Make training stick by addressing mindset first, then building skills through weekly practice rather than one-off events.
Why this is harder than it looks
- Most training fails because it treats sales as a personality transplant rather than a process upgrade. Engineers reject anything that feels like they’re being asked to become someone else.
- The biggest barrier isn’t skill gaps, it’s the belief that selling means convincing people of things they don’t want. Until this mindset shifts, no technique will stick.
- Most training firms don’t really know how people ‘learn’ – or specifically how engineers learn to do something that might not come naturally. So ‘sales training’ just won’t work for engineers. In fact ‘training’ them won’t work. You can’t just ‘train’ sales into them! You need to align specific new actions and behaviours with their proud self-identity, then help them see how it can improve their own goals and their own situation.
What good looks like in practice
- Your team approaches each client conversation with a structured process, just like they would approach a technical specification. There’s a clear beginning, middle and end, with specific outcomes expected at each stage.
- Your technical people actually look forward to client meetings because they know exactly what they’re trying to achieve. The anxiety disappears when process replaces guesswork.
- In firms that have cracked this, engineers regularly generate their own opportunities through existing relationships. Commercial development becomes everyone’s responsibility, not just the sales team’s.
Where most engineering firms go wrong
- Most firms try to change behaviour before addressing the underlying mindset that selling is somehow beneath technical people. You can’t skill your way around a belief problem.
- Engineering firms often delegate all commercial development to external trainers without leadership involvement. If managers don’t model commercial behaviours, the team won’t adopt them.
Where to start
Making any learning ‘stick’ long term is a challenge. You need to know what to put in place to enable that. The ‘system’ your people operate within will have them sink or swim. This is key. ‘Train’ them to sell inside an environment that won’t help new behaviours ‘stick’ and you’ll waste your efforts, time and money. The starting point is to talk to a specialist who understands learning, and sales performance improvement, specifically for engineers. And explore with them the conditions that would need to be in place to load the dice for this to work long term. That is the starting point. A secondary starting point is to read on about our free diagnostic tools.
The thing worth checking in your business
We have 4 free diagnostic tools that you can use to get a sense of the ‘conditions’ you might want to get right in order to drive revenue-generating behaviours from your engineers and non-sales people. These tools look at the areas you need to get right and the capabilities you might want to focus on improving. The tools act as a ‘scanner’ to help you see opportunities within so that you can get more from your team.
Want to know where your team actually stands?
Use the free commercial diagnostic tools to find out exactly where the gaps are in your team’s sales effectiveness, and what to do about them. Takes 10 minutes. The report is specific and actionable.