Training resistance is fairly common—and often for the most unexpected or obscure reasons.
Employees and even leaders can be sceptical of sales training, often due to past (boring) experiences, misconceptions, or a host of other underlying concerns.
Research indicates that well-designed, interactive sales training can lead to a 50% boost in performance within the first six months, while also enhancing talent retention and engagement. Leaders increasingly recognise that teams empowered with practical, relevant, and reinforced training achieve faster results through improved behaviours and communication, leading to stronger client relationships, higher conversions, and increased confidence.
Taking into account and understanding the various professional and personal reasons why people may be hesitant about training enables us to design our programs in a way that addresses and dispels each of these apprehensions with engaging programs that resonate, captivate, and create lasting transformational impact.
Some of the common sources of training resistance can include:
- Perceived criticism: Some employees see training as remedial, worrying it signals underperformance.
- Past experiences: Rigid, irrelevant, or dull training can foster disengagement and scepticism that it will hold people’s attention
- Fear of change: New methods may feel threatening or disruptive to established workflows or habits.
- Discomfort or anxiety: Role-plays, evaluations, or public exercises can feel intimidating, particularly for introverts.
- Feeling overqualified: Seasoned staff may assume they ‘know it all’, and feel training is too basic for them. It’s a fact: “You don’t know what you don’t know” – everyone benefits from new insights and skill refinement.
- Misconceptions about sales: Certain sectors—especially consultative roles—may associate sales with pushy, inauthentic behaviour and therefore believe it conflicts with their natural personality
- Relevance concerns: Often, people doubt external training will resonate with or reflect the nuances of their industry, culture, or specific challenges, especially in specialist or advisory roles where sales is an added responsibility, e.g., Medical, Technical, Aged Care, NDIS, etc.
Smarter Selling undertakes a thorough and collaborative evaluation process upfront with leaders and teams, which brings any hidden concerns to light and actively gets buy-in and commitment. This ensures that our program design clearly aligns with individual organisational values, goals, challenges, and team needs – turning unease into curiosity and engagement.
Participants often move from training scepticism to genuine relief when they realise Smarter Selling sales training is not about fitting a mould— on the contrary, it’s about unlocking, embracing, and channelling each person’s individuality and unique potential, making their roles easier and enabling them to be the best version of themselves.
What Makes Smarter Selling Training Different
Our advantage in converting any professional sales training distrust into clear ROI extends beyond our mastery of sales techniques—it’s due to our deep understanding of what motivates people to learn and how they learn. Each of our trainers brings a wealth of sales and training experience across various industries, utilizing accredited frameworks such as NLP, Values Levels, and Personality Styles, to enable successful teaching methods that engage every type of learner.
What are the Smarter Selling training differentiators:
- Inclusive engagement: Our dynamic and effective learning methods ensure that diverse processing styles, including introverts and neurodivergent learners, all connect, engage, absorb, and retain skills.
- Authentic impact: By embracing people’s innate styles, individuals learn to harness and build on their natural strengths, creating human-centered sales interactions that foster trust while boosting personal confidence both at work and in their personal lives, as well as with peers.
- Active, experiential learning: Lively training including real stories, exercises, discussions, movement, and humour—making learning enjoyable, memorable, and practical.
- Modern, relevant content: Sales is an ever-changing landscape. Our programs reflect current market trends, technical developments, and client behaviours to ensure immediate application with the latest techniques.
Evidence reconfirms that “how” you train people is significant when measuring training success: a 2021 study in the Journal of Workplace Learning found that interactive, experiential training increases knowledge retention by 75% compared with lecture-style methods.
The result? Participants leave Smarter Selling training feeling confident and empowered, and visibly inspired and energised with their new skills and insights.
Most people describe it as the most lifting and positive experience – unlike any professional training they’ve ever attended before.
Making Sales Training Relevant and Lasting
Training resistance disappears when it’s relevant, supported, and clearly valuable. Smarter Selling takes a holistic, collaborative approach with leaders and participants using tools and processes to ensure training is well designed and supported from the outset to post-workshop, to achieve lasting outcomes:
- Mindset: We set the tone for individual and collective growth by assessing adaptability, resilience, openness, and readiness to learn.
- Guided process: Our ‘training guidance’ maps the journey to ensure team alignment, clarity, and understanding of the value of learning.
- We do the homework: Pre-work uncovers real challenges and priorities, ensuring relevance and focus on what matters most.
- Tailor the content: Customised delivery that aligns, resonates, and reflects your culture, style, and team needs
- Embed reinforcement: Clear support frameworks for managers and leaders to keep new skills and behaviours alive post-training, with full access to the Smarter Selling Academy for ongoing coaching and guidance.
- Create a safe environment: Participants feel encouraged and confident to express, learn, and grow.
Evidence shows active reinforcement after training leads to increased skill retention by 50–60% over time (Harvard Business Review, 2020).
Training That Impacts More Than Sales
Training needs to deliver more than a buoyant day of learning and bonding – it needs to deliver an impactful and lasting transformation.
This is why professional, well-designed training, in addition to improving skills and performance measurables, also shapes and defines behaviours, mindsets, and organisational culture, which have infinite benefits, including :
- Communication: Improved collaboration internally and with clients.
- Confidence and self-awareness: Participants feel empowered in their abilities and decisions.
- Morale and mindset: Engaging sessions boost motivation, job satisfaction, and a sense of being valued.
- Relationships and well-being: Skills translate beyond the workplace, enhancing peer interactions, leadership influence, and personal connections.
- Onboarding efficiency: New employee engagement increases by 20–25% when onboarding includes structured, interactive training (Gallup, 2023).
- Staff retention: Investing in people’s development reduces turnover and speeds onboarding, saving recruitment costs and periods of lost productivity.
Research reinforces the additional positive impacts of training on staff engagement and retention. Organisations that invest in interactive, learner-focused training report a 24% increase in engagement and a 20% increase in retention (ATD, 2022). Meanwhile, 94% of employees say they would stay longer at companies that invest in their career development (LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 2023).
Changing Perceptions, Inspiring Growth, Boosting Performance
Training is so much more than an L&D checkbox—it’s an essential investment towards building a proactive culture of growth, learning, and evolution, both as a team and a business.
Imagine catalytic training programs, where participants are fully invested, immersed, energized, and lose track of time, genuinely and confidently embracing advanced sales skills as a natural extension of who they are. Picture training sessions, where individuals’ interest is piqued as they gain valuable and actionable insights into communication, body language, and behavioural influence – understanding people and themselves better, and discovering innovative ways to connect with clients and colleagues.
That’s the Smarter Selling difference: we positively flip any training resistance into enthusiasm, scepticism into engagement, and active learning into measurable results. By respecting individuality and focusing on authentic, human-centered sales communication, we create memorable and transformative training that the most experienced to aspiring sales professionals genuinely look forward to and embracen—and leaders can rely on for lasting impact.
References / Evidence Highlights
- LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 2023 – Employee engagement insights
- ATD Research, 2022 – Impact of interactive, learner-focused training on engagement and retention
- Journal of Workplace Learning, 2021 – Retention improvements from experiential learning
- Harvard Business Review, 2020 – Reinforcement increases skill retention
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