Selling Without a Net

In my article “No Way to Run a Railroad,” ?I shared an example of how expensive salesperson churn really is, and made the point that it is a company’s best financial interest to do everything they can to ensure that reps are successful – especially new reps. ??In fact, if your average annual turnover is 34%, that means that 1 out of every 3 sales positions on your team is going to produce just a fraction of the revenue you need to make the team number every year.? That is no way to run a railroad…or any other business.

There are at least two powerful reasons why sales training is not sufficient to ensure new rep success:? Memory and Time.

MEMORY:

We know that “87% of what was learned in sales training was completely forgotten by week 12.”? ?Source: ?Xerox.?

That stat is not a measurement of what was taught in sales training, it states that sales reps forgot 87% of what they had learned in training.? That's one gap.? The second gap is the one between what was taught and what was retained at the end of training.? The Xerox study quantified the extent of the knowledge retention problem…and it’s a problem.?

TIME:

Sales reps don’t have time to learn organically.? If it takes 9 months for a rep to be considered competent to perform (Source: Bridge Group study of 350 software companies), most reps are not going to make enough money in year one to see their new company as a compelling use of their time. ?Especially if their company isn’t giving them the support they need.? You can’t manage competence into someone.? You have to enable it… based on a real understanding of why it takes so long to ramp.

WHY DOES IT TAKE REPS SO LONG TO BECOME PRODUCTIVE?

In a word:? Complexity.?

If the job of an enterprise sales rep was simply to convey information about a company’s product, a week’s worth of sales training would be more than enough.? Of course, as the number of products increases, so does complexity.? However, buyers today have numerous ways to learn about products—many of which may be more effective and are certainly more convenient for them.?

The long pole is no longer conveying information, it is gathering it.? The number of questions that a sales rep needs to ask in order to win a deal could be 80 - 200+ in a complex sale.? What’s far more daunting is that the universe of questions expands exponentially as the defining dimensions of an opportunity change.? For example, the questions a rep needs to ask to earn the business of a financial services company are different than those needed to earn the business of a manufacturer or a health care company.? In fact, the questions vary even within the various segments of any of these industries.? Selling to a hedge fund is very different than selling to an insurance company or a commercial bank.? Selling to different industry segments is the tip of the complexity iceberg.? Products are another dimension of an opportunity that contribute to complexity.? You don’t sell a cybersecurity product the same way you sell a workflow product.? Another dimension is the number of buyer personas – or decision stakeholders.? Competition is another dimension.? Seasoned salespeople don’t sell against Competitor A the same way they sell against Competitor B.? And so on.?

SOLUTION:

Clearly there needs to be some form of ongoing enablement that solves this complexity problem.? The sales enablement paradigm that sales reps need:? Just give me what I need to ask, right now, in this exact context, without effort.

A DAY IN THE LIFE:

I spoke to an excellent sale rep last week that said, “I had five important meetings yesterday.? I spent an hour preparing for one of them, and I had to wing the other four.”

Whenever you make the time to prepare for a customer interaction you know immediately that you were at least twice as effective as you would have been if you had not prepared. ?The problem is, sales reps don’t have the time to develop the questions they need to ask in all of their interactions manually…and even if they had the time to reinvent the wheel before every customer interaction, they wouldn’t be able to compete with a competitor who took a collective expertise approach to the problem of discovery.? ?

Given the variability in a sales rep’s customer interactions, any individual rep might go weeks or even months without having the same type of meeting—for the same product, in the same market segment, with the same buyer persona, and for the same use case. However, across the company, that exact meeting might be happening dozens of times per week.

What if every rep could tap into the collective expertise of their peers—gaining insights from every interaction across the organization? The company’s learning process would accelerate exponentially, and reps wouldn’t have to learn what questions they need to ask in each situation before they could be effective. The most effective set of questions would be inserted into the context of each of their customer interactions, whether they are Zoom calls, emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, Slack conversations, etc.

With the ongoing enablement that I'm describing, reps would be effective immediately—starting the day after sales training. No more 9-month ramp.

WHY (fix this problem) NOW?

As Return to Office (RTO) mandates increase, so will employee turnover—which are already at unsustainable levels.

At Dell, starting March 3, 2025, all hybrid and remote employees living within an hour of a Dell office must work on-site five days a week. Meanwhile, a January 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 46% of respondents said they would be unlikely to stay at their current job if remote work were no longer an option.

If 34% turnover is already unsustainable for a sales organization, what happens when it climbs to 46%? Put simply: How can we hit our targets if nearly half our sales reps have been here less than a year?

The cycle of long ramp times and high turnover is a treadmill companies can no longer afford to stay on.

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