Abstract Companies spend billions of dollars annually on sales force training, often carried out as off-site, multiday training events. However, numerous challenges involved in training an entire sales group forces many retailers to selectively train only a subset of their salespeople. Crucial to know is when selective training can be more effective and what composition of salespeople should be trained to benefit the entire group. This study addresses these questions using data from several stores of a retailer with different sales force training policies (full-, selective-, and no-training [control]). The degree to which salespeople applied a customer relationship-building strategy taught in the training is tracked along with more than 30 store- and salesperson-level covariates and various analyses are performed to correct for selection issues. The authors find that (1) selective training can be highly effective in stores with low performance diversity, (2) training salespeople with diverse tenures helps...
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