If 2024 has taught me anything, it’s that product buying is killing sales organizations from the inside out – especially when it comes to sales training and enablement. Product means investing in solutions without proper discovery, and it’s one of the costliest mistakes sales leaders are making.
Product buying costs you:
- Wasted revenue
- Lost time
- Awful adoption rates
- Zero change in metrics
- Zero change in behavior
The result? Lucky you, you just paid a premium to remain exactly where you are. And, soon enough, you’ll be another voice on LinkedIn telling the world that “sales training doesn’t work!”
Let me be clear: it’s not the training that failed. The product buying approach kill your results before the training started. When you skip discovery and jump straight to “What does the training look like?” you’ve already lost. You’re treating symptoms and not the problem.
Costs of Skipping Discovery
Earlier this year, I was competing for a large enterprise deal. My competition showed up to the first meeting with a 65-slide deck. No discovery. Just a one-size-fits-all presentation pushing their product.
They wanted a six-figure commitment over multiple years before they did any diagnosing. They expected the client to pay for the training road map before they determined if the service would help.
Uh.
Would you invest six figures in home improvements without a contractor coming out to see the house? No, yet sales leadership routinely commits this error with organizational training. Product buying expensive solutions that they aren’t sure will move the needle.
What if sales training isn’t even the right solution. But, they’ll never know cause nobody bothered to poke around.
Why Most Sales Training Fails
As sellers, our job is to uncover root causes during discovery to show what needs to change to get results. Without this, we’re just guessing. That’s why product buying – making decisions without proper diagnosis – is nothing short of sales malpractice.
A prospect recently asked me to just sell them the thing. I can’t. I can’t recommend anything without data. That’s committing sales malpractice.
That being said, it happens all the time:
- Sales leaders accept surface-level discovery for major investments
- Enablement teams get sent to vet vendors without access to critical metrics
- Buying decisions are made based on brand names and logos
- No one is willing to ask or answer hard questions about behavior changes
The Easy Button
Change is uncomfortable and that’s exactly why sales leaders accept poor discovery. Most don’t even know what a good discovery looks like anymore. They’re so disconnected from modern sales practices they assume basic questioning is enough.
This is where metrics become irreplaceable. If you’re sending enablement or HR to evaluate training vendors, give them the data they need. I consistently encounter enablement teams who’ve been tasked with building comparison sheets but have zero access to internal numbers. They can’t tell me:
- Current win rates
- Pipeline generation
- Average sale price trends
Enablement should have the power to reject product buying approaches. If a trainer or training company isn’t asking about your day-to-day metrics, your enablement team should be allowed to walk away. Even from the big names who rely on logo dropping.
Metrics are why you’re bringing in training. If you can’t define what you want to improve with actual numbers, you’re just hitting an easy button and box checking.
I challenge buyers on this all the time. Some walk away when faced with the work of a proper discovery.
Stop Product Buying
Sales leadership that avoids metric ownership is burning money. You can product buy all the training programs you want, but until you identify the specific problems and commit to moving specific numbers, you’re hoping for change, not making it.
Here’s what a real training investment requires:
CRM
- Current conversion rates at each stage
- Average deal sizes
- Sales cycle lengths
From the team
- Potential skill gaps
- Customer feedback patterns
- Deal loss rationale
From the training partner
- Metric-based success definitions
- Behavior change targets
- Measurable improvement plans
If a sales training organization doesn’t do deep discovery, they can’t possibly train your team to do it either. Product buying their solution reinforces the exact behavior you’re trying to fix.
Hi. I’m Celeste, a Certified Gap Selling Training Partner and a fierce advocate for companies to STOP product buying and START challenging sales training orgs to do better. Discovery isn’t easy for either party, but I guarantee if you do the work upfront and dissect your org 10 ways to Sunday, you will have a clear understanding of who to partner with and which metrics to address to actually see change.
If this resonates – hit me up…happy to dive in and see if we can help your team.
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