople should focus on, you need to train them on how to most effectively develop strategies to generate interest within those accounts. Or if you are going to leverage AI to create customized content for individual stakeholders, you in turn need to educate salespeople on how to successfully leverage that content when engaging prospects and customers. Will this training come at a cost? Absolutely. But increasing your win rate by a fraction of a percent, let alone the double-digit increases seen in the table, will more than cover the cost. So plan accordingly. 

Jim Dickie is a research fellow for Sales Mastery, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking case study examples of how companies are leveraging technology to transform sales. He can be reached at jim@salesmastery.com or @jimdickie.