“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”

These wise words, uttered by the late, great Yogi Berra, have been applied to nearly every practice in nearly every industry. But they ring especially true when it comes to sales training.

Sales training is the road map to success, unless it’s failing to deliver. If it’s failing, it’s a road map to straying from your strategy.

Don’t stray from your strategy.

Instead, learn from Yogi and keep your eyes open for the five surefire signs that your sales training program is failing to deliver:

1) It's tired and takes too long

Yogi was spot-on when he opined that "the future ain't what it used to be." Sales training from the past probably won't work with the new generation of sales reps, who aren't interested in long lectures and pointers printed on paper.

If your team nods off or becomes bored, it's time to re-think training. Revamp it. Shorten it. Make it fun. Get rid of the talking heads and you'll get everybody in the audience paying attention.

2) It's unnatural

"Lunch-and-Learns." Two-day offsites. Retreats. They all seem like good ideas, until you consider they are incredibly inefficient and ineffective because they are utterly unnatural.

According to "Training Industry," 50 percent of the content presented to your sales team during training is not retained within five weeks of the training. Three months after the training, an astounding 84 percent of content is gone. The answer to this problem is to provide systemic, strategic, ongoing training and reinforcement that fits into your team's natural workflow.

3) It doesn't resonate

"You can observe a lot by watching." That's another quip from Yogi Berra that can help you understand why your sales training is failing to deliver.

If you spend time observing your sales people – really, really observing them and getting to know them – you will be better prepared to design a training program that resonates with them. You need to understand how each member of your sales team processes information and communicates to make sure your messages are getting through – and that they know how to use the tools you're giving them to connect with customers.

4) It's not problem-oriented

Developing a problem-oriented sales training program might sound counter-intuitive, until you find out that only 13 percent of customers feel like they are understood by salespeople (according to communications guru Josiane Feigon).

That means a whopping 87 percent of sales people are walking around without a clue about what it is their customers actually want from them. And what the customers want is for someone to listen to them, empathize with their problems, and then offer real solutions. Teach your sales people how to recognize their customers' problems and they'll be better prepared to demonstrate how your product or services can solve said problems.

5) It's not measured

And finally, let's get back to Yogi Berra's quote about knowing where it is you want to go – and then getting there. If you're not measuring the effectiveness of your sales training program, you will never know if it will get you to where you want to go. Measure your sales team's performance before and after trainings. Hold your team accountable. Analyze the results and be ready to make changes.

Successful sales training is part art, part science. You're going to make mistakes. But like Yogi Berra once said, you just don't want to make "too many wrong mistakes." So make your sales training fun, natural, relevant, and problem-oriented, and then measure it. Otherwise, you're making too many wrong mistakes and your training will continue to fail to deliver.