What Is L&D and Why Should Sales Managers Care?

As a sales manager, you’re responsible for shepherding your reps to success. After all, if they don’t meet their quotas, you have to answer for the hit to their numbers. The problem is that you’re often not given a clear path to help your salespeople improve. 

After all, most sales managers used to be star salespeople.  The C-suite often believes that you can magically transfer your skills to your salesforce. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy! 

While you can’t wave a magic wand, the best alternative is implementing a strong L&D program that empowers sales reps to meet their goals.

This is where your role as a sales manager is crucial. Not only should you be setting the stage for your reports’ growth, sales managers also play a large role in the success—or failure—of reps’ learning initiatives. In most cases, when these initiatives fail, it’s because salespeople didn’t get the direction and support they needed. This is usually not due to malice or neglect; it’s just that many sales managers don’t know that much about learning and development. 

That lack of understanding is exactly why we decided to write this blog! Stay tuned as we clarify some terms and explain why neglecting L&D can mean failure—both for your reps and you. We’ll wrap this up by helping you figure out ways to get the support you need for L&D so your reps can hit their quotas and you’ll hit your numbers.

L&D Terms Sales Managers Need to Know

To succeed as a sales manager, you must help your sales rep constantly improve. That means you have to have a clear understanding of the following terms and how they relate to each other. 

• Learning and development (L&D)

What is it?
This is a systematic and ongoing set of activities to enhance employees’ skills, knowledge, and competency. The result? Better employee work performance and company growth. L&D prepares employees for new opportunities in the future and has been proven to increase employee retention. 

What’s the role of L&D?
You should be using L&D all the time because it’s about a culture of continuous improvement. That means you’ll need to tailor L&D to work for different employees in different ways. For example, onboarding helps new employees become better acquainted with your company and your tools. Star sales reps with a lot of institutional knowledge might focus on working through issues via coaching or acquiring new skills via training.

• Training 

What is it?
Training is a specific event focused on teaching and transferring specific skills or capabilities that are necessary for success. 

When do I use training?
If you notice that a sales rep has a particular skill gap that a class or workshop could solve, it’s time for some training. For example, if one of your reports struggles to use the CRM or lacks business acumen, specific training can help them fill those gaps.

Training can be conducted via various methods, in person or online, but it’s always about learning specific skills. 

What’s the role of training?
As you can see from the graphic above, training is a subset of L&D because it’s a one-time event that is part of an ongoing program to improve employees’ skills and knowledge. While training boosts skills in the short term, those learnings must be used and reinforced if they are going to be retained in the long term. (We’ll touch more on that later!) 

• Coaching 

What is it?
Coaching is usually an ongoing series of one-on-one meetings in which a sales manager helps a rep figure out how to meet their goals. It’s very interactive and involves active listening, thoughtful questioning, and guidance. 

Coaching is truly all about the facilitation of learning. Your role as a coach is to help your rep develop the ability to do something without oversight. You don’t want to tell them what to do; you want to help them think about how to improve their decision-making quality. 

When you’re coaching, you may have the impulse to correct somebody. But if you correct the person, there is no learning. While you can offer advice, your goal is to help reps figure out what’s going wrong, why it’s going wrong, and how they can best correct it. 

What’s the role of coaching?
Rep coaching is one way to work one-on-one with reps to individualize their learning. For example, suppose one of your reps isn’t having enough meaningful conversations or doesn’t understand how to use content to support relationship-building with prospects. In that case, you can walk them through different potential scenarios. This helps support a stronger skillset and puts them on the path to figuring out these issues on their own down the line. (If you want more tips on when and how to coach, check out this blog.)

How does coaching fit into L&D?
Like training, coaching is a subset of L&D. However, unlike training, which is finite, coaching is ongoing. Coaching reinforces training because it teaches reps how to effectively use their new knowledge and skillsets.

All three of these categories ideally work hand-in-hand to improve performance management. (This RevOps Show episode goes into more detail.) For example, sales managers could use metrics and coaching to see where employees need more support. Then, they could tailor L&D to fit the employee’s needs. 

This individualization applies to learning styles, as well. Different sales reps will learn differently, so consider allowing them to use the methods that work best for them. That will increase retention, paying off in the long run.

