Didn't Deliver ROI

The Training Issue

More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin wrote, “If you cannot measure it—if you cannot express it in quantitative terms—then your knowledge is of a meager and insignificant kind.”

It is legitimate for an organisation to look at the return on any investment. But some ROIs are easier to measure than others. Sales training ROI is perhaps one of the most difficult to quantify because there are so many factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Imagine you are in the medical device industry and you have just spent a small fortune on training your sales force. Two weeks later, the media says that your devices kill people. Sales drop. Was it bad training or bad timing? Are other mitigating factors to blame? There are so many environmental conditions and other factors that have to be isolated in order to prove the dollar impact of any sales training initiative.

ROI is a causation issue. That is to say, return on investment of sales training requires proof of a direct causal relationship between the training and the dollars earned from the training. We have found that with sales training, correlation is good enough. When done well, it is actually almost as precise as ROI and substantially less expensive.

How Huthwaite Can Help

Huthwaite does correlation analysis on every training engagement and though not a specific or rigorous ROI, we have found that it is more than a near approximation to actual return on investment. We do evaluate each of our training engagements to whatever level a client desires (see our white paper Evaluating Sales Training ). We are so confident in our ability to produce definite, measurable results that we are more than willing, for a price, to set up the scientific parameters necessary to prove ROI.