Does sales training work?

Here is a statistic that should make anyone who has ever booked a training day feel slightly uncomfortable. You forget 50% of what you learn within 24 hours. After a week, that figure climbs to 90%.

Think about what that means in practice. You spend time finding the right trainer. You book the room, block out the diaries, pay the invoice. Your team sits through a full day of content. And within seven days, almost all of it is gone.

So does sales training actually work? The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what happens after the session ends.

Why most sales training fails before it starts

Right now, companies are scrambling for solutions to flat or falling sales. I see it constantly. Businesses investing heavily in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Others chasing the latest tool or platform. Many putting their faith in AI - Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT - convinced that technology will fix a people problem.

It will not.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a good example of money spent in the wrong place. The core issue is that 90% of people cannot sell. Handing them a sophisticated prospecting tool does not change that - it just gives them a faster way to spam people with automation or poorly written AI messages. Most teams stop using Sales Navigator within a few months, while the company continues paying for a 12-month licence. That is not an investment. That is an expensive lesson.

Bright shiny objects - the new platform, the new software, the new system that promises to transform your pipeline - follow the same pattern. They arrive with excitement, disappoint quietly, and disappear.

AI is more complicated. I use it myself, for research and for finding contact details. It has genuine uses. But when people use AI to write their emails and LinkedIn messages, they end up sounding like everyone else who is also using AI to write their emails and LinkedIn messages. Sales is about standing out. AI, used lazily, does the opposite. It also does not keep you accountable. It cannot read the room. It misses nuance. It cannot have a real conversation with a human being in the way that matters when you are trying to build trust.

What people actually want to know before they hire a sales trainer

I have been a LinkedIn Top Voice for five years. I have been recognised as a Salesforce Sales Influencer for four. I have written three books and spoken at TEDx. None of that is what closes the conversation when someone is deciding whether to work with me.

What people want to know is simpler than any of that:

• Do you actually care about my team's results, or are you here to deliver a session and move on?
• Will you listen to what our specific problems are, rather than delivering a generic programme?
• Can you solve the problems we have, not the ones you have prepared for?
• Do you bring ideas we have not thought of ourselves?

Answer those four questions well and you are halfway there. The other half is accountability - and that is where most sales training falls apart completely.

The accountability gap

Go back to those retention figures. 50% gone in a day. 90% gone in a week.

The best-designed training programme in the world cannot overcome that reality if nobody follows up. Most trainers deliver the session, send a follow-up email with a deck attached, and move on. The team returns to their desks, old habits reassert themselves within days, and three months later nothing has changed.

The way I work is different. At the end of every session, each person tells me - out loud, in front of their colleagues - the three things they are going to implement. Then they send me an email confirming those three things with a deadline. I follow up with each person a week or two later to find out what has changed, what is working, and where they are stuck.

Their manager often cannot do this. Managers are running meetings, managing upwards, chasing their own targets. The follow-up falls through the gap. That gap is exactly where the value of training is lost.

What the return on sales training actually looks like

People sometimes baulk at the cost of external sales training. I understand that. But the maths is worth doing properly.

A 1% improvement in conversion rates sounds modest. For most SMEs, that is worth £10,000 or more. For larger sales operations, the figure can easily exceed £100,000. That return does not come from the training day itself - it comes from the behavioural change that follows when the training is properly supported and followed up.

The question is not whether sales training is expensive. The question is what it costs to keep doing things the way you are doing them now.

How to find sales training that actually works

Not all sales training is the same, and the differences matter. Here is what to look for when you are evaluating whether a trainer or programme is worth your time and budget.

They listen before they prescribe. A trainer who arrives with a fixed programme regardless of your situation is not solving your problem - they are delivering their content. The first conversation should be about your team, your challenges, and what good looks like for you.

They train interactively. Slide decks do not change behaviour. I have written about this at length in my post on why interactive sales training gets better results than slide decks. The short version: people retain more when they are actively involved, and they cannot be actively involved when they are watching someone read from a presentation.

They follow up. Ask any trainer you are considering how they support the learning after the session. If the answer is a PDF summary and a link to their newsletter, keep looking.

They have done it themselves. There is a difference between someone who has studied sales and someone who has spent decades doing it across multiple industries, countries, and market conditions. Ask about their background. Ask for specific examples.

They have evidence. Not awards - recommendations. Real ones, from real clients, describing real outcomes. I have 145 recommendations on LinkedIn from businesses across pharma, SaaS, hospitality, insurance, professional services, and more. That breadth matters because it shows the training translates across different contexts, not just one sector.

The real question to ask yourself

If your team sat through a training day six months ago and nothing has changed, the training probably was not the problem. The follow-up was.

Sales training works when it is treated as a process rather than an event. One day in a room is the beginning, not the solution. What comes after - the accountability, the check-ins, the honest conversations about what is and is not changing - is where the real work happens.

If you want to find out how I approach that with sales teams, take a look at the group sales training page.