That is a fair question, but to answer it accurately, you need to know who is going to be receiving the training. Selling is an activity which combines knowledge and a range of skills which aren’t easy to teach. You either have a natural disposition towards them or you don’t.

An important part of sales work is relating to other people. This comes easily to some individuals and much harder to others. To convert an introvert who prefers his own company into an outgoing personality who hates to be alone is more than can be expected from any training course.

On the other hand those people with appropriate sales traits only need to be shown a structured sales approach and warned about mistakes to avoid, in order to become competent in selling.

Sales training information comes in a variety of formats. Each has its advantages and drawbacks: sales-training seminars are a good way to put across a lot of information in just a day. This saves down time for the company that employs the participant. But when so many points are covered in eight hours the percentage of information retained will be low; 'information-overwhelm' is the problem. But it can be said that if only a few good ideas are learned and applied, then the return on the time and cost can still be worthwhile.

Far cheaper than a seminar is a book and you can dip into it as and when you have the time and inclination. But you need to have your own motivation to do it.

An easy way to pick up ideas on sales technique is to listen to audio products when you are driving or otherwise travelling on business. The first sales training audios were on cassette, today they come in all formats; CD, mp3, Video and DVD.

A very effective sales training tool was a range of videos sold by a UK company called Video Arts. They featured an all-star cast of actors, including John Cleese, who despite his talent for comedy, played some (fairly) straight roles explaining important points about selling.

What’s the best that can be achieved with sales-training? It’s when there is one of those ‘Eureka’ moments and somebody grasps an important idea for the first time.

Here’s an example: in my Selling for Engineers training courses, I get delegates to sell an item to the person next to them. I suggest that they use their mobile phone or watch for this purpose. I give no instruction on how to go about the selling and afterwards ask them how they got on.

Irrespective of the answers they give, I next ask, ‘Who did most of the talking?’ and invariably it’s the person who had the role of salesperson. Then I ask, ‘Does that make sense?’

And after a few seconds of reflection, the delegates tell me that it doesn’t. ‘Why?’ ‘Because if you don’t ask questions and listen to the answers, you don’t know what the buyer wants to have in the product.’

That’s a valuable lesson to learn and the delegates didn’t pick it up ‘on the job’. So there it’s clear that sales-training does work.

The best way to deliver it is in short sessions. If I worked as a Sales Manager, I’d give my team half an hour of sales training at least once a week.

Once when I worked for a dynamic American sales organisation all salespeople except the top ten performers had sales training first thing every morning. There too it worked, the closing rates were exceptionally high.

A good sales pitch for any form of sales training is to say, what would it be worth to you to sell just one more job a week by using a new idea?

Looked at that way, it’s false economy not to train yourself or your sales team.