Why Most Sales Training is Expensive Theater

$98 billion spent on sales training annually. 85-90% fails within 120 days. I scaled Hubstaff $4M→$31M with almost zero external training. 

In this episode, I break down why most sales training is expensive theater and what actually works instead. The problem isn't lack of skills. It's broken systems. 

Your reps don't need Challenger Sales. They need a CRM that works, lead routing that's fast, and processes they can actually follow. 

Fix your system first. Then train for specific gaps. 

#salestraining #b2bsales #saas

Transcript

0:00

Hey, everyone said here with messy growth. Hope y'all are doing great. Another beautiful to hear in Poland. We're deep into the autumn season and pretty much it's been raining, unstuck. So, um, I hope wherever you're listening in from, the weather is a lot better there. Um, I wanna dig into a topic that I'm very passionate about. I was speaking to me Haki, um, on my podcast recently, and you mentioned something about sales training and it really got me thinking because I've been wanting to talk about this topic. It's something that I see quite a lot on LinkedIn. And, uh, I've actually written a blog post about it, why most of the sales training is just expensive theater, and I wanna talk about it today. I know I'm gonna get chewed out a little bit for this, but, uh, here it goes. And, uh, but I am happy that I have some people in my corner, like Meki said, the almost exce, same exact thing on this podcast a couple of days ago, which was they didn't spend any money on external sales training at Brand 24. He built it from the ground up. They focus primarily on processes, documenting playbooks, coaching internally, and that's pretty much what scaled them from zero to essentially going public here in Poland. And he's not alone. Um, I know a lot of the operators, VPs of sales CEOs that talk and, and know about this in detail. But nobody wants to say it out loud because this is a $98 billion industry, like $98 billion. Um, that depends. It's an industry that depends on this very myth that sales training works. And I'm not saying that it doesn't work. Um, but what I do wanna make it clear is that sales training as it's sold today, it's just simply broken. Now let's talk about the why. Look, I scale hubstaff from$4 million to $31 million. And it took me about four and a half, five years, built the sales team from the ground up customer success team from the ground up. I've done that in multiple different companies and how much we spent on external, external sales training programs. Almost nothing, not a zip needs. We built the processes, we documented what worked, what didn't work. Obviously be coached internally. That was part of my role as a VP of sales. And we optimized the workflows optimized. Our CRM built the workflows to make sure that everybody's getting the leads in the right time. We're on top of them. As soon as the lead comes in. We were primarily an app on function. How do prospects get on to go ahead and dial them those particular leads, get 'em on a demo and show how to close them as fast as possible and make sure, of course, in the process we're giving them value. The prospects that is, and that's what scaled us. No spin selling, not Challenger, not Sandler. If I showed you the playbook that I ran. Um, for my teams to go ahead and qualify leads that would ascertain whether or not a lead is qualified or not. You will laugh me out of the building, but it worked. Our numbers in terms of closing MQL to SQL, uh, skill to opportunity, close one rate, um, our paw or. Off the charts. Something that even investors when they came in looking in, it always something that really surprised them for the most part. So when I left and I started consulting, um, I now speak to a lot more companies. I keep seeing the same pattern companies pour money into the training, getting zero results, and then calling folks like me to fix their broken processes. It's something I've realized that the team training industry has convinced everyone. That the lack of skills is the problem. It's not. The problem is broken system and people constantly think about it, right? I mean, if you're not closing deals, hey you must not have a skillset or you gotta ask the right questions, or you gotta present the demo in a certain way. It kinda reminds me of something I saw a while ago, which is folks want to go ahead and get healthy and get fitter and they wanna work out, but they focus all of their time and energy on the right protein shake, um, on the right. Uh, vitamins and, and all these different, uh, exercises and so on and so forth. Yeah. Vitamins could help. A protein shake, shake could help, but that's 10% of the whole equation. 90% is just the basics, the fundamentals, which is you gotta show up to the gym, you gotta eat well, you gotta sleep well, you know, lower stress. And if you can walk on a day-to-day, that's perfect. It's gonna add to that. But majority of the people, what they do is they end up focusing on that 10%. Um, because it's something, you know, if you keep buying things, um, vitamins and everything, it's helps, it helps you keep, it helps you move forward. Um, and you're constantly thinking about it and you're trying to figure out, Hey, maybe this is how I can have an edge. Sure you could have an edge, but only if you've perfected the 90%, which is where most of the people are not focusing on. So I'm not saying that the trainings or sales trainings are useless or people don't need to learn. No, I'm saying most training is theory and there's a difference. This is the same as. Reading books on marketings and sales, right? Like instead of actually doing marketing and sales, buying equipment for a sport that you wanted to practice or a hobby you took on, but never actually following through. And here's the uncomfortable part for me at least, like sales training vendors know that this doesn't work. They've seen the research. They know 85 to 90% of it just fails, but the industry keeps on growing like clockwork, eight to 9% annually. Why? Because hope is more profitable than results. Is easier to sell A-C-E-O-A 50 K training program than to tell 'em actually their CRM is broken, that their managers can't coach and their reps are not on top of the leads