What most sales training gets wrong

There is no shortage of sales training. Frameworks, methodologies, certifications, online courses — the market for teaching people to sell is enormous.

And yet the evidence that most of it works is surprisingly thin.

The problem is not usually the content. Most sales training covers sensible ground — qualification, objection handling, closing techniques, pipeline management. The problem is the context in which it is delivered and the assumption that underlies it.

The assumption is that selling is a set of skills that can be separated from commercial understanding and taught in isolation.

It cannot.

A salesperson who can handle objections but does not understand the commercial pressures their customer is operating under will handle them in the wrong direction. A sales manager who knows how to run a pipeline review but cannot read the commercial health of an opportunity will manage the wrong things. A team that has been trained to close but has never been taught to think about what winning the contract actually means for both sides will win deals they later wish they had not.

What changes the outcome is not more technique. It is a shift in commercial thinking — the ability to see the whole picture, to understand both sides of the deal, and to make decisions based on what is actually happening rather than what the process says should be happening.

That is harder to teach in a two-day workshop. It requires a different kind of engagement — one that connects the training to real situations, builds judgment rather than just skills, and treats commercial maturity as the goal rather than a by-product.

It is also, in Merrick's experience, the only kind of training that sticks.

Read time: 3 minutes