“We need to train the sales force!” comes the cry. Whether marketing or product management, sales ops or finance, IT or legal, everyone wants to train the sales force. The reasons are always good: efficiency, effectiveness, and excellence. But frequent and tactical training can distract sellers from and delay them in performing their most important task: selling.

My newest report, "Build A Seller Development Framework," updates Forrester’s Seller Development Framework (formerly Forrester’s Sales Training Solution Framework) to take a fresh look at how to plan for and evaluate the training needs of sellers to move beyond defining needs based on "Who's asking?" to "What’s the right approach?"

Sales enablement vendors have also taken note of the need to embed seller development within sales enablement automation. Brainshark has announced partnerships with Highspot and Seismic to leverage Brainshark’s solutions for sales mastery and continuous training as part of overall sales enablement automation. Allego, a mobile video sales learning platform, just announced a partnership with Wilson Learning to provide more continuous sales development. These announcements are in line with our predictions of increased partnering in the sales enablement and development market.

As customers increasingly prefer to engage online rather than with sellers, building a framework that focuses on building the right skills at the right time, and in the way that best suits sellers, is critical to success. By applying the lessons of Forrester’s Go-To-Customer Matrix and mapping training needs to buyer and seller archetypes, practitioners can build a practical approach to plan, evaluate, and deliver sales training in a way that can ensure measurable, data-driven results. With a framework in place, you can ensure that the time that you spend training sellers will result in efficiency, effectiveness, excellence, and, most important of all, revenue.

Continuously curious,

Steven Wright