Speaking of Return on Investment

SST^® Newsletter March - April 1998

We have known for sometime that SST^® works. Post workshop evaluations glow. Success stories from users abound. Moreover, we use it nearly everyday ourselves and experience its power first-hand.

Still, skeptics out there might dismiss these accounts as soft and qualitative at best. They will ask, "Do you have any hard proof that SST works?" Others will query, "What can I expect as a Return on Investment (ROI)?"

Well, we are delighted to report hard empirical results documenting remarkable ROI for a client, Penn State Geisinger Health Plan. The number of new organizations signing medical insurance contracts following SST^® went up 288%. New members covered by PSGHP under those contracts were roughly five times higher. For those of you who remember your Stats course, those differences are statistically significant at the .01 level of confidence. In other words, the probability is 99 out of 100 that these differences were due to SST^® and not to chance.

Still, a healthy skeptic might suggest that these changes were caused by any number of extraneous variables at play. (SST^® being the independent variable and new sales being the dependent variable) The economy is healthy and consumers are buying more of everything. Or, Geisinger's merger with Penn State brought over the "Blue & White" fanatics indigenous to this part of the country. Heck, it could be yet another El Niño effect.

In response to those challenges, we are able to point to comparisons with a control group of sales people at PSGHP who did not not participate in SST. Their performance over the same periods measured, subject to all the same extraneous variables as those learning SST^®, went down.

We often use the three legged stool image to describe what it takes to improve sales: skills that work; sales people to learn and apply them; and managers to reinforce them. Absent one leg, the stool eventually falls.

Kudos to the sales team and their managers at PSGHP for a great job. Also, congratulations to Russ Brooks for co-facilitating the delivery of SST.