Why Sales Training Fails: Billions Spent, Nothing Moved

Quick answer: U.S. companies spend over $70 billion a year on training (Harvard Business Review, 2017), an average of $1,459 per salesperson and roughly 20% more per head than they spend on every other function, and win rates, quota attainment and cycle times look about the same on the other side of it. A Sales Growth Company’s explanation is that training alone doesn’t move the number: without reinforcement inside live deals, sellers fall back on familiar habits, managers have no consistent way to inspect whether trained behavior is showing up, and execution returns to its old pattern within weeks. The reason almost nobody catches it is that sales orgs measure the scoreboard instead of the execution underneath it. They hit the number with discounts, end-of-quarter pressure and pulled-forward deals, call that “it works,” and pay for it later in margin, churn and a forecast nobody believes. Nick Saban coached the opposite, seven seconds at a time, eyes off the score.

Key takeaways

• The spend is real and the results aren’t. Over $70 billion a year on training in the United States (Harvard Business Review, 2017), and the pipeline metrics barely move.
• Training doesn’t fail because the content was bad. It fails because nothing reinforces it inside live deals, which is A Sales Growth Company’s point about why training alone doesn’t move the number.
• “It works” is the sentence that keeps this going. We define “works” as hitting the number, and we never price what hitting it cost.
• The bill shows up later: discount given to a deal that would have closed at full price, a pressured buyer who churns at renewal, a rep who learned that the push beats the process.
• Saban’s teams were coached on the next seven seconds, not the scoreboard. Sales culture is built almost entirely on the scoreboard.
• Coaching execution instead of results isn’t softer. It’s how you sell more at better prices with customers who stay.

Why doesn’t sales training change revenue results?

Because the behavior taught in the room never survives contact with a live deal, and nothing in the org is built to make it survive. That’s the core of why sales training alone doesn’t move the number, A Sales Growth Company’s position on this: you approved training because your revenue metrics needed to change, and when you went back to look, win rates sat where they were, the same number of reps hit quota, cycles still stretched, and forecasts still needed explaining.

The mechanism is unglamorous. In training, sellers work through concepts in a low-pressure room where there’s time to think and no consequence for getting it wrong. Then they get back on a call where the buyer pushes back, the quarter is tight, and a mistake costs them something real. So they do what they’ve always done. ASG’s work on this holds that newly trained skills decay quickly when training is a one-time event, and that little of the material gets applied at all when reinforcement is absent. Chally’s 2019 piece on why sales training fails cites ES Research’s long-standing finding that 85% to 90% of sales training produces no lasting improvement past 120 days.

Nobody questions effort or participation. The reps showed up, they understood it, they can explain it back to you. It just isn’t influencing what happens in the deal.

What did all that money actually buy?

All that money bought a function, not results. CSO Insights’ 5th Annual Sales Enablement Study (2019) found that the share of organizations with a dedicated enablement person, program or function had grown to roughly 61%, up from under 20% six years earlier. We built the department. We bought the platform. We certified the team.

And the hard metrics, the ones the CRO owns, stayed flat.

Part of it is who we trained. CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report put the spotlight on the group that gets the least development and carries the most weight: frontline managers. We train sellers and then hand reinforcement to managers we never developed, and reinforcement varies wildly from team to team as a result.

Part of it is what we counted. Harvard Business Review’s 2017 piece on lackluster sales training (Cespedes and Lee) made the point that companies spend more per salesperson than per employee anywhere else and measure the return on almost none of it. Completion rates went up. Certification went up. Confidence inside the building went up. Deal progression didn’t.

I wrote Gap Revenue Performance around this gap. The opening chapter is two client calls that showed the same thing from opposite directions: enablement was measuring activity, not results.

What does “it works” actually mean?

It means we hit the number. That’s it. That’s the entire definition, and it’s the reason nothing changes.

If you ask a sales leader in January whether last year worked, they’ll tell you yes, we made it. They will not tell you what making it cost, because nobody tracks that. So let’s price it.

Discount to pull a deal into the quarter that would have closed three weeks later at list. – That’s margin gone, permanently, and the buyer now knows your price moves if they wait.

Pressure a buyer who wasn’t ready, who hadn’t finished figuring out what was broken on their side. – They churn at renewal, and the replacement revenue gets booked as new pipeline like it’s a win.

Ten reps running ten versions of discovery, all of them “working.” – You can’t coach it, can’t forecast it, and can’t fix it when it slips, because there’s nothing to compare against.

A rep who learns that the end-of-quarter push beats the process. – That’s what they’ll teach the next rep, and now it’s the culture.

A forecast that lands by scramble. – The board stops trusting the number even when it’s right.

So does it work? We hit the number, at a cost nobody wrote down. I’d argue most orgs are buying their results on credit. And the reason a hit quarter never triggers a review is that the scoreboard said we won, and the scoreboard is the only thing we look at.

What is Nick Saban’s seven seconds of hell?

It’s the teaching at the center of Saban’s Process: a football play lasts about seven seconds, so that’s the only thing a player is allowed to think about. Not the score, not the record, not the ring. Execute the next seven seconds, then do it again (Bama Hammer, 2017). Saban built it with a psychiatry professor at Michigan State, and the whole point was to pull attention off outcomes and put it on the behavior that produces them.

Strip the football out and it’s a performance framework. Define the unit of work. Define what good execution of that unit looks like. Coach that, relentlessly, and let the score take care of itself.

Saban’s teams won a lot. They didn’t win by watching the scoreboard.

