It isn’t new that training is necessary to develop workplace skills. What is startling is the staggering skill gap in one critical area: Marketing and Sales skills. Only one in ten Marketing managers in SA feel that they have sufficient Sales and Marketing skills in order to deliver effective guidance and the staff they’re responsible for in their daily work. With statistics like this, the value of training becomes clear.
And it’s not just initial training when taking a new job. Newly-learned sales skills typically have a half-life as short as five years in this fast evolving digital landscape. This calls for continuous learning processes to help employees keep pace with the rate of technological change and how it is effecting marketing.
For years, Corporate Training and Development organizations have struggled with concepts of Return on Investment (ROI) or Return on Expectations (ROE), since there are so many factors that affect the bottom line. However, with the available statistics it is time stop worrying about justification, and start devoting more resources to restructure training to meet the needs of today’s sales and marketing workforce, before it’s too late.
