When Training Won’t Produce Results

Early in my business career, I supervised a team of about 10 sales people that provided financial services to the business world. The company I worked for provided an excellent employee training program, and if an employee would follow that program, they would invariably have good success. The logic was that doing what other successful people had done in the past was the easiest way to get results. It worked well for us.

In my book Yes to Treatment I note that the steps of your new-patient process mirror, almost exactly, the steps in the corporate sales cycle. My employer at that time was a publicly-held corporation with a vast pool of successful employees to draw ideas from; you are a small, independent business, and your sales people – your TCs – do not have access to such resources. Thus in your business it is often “figure it out yourself.” The isolation level in your profession is significant, and it has implications here.

Several times during my management experience I would encounter a subordinate who did not buy into the recommended training process. “I don’t want to do it that way; I prefer my way”, they would say. And I wouldn’t argue; after all, what would be the point of that? I could provide the training resource, but I could not force the person to implement it.

What I would do instead is review their sales numbers with them – what you refer to as your case acceptance rate. Invariably, with these individuals, those figures would be less than what we needed them to be.

That would prompt this question: “given that we have to have improvement, what is your Plan B?” There was never a Plan B; the plan was to simply continue to do what was not working. My recommendation would then be to follow whatever method they saw fit going forward, with the understanding that improvement needed to be achieved, however they proceeded. This reminder, and the lack of an alternative plan of action, usually helped to bring people around to trying new ideas. As a mentor told me at the time, “people will only do what you want them to do if they want to do it”. I have always found that to be true.

On rare occasions, I run into this with TCs, and the reason given is always the same:  “I’ve been doing it this way for a long time, it works for me, and I don’t want to change anything.” That logic is understandable, and as far as I am concerned, it is acceptable as long as the case acceptance rate supports their position.  If there is no room for improvement in that number, then new ideas won’t make a difference, and I would be fine with that.

However, I have not seen a situation where that situation exists in your business; there is always some room for improvement, and in some cases, there is significant room for improvement. The improvements that are needed are usually skill-related, which means that they can be fixed, often easily, with training.

On the other hand, if the current approach isn’t producing the results that we want, and the person or persons following that method are not open to training, then the question becomes this:  if we are going to reject the training,  what is Plan B, given that the current case acceptance rate is not adequate?

In my experience, Plan B doesn’t exist in your business, either.

Historically, the TCs who get the most out of what I do already have very good case-acceptance rates when we work together. In other words, they understand their role and the expectations, they take pride in their case acceptance rate, and they are always looking for a better way to do things. After all, that is what got them to where they are in the first place. Put another way, those that get the most from training usually have, in terms of case acceptance numbers, the least need for it.