Sales training starts the change. It rarely finishes it.

13 October 2026 - Tony Tyler

As a young boy growing up and keen on football, I’d dream of scoring a goal for Spurs at White Hart Lane. How that must have felt. In a recent interview Wayne Rooney said that feeling of scoring a goal is what he misses most and he cannot imagine anything else will come close. Well, I was far from good enough to play for Spurs (or any other football club!) but for me there’s nothing quite like the feeling of winning a client who didn’t know you a year ago.

Anyone who has been involved in winning new clients knows that feeling. The long build. The meetings that seemed to go nowhere, then one that did. The call where you hear “we’d like to go with you”, and you try to sound calm while your heart does something else entirely. The walk back to the team, the handshakes, the bit of noise in the office. It never gets old. It is the reward of hard work, and you know the team earned it, in a live market, against people who wanted the same business.

That is why, as a sales leader who owns the organic growth line, you want your team to succeed. Not just win clients, but hit the budget, and those targets can be a stretch.

A great training programme

Sales leaders naturally want to make sure their team is ready for the challenge, and that often means investing in their skills development. A great training programme is one of the pleasures of sales. You hear an idea that makes you wince because it is so obviously right. You role play with a colleague, and it goes badly and everyone laughs. Somewhere in the afternoon you realise you are going to handle ‘that conversation’ differently, and you can’t wait to try. People walk out lit up. I have never seen a team leave a good sales workshop feeling anything but a little taller.

Then Monday arrives. The inbox is full, and you’ve got a sales meeting with an important prospect later that day. The new approach is still sitting in your notes, and the old habit is right there. It is faster, it is comfortable, and it has worked before. Under pressure, we do what we’ve always done. That is not laziness. It is human nature. We all do it.

Training fails to stick

The research says the same thing. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, first described in 1885 and successfully replicated in 2015, shows new information fades rapidly without reinforcement. A 2006 study by Alan M. Saks and Monica Belcourt found that reported use of what people had learned fell from about 62% to about 34% within a year.

Part of the answer is simply how we are built. Sellers are being asked to master an enormous range of skills at once, and cognitive load research shows that no human being can retain so many new skills together. Working memory is limited and new learning competes with existing habits. When too much is introduced at once, very little of it sticks.

It requires regular reinforcement, and the evidence on what makes training transfer to the job points consistently at one factor above all others: the front-line manager. Teams with structured coaching and genuine accountability for applying new skills consistently outperform those without it. But manager time is finite, and the more of it consumed by other tasks such as reporting, pipeline review and CRM hygiene, the less is available for the coaching that would change team performance.

The result is a gap that most leaders know intimately. Between what the team is capable of in principle and what it delivers in practice. Between the investment made in developing selling skills and the sustained behaviour change produced.

Then the team changes, as teams do. People move on, new people arrive. The programme you ran in the spring was delivered to a team that, within a year, can look quite different.

Firms try. Refresher days, e-learning, certification, champions. Or, when the last framework has gone quiet, a brand new one. Each fix gives sellers one more thing to remember and managers one more thing to police. The energy comes back for a few weeks, then fades, and we start again. None of this is a failure of effort. A workshop can teach a skill. It cannot sit beside you at four o’clock on a Thursday, when the skill is needed.

A role for AI/new technology?

But technology has moved on at quite a rate and is a long way from those flat and uninspiring e-learning modules. I believe this has the potential to change everything.

Think about what a seller does between conversations. Researching the account. Piecing together what is known about the deal. Working out which questions are still unasked, whether this one is really qualified, what to say next. It is routine work, and it is where good habits slip first, because it is always done in a hurry. An AI sales co-worker can do that work alongside the seller, every day, applying the same approach to every deal.

It isn’t another dashboard to log into; sellers have plenty of those. Nor is it generic AI that has never learnt what good selling looks like. The point is technology built around a selling approach, and one that understands your firm, its differentiators and its propositions.

That gives the training room back to the people in it. If the research, analysis and preparation tasks are carried by technology, the training doesn’t need to be spent walking through sales methodologies and processes. It can go on the part that is hard, human and decisive. Rehearsing the difficult conversation until it stops being difficult. Reading a buyer who has gone quiet. Building a champion inside the prospective client. Negotiating when you don’t hold the cards. Technology can’t do these for you, no matter how good AI is. A great training facilitator can help you do them. That is a far better use of training than a recap of the model, and there is less to learn, which leaves room for more to stick.

For the CRO, it means judging improvement by how deals are worked, not by who turned up. For the trainer, it means spending the time on the work only they can do, and that work no longer ending when the session does. For the manager, it means coaching the conversation and the judgment call, instead of checking whether the steps were followed. For the seller, it means more of what we got into this for. The good conversations, the real wins, and that moment on the phone when the answer is yes.

Training will always be where improvement starts. The firms that get the most from it will be the ones that find a way to ensure the skills that make a difference to sales results stick.

DealCraft™ is an AI sales co-worker for complex B2B selling. It is designed to carry the research, analytical and preparatory work that has traditionally consumed so much of a salesperson’s time, leaving them with less to manage and more room to develop and apply the skills that make the difference. These are the human skills of the conversation: listening, managing objections, building rapport and trust, reading the room and understanding the buyer’s real priorities.