Keep an eye on results
At last, an answer for our corporate training firm and our technology company in the Midwest. That previous training session, as it turned out, was not to blame for lower sales numbers. No, the culprit was instead the fact that the technology company executives had recently installed a drastic restructure of the compensation program. That program encouraged the sales team to try and sell only one of their many products, and that is what changed everything.
The training had not been the problem at all.
In fact, without that recent training session, the technology business might have planted itself in more trouble because of the new structure of the compensation program. The best money spent might well have been the money spent on the training — and the worst might have been the money that was about to have been spent unnecessarily correcting that training.
The only way to know where you are is to know where you were. In order to receive a more relevant return on your investment, watch the progress from the planning stages through the training itself, then during the months, even years, beyond.
“When we look at big-picture trends, at what really grew the U.S. to be a dominating factor in the last century, it was an investment in research and development, and in education — and I would argue that research and development is education, because it’s the search for new knowledge,” Squires says. “From an economic standpoint, what worries me is that investment has been going down.”
