Sales training rarely fades because people forget. It fades because nothing on Monday asks for the new behaviour: the process, the CRM, and the manager's questions stay the same. Teams repeat what their manager asks for, so that is where the change has to land.
Most sales trainings end well. The room has energy, the feedback forms are good, and everyone agrees the new approach makes sense.
Three weeks later, the team sells the way it did before.
The forgetting curve is real. It isn't the reason.
In my experience, many training budgets are defended with the forgetting curve. Hermann Ebbinghaus memorised lists of meaningless syllables and measured how fast he forgot them, published in 1885. Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated the experiment and found a similar curve, published in 2015.
It is solid science. It just says very little about your sales team. Your sellers aren't memorising nonsense. They are trying to change how they behave in front of customers, inside an organisation that still asks for the old behaviour.
Week three
At T-Mobile, I had a CRM deployment that people wouldn't use. It never stuck. In the end, the company decided it was a tool problem and replaced the tool.
The more uncomfortable part of that story is about me. With that deployment, we also wanted to change the sales process. I knew exactly what the new expectation was. What I didn't have was time to coach my people on it. I was firefighting every day, and I believed that mattered more.
So the new process lived in the system, and everyone clicked through the CRM in a way that worked around it.
In my experience, it is almost never the tool. And it is rarely the training.
What the training never touched
When a training fades, look at what it left untouched. In my experience, there are three things.
The team never mapped how its customers actually buy, so the new skills had no place in the sales process. The training explained how to persuade, not how decisions are really made on the customer side. And nobody gave the sellers or their managers a way to steer the process deal by deal.
None of them is fixed in a training room.
I bought training as the fix for everything
When I first became a sales leader, I bought sales training the way many leaders still do: as the answer to every problem. In most cases it wasn't, or at least not in the form I was buying it.
Today we start somewhere else. We start with the people: we spend time with the best and average performers and learn which process each actually follows. Then we look at the process as it is and as it should be, based strictly on customer insights. Only then can you see which skills and capabilities are really missing, and what development the team needs. A training built on that has a place in the team's daily work.
People repeat what their manager asks for
My colleague Grant MacKenzie once put it to me in one line: "People respect what the managers inspect."
Teams repeat what their manager asks for on Monday. If the pipeline review still asks for the same fields, the forecast meeting still rewards the same optimism, and nobody asks the new questions, the training changes nothing.
So the training is the smaller part of the change. The bigger part is around it: the process it belongs to, the questions managers ask in every review, and the weeks of practice on real deals afterwards. Training helps once those fundamentals are in place. Without them, it changes very little.
That is how we built our in-company Challenger programme. The two workshop days focus on the team's own deals, managers are involved from the start, and the months after the workshop matter more than the workshop itself.
The way we run it was not invented for this programme: people on our team today designed it at Philips, during its global sales transformation, and we have built our ways of working at hTWORG around it.
What to put in place before the next training
If you want the next training to last, have three things ready before the first day. None of them needs an outside partner.
First, map how your customers actually buy. Sit down with two of your best sellers and one average one, take three recent deals, and write down the steps the customer went through, from noticing the problem to signing. Then check the map with one customer from each deal. Wherever the customer's steps and your sales stages don't match, the new skills will have no place in how your team sells.
Second, write the managers' questions. Agree on three to five questions every manager asks about every deal in the stages the training targets: questions that can only be answered if the seller used the new approach. Start asking them the week after the training, not next quarter.
Third, plan the practice on real deals. Each seller brings one live deal into the training and keeps working on it in the weeks after, with the manager reviewing it every week or two.
Before you buy the next programme
Look at week three of the last one. Pick three deals and ask what your managers asked about them in the pipeline review.
If the questions are the same as before the training, you have found the reason it faded. And you know where the next one has to start.
If your last training faded and you want to know why before you buy the next one, 25 minutes is enough to look at it together.
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