BizSugar.com › Management › Forget Sales Training: Seven Ways to Restructure Your Employees Skills for Ultimate Productivity

Training is often sold as a panacea promising long-term, significant increases in revenue generation. The logical thinking attached to this approach, which makes it an easy sell, is that sales skills can be taught and process can be instilled in individuals that will elevate them to rainmaker status. Unfortunately, the reality is much different.

Behavioral research indicates that training an individual to perform tasks which lie outside of their area of natural interests and more importantly, run counter to their innate behavior pattern, will at best create a temporary increase in competency of about 20%. Combine the time, effort and expense—both in hard dollars and the cost of time—of putting together a formal training program with the fact that, for the most part, the "trainees" are most likely reluctant students, and the wisdom of the training approach rapidly becomes questionable.