because, well, you know, the lead routing is broken. One feels like progress, the other feels like work. But I know definitively that one actually works. So if you talk about, um. What exactly or actually is the problem? Lemme tell you what I see every single time I audit a sale organization. CRMs aren't set up right. You know, lead to speed is just garbage. Leads sit for hours, sometime days. Folks send out an automated email. They don't call the lead. No follow ups or inconsistent follow ups for the lack of a better way to put it. Uh, or follow ups that aren't logged. And you know, then you can later on go ahead and check on the CRM and if you wanna follow up with certain leads, you don't have the data to go ahead and follow up. There's a lot of missing things right here. Notes half of the team doesn't log them. The other half writes at a good call and calls it a day. You know who said that? The same exact thing on the podcast, MC Griffin, his exact same words. We have so much data, data coming out of our noses, but nobody's doing anything about it. And he's right. You don't need more data. You don't need another dashboard. You don't need another analytics tool. You need to create processes and you need to make sure that those processes are followed. That's it really. If you do just that, 80% of all your problems are gonna be solved. I promise you that. And here's what drives me really crazy, and I will. Screen this from the top of the rooftops until I die, or the sales community bars me from practicing. The sales is not complex. It's not some Godlike Isoteric feature that only a few chosen of us, um, possess. It's really easy. Understand the needs of the customer. Show them you can deliver it set up. Set them up for success. That is sales in a nutshell. Sure. The format in which we, how we sell it, the media medium through which we sell, it has changed, but everything else remains the same. But if you can't, you can't do that. If your lead sit in a queue for six hours before anyone calls them, your reps don't know what the last person said to the prospect. Your C-R-M-C-R-M looks like a graveyard of pretty much un incomplete data. Nobody follows your processes that you have set up because, well, there is no process to begin with. So when the CEO calls me and says, or we're talking on a, on a Zoom call, should we invest in challenger sales training? Or which book we should recommend or I recommend that people read. I simply ask them, how fast do you want your reps to respond to inbound leads? What's your follow up sequence? Can you pull up a report right now showing which deals are stalled and why? And when they can't seem to answer those questions. That's when I know right there and then. The problem isn't training. The problem is you don't have a system and no amount of challenger sales is going to fix that. And then let me please be clear. Spin selling Challenger Sandler. These aren't bad methodologies. You know, spin selling actually I think analyzed about 335,000 sales calls, spent a million dollar in research. You know, best case scenario, 17 per percent productivity improvement. And that's. Only, that's only if you implemented it perfectly. Most companies don't challenger sales. Same story. 40% of the high performers naturally use this approach. But when you try to train an average performer to be challenger, it rarely works. I've actually watched the startup spend six months drilling challenger techniques into their team. You know what happened? The natural challengers got slightly better, 5% increase, maybe if that everybody else got worse. They were fighting against their natural selling style. The relationship builders started sounding robotic or something out of a Wolf of Wall Street movie. The problem solvers felt fake performance tanked, and that's the fundamental, fundamental flaw. But pretty much all of this, these programs assume knowledge transfers equal behavior change. It doesn't. You can teach someone the challenge, your framework in a workshop, but if they go back to a broken CRM. A manager who can't coach and a process that doesn't support it. The training evaporates within 30 days. So what's actually killing your sales performance or the team's sales performance is something I've seen echo so much on Reddit. Salespeople complaining about it. The three things that training can never fix. Number one, process chaos. You can drop a pro sales rep in the middle of a company that has no process. They will fail. I think there was, McKinsey studied around 500 B2B companies. Top performers didn't win through better selling skills. They went through radical automation that freed up 20%, you know, of their time to doing actually more selling by eliminating non-selling activities. So now non-sales activities be that, be through ai I or be that, be through removing some of the redundant work. And I've seen this in my own eyes. One client, um, built a geospatial customer data tool, 2% sales increase, zero training required. Um. And number two, which is pretty critical, your CRM is broken, your data quality is garbage. Your tools don't talk to each other. You know what the average CRM delivers?$8.71 return for every dollar invested, 34% productivity increase. That destroys any training ROI, but you can't train your way out of a broken CRM Number three, management inadequacy. Here's a stat that should terrify every sales leader. 