Does Selective Sales Force Training Work?

Abstract

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on sales force training, often carried out as off-site, multiday training events. However, the numerous challenges involved in training an entire sales group force many retailers to selectively train only a subset of their salespeople. It is crucial to know when selective training can be more effective and what composition of salespeople should be trained to benefit the entire group. This study addresses these questions using data from several stores of a retailer with different sales force training policies (full, selective, and no training [control]). The authors track the degree to which salespeople applied a customer relationship—building strategy taught in the training, along with more than 30 store- and salesperson-level covariates, and perform various analyses to correct for selection issues. They find that (1) selective training can be highly effective in stores with low performance diversity, (2) training salespeople with diverse tenures helps the spillover of training to the untrained, and (3) untrained salespeople with performance that is similar to the trained group are more likely to adopt the training-related behavior.