If your team didn't hit a goal, are you more or less likely to cut your training budget? Why or why not?

I would use the miss as an opportunity to review everything we might start, stop or continue doing - including why, how, what and when we train.

I agree with many of the insights shared in the discussion. However, I would like to emphasize the importance of examining the focus of your sales training. Often, so-called sales training programs concentrate primarily on product or solution knowledge, rather than nurturing the skills, aptitude, and principles that are vital for a successful sales representative. I believe that the role of a sales rep should evolve into that of a 'journey consultant,' guiding customers through their decision-making process. Thus, it is crucial to strike a balance between product knowledge and developing the inherent abilities that make a sales rep truly effective.

I would not cut the training budget, at least initially. I would need to take a deep dive into both the training and sales results for the given period. 

Was training completed last month or last year? Did the team miss budget for the month, the quarter, or entire year after training was completed?

Even if it was the latter, I don't believe the team should be penalized with less training for missing the year's budget. If anything, more training may be necessary, but again, I'd have to look at the entire situation, not just did we make/miss X goal. 

I'm less likely to cut the training budget and I would not associate cutting the budget with goal attainment for sales. I would rather see us evaluate why the goals were missed and what's the “why” behind that first. Training is also the key to achieving budget because you focus on refreshing skills, reenergizing, and refocusing the team.

It depends because the first step would be understanding the root cause. The most critical thing would be to do a deep dive, and root cause analysis to understand whether it's a talent issue, a tooling issue, an overall resourcing issue, the quality of training programs, etc.

I would start with a metrics framework that you can break down into levels (L1, L2, L3). L1 could be the total revenue or it could be more complex like customer acquisition costs, which might be an L2 metric. Once you analyze L3 that is when you dig deeper into #4 and #5 in the 5 Why’s analysis because you may have a tool problem. It’s the analyze and measure phase to make processes and Six Sigma.