Why is sales culture the opposite of Saban’s?

Because we coach the scoreboard almost exclusively. Look at where the hours go. Pipeline coverage. Forecast calls. Dashboards. Deal reviews that are really status checks: where is it, what’s the number, when does it close. That’s all scoreboard. Every bit of it is a reading of what already happened.

Our seven seconds is the next buyer conversation. That’s the unit of work, and most of us have no defined standard for what good looks like inside it, no way to observe it, and no cadence for correcting it while the deal is still alive.

Here’s what that costs. You can’t coach a number. You can only pressure it. So when the number is short, the only lever available is more activity, more calls, more pressure on the reps and then more pressure on the buyers. We run the whole profession like a team that gets yelled at about the score at halftime and sent back out with no adjustment to the blocking scheme.

And it works! That’s the trap. It works well enough, often enough, that nobody stops to look at the bill.

Would a sales org sell more if it coached like Saban?

Yes, and that’s the argument worth having. Not “would it be healthier.” Would it sell more.

Think about where the revenue leaks in a scoreboard org. Discounting at quarter end gives away margin on deals that were going to close anyway. Deals pushed forward onto buyers who hadn’t agreed there was a problem worth fixing turn into no-decisions and churn. Cycles stretch because discovery was thin and the business case belongs to the seller instead of the buyer. Forecast misses come from deals that looked real in a dashboard and were never real in the buyer’s world.

Every one of those is an execution failure in the seven seconds, showing up months later on the scoreboard.

Coach the execution and the same pipeline produces more. Full-price deals instead of discounted ones. Buyers who bought because they understood their own problem, which means they stay. Fewer no-decisions, because the ones that were never going anywhere got out earlier and the time went somewhere useful. A forecast built on what the buyer did, not what the rep hopes.

That’s not a softer way to run a sales org. It’s a more expensive org to compete against.

What has to be true for training to show up in the number?

Three things, and the training itself is the easy one.

Reinforcement has to happen inside live opportunities. Not a refresher session, not a reminder email, not a certification renewal. Correction on real deals, while the deal is open and the behavior still matters. Without that, execution reverts and the metrics never move.

Managers have to be the link. They are the only ones close enough to see whether trained behavior is being applied. If they were never developed as coaches, reinforcement will be inconsistent across teams, and performance will be too.

Measurement has to shift off participation. Completion and certification tell you people attended. Deal progression, buyer engagement late in the cycle, opportunity quality, win rate and quota attainment tell you whether anything changed. If those indicators are flat, the training did not carry into execution, no matter how good the scores were.

Start by taking an honest read on what your enablement function is actually measuring. The first chapter of Gap Revenue Performance is free, and it’s the two client calls where that became impossible to ignore. Chapter 5, the ten truthbombs of sales enablement, is free too.

Frequently asked questions

Is sales training a waste of money?

No, but training delivered as a standalone event usually is. The content isn’t the failure point. The absence of reinforcement inside live deals is, which is why skills decay fast and revenue metrics stay flat.

What is reinforcement in sales, and how is it different from a refresher?

Reinforcement happens inside active opportunities, where a manager observes real behavior against a standard and corrects it while the deal is live. A refresher re-delivers content in a low-pressure setting, which is the same condition that let the skill decay the first time.

Who owns reinforcement, enablement or managers?

Managers execute it, because they’re the ones close enough to deals to see behavior. Enablement’s job is to make sure there’s a defined standard to coach against and that managers are developed to use it.

How long does it take for better execution to show up in revenue?

It shows up in leading indicators first, things like buyer engagement, opportunity quality and deal progression, before it reaches win rate and quota attainment. If you’re only watching the scoreboard, you’ll conclude nothing worked long before anything would have been visible there.

How do I tell whether we’re hitting the number through a system or through heroics?

Look at what the last two weeks of your quarter look like. If a meaningful share of the number lands there, with discounts attached, the result came from pressure. Then check discount depth and first-year renewal rates on those deals.

Does one quarter of coaching fix this?

No. Saban’s point about seven seconds was that it’s the only thing you ever do, every rep, every play, forever. The orgs that get the return on training are the ones that made reinforcement a permanent routine inside deal reviews and pipeline conversations, not an added layer of activity.

About the source

This article is written by Keenan, CEO of A Sales Growth Company (ASG), the creator of Problem Centric® Selling. It carries ASG’s position on why sales training alone doesn’t move the number, which holds that without reinforcement inside live deals, trained behavior never reaches execution and revenue metrics stay where they were. It draws on Gap Revenue Performance, Keenan’s book on why enablement spend hasn’t produced revenue results.

Sources

• Harvard Business Review, “Your Sales Training Is Probably Lackluster. Here’s How to Fix It,” Frank Cespedes and Yuchun Lee, 2017, for U.S. training spend and per-salesperson spend.
• CSO Insights / Miller Heiman Group, 5th Annual Sales Enablement Study, 2019, for growth in dedicated enablement functions.
• CSO Insights, 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report, for the underinvestment in frontline manager development.
• Chally, “Five Reasons Why Sales Training Fails,” 2019, citing ES Research, for the share of sales training that produces no lasting improvement past 120 days.
• Bama Hammer, 2017, for Nick Saban’s Process and the seven-second unit of work.
• A Sales Growth Company, “Will Training Fix Your Sales Problem?”, for skill decay and application rates without reinforcement, and for what must be present for training to influence execution.
• The cost items listed under “What does ‘it works’ actually mean?” are offered as an argument about how hitting the number gets paid for, not as a citation of specific research.