59% of the organizations cannot hold their salespeople accountable for applying their training. Why? Because, well, their sales managers don't know how to coach. It's not a dig on sales coaches or sales managers. It's just a fact. You can send your team to the best training in the world, but if their manager doesn't enforce it doesn't measure. It doesn't coach it. It dies. These aren't skill deficits. These are systematic organizational failures. And no amount, no amount of challenger fail sales, excuse me, can fix them. And here's why Training fail at a neurological level. Um, I was talking to somebody about this, this shared this with me, and it just kinda like mind blowing moment training focuses on essentially changing the individual's behavior. But as an organization, the system, the incentives, the processes, they all stay the same. So the newly trained behavior conflicts with the existing environment, which a sales rep is in, or a performing. It's what researchers call Environmental Mismatch. And I think it causes quite a lot of rapid skill integration. And think of, think of it like this, um, try to pull an example here. You teach someone to drive a Ferrari. Right. You put them through a week log, um, intensive program. They're excited, they're ready. And then you hand them keys to a broken, I don't know, pickup truck or with the blown transmission. The skills don't transfer because the environment doesn't support them. That's what you're doing when you train your team on a challenger sales. But don't fix your CRM and I keep hammering on about the CRM because it's the one place. If some, the, if most of the organizations perfected it, the use of it, it will. Quadruple their productivity and close rates, or your lead routing for that matter, or your follow up process. You're essentially teaching your teams how to drive a Ferrari and handing them a broken talk truck. Now, I'm not saying training training is never valuable. I've also trained people, um, in my team, previous companies I've worked at. Training works. Only when you know it addresses a specific skill gap with an already functional process. It's embedded in systematic reinforcement and measurement. It's combined with en environmental changes. Should you go ahead and go into the direction of training people? You gotta make sure the environment follows better tools, better processes, better incentives. It's delivered continuously, not as a one-time event. It's a role specific, not generic. Training becomes theater when it's used to avoid addressing those systematic problems that I've been, I've been talking about this in this episode. Leadership can enforce or measure the behavior change. It kinda like makes it everything redundant and useless or when it's deployed without fixing the tools and processes first. Um, success is measured by attendance, not performance, or it's a, like a substitute, let's say, for proper hiring and onboarding. N it's not gonna be fixed. None of this training can fix until, unless the system systemic issues are first addressed. Most of the companies, they're doing theater. Yeah, there you go. I said it. They're checking a box. They're making executives feel like they did something. Hooray. But they're not actually fixing the problem. So if training doesn't work, what does, um, what actually drives, let's say sustainable sales performance. Um, number one, selling related knowledge, not generic methodologies. Product knowledge, your company product, what exactly is it you're selling, and the space in which you're selling. It's your market knowledge. Specific tactical knowledge. How does my product solve this customer's problem? Not what's the challenge or framework. Number two, role clarity and process. Understanding, knowing what to do and when to do it. This ranks higher than any closing techniques out there. Think about that. Understanding your process matters more than knowing how to handle objections. Number three, cognitive aptitude and adaptive selling. The ability to think on your feet, to adjust your approach based on the customer. This matters more than any scripted approach and the most predictive factor. Environmental support and systemic processes. The companies that win have. Yeah, most of their processes, standard and workflows are optimized. Technology is adopted and automate. Automated performance is measured and feedback systems are put in place so people and reps can actually get feedback. Compensation is a line that enforces the actual behaviors, the right behaviors, so to speak. Not did you, did you actually notice what was missing from the list? Generic sales training methodologies. Right. The smart revenue leaders stopped asking, what training should we go ahead and buy, and which course we actually need to go ahead and give it to our reps? They started asking, what system should we build? And they're building unified revenue operations. And so what does it all mean in practice? Instead of training on objection handling, the reps or the revenue leaders, excuse me, analyze which objections actually stall deals and fix the root cause. Maybe it's pricing, maybe it's messaging, maybe it's the product. Fix that. Instead of training, training on time management, automate administrative tasks, then optimize CRM workflows that eliminate friction for the sales reps. Give them more time to go ahead and actually do what you hired them to do, which is sell. Instead of training on discovery questions, build data systems that tell reps which questions to ask or what questions to ask based on the prospect's industry, company size and behavior, set the reps up for success, not failure, and instead of generic coaching, implement performance, performance dashboards in HubSpot or wherever you have it, that you're exactly where the etra is struggling. Then coach that specific gap results. Organizations with mature rev ops functions consistently outperform training heavy competitors now buy a little, buy a lot because they address the root causes not symptoms. So here's the key insight. Let's try to get this rant to a close. Your reps don't need to be better salespeople. They need a better system to sell within. Give an average rep a great process, great rules and great data. They'll outperform a great rep in a broken system every single time. You can quote me on that. That's what the research so shows, that's what I've seen over and over. The companies that win aren't the ones with best trained reps. They're the ones with best systems. So next time, if you're thinking about buying a course for your reps, pause, please. Pause, stop, think it through. Chances are training is not what the team needs. Do they need training or do they need a better system? I would say fix your CRM, fix your lead routing. Fix your follow up process, build your playbooks. Then only then if there's a specific skill gap, like I mentioned earlier, train for that. But start with the system because your competitors are spending on training right now, while you are building the system that's going to crush them. That's the competitive advantage. Alright folks, that was it for, um, for this week. I'm Ed. This is Messy Growth. See you next week.