The Sales Archaeologist

I have been having numerous conversations with people lateley about the "cost" of sales training. My colleague Rick posted an article that described and offered Free sales training - also prompted by some of these same discussions no doubt. What should it cost to train your people, yourself, fix your organization and is there such a thing as too much? Here are some things to keep in mind.

• The trainer is worth more than the highest paid person in the room.
• The trainer is doing work behind the scenes and a two hour session might have taken 5 hours to compile.
• The trainer has to cover the costs of getting the business - time spent getting no's, prospecting, networking etc - so you cannot work out a per hour rate.
• The trainer has a unique set of skills - not everyone can do it. Unique skills push the cost up.
• When the trainer is training you or coaching you that means he cannot be working with someone else - supply and demand.
• There is the cost of intellectual property and their thoughts on your business.

With all this in mind you can hopefully appreciate how difficult it is to understand where the "price" comes from. When an experts says it is going to cost $6000 for example many default to the way they charge for what they do - hourly perhaps and then that sounds "outrageous" to them.

A better way to look at it is this. If you were to spend $2000 on a boxed one day session where someone talked about a submarine and provided a methodology that you would never be able to use and therefore would have 0 impact on your sales you would be $2000 in the hole - correct?

But if you spent $10,000 on a program that focused on your DNA and provided a custom methodology that you could actually utilize and a coach to hold you accountable and you did use it to close a few deals that you otherwise would not have - then what? The training is free!

Good training is always free because the ROI is always there. Don't focus on the amount but focus on the results.