Why blended sales training and coaching beats one-off events

What elite sports preparation teaches us about building a sales training and coaching programme that actually lasts.

A great time for sports fans as the GAA season and the 2026 World Cup approach their climax.

Called the business end of the season for a reason it has me wondering what the other end of the season is called, if not simply the ‘start?’

My own county did brilliantly against modest expectations and gives plenty of hope for the future. Louth are throwing some great shapes and Dublin and Kerry are both predictably in the mix yet again.

Cape Verde and Paraguay have shocked the world of soccer, with all eyes still on Argentina, France or Portugal, where one of them will ensure that football takes a little longer to make its way home.

Those Gaelic footballers who operate at elite inter-county level are clearly dedicated to the principle of performance improvement. Incredible levels of sacrifice, personally and professionally throughout a season in the quest for immortality.

Periodisation, macrocycles (the full season), mesocycles, (blocks of a few weeks) and microcycles (the individual week)

Volume, load, intensity, frequency, specificity, progressive overload, recovery, adaptation, tapering, peaking, monitoring, revising…

Technical, skill, tactical, psychological, mental, nutrition, sleep, lifestyle.

The detail matters at this level – everything is up for discussion if it can move the dial forward and closer to the ultimate prize.

I’ve heard it said that club football teams are now training like their inter-county heroes.

Not too long ago, it was training on a Tuesday and Thursday with a game on Sunday.

Of course these teams still ‘train’ but they don’t view training as an event any more, they view it as a continual process.

Training never works if it is treated simply as an event – it’s the very same for sales and business development.

A lot of conventional sales training that doesn’t work has very little to do with the content, trainer or delivery. It’s the training that gets treated as an ‘event’ rather than a system that is designed, embedded and measured over time.

Deciding on a sales training programme is a big investment for a business and if it lands it can have an incredible impact on sales performance. If it doesn’t work you’ve not only wasted money but you’ve wasted time and probably shaken your team’s faith in any future initiative.

It’s difficult to see how sales training could ever have a lasting impact on any sales team when the traditional format is to deliver content in the same way to a group of people who behave differently as individuals.

Back to the sport analogy, full forwards need different training to midfielders, young players have different training needs to the more mature team members.

A sales team will be made up of people with different ages, experiences, backgrounds, comprehension and absorption levels, interest and motivation levels. How can a 2 day programme benefit everyone in a sales team in the same way?

Often content is produced for a training session without thorough diagnosis of what is required and often without the influence of the sales leaders themselves.

It often falls around the same time each year as an anniversary event with little influencing the content year on year.

Sometimes the driving force can be along the lines of “The team needs a bit of a refresher.” or “…a bit of a top up…”

And they do need all of that but above everything they need the training to have impact and to endure.

There’s a body of research from myriad sources to show that a blended programme of training and one-to-one coaching has the most impact on a sales team.

According to a report by Olivero, Bane & Kopelman, Public Personnel Management (1997) sales training alone lifted productivity by 22%. Training supplemented with eight weeks of coaching lifted it by 88%.

ATD’s (The Association for Talent Development) State of Sales Training research (citing Gartner) shows that B2B reps forget 70% of training within a week and 87% within a month. The same research suggests that 79% of high-performing organisations use structured post-training activity endorsing the view that without reinforcement, the spike fades and they revert to old habits.

Ultimately you’ll have your own research and will know what has worked in the past for your team but if you are thinking of reviewing how you approach improving sales performance, I’m going to share some thoughts:

1. Make training part of a process and not an event. Consider the ongoing performance improvement of your team, what they need as individuals and how to measure any improvement, incremental or otherwise.

2. Without reinforcement, the investment evaporates. 87% forgotten within 4 weeks equals a wasted investment. A costly box-ticking exercise that can be turned on its head with the introduction of performance coaching.

3. Jump leads don’t fix the performance of the car. I have always seen occasional training as the equivalent of jump leads on a winters morning. Here the car is performing at a very basic level, getting you from A to B. Turn off the engine and you could be back to where you started.

4.  Reframe what you are looking at. Training works. Fact. Training as an isolated activity is just that. Isolated. If you want to improve the performance of your sales team ask yourself what needs to change at individual level and what is the best way of achieving and sustaining that improvement?

5. Understand what your team needs. Everyone wants sales revenue to improve but not everyone knows how to make it happen. Before agreeing on any programme, do a thorough diagnosis of the problem that you need to solve, seen from the eyes of the seller, the buyer and ensure that the sales manager has a plan for the time after the training stops, measuring performance over attendance.

If you want any further information on blended sales training and the SHIFT methodology, then please email info@shift-control.co.uk

Thanks for reading

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