David Ramos

It is 2012, you have a new year and optimism abounds. You also have a new budget…at a 20 percent increase and no additional headcount to go about the task. The members of your team don’t have the skills they need if they’re to perform at their best and your owner won’t fund any training/development initiatives. Unless he wryly suggests, “you pay for it out of your salary or the reps commissions”. You think I am making this scenario up for purposes of my article? Sadly no, this is a real life scenario a sales leader posed to me this week while asking me for help in convincing his owner to help fund some ongoing development of his people.

How do you identify the training people really need, make best use of a small training or more than likely non-existent budget, and negotiate for more money where you need it for your sales organization? This is where a well-conducted training needs assessment can be a useful tool.

When you’re designing/assessing any training and development program, you really need to know the fundamentals (who, what, why, how, where and when):

What training and development is needed?
Who needs it?
Why is the training and development important to achieving your business goals?
How will the training be delivered?

A training needs assessment or a training needs analysis is a good structured way of doing this. It identifies the training that will successfully address any identified skill deficits. It does this by surveying the skills that sales employees already have and those that they need, and it helps you think about how to deliver the right training at the right time.

By looking at existing skills and competencies compared to the skills required to meet organizational goals, you make an informed estimate of the training/development that has to be delivered. From that point you can confidently develop a training program that addresses objectives and ties into the strategic direction of the company.

Understood in this way, you can see that training needs assessment is much more than simple data gathering. Rather, it is a process that starts with gathering data and ends with a specific training plan.

Scoping Your Training Needs Assessment

Before you begin, determine what the scope of your training need assessment is. To do that, it is useful to consider which of the following perspectives is driving the training needs that you are considering:

Organization – what training needs to be done to ensure the organization performs effectively?

Is the sales organization meeting its performance targets?
Are there new laws or regulations you need to be versed in to meet client and prospect needs?
Have the sales organization’s goals and objectives changed from last year and how?
Is new technology necessary to allow for better collaboration and access to information?
Do you have to learn to work with different resource constraints?
Are there human resource issues like turnover and recruitment problems?

Tasks – what training must be done to reach performance standards for particular sales tasks?

Do people have the skills, knowledge and competence required to do the work required of them (how are they at initiating appointments, presentations skills, needs discovery, proposal writing skills, negotiation skills, and project management)?
Do skill levels need to be increased to meet performance goals?
Is the organization using best practices effectively?

Individual – which employees need training, and in what, to perform their jobs more effectively?

Are there weaknesses in job-specific skills, knowledge and competencies? (These may be flagged up by poor productivity in revenue or percent of plan, down time, customer complaints, or high levels of absenteeism or stress.)
Do the employees believe they need training on certain skills or competencies?
Are skill upgrades required to compete more effectively?

Most Training Needs Assessments involve elements from all three levels. This ensures that while the training is targeted to individual needs, these needs are tied to job performance and organizational goals and objectives.

And what’s the scope of your assessment? Are you going to determine the training needs across the organization, for a specific team, or to improve performance in a specific process or task? Clarify and write down your scope, so that you remain focused on it. It’s all too easy to get side-tracked, and broaden or narrow your scope too much during the assessment.

The Training Needs Assessment Process

The training needs assessment process starts with gathering data, depending on the scope you’ve identified. Make sure you gather the information that will help you analyze performance and/or skills in the areas you need to cover. This will help you identify gaps between:

Existing skills and competencies, and desired skills and competencies.
Current performance and desired performance.

Think about this using the following outline:

Organizational data

Strategic plans.
Key performance data, like turnover, percent of plan, revenue achievement.
Information about planned change and initiatives.

Task data

Performance data for specific processes or departments.
Job descriptions.
Knowledge/skills/abilities required.

Individual data

Performance appraisals.
Personal Development Plans.

Be sure and gather information about training that has already taken place and, where available, information about its effectiveness.

In medicine, it’s easy to understand the difference between treating symptoms and curing a medical condition. Sure, when you’re in pain because you’ve broken your wrist, you WANT to have your symptoms treated – now! However, taking painkillers won’t heal your wrist, and true healing is needed before the symptoms can disappear for good.

But when you have a problem with your sales organization, how do you approach it? Do you jump in and start treating the symptoms? Or do you stop to consider whether there’s actually a deeper problem that needs your attention?

If you only fix the symptoms – what you see on the surface – the problem will almost certainly happen again, which will lead you to fix it, again, and again, and again. If, instead, you look deeper to figure out why the problems are occurring, you can fix the underlying systems and processes that cause the problem.

Training helps build skills and improves performance. So the next stage is to identify, within your scope, what areas of skills and performance could be improved by training. To do this, you’ll need to analyze data that you’ve gathered and also consult with key people.

Analyze gaps
You’ll need to consider gaps at the organizational, task/job and individual level, depending on your scope and context. Among the questions that will help you do this:

What changes in strategy are forthcoming, and what training might be required to support it?
Are there discrepancies in performance between expectations and results?
What common themes arise in people’s appraisals and development plans?

Consult with key people

Meet with the leaders of applicable departments or teams to discuss training to ask questions such as:
What are the key tasks the department performs?
What training has already been done?
What are your most pressing training issues?
What training will help your department’s performance?

Consider surveys, interviews, and focus groups
To identify training needs, it can sometimes be important to involve people who need to be trained. You could do this by survey or interview people individually, or consult with people in focus groups. A survey can be a good way of involving a wider group of people, whilst interviews and focus groups can be more effective at making qualitative assessment and validating your assessment. Take care, however, not to emerge with a vast wish list from these sessions – you’ll need to prioritize the outputs as resources will inevitably be limited.

Among the questions to ask of individuals or groups within the organization:

What training do you think you need?
What training are you interested in?
How important are the various skills and competencies to performance?
What type of training do you prefer?
How can your training needs be best addressed?

With your data and analysis in hand, it’s now time to identify the training that needs to be planned. This means deciding which of the gaps in skills and performance you’ve identified need to be met by your training plan.

Not all performance gaps will require training. Some gaps will be better addressed by improving communications, more clearly defined expectations, or changes in job specification. Others can be addressed by changing work patterns so that people with important, rare skills focus on that type of work, making best use of the skills available.

Next, consider appropriate types of training, referring to your scope and consulting further with others as necessary. Once you have identified the training needs, you can think about how you can deliver the best training possible with the resources available. Next week, we will have an overview on the ROI of sales training. With the analysis in hand you need to figure out how the initiative will pay for itself.

About the author: David C. Ramos is a consultant with Strategy Development, a management consulting firm specializing in sales strategy and process, advanced sales training, performance improvement strategies, (www.strategydevelopment.com). He can be contacted at ramos@strategydevelopment.com