Experienced sales leaders often voice the opinion that sales training simply doesn’t work, because it fails to produce lasting behavior change. But the evidence suggests the problem isn’t the training, it’s what happens after.
Training prepares learners for improvement, but that improvement can’t be achieved without deliberate practice. In nearly every performance profession — athletics, medicine, aviation, music — practice is the primary development mechanism and training is the setup for practice. In sales, practice barely exists.
This gap between learning and proficiency is not a training design problem. It is a structural flaw in how most sales organizations approach development. Addressing it requires rethinking the salesperson development model — not just what salespeople learn, but how they practice, how they’re measured, and how the organization sustains improvement over time.
Topics include:
- What the evidence says about why training fails to change selling behavior.
- The distinction between awareness and proficiency — and why most development programs stop at awareness.
- Why practice is the missing link: lessons from performance professions applied to selling.
- The six obstacles that prevent salespeople from achieving proficiency after training.
- How AI-powered practice makes deliberate practice scalable and accessible for the first time.
- Building a development system that connects learning, practice, measurement, and coaching into a continuous cycle.
Attendees receive: A diagnostic framework (the Obstacles to Proficiency) for identifying why their development investments aren’t translating to behavior change, an evidence-based model for what a complete development system looks like beyond training, and a clear understanding of how AI practice creates the missing bridge between learning and field execution.
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