There's a promise baked into a lot of sales training. It goes something like this:
Sit down. Take the four-hour course. Learn our proprietary system (which is similar to everyone else's) and wait for guaranteed success.
The deal doesn't close? You clearly didn't follow the instructions closely enough!
Bollocks.
Sales is not painting by numbers.
Now, before the methodology police come for me: I rate sales methodologies, I really do. A good methodology is a motorway with road signs on it, keeping you on the straight and narrow.
But the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with reality, because life is unpredictable.
At some point, every seller ends up off the motorway. Middle of nowhere, no signs, no sat nav. And no methodology on earth tells you what to do next.
What gets you back onto familiar roads is your ability to adapt to the situation you find yourself in, no matter how ugly. Pattern matching. Reading the terrain, weighing the risks and opportunities in front of you, and making a very human judgement call.
Here's an example of methodology vs reality.
Methodology
A strong champion needs three things: evangelical support for your solution, a direct line to the economic decision maker, and independent credibility.
You need one, so keep building relationships until you find an individual with those attributes.
Job done?!
Sadly not. Because reality looks more like this.
Reality
A salesperson realises their Champion is actually a Coach. Friendly, helpful, keen, but not strong enough to sell internally. To win the deal they need a real champion, and finding one means going around their primary contact. The same primary contact who has asked them to channel everything through them.
A difficult and common situation that real salespeople face every week.
The salesperson has to weigh the odds. Go around your contact and there's maybe a one-in-four chance they take it badly, feel betrayed, and quietly poison the organisation against you. You've turned an ally into an enemy by going over their head.
But.
Stay single-threaded with a contact who can't sell for you, and you're looking at roughly a 60% chance the deal dies anyway.
Weigh those odds and yes, the correct call is to go around them. The maths says so. But if we pretend there's no risk in the move, we're not teaching salespeople to sell. We're teaching them to follow instructions and act surprised when reality doesn't cooperate.
Salespeople need to master navigating that nuance, not ignoring it.
That kind of judgement doesn't come from an acronym. It comes from a commitment to the craft underneath the methodology: learning how to run a bid, deliver a presentation that actually lands, prepare a cold call properly, do discovery that goes deeper than the question list. The unglamorous, granular skills a methodology quietly assumes you already have.
So no, I'm not telling you to bin your methodology. Just make sure it's underpinned by enough skill and context to survive contact with the real world, and that doesn't come from a two-hour MEDDIC session once a year at your annual Sales Kickoff.
Enjoy your sales methodology, but know that success requires flexibility and is almost never as simple as following a cooking recipe.
There is no magic button.