The Risks of Neglecting L&D

If you want your sales force to succeed, you must understand when and how to use L&D and which methods to use at a particular time. Neglecting L&D can mean the difference between meeting your goals as a sales manager and failing. Here’s why:

• The “forgetting curve”

  Almost everyone has walked out of a training pumped and confident, but three weeks later, finds they can’t remember much of anything. Per McKinsey, if training isn’t reinforced and implemented, learnings evaporate quickly. 

 In other words, a “set it and forget it” approach to training will be expensive and unproductive! L&D—and especially coaching, because of the thoughtful conversation and the regular cadence of the meetings—reinforces these learnings.

• Frustrated employees

  If an employee requires specific skills to be successful but lacks a clear path to gain those skills, frustration will skyrocket. Employees may be working harder than ever, but they’re still falling short. There’s nothing less motivating.

Many sales managers believe the biggest payoff comes from concentrating their efforts on the top reps. However, they actually get more “juice for the squeeze” when they help middling reps improve. 

• High employee turnover

  The percentage of reps meeting quota has been dropping for years—and when fewer reps are making quotas, they leave or are laid off. That sparks a vicious cycle of continuous turnover where you have to devote time to firing and hiring instead of building the skills of your current reps. 

That’s a huge problem; a recent survey showed that the main reason employees voluntarily leave a company is a lack of growth opportunities. 91% of employees said it’s “somewhat or very important” to have learning opportunities at their job. 

That’s where L&D, an important tool for employee retention, comes in. It boosts skills, improves sales, and retains sales reps, improving the average ones while continuing to challenge the strong ones. That not only reduces layoffs, it keeps your star salespeople happy and gives them less incentive to stray.

• Less competitive recruitment
  

  Unemployment is at a record low, so companies have to compete harder for a shrinking talent pool. Having an L&D program in place makes you more competitive during the interview process. It’s an important signal that your company is cultivating excellent opportunities for new hires.

When top salespeople are being heavily recruited and can go anywhere they want, they’ll choose the company that offers a clear path to success and growth. An L&D program demonstrates your dedication to your salesforce.

• Skillset deficiencies
  
  Even though the fundamentals of sales stay pretty consistent, mastery of those fundamentals doesn’t happen overnight. It can take a while to build some skills—for example, business acumen, which helps reps really dig into their prospect’s issues so they can be more persuasive. 

When you layer ever-changing sales tech into the mix, it gets even more complicated. For example, if an otherwise excellent sales rep avoids the CRM, their quota will suffer—as will the quality of the overall customer data.  

An L&D plan ensures that you’re helping sales reps identify their weaknesses so they can stay ahead of the game. That helps them meet their own goals and also helps your overall business.

The Bottom Line on L&D

As you can see, L&D is crucial if you want your reps to consistently meet their quotas. However, management may push back by claiming it’s too expensive or labor-intensive. 

That means you’ll need to build a business case for an L&D program. 

The first step is examining your company’s business objectives. In theory, it seems obvious that your learning strategy should support your company’s business goals, but in reality, only 40 percent of companies succeed in creating this type of alignment. 

After that, ask yourself a few questions:

• What skill gaps does your team have? In other words, what skills do they lack that are keeping them from meeting their quotas?
• What are the industry trends? If your company wants to stay ahead, what new skills does your salesforce need to acquire?
• How will you measure results to prove your program is effective? Be sure to connect metrics to your company’s business goals.
• What are people using in your tech stack? What are they not using? What should they be using that they aren’t—and why are they avoiding those applications?
• If you already have an L&D program in place, what is working and what isn’t? Why does it need to be improved?
• What is your department’s turnover? Why are people leaving? What percentage of people is being fired for not meeting quota and what percentage is leaving for better opportunities? 
• How much time and money are you spending when you have to fire those who don’t meet quota and recruiting new reps? Be sure to quantify your current costs. According to HubSpot, annual salesperson turnover is a staggering 35 percent. This means that the average sales manager must recruit and train the equivalent of their entire sales force every three years. 

It’s easy to see that it’s more effective and cost-efficient if you lower turnover by improving the skills of the salespeople you have right now. Plus, when you do hire, you’ll be far more competitive and will be able to recruit better salespeople.

Another important thing to remember is that you don’t have to do all of this alone! In fact, it’s a good idea to collaborate with your own manager and L&D (if you have a dedicated team) to get buy-in and feedback as you build your business case. 

Once you have a strong L&D program in place that supports your company’s business goals, you’ll be able to focus more on small tweaks that will result in continuous improvement—and both you and your sales reps will shine on your annual reviews.