A few years ago I watched a team of enterprise account managers get trained on a methodology built for something they didn’t do.
The methodology was designed for new business development: get in front of a buyer who doesn’t yet know they have a problem, disrupt their thinking, and use that discomfort to create urgency toward a decision they weren’t planning to make. Genuinely effective - for that job. The team receiving it managed a portfolio of existing enterprise accounts. Their job was not to manufacture urgency in someone who hadn’t asked for it. Their job was to protect a relationship that already existed and quietly earn the right to keep it.
They ran the training anyway, because it was the training the company had licensed that year, for every customer-facing role, regardless of what the role actually did.
Within two quarters, several of the best account managers on that team - people whose entire value to the customer was patience and reliability - were opening renewal calls by manufacturing tension with clients who’d been perfectly happy a month earlier. Somewhere, a training vendor was very pleased with the completion rate.
Racket in Hand, Wrong Sport Entirely
Here is the comparison I keep coming back to, because it explains the problem faster than any org chart could.
Tennis, padel, and table tennis all involve a racket, a net, and a small round object you are trying to keep out of someone’s reach. Hand a padel player a tennis racket and tell them the fundamentals transfer - and they will indeed hit the ball. They will also lose, badly, to anyone who has actually played tennis, because padel rewards patience and the walls, tennis rewards power and depth, and table tennis rewards reflexes so fast the ball is gone before you’ve decided how you feel about it. Three sports. One piece of equipment. Completely different games, and completely different training, if you actually want someone to win rather than simply make contact with the ball.
Nobody would seriously suggest a single six-week racket-sports bootcamp to produce elite players in all three. And yet that is more or less what most sales organizations do every year, with a straight face, and a training budget to prove it.
The Job Title Was Never the Problem
It’s tempting to treat this as a job title issue - Account Executive, Business Development Representative, Customer Success Manager - so many names for what looks, from the outside, like the same basic activity of getting someone to buy something. Sort the titles into buckets and assume the training gap is just a matter of picking the right one.
But the deeper issue isn’t which bucket a title belongs to. It’s that most organizations choose training the way they choose a benefits provider: one vendor, one program, applied uniformly, because uniformity is administratively tidy and nobody wants to explain to the board why the training budget produced four curricula instead of one.
The tidiness is real. So is the cost. A methodology built to create discomfort in a stranger and a methodology built to sustain trust with someone who already trusts you are not two dialects of the same skill. Training one team on the other’s methodology doesn’t produce a milder version of the right instinct. It produces a well-executed wrong one - and the person delivering it has no way of knowing the difference, because the training told them this was simply what good selling looked like.
Why Nobody Notices Until the Damage Is Done
The reason this goes uncorrected for so long is that it never fails loudly. It produces a slow erosion - a renewal call that feels slightly more adversarial than it needed to, a customer quietly taking more calls from competitors, a relationship that used to run on trust now running on a script. None of it shows up on a dashboard that measures activity and pipeline stage. It shows up eighteen months later in a churn number nobody can quite explain, blamed on budget cuts or a competitor’s pricing - anything other than the real diagnosis, which is that a perfectly good account manager was trained, skillfully, to play the wrong sport.
Which means the fix is never “more training.” More of the same methodology just produces someone more fluent in the wrong instinct - a padel player with an excellent tennis serve and no idea why they keep losing. The fix requires an organization to ask, before the invoice is signed, which specific game this specific role is actually playing - and whether the program they’re about to buy assumes the same game, or a different one entirely.
This is, in the end, a narrower version of a wider problem. Elsewhere I’ve made the case that most sales methodologies are also blind to something else entirely - not the role, but the room. They were built inside a specific culture, for a specific way of building trust and making decisions, and exported as if that culture were simply “how business works.” A methodology can be blind to role and be perfectly at home culturally. It can also be blind to culture while assigning the correct role. Get either one wrong and the training produces the same result: a well-executed performance of the wrong game.
Most training budgets get approved without either question ever coming up. Which is how you end up with a very well-trained team, uniformly excellent at a sport none of them were hired to play, in a stadium built for an audience that was never going to show up.
See also : Your Sales Methodology Has a Passport. It Just Doesn’t Always Get a Visa.