There is a particular kind of sales training that exists to be bought rather than to work. A two-day workshop, a binder, a room of people who nod, and a month later nothing in the call recordings has changed.

The programme we wrote in May 2025 is built to avoid that, and its structure is the argument. Twelve weeks. Twenty-four sessions. Twelve of them are role plays.

Who it is for

Reps with six to twelve months behind them. Not beginners. The programme assumes somebody who can already hold a conversation and is now losing meetings for reasons they cannot name.

That assumption changes everything about the content. There is no session on what a CRM is. There is a session on vocal tonality, one on note-taking during a live call, and one on reading your own activity data to find out which hour of your day is wasted.

The shape

The sessions alternate. A teaching session introduces a skill, and the following week a role play makes the rep use it under pressure while somebody watches.

Week one covers sequences, needs analysis and organising the day: how many touches over how many days, and how to research a prospect in three minutes rather than thirty. Week two grades accounts, because not every prospect deserves the same effort and reps need permission to say so. Weeks three and four are the cold call: structure, value proposition, rejection, then practice. Weeks five and six are brush-offs, the "not interested" that arrives in the first ten seconds, then practice. Then cold email and an email workshop where the team marks each other's drafts.

Halfway through, a session on mindset, which is the one everybody expects to be filler and is not. A rep who is dialling fifty times a day into a market that mostly says no has a resilience problem before he has a skills problem.

The back half gets specific: gatekeepers and how to get past them, account management, LinkedIn, a sequencing workshop, priority note-taking, using metrics to fix your own workflow, research discipline including when not to research, and tonality. It closes with an exam.

Three design decisions worth defending

Half the programme is practice. The reason is unglamorous. A tactic explained is a tactic forgotten; a tactic performed badly in front of two colleagues and corrected on the spot is a tactic learned. It is also the cheapest way to find out that a rep who sounds confident in a meeting cannot open a call.

Research is time-boxed on purpose. Three minutes per prospect, enough to find one relevant thing and no more. Left alone, an anxious rep will research for twenty minutes because research feels like work and dialling feels like risk. The guardrail is there to protect the rep from himself.

It ends with an exam. Not a certificate. A demonstration, marked, with a result that goes in the record. We keep a skills matrix per rep, with levels per skill, and a cold call evaluation is a score against it rather than an opinion. If a programme has no failure state it is entertainment.

What we would change

Two things, now that we have run it.

The metrics session belongs earlier. A rep who understands his own conversion arithmetic in week two makes better decisions for the following ten weeks; teaching it in week ten is teaching a lesson to somebody who has already formed his habits.

And the role plays should have been recorded from the start. We ran the early ones live and the feedback lived in the room. The moment we began recording practice calls the coaching improved, because a rep arguing with your memory of what he said is a different conversation from a rep listening to what he said.

That change is also what made the next step possible. Once practice is recorded and scored, most of it does not need a human on the other end of the line, and the objection library stops being a document somebody maintains and starts being a by-product of the work.

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