Someone told me last week that good sales training is universal.
I disagreed.
We were talking shop, and their argument was simple. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. Learn them once and they work anywhere.
I've been chewing on it ever since, because they're half right. But the half they're wrong about is the half that costs you deals.
Every sale really does run on the same three things: the pain driving the buyer, the process they go through to buy, and the people involved in the decision.
The elemental parts of the sale are the same everywhere. But inside any regulated business all three behave differently.
The pain isn't just the cost of the problem. It's the risk of the change itself. Around 70% of transformations fail (that's the figure everyone quotes), and a failed one can end the career of the exec who sponsored it. So the safest move for your buyer is often to do nothing at all. You're not just selling the upside any more. You're selling the survivability of the change.
And even a buyer in genuine pain isn't only weighing you against the status quo. Regulated businesses carry a laundry list of things they want to fix and a finite capacity to deliver them. Ruthless triage decides what actually gets done, and your problem has to fight its way to the top of that pile.
The process has a split personality. One moment you've got a lovely collaborative chemistry with workshops. The next? Bam. The walls come up, the RFP starts, and you can only talk to your contact in officially sanctioned meetings. There are things you have to achieve before that phase change, and if you miss them, no amount of rapport gets you back in the room.
And the RFP isn't the process. It's one gate in a rigid governance machine: procurement reviews, gruelling due diligence, and contracting that regularly runs longer than an entire sales cycle in other industries. Treat the RFP as the finish line and you'll learn the hard way it was the starting gun.
And the people. Methods like MEDDIC give you two to focus on: Champion and Economic Buyer. A regulated business gives you risk and compliance, domain leads, boards and steering committees, programme managers, architects, systems integrators, management consultants... a cast of many who can, and might even want to, kill your deal without ever meeting you.
Knowing they exist isn't enough. You have to map your subject matter experts against theirs, get your architects in front of their architects, and help the buyer gather requirements they didn't know they had. You're not just answering their questions. You're helping them work out what to ask.
So, is good sales training universal?
Not in my opinion. Not because generic training is wrong, but because it's only half the picture.
And the reason we get it all upside down is that we focus on the sales process, when we should be understanding the buying process. Nowhere is that more true than selling into financial services and regulated industries.
If the buying process your prospect goes through is different, surely how you sell to them must be??
It's the belief that every hour of training I deliver is built on.