The Kehoe Company, which specializes in the sales of medical office software, has decided to provide training for its salespeople. The training includes live role-plays and online training about the products themselves.
To evaluate the program, the company assessed sales performance and product knowledge in the year before and after the training. The company compared employees in two regions, Atlanta (the trained group) and Houston (who were not trained). The two groups were considered equivalent in terms of their performance and demographics. All metrics are on a 10-point scale.
The following table shows the results of the training evaluation for the two offices.
The metric used to evaluate the training is a composite of sales volume and a measure of employees’ product knowledge.

Questions 

1. Overall, based on these numbers, how effective would you say the training program is?
Next, the company decided to evaluate the effects of the training program on the two metrics separately. The first table shows a measure of average employee sales performance for the two offices pre- and posttraining. The second table shows a measure of product knowledge for the two offices preand posttraining.

2. Based on these numbers, what would you say is the effectiveness of the training program with regard to each of the training outcomes?
3. If the company wanted to adjust the training program, what would you recommend?
4. A colleague argues that sales numbers seem to be up as a result of the training program, so it doesn’t matter whether employees showed an increase in product knowledge. What would be your response to that argument?

Transcribed Image Text:

OFFICE Atlanta (trained) Houston (untrained/ control) PRETRAINING COMPOSITE (AVERAGE) OF SALES PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE 8.4 8.5 POSTTRAINING COMPOSITE SAMPLE SIZE (AVERAGE) OF SALES PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE 9.2 8.7 449 398