Conventional wisdom among sales training and enablement leaders is that the benefits of sales training are obvious. When you equip your sellers with skills and product knowledge, they simply do better — they qualify prospects, build relationships, ask probing questions, prove value and close deals more quickly and consistently.

Yet somehow the value doesn’t speak for itself. You still have to get buy-in for sales training initiatives every year. You need to be proactive to get the budget and thumbs up to proceed, especially if it’s a new program.

This article shows you how to get leadership buy-in by leveraging the signs you need sales training and by clearly communicating its value.

4 Signs You Need Sales Training

One way to start the conversation with leadership is by connecting the need for sales training with their strategic challenges. There are several telltale signs and milestone events that indicate it’s time to take a look at your sales team’s core selling competencies.

Underperformance Against Goals

If your sales team struggles to hit targets despite leadership’s best efforts, or if some team members excel while others consistently fall short at the same tasks, it’s time to assess why you’re getting the results you’re seeing (or not seeing) and to prescribe a remedy to fill those gaps.

Communication Breakdowns

When teams aren’t collaborating effectively, when there’s persistent conflict, or when team members consistently aren’t responding as expected, these communication issues often stem from fundamental differences in how people are wired to work and interact. Sales training can help address these issues.

New Sales Strategy

Any time your organization changes the direction of the overall strategy, sales training becomes critical. Organizations that hired account managers to maintain existing relationships may now need aggressive new business development. Leadership may discover their sellers can’t pivot without upskilling.

Restructuring or Mergers and Acquisitions

When company structures change or teams merge, strengthening capabilities and communication styles across the newly combined organization prevents friction and accelerates integration. Sales training can create a common language and sales process.

How to Prove Sales Training Value

If you observe any of these signs or events, the next step is to link the benefits of sales training with specific business objectives. You need to build a compelling business case with clear, measurable goals and anticipated ROI.

Stop thinking just about revenue. That’s a lagging indicator you can’t influence. Instead, focus on the cause-and-effect relationships that drive results.

Ask yourself: If your organization’s goal is to increase revenue by 20%, where will that growth come from? New accounts? Account expansion? Improved win rates? Each source requires different capabilities and behaviors.

Find out which leading indicators sales leadership is tracking: number of meetings per closed deal, prospecting activity levels or initial outreach conversion rates are a few examples.

Then connect training activities to seller improvement in each of these areas. Your goal is to tie the training to specific, measurable business objectives, such as improving win rates or reducing turnover.

Try to track both learning outcomes and business results. Essential KPIs include:

• Business Metrics: Revenue growth, win rates, average deal size, sales cycle length and net new business acquisition (accounting for customer losses).
• Learning Metrics: Pre-/post-assessment improvements, skill application frequency and behavior change indicators.

Next, develop a compelling argument that includes both tangible benefits (like ROI) and intangible ones (like improved morale) and use data to highlight existing performance gaps.

Your sales team’s success depends on making the case for training. When you align training with specific business objectives and tailor it to your team’s actual needs, you’re much more likely to get leadership buy-in.

One Last Point About Buy-In

Many sales leaders believe that people who have a few years of selling experience don’t need training. The truth is that everyone, regardless of experience or age, can benefit from up-to-date tactics or a refresher course. Make sure your leaders know sales training is a factor that’s critical to your organization’s success.